The work both Latin and Greek was banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which called attention to it.

Spanish)-both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and place by internal typographical evidence only. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice-once in the fifteenth century in black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (prob. For a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by the patriarch Michael. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho’ surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople under the title Necronomicon. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind.

biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon ( Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it.

He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia-the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients-and “Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Original title Al Azif-azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos’d to be the howling of daemons.Ĭomposed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D.

The history of the necronomicon