THE NECRONOMICON: SIMON vs. MARDUKITE — Whether actually from some insane “Arab” from the eighth century A.D., or the result of attention to scholarly transliterations available of ancient Mesopotamian tablets simply coupled with ceremonial magic, traditions alluded to in Simon’s Necronomicon are neither an indigenous form of shamanism or a folk-magic of the masses…

As has been expressed in our cycle of work regarding it, the tablets are a part of the literary collection of the ancient “Mardukite Order of Nabu” that led the religion and government in Babylon – and Egypt under a different guise.

[This mardukite necrogate blog post is officially excerpted from Mardukite Liber R, currently available in the new second edition of Necronomicon Revelations by Joshua Free. Liber R may also be found in the mega-anthology Necronomicon Anunnaki Legacy (Silver Edition).]

One modern ceremonial occultist bridging the gap between Crowley’s era and the modern one, is Kenneth Grant. While some of Grant’s earlier works could only allude to connections between Crowley’s magick and specifically Lovecraftian interpretations of the Necronomicon, more recent installments of Grant’s work make citations from what he calls: the Schlangekraft recension – the Simonian Necronomicon.

The manner in which the tome is related to in Grant’s volume from the Typhonian Tradition of the Ordo Templi Orientis, titled Outer Gateways, concerning communications made by ceremonial magicians of magical lodges with the “Old Ones” or “Deep Ones” shows that he evidently took this seriously. That Kenneth Grant essentially inherited the O.T.O. organization and following of Aleister Crowley establishes that the Schlangekraft recension was far from the only means, or even remotely close to their own means of making contact with alien intelligences. But Grant knew of, acknowledged (no doubt made successful use of) and celebrated the work at length as a very real “portal to the Abyss.”

“Where the New Age is concerned, a lot of the occultism is ‘Judeo-Christian’ – the Keys of Solomon, for example; the Secret Books of Moses and all of that stuff. It was all based on a Jewish and Christian concept. With the coming of the New Age you did have a rise in neopaganism, but there was not a system of ‘ceremonial magick’ for a neo-pagan mentality; it [ceremonial magick] was, again, based on Jewish and Christian concepts, which were themselves borrowed from pagan origins, but the pagan origins were gone for the most part. In a sense the Simon Necronomicon filled a need for people with a true neopagan interest to become involved with the ‘higher magics’ so to speak.”
–Peter Levenda

Rather than a “Cthulhu mythos” drawn from the semantics used by H. P. Lovecraft to describe the dreams and visions he experienced and accounted for in his artistic creations, the Schlangekraft recension offers a preliminary means by which someone with no background in Mesopotamian cultures or ancient cuneiform tablets can quickly immerse themselves – thereby unlocking that personal subconscious portal into the “Other.” It is by no means complete and certainly not wholly accurate, but that is not to say it has not served its purpose in the greater scheme – in the system – just as the contributions of others, intricately interwoven, have.