LogFAQs > #974688465

Ozmose posted...

It's the real life basis for the mythical book Al Azif

It almost certainly isn't. Lovecraft was always fairly open about where he got the idea from, and forbidden tomes of lore were common in the horror of the era even before him (mainly stemming from the various grimoires that were circulating around Europe at the time, especially via groups like the Golden Dawn during the Victorian Era).

Lovecraft actually started with the Necronomicon as a concept and then retroactively invented its history, which makes stuff like the Lemegeton or the Book of Abramelin far more likely as original inspirations. And books claiming to be far older or from "foreign" lands was fairly common practice at the time. Odds are he never would have even heard of a book that was mostly specific to Sufis and Islam (especially considering his rampant racism and Anglophilia). His ignorance of actual Arabic culture is part of why he came up with a name that literally cannot exist for the original writer (it should be closer to something like Abd-el-Hazred).

(And even beyond that, he also screwed up the meaning of the actual word "Necronomicon" itself, because he sucked at Greek as well. His translation for it was "An Icon of the Law of the Dead", but the actual correct translation would be closer to "A Scientific Classification of the Dead". He screwed up again when mentioning when Olaus Wormius translated it into Latin, because he was off on when he actually lived by about 400 years. And he stole the name Al Azif from the story Vathek.)

But yeah. Lovecraft never really based anything on anything specific. A lot of his ideas were just half-remembered ideas and names from other sources kind of slammed together to form a new synthesized hybrid mess, that sounded vaguely right to him (which was "good enough" for someone writing pulp genre trash fiction for magazines that he didn't expect to last all that long after initial publication - he'd be utterly astonished that people were still reading his stories almost a hundred years later). It's why all his made up New England placenames all sound vaguely plausible but don't actually describe any real place (and in some cases, they describe literally impossible places that could never be located on a map due to conflicting elements).

Lovecraft probably never even heard of the Shams al-Ma'arif al-Kubra.





And suddenly that obsessive Lovecraft phase I went through in college finally bears fruit. WOO WOO!