Seamus wrote:

There are quite a few jumping off points. There are magicians that
utilize the fictional Cthulhu mythos as a map to practice magick.
I published a book many years ago and New Falcon publications has
published in the recent past, expanded, etc titled "The Pseudonomicon"
by Phil Hine which outlines utilizing the Lovecraftian/Cthulhu mythos
as a magickal system.

The following cut and paste is the alleged origin of the printed
Necronomicon:

The Doom that Came to Chelsea

My ex-wife died back in March, after a long and heroic bout with cancer.
She walked out on me in 1997, but we remained on good enough terms that
I hosted her first and only visit to Vegas in October of 2001. Las Vegas
was a refuge from the maudlin hysteria of the time. She was dazzled by
it. I got to spend a week with her last year, just before I drove to
California. I didn’t think I’d be coming back, and we both knew that
this would probably be our last time together.

She had just enough strength to walk down the driveway to the mailbox,
so we spent the week just hanging out, smoking pot and watching
television, going over old times. The pot counteracted the nausea from
the chemo and kept her appetite up. I brought her a stuffed toy camel
from the Hard Rock Cafe in Bahrain and a keffiya from Beirut, and
offered pep talks about spontaneous remissions and her old Lotto habit.

"The odds on Lotto are pretty bad," I said, "but you played it twice a
week. Your chances of beating this are much better."

I managed to hold back the tears until I got back to my apartment in
Manhattan. I had a tricky moment in the airport bar, but then again, I
always do in those places.

I first laid eyes on Bonnie at a bar called the Bells of Hell on 13th
St. just west of 6th Ave. where the Cafe Loup now resides. The Bells of
Hell was a hardcore Irish joint with a bar in the front and a good-sized
performance space in the back. The location and name made the place a
natural watering hole for the customer base of Herman Slater’s Magickal
Childe, up in Chelsea at 35 W. 19th St. The Magickal Childe was ground
zero for the occult explosion in New York City in the 1970s.

Herman Slater and his lover Ed Buczynski had a little occult emporium on
Henry St. in Brooklyn, just off Atlantic Ave., back in the early 1970s.
They mainly sold herbs, candles and oils, but they also carried a modest
selection of books. The Warlock Shop was just a hole in the wall, but
despite its humble appearance, it was a true cash cow. In 1976, the duo
pulled up stakes and moved the operation to Chelsea.

At the Magickal Childe, there was enough space to dramatically increase
the merchandise offered, and since Herman had the cash and the
connections, the new store became, in effect, the one-stop-shop for any
and all conjuring needs. In addition to herbs, oils, candles, books,
robes, swords and other accoutrements of the Art, one could find human
skulls, dried bats, mummified cat’s paws and a wide variety of unusual
jewelry, a large portion of which was created by Bonnie, my
ex-wife-to-be. A room in the back of the store served as a temple and
classroom for the various strains of wicca that began to gravitate to
the place.

That temple also served as the launching pad for the explosive growth of
Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) in the city in the late
70s and early 80s.

Herman had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the
Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon." No doubt he’d grown weary
of explaining to customers that H.P. Lovecraft’s fabled forbidden tome
was a fiction, a plot device for great horror stories and nothing more.
He was savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones
to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for a
"genuine" Necronomicon could be huge–with the right packaging. In 1977,
the book made its debut in the window of Herman’s little shop of horrors
in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene bursting with mad,
unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had just published their Illuminatus
trilogy, and interest in secret societies and occult lore was sweeping
through counterculture circuits. Grady McMurtry was attempting to
jumpstart the long-dormant OTO in California and had just succeeded in
having Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck published. Punks and
proto-goth/industrial types searched out obscure Satanic treatises and
rare tracts from the seemingly defunct Process Church of the Final
Judgement. Unrepentant hippies and uber-feminists found common ground in
the gentle, woodsy eco-cult of the wicca, available in enough variant
"traditions" to suit any palate with an appetite for sweets.

None of the wiccan "traditions" were any older than the electric light
bulb, and the OTO had its origins in a very dubious Masonic lineage of
no greater antiquity than aniline dyes, but that didn’t stop any of us
from having a good time. The Necronomicon was not merely the icing on
the cake: It was the hideous formless mass that squatted gibbering and
piping where the bride and groom should be.

This was the 1970s, and the whole scene was awash in drugs and crazy
sex. Herman had an appetite for rough trade and kept a steady stream of
dope-crazed street hustlers flowing down from the Haymarket Saloon up on
8th Ave. above Port Authority. He’d keep them around until they ripped
him off, then give them the boot and move on to the next one. He liked
them big and stupid, a total contrast with Eddie’s graceful and
intelligent demeanor.

The differing wicca groups were squabbling over the supposed validity of
lineage, and there were no fewer than four established OTO groups
internationally, each claiming exclusive dominion over the brand and
trademarks. As a lifelong student of what Crowley termed "magick" (the
"k" inserted to distinguish the practice from prestidigitation), I have
never been a big fan of what I call the "booga-booga" school of magick.
I tend to see the practice more as a form of radical self-help and
advanced covert sales technique than any kind of actual traffic with
disembodied critters and goblins. That said, between the copious amounts
of hallucinogens ingested and the spells and counterspells hurled
around, there were times when the vibes around the store congealed and
quivered like a great Waldorf Salad.

Into this bubbling swamp of spiritual fecundity stepped Peter Levenda,
aka "Simon." Charming, soft-spoken and aloof, well-versed in all aspects
of occult theory and practice, he eased his way to the center of the
scene. The Necronomicon was a team effort. Herman provided the
sponsorship, while the design and layout were the work of Jim Wasserman
of the OTO, a raving cokehead from Jersey named Larry Barnes whose daddy
had the production facilities and a fellow who called himself Khem Set
Rising (who also designed the sigils). The text itself was Levenda’s
creation, a synthesis of Sumerian and later Babylonian myths and texts
peppered with names of entities from H.P. Lovecraft’s notorious and
enormously popular Cthulhu stories. Levenda seems to have drawn heavily
on the works of Samuel Noah Kramer for the Sumerian, and almost
certainly spent a great deal of time at the University of Pennsylvania
library researching the thing. Structurally, the text was modeled on the
wiccan Book of Shadows and the Goetia, a grimoire of doubtful
authenticity itself dating from the late Middle Ages.

"Simon" was also Levenda’s creation. He cultivated an elusive, secretive
persona, giving him a fantastic and blatantly implausible line of
bullshit to cover the book’s origins. He had no telephone. He always
wore business suits, in stark contrast to the flamboyant Renaissance
fair, proto-goth costuming that dominated the scene. He never got high
in public.

In short, he knew the signifiers and emblems of authority, and played
them to the hilt. He hinted broadly of dealings with intelligence
agencies and secret societies operating at global levels of social
influence. He began teaching classes in the back room, and showed a
genuine knack for clarifying and elucidating such baroque encrypted
arcana as John Dee’s Enochian magick system in such a way as to make it
understandable even to a novice. He also lacked the guts to let a woman
know when he was through with her, or so Bonnie said. She was positioned
to know at the time, despite her failing marriage to Chris Claremont,
the comic book author who put the X-Men on the map. Chris was her third
husband. I was her fourth, and last.

As Simon, Levenda threw parties with various forms of live entertainment
and staged rituals presented by the various groups that swarmed around
the shop. He had no political enemies on the scene, owing to his
adamantine and resolute refusal to affiliate with any one group. There
has always been a very heavy crossover factor between the Renaissance
fair/Society for Creative Anachronisms crowd, the science-fiction fan
circuit and the occult/wicca scenes. Simon had friends throughout all of
these arenas, and they all showed up to support this effort at unity.

The house band for these affairs was Turner and Kirwan of Wexford, whose
sound was primarily influenced by Irish traditional folk music, Pink
Floyd and the esoteric "Canterbury School" of so-called "progressive"
rock inspired by the band the Soft Machine, which school included Mike
Oldfield; Hatfield and the North; McDonald; Giles, Giles and Fripp.
Connor Freff Cochran (known then simply as "Freff") was nearly always in
attendance, juggling and entertaining, ornamental and always a hit with
the women.

Copernicus–second only perhaps to G.G. Allin on the obnoxious meter–had
his performance debut at one of these events, and occasionally even
Norman Mailer would pop in, with his assistant Judith McNally in tow.
Judith and Simon were rumored to be an item, and it was also rumored
that she had done the bulk of the work on Mailer’s big hit, The
Executioner’s Song. She’s listed in the acknowledgements of the
Necronomicon.

Certain theories have it that even a bogus (or, to be kind, synthetic)
grimoire will work if it is internally consistent, but that means
following the rules to the letter. Simon’s Necronomicon contains a
manual of self-initiation in the form of a series of "gates" that are to
be "walked." Following the instructions given in the book, walking these
gates should take just shy of a year. One certain Martin Mensch–an
adepti who had received the book in manuscript form for examination, as
had Bonnie due to her status as a Gardnerian wiccan high priestess of
some repute–decided to accelerate the process, and ran the gates in a
matter of weeks. Shortly after completing the final gate, he stepped out
of a cab at 10th St. and 1st Ave. and got capped in the head in one of
those random acts of mindless violence that were coming into vogue at
that time.

Simon decided to start a group of his own, one that would span the
different traditions and merge the gentle current of the wicca with the
rigorous scholarship of the Golden Dawn/OTO trend under the umbrella of
the Necronomicon. Heavily inspired by the Illuminatus books and Timothy
Leary’s exopsychology theory of the eight-circuit brain, he launched
Stargroup-1 at these parties.

As the 80s dawned and the Reagan era began, the Berkeley-based Caliphate
OTO swelled to become the dominant force among the Crowley crowd, and
the internal politics of that group morphed into a drug-soaked,
sex-crazed caricature of I, Claudius. The wicca continued their ongoing
disputes regarding the validity or lack thereof of the various
"traditions," and Stargroup-1 issued the New York Tarot, a genuinely
cute endeavor to replace the traditional tarot card images with
photographs of New York City and certain members of the group. People
were having mad sex of every conceivable variety in every imaginable
combination. Turner and Kirwan of Wexford streamlined their sound and
turned into a new-wave effort called the Major Thinkers.

Simon was finding Larry Barnes increasingly difficult to tolerate, an
understandable position given the man’s outrageous level of cocaine
consumption. Simon refused to attend a book signing, so Wasserman
recruited me to impersonate him and forge his signature on a run of
hardcover reprints. Barnes kept laying out rails of blow until I simply
had to refuse any more; I thought I was going to have a stroke. His skin
had that bluish tinge one usually associates with corpses; he couldn’t
shut up and made no sense at all. He was completely obsessed with
numerology, a classic symptom of incipient paranoia. Shortly thereafter,
Larry snitched out his suppliers and entered the Federal Witness
Protection Program, never to be seen again. In 1980, Avon released the
paperback version of the Necronomicon, which remains in print and has
been selling very steadily ever since.

For me, the scene peaked at a reception thrown by a prominent tax
attorney from DC at the Plaza Hotel honoring Grady McMurtry, filmmaker
Kenneth Anger and Simon. There was a screening of Anger’s film, Lucifer
Rising, a splendid buffet, rivers of free booze and a full range of
sense-deranging substances. It was the last time that particular crowd
got together on friendly terms.

Not all of us took Simon’s hints of dabblings in intelligence work all
that seriously, but apparently the Feds did. An agent infiltrated the
OTO with the apparent intent of getting close to Simon, who was doing a
great deal of consulting for the local lodge and seemed to be flirting
with affiliation. As the noose tightened, Simon became more and more
critical of the OTO, finally denouncing it as "fascist" and vanishing,
some said to Singapore. Other reports placed him in Hong Kong or
Shanghai. The truth is, no one knew.

Bonnie and I headed out to San Francisco, where we were married by a
Justice of the Peace on October 6, 1983. Grady McMurtry led the
Caliphate OTO through a series of court battles aimed at establishing it
as the one true OTO and died of congestive heart failure on the day the
judge granted his victory. Stargroup-1 quietly disintegrated, and the
wicca made peace with one another as fundamentalist Christians took
control of the White House. The Major Thinkers broke up. Pierce Turner
went solo, and Larry Kirwan formed Black 47.

Herman Slater sailed his little pirate ship through it all, indomitable
and ornery, the very fairy godmother of the entire scene. Every now and
then the issue of unpaid sales taxes would pop up and he’d threaten to
sell the shop, but he never did. The books, such as they were, consisted
mainly of scraps of paper stuffed into shopping bags. There was no
earthly way anyone but Herman could make any sense of it. The cranky old
fucker fired me no fewer than three times in the course of my tenure
there, but Bonnie’s jewelry sold, and he eventually bought the line from
her. She never had much business sense, not that I consider that a flaw.
She was an artist, first and foremost, and a damned fine one at that.

In 1989, Ed Buczynski died of complications from AIDS. On July 9, 1992,
Herman followed him into the Western Lands. He left the shop to a
handful of employees who had managed to avoid pissing him off.
Unfortunately, he also left an incredible tax debt. The shop limped
along for a few years, deteriorating gradually and finally closing its
doors for good in 1999. The space remains vacant as of this writing.

During the last ten years of her life, my wife embraced Tibetan
Buddhism, specifically the variant known as Dzogchen. In our last
conversation, she mentioned that my picture was sitting next to the
Dalai Lama in her makeshift shrine in the hospice where she was spending
her final days.

"I am honored by the gesture," I told her, "but I’m not so sure I belong
there. It might give His Holiness weird dreams."

She left me her Necronomicon, number 141 of the first edition of 666
hardcover copies, inscribed by Simon: "To Greymalkin, As per the missing
page of the Nec… ‘Blessed Is, Blessed Was, Blessed Will Be…’"

She was a wonderful woman. It was a very colorful scene, a very colorful
time. We were all naive and completely insane, but we had a good time
together. It was, in a word, magick.

-Douglas