The Necronomicon and the Line between Fact and Fiction

Repost of an oldie-but-goodie article I wrote for Popdust back in October 2020, called “Lovecraft Country” Reminds Us That Magic Is as Real as We Believe It Is.” For those who missed it, “Lovecraft Country” was an HBO miniseries about a young black man in segregated 1960s America, looking for his father in the small town that HP Lovecraft often wrote about about.

One of the earliest episodes of “Lovecraft Country” mentions the Necronomicon, an infamous book of magic featured in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction stories. This is an acknowledgement of the 100-year-old Lovecraftian world of antediluvian terrors. 

But the way Lovecraft Country introduces the esoteric arts is very much aligned with real history. Magickal lodges with secret initiations exist. Voodoo priestesses exist. Korean shamans, called mudang 무당, exist and even influence top-level politicians.

And people are doing rituals that call upon the terrifying entities from Lovecraft’s stories.

For a long time, fans of HP Lovecraft have attempted to blur fiction and reality, sometimes even writing fiction into reality by performing rituals that summon the terrifying entities from Lovecraft's stories. So, not only do people doing these rituals exist—they have and continue to experiment with ways to successfully work with the plasticity of identity, re-evaluating what is defined as “real vs. fake” in the process. 

“Fictional works—especially horror or fantasy—strike me as an opportunity for the mind to consider things far beyond the dominant reality,” says Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom, a multi-award-winning fiction story that adds much-needed subversion to Lovecraftian mythos by centering the narrative around a Black man who has the power to summon alien entities called the Old Ones. “I view writing as a form of labor that, at times, reaches something beyond labor, whether that would be called art or...reality-shifting.”

✨ In the next sections: The Necronomicon and the power of fanfic … who gets to define the “realness” of magic? … and what is the Necronomicon, really?