Some comments on Müller's Treasurer of the Forbidden

by Daniel Harms

Note: Thanks to some comments made by Karl Kluge, this piece will be updated shortly.

Wolfgang H. Müller is a German occultist who has devoted the past few decades to the study of Lovecraft and his works. According to a biographical piece in the booklet for the first NecronomiCon, he has translated the works of Carl Jung and Sir E. Wallis Budge, deciphered Babylonian cuneiform, and is considered one of the most prominent experts on Lovecraft in Germany. His works include both Polaria: The Gift of the White Stone and Schatzmeister des Verbotenen (Treasurer of the Forbidden). The latter has yet to be translated into English, so until now I have been unable to give an opinion on its conclusions regarding the Necronomicon.

A few days ago, a friend of mine was kind enough to send me the text of the chapters on the Necronomicon, and I spent an hour feeding them through a translation engine on the Internet. This is an affair fraught with peril, as users of such engines know, but I am reasonably certain that I have the gist of his arguments, and my friend agrees that it is accurate. However, if any readers of Müller in the original German notice any errors, I encourage them to let me know.

According to Müller, Doctor John Dee came into contact with the Necronomicon in its original Arabic at the court of Rudolf II at Prague in 1586. Rudolf brought this "Necronomicon Codex", as Müller dubs it, back with him from Spain after his education there. Dee had been seeking this book as the result of his research into a mysterious cult based around the East Anglia town of Dunwich. To further his researches, he bore this "Arabic book", or a copy thereof, back to England with him. Dee's diaries reveal that he took steps to retrieve a certain "Arabic boke" (Dee p. 54) he had lent to a Mr. Harding and a Mr. Abbott in 1594 and 1595, and that he finally retrieved it late in the second year. Müller notes that no such book turns up in any catalog of Dee's library, a fact which he considers significant.

The fundamental thesis underlying Müller's works on Lovecraft is that HPL learned of the hidden lore of the alchemists and troubadours and incorporated it into his stories. In this case, HPL mentions the town of Dunwich, Massachusetts in his works and states that it is imaginary. A town with this name did exist in England, and since Dee may have been interested in it, Lovecraft's failure to recognize its existence is (supposedly) proof that he was covering something up. In addition, the only story in which Lovecraft mentions John Dee's translation of the Necronomicon is "The Dunwich Horror". To Müller, this is a clear sign that Lovecraft is covering up his true knowledge of Dunwich, John Dee and the Necronomicon.

In pursuit of this real Necronomicon, Müller follows Lovecraft's claim in "History of the Necronomicon" that the Catholic Church placed the volume on a list of banned books. Looking through the numerous lists compiled over the centuries, Müller finds a document titled alternately "Interpretatio nominum chaldaeorum" or "Delaratio nominum chaldaeorum" (both meaning "interpretation of the Chaldean names"). The author links this with the Nestorian church, a sect which believed that Christ contained both a divine and human nature in moral union. Some members of this sect rejoined the Roman Church in 1551 and became known as "Chaldeans", while others remain separate even to this day. The term Chaldean, according to Müller, was synonymous with magician, hence this vanished work is a good candidate for the Necronomicon.

When I was reading Müller's work, I noted two troubling points. First, the author rejected Lovecraft's non-fiction writing, in which he stated that the Necronomicon was his own creation. Yet he went to the other extreme, treating everything in Lovecraft's fiction as if it were gospel truth to be followed to the letter. Second, some of his arguments were clearly derived from other disreputable sources. For example, his argument about Dunwich is a more developed version of that found in the Hay Necronomicon (p. 51), and his discussion of how the word "cthonic" mirrors Lovecraft's "Miskatonic" was first proposed in the Simon Necronomicon (p. xviii). Still, it fell upon me to try to evaluate the claims herein while giving him the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.

To continue, I'll examine Müller's assertions one by one:

Rudolf II brought back the Necronomicon Codex from Spain - Müller cites absolutely no documents in support of this claim.

Dee's Arabic book was the Necronomicon - This assumption underlies much of Müller's argument, yet he has no proof of it. Even if the Necronomicon does exist (and no evidence for it has appeared), surely many other valuable Arabic works existed in Dee's time. Dee's concern over getting it back is not unfamiliar to anyone who has lent out a treasured book and not had it returned - and in Dee's time, coming by such works was considerably more difficult. Müller gives no particular reason for assuming that this book is the Necronomicon.

Dee found his Arabic book in Prague in 1586 - No evidence for this is given at all; Rudolf's court was a center of learning in those times, but it need not have been the source for Dee's book. In fact, there may be evidence that Dee did not find his book on his visit to Prague. There is a record of a séance held in early 1583, before the departure for the Continent. In the course of questioning the spirit Il, Dee asks if an Arabic book of tables returned to him (Fell-Smith p. 125). This was most likely the Book of Soyga (now Sloane MS 8 at the British Library).

Dee kept this Arabic book out of his catalog - John Dee had over four thousand works in his library, and his catalog only covers two hundred of them, and omits such works as his treatises on witchcraft and demonology (Fell-Smith, p. 123). My (cursory) search of the shorter list nonetheless yielded over a dozen books containing treatises by Arabian writers. At any rate, it seems unlikely that Dee took great care to omit books from his library catalogs - he never got around to finishing them to begin with.

Dee encountered a strange cult in the town of Dunwich based around the Necronomicon - This assertion is based on a letter from an unnamed bookseller to John Dee in 1573, mentioning Dunwich and a man dressed in a strange fashion who had been unearthed in a churchyard there. Even though Müller goes on to speak of this as if it almost certainly happened, he gives no proof that Dee was interested at all in the discovery (though he probably was). No one has uncovered a mention of a trip to Dunwich, or of the town at all, in Dee's writings, and Müller is forced to admit that Dee is never mentioned in the Dunwich town records. Given this, his scenario in which Dee encounters a mysterious Dunwich cult based around the Necronomicon is more historical fiction than anything else.

Lovecraft had inside knowledge of Dee, Dunwich, and the Necronomicon - Müller points to the presence of Dunwich and Dee in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" as proof that Lovecraft was aware of the connections between them. However, as we have seen, the only provable connection is that someone once mentioned Dunwich in a letter to Dee. The only links between the fictional Dunwich, Massachusetts and the real Dunwich, England is that they are both crumbling old towns near which human remains have been found. The differences are considerable (the English Dunwich was at one time a thriving port which crumbled into the ocean; the Massachusetts Dunwich is a never-prosperous home of inbred degenerates). Modern Lovecraft scholars agree that Lovecraft most likely derived the name "Dunwich" from Arthur Machen's novel "The Terror" (1917).

As proof that Lovecraft had knowledge of esoteric matters, Müller points out that Lovecraft mentions the illegal acquisition of artifacts, the Nestorian Church, a few Arabic works in his stories. He is right - Lovecraft does mention these things, along with many others, in over a thousand pages of work. He does not display any in-depth knowledge of any of them, whether in his fiction or his letters, making these items of doubtful importance.

Lovecraft kept his knowledge of Dee's Necronomicon a secret: This is undoubtedly the most difficult parts of Müller's assertions to believe. In actuality, it was not Lovecraft who created John Dee's English translation of the Necronomicon, but his friend Frank Belknap Long, who included an epigram from it in his story "The Space-Eaters". Admittedly, he does acknowledge that this was the case, but he then states that Long must have also been part of the cover-up. (In his later work Polaria, this conspiracy expands to Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Barlow, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, stretching the bounds of credibility.)

Despite Müller's attempts to stress the John Dee-Necronomicon connection, it is clear that Lovecraft did not consider it important - his reference to Dee's translation in his "History of the Necronomicon" is written in between lines as an afterthought.

The book on "Chaldean names" is the Necronomicon -The phrase "nominum Chaldaeorum" does not necessarily mean "magical names" - the words "nominum Hebraeorum, Chaldaeorum, Graecorum" (of the Hebrew, Chaldean, and Greek names) turn up in the titles of Bibles of the sixteenth century. At any rate, the only commonalities with the Necronomicon this book has is that it includes the word "name" in its title (a fact which many scholars would dispute) and the fact that it may or may not have something to do with magic.

In the course of his argument, Müller makes a number of mistakes in regard to Lovecraft's life and work. For example, he asserts that Lovecraft wrote about a copy of the Necronomicon at the Vatican. Lovecraft did no such thing, though his pupil August Derleth would include such a copy in one of his "posthumous collaborations" (stories based on a short idea of Lovecraft's). Long is listed as Lovecraft's co-author; aside from borrowing gods and creatures from each other's stories and the use of one of Lovecraft's letters in Long's "The Horror from the Hills", this is not supported by our knowledge of Lovecraft's life. He states that "Necronomicon" is a combination of Greek and Latin (it is strictly Greek), that Dee's translation was made from the Greek (which Lovecraft never states), that the mysterious Voynich Manuscript's contents indicate its author had Cabalistic knowledge (the work remains untranslated), and that the "Comte d'Erlette" was one of Lovecraft's phonetic respellings of August Derleth's name (it was a noble title to which Derleth claimed his family were the heirs). Every author is bound to make some errors now and again, but I was dismayed to find this many in the small section that I read, especially when made by an expert on Lovecraft.

In the end, it seems that Müller has spent a great deal of time and effort in researching these matters, but in the end has little to show for it. He is so taken with his speculations he fails to recognize that in the end, that is all they are, and that piling one on top of the other is unlikely to lead anywhere. As it stands, the author grabs at shadows, without looking to see how plausible his assertions are. Hopefully in the future Müller will attempt more documentation of his claims than he does in this piece.

Dee, John. The Private Diary of Doctor John Dee and the Catalogue of his Library of Manuscripts. James Orchard Halliwell, ed. London: Camden Society. 1842.

Fell-Smith, Charlotte. John Dee. London: Constable and Company. 1909.

Thanks to Karl Kluge for his commentary and suggestions.

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