II. An Antecedent and a Horror (Patreon)

Hello!
This seems like a pretty good opportunity to do a recap of the project, and an introduction. In the last few weeks over twenty five new members have joined up, so I want to welcome them, and explain the process I use for this project.
In my version the Necronomicon is a codex comprised of four Books, bound together in a series of Quires or Gatherings. Each Quire is made up of twelve Leaves, for a total of forty eight pages.
As the Leaves are mailed out, they nest into each other until the Quire is complete. The next mailing to go out (this week) will finish off the second Book of the Necronomicon. But this means it will be the middle eight pages of the final Quire of that book. On the downside, this means new patrons will be coming in at the midpoint to an ongoing narrative, but on the upside it means they will be getting eight continuous pages to read from start to finish.
The following month will be the start of a new Book, a new Quire, and a new direction for the narrative.
But where is all this coming from? First and foremost I am extrapolating from Lovecraft’s stories. Early on I settled on the four paths I saw that a human in the world of the Mythos could take to survive the impending apocalypse. Pickman became a ghoul, Obed Marsh made a deal with Deep Ones, Mr. Noyes made a deal with the Mi-Go, and Wizard Whateley & Keziah Mason both found opportunities worshiping even more powerful entities. This is a simplification, but from this I saw the shape of the Necronomicon. Four Books, each focused on a different path True Believers could follow to move beyond the limitations of the human form. We have now finished with “Those Beneath the Land” and “Those From the Sea”, and will move to “Those from the Aether” next.
Lovecraft also provided a road map in his History of the Necronomicon, writing that “He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia”. We will actually be starting with that ten year exile in Book 3, and saving the two trips until a little later. It is a journey of 1,900 km from Yemen to the Ancient Ruins of Babylon (and a full 2,000 km from Sanaa in Yemen to Memphis in Egypt), so getting Abdel to those locations will be exciting. Of course in fiction all problems are opportunities!
But this is just a framework. While the majority of the writing is my own, I also discovered an amazing resource in the correspondence between Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. They created fanciful character names, place names, and even magical terms in their letters and I have mined these for the Necronomicon. Gnaran-Hofash, The Brotherhood of Y’ang-Kthah, Nush-Gibburash, and many more are all taken from these notes. The most exciting is an explicit reference to a formula on page 829 involving Yog-Sothoth, and how “in many copies of the Necronomicon it has been torn out because of certain perils and ambiguities involved in the 7th invocation”. Being able to include that sort of detail at the tail end of the project is very exciting.
In the end this Necronomicon exists because in 1993 I read my first Lovecraft stories and the fictional book captured my imagination. I started my first version a few years later (hand drawn, in a blank journal) and thus Propping Up the Mythos was born, but the quest to have a truly immersive Necronomicon never went away. I am so excited to have you all along on this journey, and I really appreciate the support.
My goal for 2023 is to get everyone on the path to being caught up with backorders. I will be rolling out a new, comprehensive spreadsheet to make sure I have everyone tracked and accounted for with the pages they missed prior to joining. In the end I want everyone to have a complete copy of the Necronomicon. Let’s make that happen!