Necoronomicon..the brainchild Lovecraft's?

It is often said that the Necronomicon is pure fiction. A brainchild H. P. Lovecraft’s, used to spice up his horror stories in the 1920s. That there never was such a book before that.
The writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is recognized as one of the world masters of tales of horror. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island on August 20, 1890 he wrote "The Beast in the Cave" and "The Alchemist”,"The Call of Cthulhu", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" , “The Dunwich Horror” and much more. In March 1937 he died of cancer.
"The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) is one of the important books for us here. It supposedly started what has become known as the "Cthulhu Mythos." One of Lovecraft’s recurring plots throughout his books was a terrible & forbidden book, that he called the Necronomicon. It first was mentioned in “The Hound” (1922). A foreign name “Abdul Alhazred” in “The Nameless City” (1921).
Soon other writers started to borrow the same names and readers were amazed and the word spread that the Necronomicon was as real as it’s writer Alhazred.
Lovecraft enjoyed it enormously, which is proven in his letters to Robert E. Howard, in 1930. Quote: "I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation" and in a letter to William Anger, in 1934: "For the fun of building up a convincing cycle of synthetic folklore, all of our gang frequently allude to the pet daemons of the others. . . . We never, however, try to put it across as an actual hoax; but always carefully explain to enquirers that it is 100% fiction."
Lovecraft claimed Necronomicon was the Greek form/translation of “The image of the Law of the Dead”, that occurred to him in a dream. (nekros (corpse), nomos (law) and eikon (image).
Even that he denied that such a book ever existed he then went further and created a detailed background "History" for the book. According to him Necronomicon was written in the 8th Century AD by the "mad Arab" Alhazred, and was translated into Greek under the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas in AD 950, then into Latin by Olias Wormius in 1228. An "imperfect" English translation was supposedly made by Sir John Dee (1527-1608), an English alchemist, mathematician and astrologer and so on.
He even replied once in another letter “"I am forced to say that most of them are purely imaginary. There never was any Abdul Alhazred or Necronomicon, for I invented these names myself."
Today we have three main editions of the Necronomicon.
The DeCamp-Scithers, the Wilson-Hay-Langford-Turner, and the Simon Necronomicons. They contain a mix of conventional sets of rituals from various Mesopotamian sources, Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian, with assorted references to Lovecraft’s deities tossed in at random.

So far so good. But is this really all, which can be said about the Necronomicon? A book that still seems to pull to so many into its ban?
I’m afraid not. The following information contradicts that theory.

The so called Necronomicon the (Al Azif) was composed by Abdul Alhazred from Sanaa, Yemen, in Damaskus.
It is said that he visited the ruins of Babylon and the secret subterranean of Memphis.
But most important, he spent ten years, alone, in the Arabian desert (Roba el Khaliyeh), which is believed to be inhabited by protective evil spirits.
Also known as “The Empty Space” of the ancients.
He used ritual magic to probe the future, incense composed of olibanum, storax, dictamnus, opium and hashish, to clarify the past, and it is this, combined with a lack of references, which resulted in the Necronomicon being dismissed as largely worthless by many historians.
He is often referred to, as the mad Arab “or” the mad Poet, but there is no evidence to substantiate a claim of madness
In his last years Alhazred wrote the Al Azif and died or disappeared 738 A.D.
I said disappeared, because it was claimed that he was seized, in front of a large number number of witnesses, by an invisible monster.

In 950 A.D. Theodorus Philetas of Constantinopel secretly translated the Azif into Greek, under the name Necronomicon.
Due to leading certain readers, that experimented with the book, to terrible attempts, it was suppressed & burned by the patriarch Michael.
In 1228 Olaus Wormius, a German Dominican translated the Azif from Greek into Latin and it was printed twice. In the fifteenth century in Germany & in the seventeenth century in Spain.
In 1232 the Greek and Latin translations were banned by Pope Gregor lX, which then started to draw much attention to the book.
The original was supposedly lost in the lifetime of Wormius, who was charged with heresy & his “blasphemous” interpretations of the book. All the copies of Wormius's translation were seized and burned with him, although there is the inevitable suspicion that at least one copy must have found its way into the Vatican Library.
In 1586 a copy of Wormius’s translation surfaced in Prague.
Edward Kelly the assistant of the famous English magician Dr. John Dee bought it from the Rabbi & Kabbalist Jacob Eliezer. This should not surprise us, because under the reign of Emperor Rudolph the second, Prague was a magnet of charlatans, alchemists and magicians. Rudolph obsessed with his dream of the making of alchemical gold, welcomed & protected them all.
The English translation made by Dee was never printed, and exists only in fragments recovered from the original manuscript.
Later John Dee’s manuscripts held in the British Museum showed that John Dee had preserved the lost work in an enciphered form called the Liber Logaeth.
The Liber Logaeth does exist and is a combination of an incomprehensible angelic language, which Kelly supposedly understood only while in trance, and a series of letters composed into a series of 49 by 49 squares.

No Arabic manuscript is known to exist anymore.
Without any success many have been searching in the libraries of Egypt, India & Mecca.
The last Greek copy, which was printed in Italy between 1500 and 1550, has not been reported since the burning of a private library in Salem Massachusetts 1692.
Latin translations & seventeenth-century editions are said to be kept locked up in the British museum (or that after the British Museum had been suffering from several abortive burglaries, the Wormius edition was deleted from the catalogue and removed to an underground repository in a converted slate mine in Wales & in the Bibliothèque Nation ale at Paris.
Also one in the library of the University of Buenos Ayres.
There are some that believe that there is a large wartime cache Hitler’s of occult and magical documents in the Osterhorn area near Salzburg.

But in all reality, today there is no library with a genuine catalogue entry for the Necronomicon & even that it is likely that copies do probably exists in secret, they have not surfaced yet.

The interpretations of the title The Necronomicon vary. "The Book of Dead Names”, “An Image of the Law of Death”, “The book of dead Lawyers” or “Book Concerning the Dead”. All of the above are proven to be miss- translated. But whatever the translation attempts, the name still conveys a sense of death, dread, and ancient lore. Also the meaning of azif is not entirely clear. One speculation, that it indicates that the book was inspired by Alhazred hearing voices, but it also translates into “buzzing” (Arabic). The nocturnal sounds of insects then were believed to be the sounds of demonic entities.
The book was influenced by Alhazred’s studies of many original sources now lost (the Book of Genesis or the apocryphal Book of Enoch etc. Alhazred used magical techniques to clarify the past, but he also shared with 5th. Century B.C. Greek writers a critical mind and a willingness to explore the meanings of mythological and sacred stories.
The “Old Ones” mentioned it his book, are identical to the Giants of Genesis and the ones mentioned in the book Enoch. The Fallen ones (fallen angels).

“They have walked amidst the stars and they have walked the Earth. The City of Irem in the great desert has known them; Leng in the Cold Waste has seen their passing, the timeless citadel upon the cloud-veiled heights of unknown Kadath beareth their mark. Wantonly the Old Ones trod the ways of darkness and Their blasphemies were great upon the Earth; all creation bowed beneath Their might and knew Them for Their wickedness.” – Liber Logaeth (translated by Dr. John Dee)

The Necronomicon was primarily intended as a history, and while it did provide some practical details and formulae, it was not a beginner's guide or a magic grimore to summon none human intelligences. Dee and Kelly filled in many details themselves, so their system is a mix of ideas taken from the Necronomicon and techniques of their own work.
Also there is no question that Aleister Crowley read Dee's translation of the Necromonicon. Too many passages in Crowley's “Book of the Law” (Liber Al vel Legis) read like a transcription of passages in that translation.
Taking us back to Lovecraft, it is very interesting, that in a letter, to James Blish and William Miller, 1936, Lovecraft actually wrote: “You are fortunate in securing copies of the hellish and abhorred Necronomicon. Are they the Latin texts printed in Germany in the fifteenth century, or the Greek version printed in Italy in 1567, or the Spanish translation of 1623? Or do these copies represent different texts?”

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Doctor Dee, J, “Liber Logaeth”
Harms, D, and John Wisdom Gonce, III. “The Necronomicon Filed”
Hay, G, “The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names”
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