Fiction & pseudobiblia

Not folklore, and saying so

Thirteen entries from the Lovecraft cycle, kept in a section of their own. They carry the grade L — authorial invention — and the reason they are in an atlas of folklore is that they are constantly mistaken for it.

The Necronomicon has an author, a date of composition and a magazine issue number. So does every book, entity and city in this section. That is precisely what makes them worth a page: a documented invention is ethnographic material about the twentieth century, and the reflex that turns an invention into an ancient tradition within a generation is the same reflex this atlas tracks everywhere else.

So these entries give the publication data the way the other entries give the collector and the year of collection. Lovecraft himself was explicit that he had made it all up; the confusion came later, and it came fast.

The rest of the atlas — 127 entries of folklore proper, the maps and the source checks — is at atlasnoctis.com, mostly in Italian. The Method page explains the four grades and why L exists.