Alien: Summoner of the Demon

leading from

 Alien: Temple Of Mysteries
and
Dan O'Bannon's admiration for  HP Lovecraft

and

Alien: Creating The Alien  
and
Exorcist
and  
Dan O'Bannon  

 

a)  The shifting circumstances of finding the Necronomicon

 

 

a.i) A story of a discovery in the Bibliotch National 

 

The first version of Dan O'Bannon's story goes that Alejandro Jodorowsky had discovered something in the Bibliotech National, a document that was someone's PhD thesis which was a study of the actual Necronomicon that was peceived to be an imaginary book that HP Lovecraft imagined and wrote about, and that book among other things, contained an account of the Old Ones, their history, and the means for summoning. 

 

a.ii)  The myth of  Jean-Baptiste Cohen

 

The student who wrote the thesis had since disappeared although Dan would reveal in 2004 to Fangoria that the author, Jean-Baptiste Cohen was deceased, that he had died very young at 25 in 1999, and didn't quite finish this particular dissertation. He wrote most of it, but since his death interrupted the completion, Dan felt that he had to finish the last part. 

a.iv) The structure of this study of the Necronomicon

To stay with the idea that Dan received it during the time of Dune in 1975 which would have been before Cohen's death in 1999, Alejandro must have known that Dan O'Bannon was a great fan of Lovecraft, but this thesis was a study of the Necronomicon that quoted many individual. It was primarily written as a long essay quoting substantial chunks of the Necronomicon from different translations, in Latin, Greek and English. This was the nearest that Dan had got to the real thing. 

a.v) Other versions of the Necronomicon

 

Dan was certainly struck by this and felt that it needed to be brought to the attention of English speaking readers. Decades after Alien was releases,  he observed how there had been numerous books marketed under the name of the Necronomicon. The problem was that when you opened them, they turned out not to be the real thing. He enjoyed the one with an introduction by Colin Wilson published in 1993, but not the one by someone named Simon, and he became very impatient of these fictional Necronomicons certainly because they were unrealistic and as far as he could understand, he had seen something very close to a real thing.

a.vi) The need to present the most realistic Necronomicon of all

 

Even Lovecraft himself used to say that he didn't have the imagination to write the Necronomicon, and that should have been a warning to everyone so that no one else should mess with it.  Dan became fed up with these other fake Necronomicons - not because they were fake, but because they were not any good. So in version two of Dan's story about the development of his tome, by an amazing coincidence,  presumably some time after Jean-Baptiste Cohen died in 1999,  at that exact moment he came across a copy of Cohen's work.

a.vii) Producing that Necronomicon

 

Dan decided that it was a good time for him to make this translation into English and show people what the Necronomicon should be. Towards the end of his life, he spent a good ten years carefully translating the contents of the thesis into English and finally got it to a point where it was ready to be seen by the public at large. All that remained for him was to discover a way to market it so that people who wanted a copy could obtain it. He passed on in 2009 and at some point in time it will be published by his widow Diane.

A faux Necronomicon with an introduction by Colin Wilson, 2003

1. Dan O'Bannon: There have been a couple of books published as The Necronomon during the last four decades. Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you that those books were frauds. They're not actually the Necronomicon. (Fangoria,#239, 2005 p38)  
2. Dan O'Bannon: When I first bought a Necronomicon, I was dying to read it, I was really interested. I think it was the British one, written by Colin Wilson (author of Space Vampires, the inspiration for Life Force]. I enjoyed that, but I really was disappointed by the parts they chose to publish. A couple of years later, another one was put out, this time in America. I bought it, took it home, and had the same reaction. They've just taken the name. Even Lovecraft himself used to say that he didn't have the imagination to write the Necronomicon. And that should have been a warning to everyone. If he didn't have the imagination , no one else should mess with it.  (Fangoria,#239, 2005 p38)  
3. Dan O'Bannon: So I got fed up with these other fake Necronomicons - not because they were fake, but because they were not any good. It was an amazing coincidence, but at that exact moment I came across a copy of Cohen's work. And I decided that it was a good time for me to make this translation into English and show people what the Necronomicon should be. (Fangoria,#239, 2005 p38)  
4. Daily Grindhouse: Can you give us a feel for that project?
   Diane O'Bannon: It’s very interesting how he did this. He has a backstory on how he found it. It’s actually the dissertation of a PhD student. Alejandro Jodorowsky told Dan that it existed in Sarbonne (University of Paris library) and he went and found it. Now the student -the PhD student who wrote the dissertation – vanished. Nobody knows what happened to him. So, Dan felt free to take the information and use it. The PhD student actually found The Necronomicon. He wasn’t a believer, but he did the most research on it, so Dan is basically putting out his version of the dissertation. (dailygrindhouse.com 2011)
5. Interviewer: Now, you have an obvious interest in Lovecraft and arcane things and Lovecraft's circle people as well. Can you talk about your project the Necronomicon a little bit, what drove you to start to do that?
   O'Bannon: Well now, i came across this project in a very mysterious way, back in 1975 I was in Paris working with Alejandro Jodorowsky, actually on a film then, and he was very much a mystic and you might say for a time he was my guru, and he discovered something in the Bibliotech National, a er, a document, and it was someone's PhD thesis and he brought it to my attention and I looked at it and it turned out to be a study of the Necronomicon, the real Necronomicon, the closest I had ever gotten to the actual original text, and I was so struck by this that I felt it needed to be brought to the attention of English speaking readers, so I spent the better part of ten years carefully translating this into English and I finally got it to a point where it's ready to be seen by the public at large. All that remains is a … to discover a way to market this so that people who want a copy can obtain it.
   Interviewer: So this document, was it written by multiple individuals
   O'Bannon: No, it was a, it was a PhD thesis of a student at the erm, was it the Sarbonne or something, i forget the…. he certain quoted many other individuals but it's primarily written, a long essay quoting substantial chunks of the Necronomicon from different translations obviously, the Latin translation, the Greek translation, the English translation, and this author had managed to obtain... the opportunity the book had originally copies, copy extensive passages from the, because it was then the last several years, a couple of books marketed under the name of the Necronomicon, but when you open them, they turn out not to be the real thing. So i became very impatient with these erm fictional Necronomicons and at least I saw the real thing  (2009 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival: Dan O'Bannon's "Howie" Acceptance Speech) 
6. Shadowlocked: Did O’Bannon’s Rules Of Writing ever make it to press?
   Dan O'Bannon: It did not. It’s just sitting over on a corner of my desk, gathering dust. Over the years I’ve read a couple of Necronomicons published. I bought and read them and I was very disappointed, and I finally got annoyed. At the very least if you’re going to write a Necronimicon, it should be scary…I just started compiling notes, and by the time it was done I realised I had a book. It’s not a long book, but it shouldn’t be long. It’s certainly dense. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Jekyll and Hyde…?
   Shadowlocked: Yes, I have.
   Dan O'Bannon: When you read it, you feel you’ve read a novel, but if you go back and count the pages, you realise there’s only forty pages. My Necronomicon is like that; it’s very dense but it’s not hundreds of pages long, at which point it would become dull. So it’s almost done, but I’ve had various things in my life getting in the way of completing it.
   Shadowlocked: So this is something we can look forward to in the near future, maybe?
   Dan O'Bannon: Absolutely. It should have been done a year ago, but family problems intervened, so huge that I just didn’t have the time to write anymore. Things are starting to smooth out now again at last, so if I do anything at all next, it’s going to be to finish that and get it out. So much of it is finished, it’d just be a crime not to finish it... ( Shadowlocked.com 2007)

 

 

 

b) Sorcerous intentions of the Subconscious
 

b.i)  The Necronomicon within

One might stop to take a look here at Dan O'Bannon as someone who possessed near enough an actual version of the Necronomicon that H P Lovecraft might have dreamt about. Then he was being introduced to HR Giger who was providing images of majestic demons of a Lovecraftian nature that inspired Dan with ideas for his Alien script and Giger for his forthcoming book would be using the name Necronomicon, (I should say that I don't know when Giger gave his book project the title).

b.ii) Visualised as an HR Giger monster 

 

Dan would visualise his monster for his Alien script that he was writing, as something from Giger's painting and Giger would be the one to design the monster.

Necronomicon by Simon (1977)

 

 

c) The back story of the grimoire

 
c.i)  Blackest grimoire of them all

The Necronomicon of Lovecraft's fiction was known to be a grimoire, or a book of black magic spells. It's legendarily known as the blackest of them all. It was written by an Arabic scholar.

c.ii) Another race of beings waiting to return

The central theme of the Necronomicon is that our world, the Earth, was once inhabited by another race of being, who in practising black magic lost their foothold here and were expelled. Yet, they continued to live outside our realm, waiting to take possession of Earth again. The Necronomicon contains incantations to hasten their return, as well as other spells to repel them. That was the basic content of the book.

Ithyphallic Pazuzu statue with erect male member in The Exorcist

1. Dan O'Bannon :It's a grimoire, or a book of black magic spells. It's legendarily known as the blackest of them all. It was written by an Arabic scholar. The central theme of the Necronomicon is that our world, the Earth, was once inhabited by another race, who in practising black magic lost their foothold here and were expelled. Yet, they continued to live outside our realm, waiting to take possession of Earth again. And the Necronomicon contains incantations to hasten their return, as well as other spells to repel them. That's the basic content of the book. (Fangoria,#239, p38)   

"Umbilical" Alien or "Ithyphallic" Alien

 

 

 

d) Bringing the demon to the public consciousness
 

d.i) Introducing a new demon

As it went, writing his script that would become Alien,  Dan became quite serious about introducing a new demon into the public consciousness and of course what a demon it would be. 

 

It would be one that would give the audience a feeling of primal evil, and so he would make it a sexual carnivore.

d.ii) Demons from the collective sleep

 

Dan was summoning up devilish forces, demons which lived in the collective sleep of all humanity, and he knew they were everybody's because they were his. He was inventing a bad dream, imagining a creature that mankind can not distance itself from because it emerged from inside. Dan was gazing down into a space that was both a cave and a womb, the unconscious mind and Hell. In that space, something was born, it was vile, and unclean. Someone would be attacked by this thing and be unable to defend him or herself from it. It gets on the face, it smothers that person

d.iii) Demon reflecting a state of mine

 

Dan would admit in retrospect that this act of summoning a demon might not have been a very wise ambition, but it accurately represented his state of mind during the writing at the time, from 1976-1978. 

Of course this is might as well be a form of extreme Lovecraftian enthusiasm , but he might as well have been burnt at the stake for less back in the 1600s.

d.iv) How real is any of this?

 

If the Necronomicon study found in the library was as real as Dan might have wanted us to believe it was and it had inspired Dan in some strange way to say what he did about the alien being a demon, we might start asking ourselves again exactly what exactly is the nature of this thing that Dan had unleashed.

1. Dan O'Bannon: Dear Bill - I wrote "ALIEN" to introduce a new demon into the public consciousness, In retrospect this may not have been a very wise ambition, but jt does accurately represent my state of mind at the time (1976-1978) (Note to William Froug from the front of a script shown in the book "The New Screenwriter Looks At the New Screenwriter"1991.) 
2. Dan O'Bannon: Many moons ago, I sat down at my old IBM moel B typewriter to conjure up a demon. (Dan O'Bannon's essay"Something really disgusting"Alien Quadrilogy, 2003) 
3. Dan O'Bannon: But I had a different agenda. I was summoning up devilish forces, demons which live in the collective sleep of all humanity. I knew they were everybody's because they were mine. [Later , when the film was in production, Gordon Carroll suggested bringing in a psychiatrist to tell us what was frightening. I was outraged - no psychiatrist would ever know as much as I did about fear.] You may wonder if I was mad. I wondered it myself. (Dan O'Bannon's essay"Something perfeclty disgusting"Alien Quadrilogy, 2003)

 

 

The ithyphallic beast in Necronom IV

 

 

 

 

 

e) Giger's Alien as a postmodern Pazuzu

 

e.i) Exorcist as nothing but funhouse evil

 

This demon would make the actions of Pazuzu who had been unleashed onto the public by way of The Exorcist in 1973 seem like funhouse evil.
 

e.ii) A character from Syrian and Babylonian mythology

 

It was that Pazuzu which interestingly turned out to be a character from Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, king of the demons of the wind, and son of the god Hanbi. Pazuzu stood with four wings extending from his back, and often shown with an erect male member . 

 

Meanwhile Giger's biomechanoid alien beast started out in the painting as a large erect male member extending from its groin (which Ridley compared to an umbilical cord) with numerous pipes and winged membranes extending from the back. The creature in the movie would eventually have an long tail that at times would extend from the front and have four pipes sticking out from its back. However Giger wasn't quite sure whether they should be wings or pipes.
 

e.iii) Pazuzu's four wings become the alien beast's four back pipes?

The four pipes on Giger's beast were there in his 1976 Necronom IV painting but look possibly derived from the wings of a sphinx in Ernst Fuchs' "The Triumph of the Sphinx". 

(See also:  HR Giger: Necronom IV (work 303) (1976) references Ernst Fuchs' Triumph of the Sphinx (1966)?)

 

What exactly was this all about?  Are Pazuzu and Giger's Alien distant relatives with the same four winged gene, but the ones on Giger's Alien had transformed into useless stunted pipes?  

 

 e.iv) Similar bifurcated cheeks

 

As it went , details of the face structures of the Exorcist movie head relic and the Alien face showed that some thought went into integrating the two, including the bifurcated cheeks

 
(See also: Small pazuzu head relic from The Exorcist and A touch-of the Pazuzus in the huge skull in The Creeping Flesh)

face of the alien and the head of a
Pazuzu relic from The Exorcist, with similar bifurcated cheeks

1. HR Giger: Mia created the wings or whatever they're supposed to represent (Giger's Alien Diaries, June 10th 1978, p207)  
2. HR Giger: The four wings or tubes were broken and had to be attached with wires (Giger's Alien diaries, September 6th 1978, p539)
3. Dan O'Bannon: I wanted to raise movie monsters to a new level. I wanted to introduce a new demon into public consciousnesss, and I wanted to speak directly to the unconscious. That demon in "The Exorcist" was just funhouse evil. I very definitely wanted the audience to have a feeling of extraordinary primal evil, which is why I made it a sexual carnivore.  (Washington Post, July 29th, 1979)

 

 

 

 

f) An attempt to incorporate Pazuzu into the Necronomicon myth by Simon
 

f.i) Pazuzu in Simon's Necronomcon

 

By 1977, in a publication Simon's Necronomicon, attempting to provide version of the Necronomicon, an incantation to evoke Pazuzu was included and described him as Lord of all fevers and plagues, grinning Dark Angel of the Four Wings, horned, with rotting genitalia and he was said to be the brother of Humwawa.

f.ii) Assyrian origins of Pazuzu

Although the book claims that Pazuzu was of Sumerian origin,  the name only goes back to the rise of the the Assyrians in the first millenium but there are thoughts that Pazuzu may have appeared in Sumerian myth in the form of Imdugud, a lion headed eagle.

f.iii) At least William Burroughs approved 

 

People such as William Burroughs were very interested in such a document, although Dan O'Bannon was not so impressed.

Pazuzu statue in Exorcist

1. And is HUMWAWA appears to the priest, will not the dread PAZUZU also be there? Lord of all fevers and plagues, grinning Dark Angel of the Four Wings, horned, with rotting genitalia, from which he howl in pain through sharpened teeth over the lands of the cities sacred to the APHKHALLU even in the height of the Sun as in the height of the Moon; even with whirling sand and wind, as with empty stillness, and it is the able magician indeed who can remove PAZUZU once he has laid hold of a man, for PAZUZU lays hold unto death (THE SIMON NECRONOMICON, 1977 Avon Books, ISBN 0380751925 )
2. Likewise, the demon Pazuzu does not appear in myth until Assyria's rise in the first millennium B.C., long after Sumer's prime ... Thus the beings of the Simon Necronomicon bear little resemblance to either Sumerian myth or Lovecraftian fiction. (Harms, Daniel; Wisdom Gonce, III, John. The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind Lovecraft's Legend.)
3. Pazuzu was an Assyrian and Babylonian demonic god of the first millennium BC. He is represented with a rather canine face with abnormally bulging eyes, a scaly body, a snake headed penis, the talons of  a bird and usually wings. He is often regarded as an evil underworld demon, but he seems also to have played a beneficent role as a protector against pestilent winds (especially the west wind). His close association with Lamastu led to his being used as a counter to her evil: he forced her back to the underworld. Amulets of Pazuzu were therefore placed in dwellings or , often in the form of his head only,  were hung around the necks of pregnant women.
   Pazuzu's, incidentally, made his latest appearance to date as the demon who possessed the girl in the Hollywood Exorcist films (J. Black and A. Green, Gods, demons and symbols of ancient Mesopotamia (London, The British Museum Press, 1992))

g) See:  The Demon Manifests: Inventing the Facehugger