It was fun

At this point, you're probably asking yourself who this Simon character is exactly, and why anyone would put stock in his book.

As far as the Simon Necronomicon is concerned, you'd be hard pressed to prove that it's actually an ancient magical text. The fact of the matter is that there is no record of a Necronomicon existing prior to H.P. Lovecraft's invention, and the manuscript that Simon says he received from some rare book thieves is nowhere to be found. (The thieves, Huback and Hapo, are real, however. But there's nothing to tie them to this caper. It looks like Simon brought a real news item into his story to add verisimilitude — just as Lovecraft would have, if this were one of his stories.)

The most common theory is that the role of Simon is being played by The Dark Lord author Peter Levenda. According to a brief bio from the Coast to Coast AM website, Simon "has appeared on television and radio discussing such topics as exorcism, Satanism, and Nazism," as has Levenda. In fact, when Simon appeared on the talk show, he attempted to disguise his voice by speaking through some sort of audio effect that lowered the pitch a couple of steps. When I played the audio file on my computer and pitched it back up using Ableton Live software, the unmasked Simon's voice clearly sounded like that of the Peter Levenda I interviewed earlier this year. Most tellingly, if you do a record search at the US Copyright Office website, "Peter Levenda (Simon, pseud.)" appears as the copyright owner on two of Simon's books (The Gates of the Necronomicon and Papal Magic).

"The Necronomicon should be in the hands of the people."

I asked Alan Cabal, a former child actor, who — in addition to playing "Stanley" on one memorable episode of the Patty Duke Show — worked at The Magickal Childe "off and on" from 1978 until the early 1990s, whether Simon and Levenda were in fact the same.

"Levenda is such a fuckin' snake, man," Cabal replied. "He's doing lectures as Simon at The Magickal Childe. He's doing workshops as Simon. And then all of a sudden, he decided to not be Simon."

When I asked Levenda to respond, his answer was short and to the point.

"No," he said. But "I’m perfectly flattered to be confused with Simon."

When asked by Ian Punnett on Coast to Coast AM why he released the Necronomicon, Simon's answer mirrored that of Burroughs. "The Necronomicon should be in the hands of the people," he told host Ian Punnett. "I think we as people have been betrayed by our leaders in many different areas. I don't know if we can trust them to protect us, quite frankly."

But there's another motivation for having produced this hoax-Necronomicon, and it's one that I can't say I disagree with.

"It was fun," Peter Levenda said on a recent Thelema Now! podcast. He was talking about the New York occult renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s in general, a scene that flowered in that brief moment between Vietnam and the conservative counter-revolution in the 1980s where people thought that they could inject some positive magic into everyday life, a sense of adventure that perhaps was overshadowed by the heaviness of the times — and of the Necronomicon.

"There was this window of opportunity," he continues looking back on the occult resurgence of the 1970s, when "we wanted to show that this is not scary stuff. It could be powerful, it could be mind-altering, it could change your life. But it was not dangerous, it was not going to kill you. And that's what we were trying to promote."

I recently paid a visit to the former location of The Magickal Childe. Herman Slater died of AIDS in 1992 and his store folded soon after. In its place there's now a restaurant called Sala One Nine. It was a quiet evening (they ended up closing at 11:00PM) and the place was low-key, dimly lit. I tried to get a sense of what was there once before, of the rich history of the location, but I couldn't. It's just another fine dining establishment in a city that's feeling pretty one-dimensional these days. Before I left, I spoke to the restaurant's manager. I wanted to know if she knew anything about The Magickal Childe.

"Oh yes," she said. "I see them all the time."

Him? Them? I couldn't quite hear what she was saying. So I asked, "What do you mean? People come in often and ask about the shop?"

"No," she replied. "I mean the ghost!"

Apparently, she felt it the first time she entered the space. This presence. I didn't notice it, but then again I could be run over by a truck and I might not notice (strike it up to my journalist's keen sense of situational awareness). The ghost never bothers her, it turns out — but none of the men working there will be in the store alone, after hours. The ghost won't leave them alone.

Why is she off limits, while the men get so much grief?

The manager says, with a laugh: "It's a gay ghost!"

The world of H.P. Lovecraft might be a bleak one, but at least Herman Slater's still having fun. Wherever he is.