New Book By Simon Options

I just wanted everyone to know there is a new book coming out by our old friend Simon. Yes the same author of the Necronomicon.

The title of the new book which is Dead Names : The Dark History of the Necronomicon has been out for awhile and it is still not released as of yet BUT they have finally released a picture of the book and a quick overview.

Here is the picture of the new book:

(IMG:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v235/Frater_Nero/newbook.jpg)

and here is the Book Description:


The most feared, fascinating, and dangerous book in the history of humankind . . . Necronomicon

An ancient Arabic text -- a powerful book of spells that could, in the wrong hands, create unimaginable and irreversible devastation -- the Necronomicon featured prominently in the stories of legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. For many generations, few believed it to be anything other than pure fiction.

But in 1972, a young man who, for his own protection, must be known simply as "Simon," stumbled upon an old, handwritten manuscript that ultimately proved to be an authentic edition of the unholy work.

Dead Names is the startling true account of the dark and violent history of this most fearsome of books: from its Middle Eastern origins to its reemergence centuries later; its role in pivotal events of the twentieth century, from the JFK assassination to the Son of Sam murders; and the terrible fates that befell those who helped bring the Necronomicon out of the shadows and into the light of day.

Dipping back into Dead Names...

To support his theory of a continued "Sumerian tradition," Simon cites the Toda, dwellers in highlands near the Nilgiri river valley in southwest India, as evidence that Sumerian traditions are still maintained today. Most of his information on them, however, is dated and inaccurate.

Simon's first evidence on this front is genetic, noting their lack of sickle cell anemia as proof they came from elsewhere. This is not as surprising as he portrays it. The sickle cell gene, when partially expressed, can lower the severity of malaria. When the highland Toda are compared with nearby lowland tribes in an area prone to mosquito-borne malaria, the difference is striking but hardly proof of Sumerian origins.

Those who read Simon's section on the Toda will note that he never says that recent anthropologists believe in a Toda-Sumerian link. Well, it's because they don't, and neither did the "early anthropologists" he mentions. The link was first proposed by Prince Peter of Greece in 1951. (Simon states that Peter was a contemporary of Blavatsky, when in fact the prince wasn't born until 1908, seventeen years after Blavatsky's death.) It was not a theory maintained for any great period of time, and was quickly rejected.

Simon mentions that the god of the underworld in this place is called On and asks, "who can that be but the Sumerian An or Anu"? Two years after Peter's first paper, M. B. Emeneau, an ethnologist and linguist working with the Toda, published an article in American Anthropologist citing the word's links to several other words in the tongues of neighboring people and discounting any Mesopotamian origin.

Also, there are some parts of this section that are just baffling. Simon mentions that archaeologists state that the stone monuments in the region are not Toda work, being constructed by people who lived in the highlands before the Toda's arrival. Nonetheless, a page later he is discussing the symbolism of the "stone monuments of the Toda" as connected to Sumer.

Likewise, he tells us about a ritual in which cattle are killed with hammers in a stone circle, and that they practiced infanticide by tossing baby girls beneath the hooves of cattle. Apparently this is done to make the Toda seem mysterious, but what any of it has to do with Sumer, aside from the basic notion of sacrificing cattle, is uncertain.

Today, the Toda's links to the Sumerians, as well as all other theories that they are the survivals of some far-off culture, are dismissed as "amateurish speculation" by the Encyclopedia of World Cultures. I'm not certain what sources Simon used for his research, but it is odd that his conclusions are certainly at odds with the people who have studied the culture.