I’ve always found the Necronomicon a rather unique common trade paperback in that it actually provides a set of concise rituals to call up the celestial spheres, which are the archetypal foundation of many pagan pantheons, not to mention the sephiric forces of the Kabbalah as well. Of course this is completely overlooked by most of the people that pick it up, the melodramatic "Lovecraftian" angle automatically making it rather generically sinister to those without any fame of reference to compare it with anything else.
The point is that it's hardly "Black Magic," if you’ll excuse my use of that ridiculous term, since the gods it calls to are all exactly the same archetypical pantheon of "good guys" who were worshipped, of course, by the Sumerians under the names they provide in the text, and later by the Greeks and the Romans as the now rather familiar Olympians, and who finally were venerated by even the Judeo-Christian Hermetics as the planetary based choirs of angels, or, as I like to think of it, the rather polytheistically flavored monotheism of those clever Kabbalists. In fact, I often view the text in purely Kabbalistic terms, which is quite amusing since it takes dabblers who are looking to contact "the dark forces of Chuthulu," and instead puts them on a regimen of Kabbalistic pathworking that sets them on a guided visualization trip up the tree of life to the 7th gate, which is of course Daath, a.ka. the dark night of the soul where you are said to come face to face with God and the final Judgment of your soul. Must be a real bummer for all those black metal kids expecting to meet some sort of Ozzy Osborne-esqe "Prince of Darkness," huh?
Buy hey, at least it's not just some bullshit that was made up out of thin air like lots of the stuff that comes out these days, right? If anything, the rituals, however misguided, should stand a better chance of success due to this appropriation of actual magical principals. Then again, I suppose a chaos magician is supposed to be able to call upon the god of belly button lint and still get a result, but in practice I kind of think it's easier to put Will behind the well worn archetypes of the past, for whatever reason one may think that is.
Although, it’s worth mentioning that the power of the mythos goes way beyond the astrological significance of the Necronomicon’s celestial pantheon. Lovecraft was either an initiate, which is doubtful, or an "inspired" artist that was tapping an area of spiritual ideas that are very significant to many magical groups active today and going back to even before Lovecraft. Take for instance the Enochian work of Dee and Kelly, and later Crowley, all supposedly aimed at the apocalyptic release of the powerful cosmic forces that are held outside this sweet piece of real estate which for some strange reason they seem unable to let slip away, but more on why that may be later.
Of course I am quite aware that there is split in the Cthulu Mythos community between those who favor Lovecraft’s own atheistic and mechanist view of a cold and impersonal universe with little “spiritual” hope for mankind, and the “Gnostic” position I’ve laid out above. The former was of course a large part of the horror that he attempted to impart to his readers with his macabre tales of doom, but this Victorian numbness to the spiritual grist of his own mythology is a trait that is not often shared by those who truly understand why the stories call out to us as they do. To me the mythos is subtle declaration of the ancient mythical idea that we are all lost and broken creatures, born of divine blood and ashes, dwelling unaware within the shadows of the dark and powerful monsters that we once were.
As you may already be aware, the "Lovecraft mythos" shadows the occult secrets of many initiatory orders, from the Typhonian O.T.O., where it’s rather literally appropriated with the atavistic recidivism take on the Old God’s return, to the Scientologists and their magical alien fragments scattered and lost in the unconscious souls of mankind awaiting rebirth, to other less specific speculations concerning the Golden Dawn, the T. O. S., and even the Freemasons, which I either don’t feel well enough informed about or convinced of to repeat here.
The point is that historical traditions that validate the paradigm of the Mythos are numerous, especially in the area of ancient religion. In actual Sumerian lore, which is barely scratched by the hackney Necronomicon rendition of it, Marduk, Supreme God of the Sumerian pantheon, slays the ancient Tiamat and makes the universe out of her corpse, while mankind is fashioned as a race of slaves born from of the blood of her consort and mightiest defender, the monstrous Kingu. Later, in the Greek mysteries, stories abound of incarnate and slumbering deities, least of which are the Zagreus eating Titans, once more ashed by another Marduk-like Father figure, the cosmocrator Zeus, who then also raises mankind from the Titan’s ashes. The Norse world was built from the body of the greatest Frost Giant to be slain by Odin and his conspirators, the first people fashioned from some tree stumps found in that new world. This seems on the surface to deviate from the divine-origin-of-man motif until one considers that the trees were actually a part, a small fraction if you will, of this dead giant’s body, as well as the intense esoteric significance of trees within the Norse paradigm. Regardless, even the so called Gnostic heresies were another ready source of lore that repeats this spiritual truth that eternally calls out to the more than mortal ambitions of mankind. “That which lies dreaming can eternal lie, and with strange eons, even death may die.”
As a parting note I feel I should also give a quick mention to the now widely disseminated dualist belief of the battle between Ahuraman and Ahuramazda from Zoroastrian mythology, significant perhaps only because the Evil Gods are imprisoned here and mankind is created to be used as a sort of game piece for the gradual negotiation of the Evil Gods' destruction. Oh, and how could I forget the tragic story of the Djinn. “Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They rule again.”