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Abstract
Lovecraft would have been at the very least amused, but more than likely discouraged and then perhaps finally dismayed, that the subjects of his deepest nightmares could have become fodder for magical systems, games of divination, and the basis for worldviews. Since many of Lovecraft's stories concern themselves with the revealing or unveiling of realities seemingly hidden underneath the mundane appearances of external reality, and how practitioners of witchcraft, voodoo or other forms of "non-mainstream" spirituality seem to be tuned into these same planes of existence, it is a perfectly legitimate question, among others, to ask how Lovecraft actually portrayed the divinatory arts that such practitioners are often said to employ. [...]throughout the corpus of Lovecraft's work, there is almost no reference to cartomancy or palmistry, two well-known divination practices. According to his medical history, the man first began experiencing this superior being in dreams, and being unable to adequately describe this personality, given his limited intelligence and education (which is described in embarrassing classist and racist detail by Lovecraft), begins to experience a mental breakdown. According to Levenda, the anonymous author of the Simon Necronomicon "borrowed" an ancient scroll when he (and Levenda) came across it while covertly inspecting a cache of antiquities that had been delivered to one of the New York occult bookstores they frequented in the early seventies.