Sunday, June 15, 2008

Mysteries of the Necronomicon: The Mystery of the Missing Whiskers

I was in a local Hastings browsing books the other day when I came across a copy of the Simon Necronomicon (hereafter called Simonomicon). I smiled and flipped through the book. I stopped at the sigil of Humwawa and said, "I was right, the sigil does have whiskers!"

I took the book to the cashier and paid for it with a handful of gold coins.

What made me do that?... A couple of years ago I was following Dan Harms' wordpress blog and there was talk of Humwawa (also Humbaba) having whiskers while the sigil in the Simonomicon resembles a mass of entrails. In Dan's blog he uses the following quote from Black and Green:
In art, Humbaba is typically portrayed as a human-bodied figure with lion’s claws for hands, a monstrous face, long hair and whiskers.
Dan emphasized "and whiskers" and I got a little confused as to why... in my memory the sigil of Humwawa has whiskers. In my comment to the blog post I asked "It has been years since I’ve had a copy of Simon’s Necronomicon, but are there not whiskers on the sigil of Humwawa?"

After that I did a google image search for the sigil and came up with a lot of sigils looking like this:
This kind of made me feel silly, but I'm comfortable with that feeling so I moved on knowing my memory was playing tricks on me.

But now I have a genuine copy of the Necronomicon. This copy is complete and perfect and with it's aid and the use of my Lexmark scanner I will now reveal for the very first time on the internet the true form of Humwawa's sigil! PREPARE YOURSELF!

As you can see, the sigil has entrails AND whiskers!

Now, I don't really care about the bickery nitpicking, but I would like to know where all the whiskers have gone! I know this is the internet and shaving is in vogue, but don't shave your sigils.

That's all I've got to say about that.

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