Is Abdul Alhazred Still Alive?

by Robert M. Price

copyright � 1982 by Robert M. Price
reprinted by permission of Robert M. Price

Next to his writing of Al Azif, probably the best known fact concerning the "mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred is his gruesome death. As it is recorded in a work by Ibn Khallikan no longer extant, Alhazred�s death occurred when "he was seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses" (H. P. Lovecraft, History of the Necronomicon). The Implication is that Alhazred was punished by one of the Old Ones for his presumption in making their secrets public in the Necronomicon. And as he had written in that hideous volume, no one may "behold the hand that smites." Or perhaps his dismemberment was the awful price he had agreed to pay for receiving that knowledge, and payday had arrived. Certainly something like this was the import in the minds of those who circulated the account of Alhazred�s death.

But there is room to challenge the authenticity of the story. Lovecraft himself had left open this possibility in his History of the Necronomicon when he noted that "of his final death or disappearance (A. D. 738) many terrible and conflicting things are told." In other words, Ibn Khallikan�s version was only one of many legends then current. Indeed a study of the religio-cultural milieu of the tale makes it clear that the story originally dealt not with Alhazred's death, but with his "prophetic calling", a near-epileptic fit commonly experienced by "mad poets" and "soothsayers" of his day. (See my "The Old Ones' Promise of Eternal Life", Nyctalops #17, and my forthcoming Critical Commentary upon the Necronomicon.)

All the preceding may fairly be judged circumstantial considerations. Is there any concrete evidence in Cthulhu Mythos fiction that Alhazred escaped the fate ascribed him by Ibn Khallikan? In August Derleth's The Trail of Cthulhu, Dr. Laban Shrewsbury voices his belief that Alhazred did not thus die, rent asunder in the streets of Damascus. The mad Arab was "tortured and slain, beyond question . . . but it is more than possible that the devouring was an illusion and that he was brought here [to the Nameless City] to undergo punishment and death for his temerity in revealing the secrets of the Ancient Ones" (p. 185). Shrewsbury's guess is corroborated as Alhazred's shade is invoked to disclose the location of R'lyeh.

So then, Derleth discounts Ibn Khallikan's story as misled though not inaccurate. The twelfth century chronicler did record what people saw, but they saw a mirage. Alhazred died later, though presumably not much later, in the Nameless City. But all this is Derleth. Did Lovecraft himself leave any such hints, or are we just dealing with one more of Derleth's "corrections" of HPL? As it turns out, Lovecraft did hint of an alternative ending to Alhazred's saga.

Lovecraft often employed the idea of a sorcerer preternaturally extending his lifespan. Ephraim Waite manages this feat by mind transference from one descendant to the next ("The Thing on the Doorstep"). Joseph Curwen arranges for a descendant to raise him from the dead while his colleague Simon Orne simply remains alive from age to age (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). The same theme, with different methods, occurs again and again in "The Festival", "Medusa's Coil", "The Dreams in the Witch House", "The Survivor", and "The Last Test". In the last named, the Atlantean magus Surama remains in an age-long torpor until he is revived by the mad scientist Clarendon. In the same story Clarendon is found disputing with Surama and warns him that "there are things in Alhazred's Azif which weren't known in Atlantis! We've both meddled in dangerous things, but you needn't think you know all my resources. How about the Nemesis of Flame? I talked in Yemen with an old man who had come back alive from the Crimson Desert---he had seen Irem, the City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb---Ia! Shub-Niggurath!" (pp. 219-220).

Does this sound familiar? Indeed it does, for in his History of the Necronomicon, Lovecraft tells us that Abdul Alhazred was "a mad poet of Sanna, in Yemen" (emphasis mine). He, too, had visited underground tombs and made pilgrimages to "the great southern desert of Arabia---(The Roba El Khaliyeh or 'Empty Space� of the ancients and 'Dahna' or 'Crimson' desert of the modern Arabs)" (emphasis mine). And like Clarendon's informant, "he claimed to have seen the fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars." It remains but to note that Alhazred is actually mentioned in the same passage, and finally, that "The Last Test" and History of the Necronomicon were written in the very same year, 1927!

The implication, surely, is that Clarendon had, wittingly or not, encountered none other than Abdul Alhazred himself! The latter will then be seen to have prolonged his life by eldritch means, like many another Lovecraftian sorcerer. And of all of HPL's magi, who would have been more likely to have such powers?

There is no doubt that Abdul Alhazred lives on in the imagination of Lovecraft's many readers, but more startling is the thought that he himself might be one of them!