Proppingupthemythos
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What to Expect in the First Hundred Pages
🕑 Added 2018-05-15 20:28:09 +0000 UTC As the first Quire takes us pretty much to the halfway point of this milestone, I want to explain a few of my ideas for this section of the Necronomicon. First, Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith (dated Nov. 18th, 1930) that he imagined the book would contain various adventures of Alhazred's In Irem and elsewhere. So that is going to be an important component.Another source of inspiration is the Dunwich Horror. When Prof. Armitage translates Wilbur Whateley's diary he reads:
“Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth,” it ran, “which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. [...] Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can’t break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May-Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured, there being much of outside to work on.”
Given that Wilbur wrote this when he was three years old I am assuming these various formulas and signs all appear early in the Necronomicon. There's a lot of good stuff to unpack in that paragraph!
Finally, given that the book is intended for an apocalyptic death cult, I feel Alhazred would lead with the Eschaton, so essentially the bible in reverse. The Book of Revelation would certainly be a hell of an opening chapter!
Comments
Christian Matzke
Sam, that is great to hear! I'm trying to research and learn as much as I can as I dig into this. That Urdu version is damned close, I'm going to have to look into that!
Concerning the name, on the contrary; the fact that you chose “Abdel Hazred” as a grammatically correct compromise inspired a great deal of confidence in me in this project, as it showed you’d done your research! As for the inaccuracy of “Hazred,” the Urdu form of “Hadrat,” or so Wikipedia informs me, can be rendered as “Hazret.” Obviously, Urdu didn’t really exist before the Islamic expansion, and even then Alhazred wouldn’t have been given that name in Sanaa in the mid- to late-600s, but some similar misrendering of his name in the course of his work being translated from Arabic to Greek to Latin to English seems not implausible.
