by Donald Tyson
Lovecraft was an amateur genealogist who enjoyed researching the forbearers of his relatives. This interest finds its way into his fiction in the form of family bloodlines for some of his major characters that span multiple generations. The Carters seem always to have been wizards. We read not only about Randolph Carter the antiquarian and writer, but about a distant ancestor who was captured during the Crusades and studied magic under the Saracens, and about a Sir Randolph Carter who practiced magic in the time of Queen Elizabeth the First. An Edmund Carter was almost hanged for witchcraft at Salem. The Carter line is even extended into the future by Lovecraft when he refers to Pickman Carter, who will use occult methods to turn back a Mongol invasion of Australia in the year 2169.
The line of wizards bearing the name Van der Heyl is particularly well detailed, as is the line of Van Kauran. Several generations of the Marsh family of Innsmouth occur in various of Lovecraft's tales, as do the Waites. In New England, the roots of wizardry and witchcraft run deep. Witches such as Goody Fowler and Keziah Mason may have lived centuries ago, but that does not necessarily mean that they are gone entirely, or that their power has faded. Their history and their presence lingers in the streets of Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth, Dunwich, and other towns steeped in the magic of the past.
Some of the most fascinating characters in Lovecraft's stories never set foot on our everyday world at all, but inhabit only the dreamlands, while others, such as the artist Richard Pickman and Randolph Carter, straddle the waking world and the world of dreams. It is possible to inhabit the dreamlands in three ways-by projecting the mind into them during sleep, by entering them bodily while still alive through some mysterious form of dimensional transition, and by becoming a part of them after death. Yet there are many living in the dreamlands who were never alive, in a corporeal sense.
Names with asterisks after them represent characters not wholly of Lovecraft's invention. They may be individuals from history that he has incorporated into his stories, or characters who were invented by other writers that Lovecraft adopted for his own use.
The semi-mythical ruler and warrior hero of Turan, an ancient kingdom that was bordered by the Oxus River (present-day Amu Darya), a river that runs along the southern border of modern Uzbekistan. The Oxus was the boundary between ancient Turan and Iran. Afrasiab made war against the Persians, and lost. He is remembered in the Persian epic Shahnameh (Book of Kings) written around 1000 AD. Lovecraft wrote in his story The Nameless City, "I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus." Lovecraft's reference is taken directly from a mention by Edgar Allan Poe at the end of his story The Premature Burial, where Poe wrote: "but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us-they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish." Poe derived the reference from the 1838 work Stanley by Horace Binney Wallace, who wrote (bk 1, p. 124): "The passions are like those demons with whom Afrasiab sailed down the river Oxus, our safety consists in keeping them asleep; if they wake we are lost."
(The Nameless City)
The author of the dreaded Necronomicon is described as a mad poet from the ancient city of Sanaa in the land of Yemen. The date of his birth is not known, but Lovecraft indicated in his brief biography that Alhazred flourished around the year 700. He end is fixed with more exactness. He disappeared from Damascus in 738, when he was reported by his twelfth-century biographer Ebn Khallikan to have been caught up into the air by an invisible monster and devoured before a large number of horrified witnesses. Lovecraft wrote that concerning the disappearance of Alhazred "many terrible and conflicting things are told." However, he may have meant only that the reasons for Alhazred's disappearance are in dispute, not the manner of his disappearance, since he offers only the version of Ebn Khallikan.
The description of Alhazred's end, brief though it is, raises several questions. What was he doing in front of a large number of people at the time of his misfortune? Was it happenstance that he found himself in a crowded place at that fateful moment, or was he engaged in activity that precipitated the events described by Ebn Khallikan? It is possible that he was giving a demonstration of necromancy before an audience of people at Damascus, and that it was Alhazred himself who evoked the invisible being, either deliberately or accidentally, which devoured him? He may even have been performing for the caliph at the royal court.
Lovecraft in his brief biographical essay on Alhazred refers to the "death or disappearance" of the mad poet, so it is evident that Lovecraft himself was uncertain whether the events of 738 caused the end of Alhazred's life, or only his vanishing. If he was consumed, as Ebn Khallikan asserts, there can be little doubt that he was killed, but if he was merely caught up into the air and his body progressively obscured from sight, it is at least possible that the invisible creature took the poet through a dimensional portal. Lovecraft left the door open as to whether Alhazred met his death that day in Damascus.
Alhazred lived at Damascus during his "last years" and it was in this great city that he wrote his Necronomicon, the account of all the arcane history, geography, and necromantic art that he had acquired throughout the course of his life. As a young man he had been a wanderer, traveling to the ancient city of Memphis in Egypt, where he explored "subterranean secrets," and to the ruins of the city of Babylon in Persia. How he lost his reason is not revealed, and it may be presumed that it remains unknown to the historians. It was probably something he saw or encountered during his ten years living in solitude in the great desert of Arabia known as the Empty Space. This desert covers much of the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula and is one of the least hospitable lands on this planet. Almost nothing grows there.
The moment of his loss of reason may have come during his explorations of catacombs beneath the ruins of a nameless desert town, where he is said by Lovecraft to have discovered "shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind." Or it may have happened during his encounter with the fabled lost city of Irem, called the City of Pillars. In recent years the location of Irem was rediscovered through satellite photographs of the desert, which are able to show ancient and almost obliterated caravan roads that cannot be seen from the ground. Irem is presently little more than a shallow pit in the sand, but who knows what wonders lie beneath? It may even be that the nameless city and Irem are connected.
Whether Alhazred was truly mad may be questioned, since his reputation for madness stems from the incredible and scarcely believable things he wrote in his Necronomicon. If it chances that these matters are accurately reported by the poet, then he may have been as sane as any other man of Yemen. It is possible for a sudden shock to unhinge the reason for a temporary period, and for full rationality to be recovered at a later time. If Alhazred's mind was made mad due to some horror he encountered while wandering the Empty Space, he may have regained full clarity of thinking by the late period of his life when he sat down to pen his book at Damascus.
Alhazred was a man of some wealth or prominence, or at least had the benefit of a wealthy patron. The occupation of poet was not taken up by poor men, since it was an uncertain way to put food on the table. Poets, musicians, and artists required patrons to support their work. The only other way to earn a living as a poet was to recite in the marketplace for coins. Alhazred must have had money or he could not have traveled to distant lands. In the late seventh century, Egypt and Persia lay at the ends of the expanding empire of Islam. They were the boundaries of the civilized world-more distant and half-fabulous places such as Britain were no more than barbarian wildernesses as far as the learned Arabs of that time were concerned, lacking in both culture and history, and they would have regarded them as not worth visiting.
Lovecraft reported in his biographical note on the poet that Alhazred was an "indifferent Moslem" and also that he worshipped Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. Both the lack of devotion to Islam and the worship of alien gods would have earned Alhazred an execution at the han
ds of the caliph, had the ruler chosen to press the matter. Yet it is apparent that Alhazred was able to live freely at Damascus, and even to write what would have been a forbidden text, without suffering persecution from the mullahs of the city. He may have hidden his practices and beliefs during his life, and his book may not have begun to circulate publicly until after his death. Or, it is possible that he had the protection of a man of wealth and power to insulate him from persecution.
There are many examples of this selective enforcement of religious law in Christian Europe of the Renaissance. The magician John Dee, who lived in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, was engaged in communications with spirits that could easily have resulted in his execution by hanging, had his sovereign chosen to pursue the matter, but Dee was protected from the malice of his enemies by the queen, who relied on him for horoscopes and for counsel in the arts of magic and alchemy. Elizabeth's successor, the Scotsman James I, was far less tolerant of Dee's studies and reviled him as a conjuror, but failed to get Dee hanged due to the vigor of Dee's self-defense and the fairness of English law.
The fate of necromancers was capricious during the Dark Ages. Some prospered thanks to shrewd dealings and powerful patrons, while others suffered the penalty for their practices under the law, which was almost invariably execution. Alhazred's reputation for madness, coupled with his outward profession of poet, may have conspired to shield him from the harshest criticism. His writings, if they became known during his lifetime, might have been dismissed as either the fantastic creations of an artistic genius or the ravings of a lunatic.
The name `Abdul Alhazred" is said to be an improper and even an impossible form for a true Arab name. The name came to Lovecraft in very early childhood. Lovecraft related in a letter that he had coined the name at age five after reading the Lang edition of the Arabian Nights. He was a precocious child and began to read adult literature at a very young age. He took the fancy to present himself as a little Arab, by giving himself what he imagined to be an Arab name, and dressing up in what appeared to him to be Arab robes, to the vast amusement of his family, who humored him in this caprice.
In another letter, Lovecraft admitted that he was not sure himself exactly where the name `Alhazred" had originated. He dimly associated it with the family lawyer, who sometimes visited the Lovecraft house, but was not sure if he had received the name from the lawyer, or had merely asked the lawyer to criticize his own selection of a name. Various attempts have been made to derive meaning from the name, even though it is improper Arabic. "Servant of the Devourer" seems to be the most significant, and raises the possibility that it is not a birth name at all, but rather a title bestowed on Alhazred through his cultic worship of the Old Ones.
We should not be too quick to dismiss the name merely because its construction appears to modern eyes faulty. During the Middle Ages many of the books of the great Arab philosophers and physicians made their way to Europe and were translated into Greek or Latin. The names of their authors were invariably corrupted by Europeans. For example, the philosopher Abul-Waleed Muhammad Ibn Rushd became in European common usage `Avarroes." Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq became in European usage 'Al- kindi." It is entirely possible that the name `Abdul Alhazred" is a corrupt simplification of the mad poet's original name by a translator of his book, and that his original name has been lost. Perhaps this occurred when Theodorus Philetas made his Greek translation of the Necronomicon in the year 950 at Constantinople.
The identity of the invisible monster that caused Alhazred to vanish into the air is impossible to establish with certainty due to a lack of information, but there seems every likelihood that it was one of the Old Ones. Alhazred worshipped the Old Ones and had dealings with them. He may have earned their anger. The Old Ones are described as invisible by Lovecraft, and are able to fly through the air, even though they lack wings, by a form of levitation. They can be invoked by human beings, as they were by Wizard Whateley on Round Hill near Dunwich. The text of the Necronomicon itself testifies that the Old Ones are immensely powerful beings who can uproot trees and crush houses, so lifting a man into the air would be an easy task.
Yog-Sothoth, who appears to be one of the leaders of the Old Ones, controls the portals to other dimensions. Alhazred wrote about him in the Necronomicon, "Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate." It may well have been Yog-Sothoth himself who visited Alhazred at Damascus in the year 738, and who caught the necromancer up into the air and carried him away through a portal to another world. This would have given the appearance to the amazed onlookers that the poet was vanishing by degrees, or being devoured by space itself. Whether it was done in anger, or at the direction of Alhazred, who may have chosen to leave Damascus in a spectacular fashion, no man other than Alhazred himself can say.
(History of the Necronomicon; At the Mountains of Madness; The Dreams in the Witch House; Out of the Aeons; The Call of Cthulhu; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; The Descendant; The Festival; The Hound; The Last Test; The Nameless City; The Shadow Out of Time; The Thing on the Doorstep; The Whisperer in Darkness; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
A three-hundred year old priest of the dream city of Ulthar, who instructed Randolph Carter concerning the lore of the gods of Earth. He told Carter that "they are indeed only Earth's gods, ruling feebly our own dreamland and having no power or habitation elsewhere." Sometimes they answer prayers, but only if they are in a good humor. They are protected by the Other Gods from Outside, about whom it is best not to speak. Carter tricked Atal into drinking too much moon-wine, so that the old priest would talk about forbidden things. Atal told Carter where in the dreamlands to find a graven image of the gods of Earth, located atop "the mountain Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab in the Southern Sea," whereby he might recognize the gods by their features if he ever saw them.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
The companion of Atal, priest of Ulthar, who climbed the mountain Hatheg-Kla to see the gods of Earth dancing in the moonlight. For this transgression of divine dignity, he was drawn screaming up into the sky.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
Pierre Borel (1620-89), a French physician and author of various works on scientific and historic subjects, who is more commonly known as Borellus, was born and grew to adulthood at Castres, a town in southern France. In 1640 he received his degree in medicine from the University of Montpellier. He moved to Paris in 1653 and the following year was named physician to King Louis XIV. In 1674 he was admitted to the French Academy of Science.
Borellus found his way into Lovecraft's short novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, via Cotton Mather. Mather wrote of Borellus in his 1702 work Magnalia Christi Americana (bk. 2, ch. 12), asserting that the Frenchman had written that from the essential salts of human dust it was possible, without any criminal necromancy, to call up the form of a dead ancestor. What Borellus probably meant was the calling up of a shade or spectre of the dead by means of natural magic, which was not considered forbidden by most scholars.
In Lovecraft's novel, the technique is necromantic, and is based on an incantation in the Necronomicon. Joseph Curwen corresponds with other alchemists concerning their efforts to replicate the technique of Borellus. Curwen wrote, "I am foll'g oute what Borellus saith, and haue Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke."
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
Bran Mak Morn, the last king of the Picts, was the hero in a series of short stories written by Robert E. Howard, who was the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Lovecraft and Howard corresponded, and Lovecraft liked to work references to the writings of his friends into his own stories, as a kind of wry homage. The name appears in The Whisperer in Darkness in a list of various esoteric references intended to evoke a mysterious atmosphere.
(The Whisperer in Darkness)
This wise resident of an alien race of wizards that ruled the planet Yaddith in the distant past is described as the Arch-An
cient Buo. It exchanged information with the wizard Zkauba, another member of its own species, while the body of Zkauba was inhabited by the consciousness of Randolph Carter.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
A future relative of Randolph Carter who, in 2169, will use "strange means" to repel the Mongol hoards from Australia. Randolph Carter became aware of him while traveling beyond the Ultimate Gate.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
The most prominent of Lovecraft's characters is the explorer of dream worlds, Randolph Carter. In many ways, Carter is a projection of Lovecraft himself, or at least an idealized version of Lovecraft as he wished himself to be. Lovecraft saw himself as an explorer of dreams. Much of his fiction is based on his dreams and nightmares. Lovecraft is the real Randolph Carter, but how extensively Carter's dream wanderings mirror those of his creator is not easy to determine. Lovecraft inserted many elements from his dreams into his stories, and a few of his shorter tales were entirely based on dreams.