THE KITAB AL-AZIF

"The Coming of the Grasshoppers"

EDITED by ALLEN MACKEY

Note: The following excerpt is from the Fifth Scroll of Power, found
by a twenty-one year-old Abdul Alhazred. The more he studied the
ancient text, the stronger he believed the words had been written
many aeons past solely for HIM to read! He described it as "a verse
that seemed out of place in its context, almost as a special message
inserted for me in particular!" Apparently the swarming grasshoppers
and their incessantly ominous buzzing drove him to madness.
Feverish, he was driven to compose his infamous tome--The Great
Work--by unseen forces. Therein he conflated sum of dark lore and
rituals learned from the "Al-Azif" as The Kitab Al-Azif ... named for
this verse from the Fifth of the Scrolls of Power ... and for the Buzzing
... known as ... Al Azif (or, "The Coming of the Grasshoppers") ...

When locusts chirp at fall of night,

And the sands do echo at their churning,

The wise can understand their cry:

"Three!" They say, "Three! Three!"

Triumvirate of Monstrosities!

But do their desparate signals serve

To warn the ears of men?

To bid them flee away?

Or do they keep at bay the terrors that they sing?

 Or do they herald their return?

For soon must come forth

Yog-Sothoth, Great Hound of the Damned,

The Great Unhinged, that rendeth limb from limb,

And Great Cthulhu ten times grim.

These three will make the world their tomb.

Commentary: One can easily understand how the quoted passage

had shaped Alhazred's developing world-view. The serious
Alhazredic scholar (or cultist) can find out more about "The Scrolls of
Power" and Alhazred's subsequent discoveries in the first-hand
account translated by Stephen T. Larkin: "The Saga of Abdul
Alhazred." This document recounts a few hitherto-unknown details
from Alhazred's early life. It was reprinted from Tales from the
Necronomicon (2001), a small-press publication, by Robert M. Price.
The editor-extraordinaire brought Alhazred's "Saga" to a larger
audience by selecting it for inclusion in the second, expanded edition
of The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the
Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab (2002).