Transcription
Lemurian Time War
From the CCRU writings, the account that follows charts William Burroughs' involvement in an occult time war and considerably exceeds most accepted conceptions of social and historical probability. It is based on sensitive information passed to the CCRU by an intelligence source whom we have called William K.
CCRU first met William K on March 20th, 1999. He stated at this, our first and last face-to-face encounter, that his purpose in contacting CCRU was to ensure that his tail would be protected against the ravages of time. The irony was not immediately apparent. The narrative has been partially fictionalized in order to protect this individual's identity. Kay himself admitted that his experiences had made him prone to paranoid chronomaniac hallucinations, and CCRU continues to find much of his tale extremely implausible. We have recorded our comments and doubts, along with details of the story, in the footnotes of this document. Nevertheless, while suspecting that his message had been severely compromised by dubious inferences, noise, and disinformation, we have become increasingly convinced that he was indeed an insider of some kind, even if the organization he had penetrated was itself an elaborate hoax or collective delusion. K referred to this organization as "the Order" or, following Burroughs, "the Board."
When reduced to his basic provocation, Kaye's claim was this: "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar." This story was commissioned and published by Omni magazine in 1987. The only constraint imposed by the magazine was there should not be too much sex. Which he also referred to as "the Burroughs Necronomicon." A text dating from 1987 have been an exact and decisive influence on the magical and military career of one Captain Mission three centuries previously. Mission appears in historical records as a notorious pirate active in the period around 1700 A.D. He was to become renowned as a founder of the anarchistic colony of Libertasia, established on the island of Madagascar. Kaye asserted that he had personally encountered clear evidence of Burroughs' impact upon Mission at the private library of Peter Visparov, where Kate worked for most of his life. The Visparov collection, he unswervingly maintained, held an ancient illustrated transcript of "The Ghost Lemurs in Madagascar," and scribed meticulously in Mission's own hand. K was adamant that the existence of these two texts could not be attributed to either coincidence or plagiarism, although his reasoning was at times obscure and lessened wholly persuasive to the CCRU. Nor has CCRU been able to track down examples of Mission's handwriting sufficient to provide a basis for identification for the manuscript, although Kay assured us that the British Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, and several private collections possessed the relevant documents, despite their denials of the fact.
Kay assured us the Board considered the demonstratable time rift he was describing to be a matter of the gravest concern. He explained that the organization had been born in reaction to a nightmare of time coming apart and, to use his exact words, "spiraling out of control." To the Board, spirals were particularly repugnant symbols of imperfection and volatility. Unlike closed loops, spirals always have loose ends. This allows them to spread, making them contagious and unpredictable. The Board was counting on K to contain the situation. He was assigned the task of terminating the spiral templates.
The concept of the spiral templates, according to which the rigorous analysis of all time anomalies excavates a spiral structure, is fully detailed in R.E. Templeton's "Miskatonic Lectures on Transcendental Time Travel." A brief overview of this material has been published by CCRU as a "Templeton Episode" in *Digital Hyperstation Abstract Culture*, Volume Four.
Visparov has sought out Burroughs because of his evident interest in the convergence of sorcery, dreams, and fiction. In the immediate post-war years, Visperov had convened the so-called "Cthulhu Club" to investigate connections between the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, mythology, science, and magic. Bispurov's involvement in Aleister Crowley's O.T.O. and Telemach magic is evident from his treatise on "Atlanian Black Magic" (Kingsport Press, 1949). His investigations into the connections between the writings of Crowley and Lovecraft seem to have foreshadowed the similarly oriented researches of Kenneth Grant, although there is no reason to believe that Grant was in any way aware of the Cthulhu Club synthesis. He was at an early stage in the process of formalizing the constitution of Miskatonic Virtual University, a loose aggregation of non-standard theorists whose work could broadly be said to have Lovecraftian connotations.
The interest in Lovecraft's fiction was motivated by its exemplification of the practice of hyperstation, a concept that had been elaborated and keenly debated since the inception of the Cthulhu Club. Loosely defined, the coinage refers to fictions that make themselves real. K drew CCRU's attention to Burroughs' description of viruses in *Ah Pook Is Here*: "And what is a virus? Perhaps simply a pictorial series like Egyptian glyphs that makes itself real." The papers K left for CCRU included a copy of this page of the *Ah Pook* text with these two sentences italicized in the original text, heavily underlined. For K, the echo of Visperov's language was unequivocal evidence of the Russian's influence upon Burroughs' work after 1958.
Whether or not this is the case, such passages indicate that Burroughs, like Visperov, was interested in the hyperstational relations between writings, signs, and reality. In the hyperstational model K outlined, fiction is not supposed to be real; rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions, consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, effective, and behavioral responses. Kay considered Burroughs' work to be exemplary of hyperstational practice. Burroughs construed writing and art in general not aesthetically, but functionally; that is to say, magically, with magic defined as the usage of signs that produce changes in reality. Kane maintained that it was far from accidental that Burroughs' equation of reality and fiction have been most widely embraced only in his negative aspect as a variety of postmodern ontological skepticism, rather than in its positive sense as an investigation into the magical powers of incantation and manifestation.
The efficacy of the virtual. For K, the assimilation of Burroughs into textualist postmodernism constituted a deliberate act of interpretivist sabotage, the aim of which was to de-functionalize Burroughs' writings by converting them into aesthetic exercises in style. Far from constituting a subversion of representative realism, the postmodern celebration of the text without a referent merely consummates a process that representative realism had initiated. Representative realism severs writing from any active function, surrendering it to the role of reflecting, not intervening in, the world. From there, it is a short step to a dimension of pristine textuality in which the existence of a world independent of discourse is denied altogether.
According to Kaye, the metaphysics of Burroughs' clearly hypostational fictions can be starkly contrasted with those at work in postmodernism. For postmodernists, the distinction between real and unreal is not substantive, or as held, not to matter. Whereas for practitioners of hyperstation, differentiating between degrees of realization is crucial. The hyperstational process of entities making themselves real is precisely a passage, a transformation in which potentials, already active virtualities, realize themselves. Writing operates not as a passive representation, but is an active agent of transformation and a gateway through which entities can emerge. By writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible. But these operations do not occur in neutral territory.
K was quick to point out Burroughs treats all conditions of existence as a result of cosmic conflicts between competing intelligence agencies. And making themselves real entities must also manufacture realities for themselves, realities whose potency often depends upon the stupefaction, subjugation, and enslavement of populations, and whose existence is in conflict with other reality programs. Burroughs' fiction deliberately renounces the status of plausible representation in order to operate directly upon this plane of magical war, where realism merely reproduces the currently dominant reality program from inside, never identifying the existence of the program as such. Boro seeks to get outside the control codes in order to dismantle and rearrange them. Every act of writing is a source's operation, a partisan action in a war where multitudes of factional events are guided by the powers of illusion. Even representative realism participates, albeit unknowingly, in magical war, collaborating with the dominant control system by implicitly endorsing its claim to be the only possible reality.
From the controller's point of view, Case said, "it is of course imperative that Burroughs is thought of as merely a fiction writer. That's why they have gone to such lengths to sideline him into a ghetto of literary experimentation."
The One God Universe. Burroughs names a dominant control program "One God Universe," or OGU. He wages war against a fiction of OGU which builds his monopolistic dominion upon the magical power of the word, upon programming and illusion. OGU establishes a fiction which operates at the most fatal level of reality, where questions of biological destiny and immortality are decided. Religions are weapons. In order to operate effectively, OGU must first of all deny the existence of magical war itself. There is only one reality: its own. And writing about magical war, Burroughs is thus already initiating an act of war against OGU, mainlining contestation into primal unity. OGU incorporates all competing fictions into its own story, the ultimate meta-narrative, reducing alternative reality systems to negatively marked components of its own mythos. Other reality programs become evil, associated with the powers of deception and delusion. OGU's power works through fictions that repudiate their own fictional status: anti-fictions and unfictions.
In that case, said, is why fiction can be a weapon in the struggle against control. In OGU, fiction is safely contained by a metaphysical frame, prophylactically delimiting all contact between the fiction and what is outside it. The magical function of words and signs is both condemned as evil and declared to be delusionary, facilitating a monopoly upon the magical power of language for OGU, which of course denies its own mythos exerts any magical influence, presenting it as a simple representation of truth. But OGU's confidence that fiction has safely been contained means that anti-OGU agents can use fiction as a covert line of communication and a secret weapon. He concealed and revealed the knowledge in fictional form. This, for K, was a formula for hyperstational practice. Diagrams, maps, sets of abstract relations, tactical gambits are as real and a fiction about fiction about fiction as they are when encountered raw. But subjecting such semiotic contraband to multiple embeddings allows the traffic and materials for decoding dominant reality that would otherwise be prescribed. Rather than acting as a transcendental screen blocking out contact between itself and the world, the fiction acts as a Chinese box, a container for sorcerous interventions in the world. The frame is both used for concealment and broken. The fictions potentiate changes in reality, whereas hyperstational agents produce a positive unbelief, a provisionalizing of any reality frame, in the name of pragmatic engagement rather than epistemological hesitation.
OGU feeds on belief in order to work. The story that runs reality has to be believed, which is also to say that the existence of a control program determining reality must not be suspected or believed. Graduality in the face of the OGU meta-narrative is inevitably coupled with a refusal to accept that entities like control have any substantive existence. That's why, to get out of OGU, a systematic shedding of all beliefs is a prerequisite. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. Techniques of escape depend on attaining the unbelief of assassin-magician Asan Isaba: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
Once again, K cautioned that this must be carefully distinguished from postmodern relativism. Burroughs' or Sabaa's "nothing is true" cannot be equated with postmodernism's "nothing is real." On the contrary, "nothing is true" because there's no single authorized version of reality; instead, their super-fluidity in excess of realities. The adversary's game plan is to persuade you that it does not exist.
The episode K's story began in the summer of 1958, when his employer Peter Visprov met William Burroughs while he was conducting occult investigations in Paris. Kaye insisted, on grounds that he refused to divulge, that this meeting was not a chance encounter but had in some way been orchestrated by the Order. As a result of this meeting, Kay was himself introduced to Burroughs on December 23rd of the same year at Visperov's private library in New York. It is clear from public documentary material that Burroughs was predominantly resident in Paris and London at this time. CCRU found no evidence of any trip to the USA, although his biography is not sufficiently comprehensive to rule out an excursion to New York with confidence. There is no doubt, however, that shortly after the winter of 1958, Burroughs starts writing cryptically of visions, paranormal phenomena, and countering his double, and working with cut-up techniques.
As Burroughs hunted through the library's unparalleled collections of rare occult works, he made a discovery that involved him in a radical, apparently unintelligible disorder of time and identity. The trigger was his encounter with the text that he was yet to compose: an old picture book with gilt-edged lithographs, onion paper over each picture, "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar," and gold script. He could not then have known that Captain Mission had taken the very same volume as his guide through centuries previously, already describing it as old. Flipping through the pages, Burroughs entered a momentary catatonic trance state. He emerged disoriented and scarcely able to stand. Despite his confusion, he was more than willing to describe, with a strange, sardonic detachment, the anomalous episode.
Kaye noted that both Visvarav and Burroughs have a mutually forthcoming of their respective experiences of a mystical, transcendental nature. Although this openness would seem to run counter to the hermetic spirit of occult science, Kay described it as surprisingly common amongst magicians. Twenty-nine years would pass before Kaye understood what had occurred. Burroughs told Kaye that during the trance, it felt as though silent communication of the ghostly, non-human companion had flashed him forward to his life as an old man, several decades in the future, oppressed by a crushing sensation of implacable destiny, as if fragments of a frozen time dimension were cascading into awareness. He remembered writing "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar," although it wasn't writing exactly, and his writing implements or archaic, belonging to someone else entirely, in another place and time. Even after his recovery, the sense of oppression persisted, like a new dimension of gravity. The vision had granted him horrific insight into the jailhouse mind of the One God. He was convinced the knowledge was dangerous and that powerful forces were conspiring against him, that "the invisible brothers are invading present time." The episode sharpened his already vivid impression that the human animal was cruelly caged in time by an alien power. Recalling it later, he would write, "Time is a human affliction, not a human invention, but a prison."
Although there is no direct historical evidence supporting Kate's description of events, the immediate period after the 1958 episode provides compelling symptomatic evidence of a transformation in Burroughs' strategies and preoccupations. During this period, it was then that Burroughs' writing underwent a radical shift in direction, with the introduction of experimental techniques whose sole purpose was to escape the bonds of the already written, charting a flight from destiny. Ginsberg's role in the discovery of these cut-ups and fold-ins is well-known, but Case's story accounts for the special urgency with which Burroughs began deploying these new methods in late 1958. The cut-ups and fold-ins were innovative time-work tactics, the function of which was to subvert the foundations of the pre-recorded universe.
Burroughs described his production methods, cut-ups and fold-ins, as a time-travel technology, coded as a passage across decimal magnitudes: "I take page 1 and fold it into page 100. I insert the resulting composite as page 10. When the reader reads page 10, he is flashing forwards in time to page 100 and back in time to page 1." "Cut the word lines with scissors or switch blades as preferred. The world lines keep you in time."
Boro's adoption of these techniques was, K told CCRU, one of the first effects, if one may be permitted to speak and still lose a way, of the time trauma. Naturally, Kay attributes Burroughs' intense antipathy towards pre-recording, a persistent theme in his fiction after *The Naked Lunch*, to his experiences in the Visperov library. The cosmic revelation in the library produced in Burroughs a horror so profound that he would dedicate the rest of his life to plotting and propagating escape routes from the boardrooms and torture banks of time. Much later, Burroughs would describe a crushing feeling of inevitability, of life being scripted in advance by malign entities: "the custodians, the future convene keyboards of the board, books, mek tobe. It is written, and they don't want it changed."
It was in the immediate aftermath of the episode in the Visperov library that Burroughs exhibited the first signs of an apparently random attachment to lemurs, the decisive implications of which took several decades to surface. Burroughs was unsure who was running him, "like a spy in somebody else's body where nobody knows who was spying on whom." Until the end of his life, he struggled against the thing inside him, the ugly spirit, remarking that "I live with the constant threat of possession and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. Escape and control."
In Burroughs' mythology, OGU emerges once the magical universe MU is violently overthrown by the forces of monopoly. The magical universe is populated by many gods, eternally in conflict. There is no possibility of unitary truth, since the nature of reality is constantly contested by heterogeneous entities whose interests are radically incommensurable. Where monotheistic fiction tells of a rebellious succession from the primordial One, Burroughs describes a One initiating a war against the Many. These were troubled times. There was war in the heavens, as the One God attempted to exterminate or neutralize the Many Gods and establish an absolute seat of power. The priests were aligning themselves on one side or the other. Revolution was spreading out from the South, moving from the East and from the Western deserts. OGU is an anti-magical, authoritarian, dogmatic, the deadly enemy of those who are committed to the magical universe: spontaneous, unpredictable, alive. The universe they are imposing is controlled, predictable, dead. Such a universe gives rise to the jury paradoxes so familiar to monotheistic theology that necessarily attend omnipotence and omniscience. Consider the One God Universe, OGU. The spirit recoils in horror from such a deadly impasse. He is all-powerful and all-knowing because he can do everything; he can do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition. He knows everything, so there is nothing for him to learn. He can't go anywhere, since he's already everywhere. Like Khao Shin, Kolkata, the OGU is a pre-recorded universe in which he is the recorder.
For K, the superiority of Burroughs' analysis of power over trivial ideology critique consists in his repeated emphasis on the relationship between control systems and temporality. Burroughs is emphatic, obsessive, in time. Any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die, like an old joke. A basic impasse of all control machines is this: control needs time in which to exercise control. OGU control coatings far exceed ideological manipulation, amounting to cosmic reality programming, because at the limit, the One God is time. The presumption of chronological time is written into the organism at the most basic level, scripted into its unconsciously performed, habituated behaviors. Time is that which ends. Time is limited. Time experienced by sentient creature, scenting of time, that is making adjustments to time in terms of Korzybski calls neuromuscular intention behavior with respect to the environment as a whole. A plant turns towards the sun; nocturnal animal stirs at sunset. [ __ ] piss, move, eat, [ __ ] die. Why does control need humans? Control needs time. Control needs human time. Control needs your [ __ ] piss, pain, orgasm, death. Power operates most effectively not by persuading the conscious mind, but by delimiting in advance when it is possible to experience, by formatting the most basic biological processes of the organism in terms of temporality. Control assures that all human experiences is of and in time. That is why time is a prison for humans. Man was born in time; he lives and dies in time. Wherever he goes, he takes time with him and imposes time.
Korzybski's definition of man as a "time-binding animal" has a double-bind sense for Burroughs. On the one hand, human beings are binding time for themselves; they can make information available over any length of time to other men through writing. On the other hand, humans are binding themselves into time, building more of the prison which constrains their effects and perceptions. Korzybski's words took on a horrible new meaning for Burroughs in the library. Case said he saw what time binding really was: all the books already written, time-bound forever. Since writing customarily operates as a principle means of time binding, Burroughs reasoned that innovating new writing techniques would unbind time, blowing a hole in the OGU present and opening up space. "Cut the word lines with scissors or switch blades as preferred. The word lines keep you in time. Cut the inlines, make out lines of space." Space has to be understood not as empirical extension, still less is a transcendental given, but in the most abstract sense: it's a zone of unbound potentialities lying beyond the purview of the OGU's already written.
You can see that Burroughs' writing involves the highest possible stakes, Kate wrote. "It does not represent cosmic war; it is already a weapon in that war. It is not surprising that the forces ranged against him, the many forces ranged against him, you can't overestimate their influence on this planet, sought to neutralize that weapon. It was a matter of the gravest urgency that his work be classified as fantasies, experimental data, anything but that they should be recognized as what they are: technologies for altering reality."
The Rift. For almost 30 years, Burroughs has sought to evade the inevitable. Yet numerous signs indicate that by the late 1980s, the control complex was breaking down, redirecting Burroughs' flight from pre-recorded destiny into a gulf of unsettled fate that he came to call "the Rift." K consistently maintained that any attempt to date Burroughs' encounter with a rift involved a fundamental misconception. Nevertheless, his own account of this episode repeatedly stressed the importance of the year 1987, a date that marked a period of radical transition: the eye of a spiral templex. It was during this time that the obscure trauma of the Visperov library flooded back with full force, saturating Burroughs' dreams and writings with visions of lemurs, ghosts in the land of the dead.
1987 was the year in which Burroughs visited the Duke University Lemur Conservation Center, consolidating an alliance with the non-anthropoid primates or prosimians. There are two sub-orders of primates: the anthropoids, consisting of monkeys, apes, and humans, and the prosimians, which includes Madagascan lemurs, Asian lorises, Australian galagos, or bush babies, and the tarsiers of the Philippines and Indonesia. The prosimians constitute a branch of evolution distinct from and older than the anthropoids. Outside Madagascar, competition from the anthropoids has driven all prosimians into a nocturnal mode of existence. In the western lands, which Burroughs is writing during this year, he remarks at sight of the black lemur with round red eyes and a little red tongue protruding: "The writer experiences a delight that is almost painful."
Most crucially, it was in 1987 that Omni magazine commissioned and published Burroughs' short story "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar," a text that propelled his entire existence into the rift of Lemurian Time Wars. For some time previously, K's suspicions had been aroused by Burroughs' increasingly obsessional attitude to his cats, his devotion to calico Fletch, Ruski, and Spooner. The extended Burroughs' attachment to his feline companions is evidenced by his final words as recorded in his diaries: "Nothing is there is no final enough of wisdom, experience, any [ __ ] thing, no holy grail, no final satori, no final solution, just conflict. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner and Calico, pure love, what I feel for my cats present and past." Exhibited a profound biological response that was the exact inversion of his instinctual revulsion for centipedes. His libidinal conversion to a cat man also tracked and influenced never-deepening disillusionment with the function of human sexuality: "Orgasm, addiction, invention, conspiracy. Cats may be my last living link to a dying species," Burroughs wrote in his essay "The Cat Inside."
For K, it was evident that this intensifying attachment to domestic felines was part of a more basic current, typified by intimate familiarization with a cat spirit or creature who partakes of many other species, including raccoons, ferrets, skunks, and numerous varieties of lemurs, such as ring-tailed cat lemurs, the sephaka lemur, mouse lemur, and ultimately the gentle deer lemur. As initiatory beings, media mystic familiars, or occult doorkeepers, these animals return Burroughs to lost Lumerian landscapes and to his double, Captain Mission. K was highly dismissive of all critical accounts that treated Mission as a literary avatar, as if Burroughs was basically an experimental novelist. He maintained that the relation between Burroughs and Mission was not that of author to character, but rather that of anachronistic contemporaries.
CCRU was never fully confident as the exact meaning of this pronouncement. Case seemed to be suggesting that Mission and Burroughs were the same person, caught within the vortex of a mysterious personality interchange that could not be resolved within time. Bound together in a knot of definite yet cognitively distressing facts, of these facts, none was more repugnant to common human rationality than their mutual involvement with "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar." "We offer refuge to all people everywhere who suffer under the tyranny of governments," declared Mission. Burroughs writes of Madagascar, providing "a vast sanctuary for the lemurs and for the delicate spirits that breezed through them." This convergence of ecological and political refuge fascinated Kaye, who on several occasions noted that the number for refuge in Roget's Thesaurus is 666. The relevance of this point still largely escapes the CCRU.
This statement was sufficient to awaken the hostile interests of the powers that be. Although from the Board's perspective, even Mission's piratical career was a relatively trivial transgression, their primary concern was a more significant danger: Captain Mission's unwholesome concern with lemurs. Mission was spending more and more time in the jungle with his lemurs, the ghost of a lost continent slipping into time disturbances and spiral patterns. Lemurs became his sleeping and dream companions. He discovered, through this dead and dying species, that the key to escaping control was taking the initiative or the pre-initiative by interlinking with the Old Ones. The lemur people are older than Homo sapiens, much older. They date back 160 million years to the time of Madagascar split off from the mainland of Africa. They might be called psychic amphibians, that is, visible only for short periods when they assume a solid form to breathe, but some of them can remain in the invisible state for years at a time. Their way of thinking and feeling is basically different from ours, not oriented toward time and sequence and causality. They find these concepts repugnant and difficult to understand.
The Board conceived Mission's traffic with lemurs, his experiments in time sorcery, and his anachronistic entanglement with Burroughs as a single and intolerable threat. "In your pre-recorded and therefore totally predictable universe, the blackest sin is to tamper with a pre-recording which could result in altering the pre-recorded future. Captain Mission was guilty of this sin." Now, more lemurs appear as in a puzzle. Lemurs are denizens of the Western Lands, the great red island of Madagascar, which Mission knew as Western Lemuria.
Puzzling consistencies between rocks, fossils, and animal species found in South Asia and Eastern Africa led 19th-century paleontologists and geologists to postulate a lost land mass that once connected the two now separated regions. This theory was vigorously supported by E.H. Haeckel (1834-1919). He used it to explain the distribution of lemur-related species throughout Southern Africa, South, and Southeast Asia on this basis. The English zoologist Philip L. Sclater (1829-1913) named the hypothetical continent Lemuria, or Land of the Lemurs. Leimerto treated as relics or biological remainders of a hypothetical continent, living ghosts of a lost world. Haeckel's theoretical investment in Lumeria, however, went much further than this. He proposed that the invented continent was a probable cradle of the human race, speculating that it provided a solution to the Darwinian mystery of the missing link: the absence of immediately pre-human species from the fossil record. For Haeckel, Lemuria was the original home of man, the true Eden, all traces of which have been submerged by his disappearance. He considered the biological unity of the human species to have since been lost, disintegrating into 12 distinct species.
As a scientific conjecture, Lemuria has been buried by scientific progress. Not only have paleontologists largely dispelled the problem with the missing link through additional finds, but the science of plate tectonics has also replaced a notion of sunk continents with that of continental drift. Now bypassed by conventional rationality as a scientific fiction or an accidental myth, Lemuria sinks into obscure depths once again.
The Land of the Lemur People: A Wild West. It was on the island of Madagascar that Captain Mission discovered that the word for lemur meant "ghost" in the native language, just as the ancient Romans spoke of lemures, wraiths, or shades of the dead. In the late 19th century, Lemuria was largely seized upon by cultists who, like their scientific cousins, wove it into elaborate evolutionary and racial theories. In *The Secret Doctrine*, a commentary on the Atlantean Book of Dzyan, H.P. Blavatsky describes Lemuria as the third in a succession of lost continents. It is preceded by Polaria and Hyperborea, and followed by Atlantis, which was built from a fragment of Western Lemuria. Atlantis immediately precedes the modern world, and two further continents are still to come. According to theosophical orthodoxy, each such continent is a geographical aspect of a spiritual epoch, providing a home for the series of seven Root Races. The name of each lost continent is used ambiguously to designate both the core territory, the dominant Root Race of that age, and the overall distribution of terrestrial land mass during that period. In this later respect, it can even be seen as consistent with continental drift and thus is more highly developed than the original scientific conception.
E. Sprague de Camp describes Blavatsky's third Root Race, the ape-like, hermaphroditic, egg-laying Lemurians, some with four arms and some with an eye in the back of their heads, whose downfall was caused by the discovery of sex. There is a broad consensus among occultists that the rear eye of the Lemurians persists vestigially as a human pineal gland. W. Scott Elliott adds that the Lemurians had huge feet, the heels of which stuck out so far they could as easily walk backwards as forwards. According to his account, the Lemurians discover sex during the period of the fourth sub-race, interbreeding with beasts and producing the great apes. This behavior disgusted the transcendent spirits or "Lots," who were supposed to incarnate into the Lemurians but now refused. The Venusians volunteered to take the place of the Lots and also taught the Lemurians various secrets, including those of metallurgy, weaving, and agriculture.
Rudolf Steiner was also fascinated by the Lemurians, remarking in his *Atlantis and Lemuria* that "this root race as a whole had not yet developed memory. The Lemurian was a born magician whose body was less solid, plastic, and unsettled." More recently, Lemuria has been increasingly murdered in the colonial James Churchward's lost continent of Mu, drifting steadily eastwards until even parts of modern California have been assimilated to it. Although Blavatsky credits Sclater as the source for the name of Lemuria, it cannot have been lost upon her or her fellow occultists that Lemuria was a name for the land of the dead or the Western Lands. The word "lemur" is derived from Latin *lemures*, literally "shade of the dead." The Romans conceived the lemurs as vampire ghosts, propitiated by a festival in May. In this vein, Eliphas Lévi writes in his *History of Magic* of "larvae and lemurs, shadowy images of bodies which have lived and of those who have yet to come, issued from these vapors by myriads."
In their joint voyage across a ghost continent of Lemuria, interlinked by lemurs, Mission and Burroughs found immortality through involvement with the native populations upon life. In describing this process, Kay placed particular emphasis on Burroughs' 1987 visit to the Duke University Lemur Center. It was this colony of lemurs that introduced Burroughs to the "West Lemurian Time Pocket." Just as Captain Mission was drifting out faster and faster, caught in a vast undertow of time, "out and under and out and out," a voice repeated in his head: "If time travel ever happens, it always does." He finds himself at the gateway, inside the ancient stone structure, with the lemur who is his phantom, his ghost, seated at a writing table with inkpot, quill pens, parchment. He uses a native drug to explore the gateway. Who built it? When? The tale comes to him in a time-faulted vision, transmitted in hieroglyphics. He chooses a quill pen. It is difficult to describe where the text comes from, but there it is: an old illustrated book with gilt edges, "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar," an old picture book with gilt-edge lithographs, onion paper over each picture, "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar," and gold script. The vision echoes or overlaps time, twinning waves where Mission and Burroughs coincide. They copy an invocation or summoning, a joint templax innovation that predates the split between creation and recording, reaching back before the appearance of man on earth, before the beginning of time.
When attached to Africa, Madagascar was the ultimate land mass, sticking out like a disorderly tumor, cut off by a rift of future contours. This long rift, like a vast indentation, left the clef to divide the human body. They feel themselves thrown forward 160 million years as they access the big picture, a seismic slippage from geological time into transcendental time anomaly. The island of Madagascar shears away from the African mainland.
According to current scientific consensus, Burroughs' figure of 160 million years is exaggerated. Burroughs' geological tale is nevertheless a recognizably modern one, with no reference to continental subsistence. With the submergence of the Lemurian hypothesis, however, the presence of lemurs on Madagascar becomes puzzling. Lemurs are only 55 million years old, while us Madagascar is now thought to have broken away from the African mainland 120 million years ago. Whilst on the other side of time, Western Lemuria drifts back up into the present; the Lemurian continent sinks into the distant future, stranding the red island with its maroon-to-lemur people. What is the meaning of 160 million years without time, and what does time mean to foraging lemurs? Time crystallizes as concentric contractions, sees a spiral mass from deep in the ages of slow panic.
Burroughs remarks a mission: he was himself an emissary of panic, of the knowledge that man fears above all else: the truth of his origin. "They see the people of the cleft, formulated by chaos and accelerated time. Flash through 160 million years to split. Which side are you on? Too late to change now." Separated by a curtain of fire, "The Ghost Lemur to Madagascar" opens out onto the rift, to the split between the wild, the timeless, the free, and the tame, the time-bound. That tethered as one side of the rift drifted into enchanted timeless innocence, and the other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war, exploitation, and slavery. "Which side are you on?" As time rigidifies, the Board closes in. The lemur people on a chance that has already passed, a ghost of a chance, a chance that is already dead. "There might have beens who had one chance in a billion and lost. Exterminate the brutes." Mission knows the chance that occurs only once in 160 million years has been lost forever, and Burroughs awakens screaming from dreams of dead lemurs scattered through the settlement.
Burroughs drifts out of the white magical orbit as his lemur commitments strengthen. To the Board, his support for the cause of lemur conservation, the Lemur Conservation Fund, must have been the final and intolerable provocation. According to Kaye, everyone on the inside knew about the bad dreams, "certain they were coming from a real place." In this, as in so much else, Kay's reconstruction of the 1987 event depended centrally upon "The Ghost Lemurs in Madagascar," an account he cited as if it were a strictly factual record, even a sacred text. He explained this interpretive stance had been highly developed by the Board since respecting the reality of non-actualities is essential when waging war in deeply virtualized environments, in spaces that teem with influential abstractions and other ghostly things. Kay considered Bradley Martin, for instance, to be entirely real. He described him as an identifiable contemporary individual, working as an agent of the Board, whose task was to seal the ancient structure that provides access to the Rift.
The Board had long known the Visperov library contained an old copy of "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar," which dated itself with the words "now in 1987." It had been catalogued there since 1789. The text was a self-confessed "time abomination," requiring radical correction. It disregarded fundamental principles of sequence and causality, openly aligning itself with the Libra people. What the Board needed was a dead end. Burroughs was an obvious choice for a number of reasons: he was sensitive to transmissions, amenable to misogyny and mammal chauvinism, socially marginalized, and controllable through junk. They were confident, K recalled, "the forthcoming 1987 story will be lost amongst the self-marginalizing fictions of a crumbling junkie [ __ ] on the outside." It worked as a cover-up, but the insiders had still more essential tasks. They had inherited the responsibility for enforcing the law of time and evoji. "You defend the integrity of the timeline." This great work involved horrifying compromises. K cited the hermetic maxim: "Strict obedience to law excuses grave transgressions." "They're speaking of white chronomancy," he explained, "the sealing of runaway time disturbances with enclosed loops."
The physical conception of closed timelike curves and votes a causality from the future to make the past what it is. They work to make things come out as they must. If this is the only type of time travel allowed by nature, then it obviously shouldn't require a law to maintain it, such as notorious "don't kill granny." The rigorous time law policies of the Board, however, indicated the problem of time enforcement is actually far more intricate. What Mission had released, Burroughs had bound again. That is how it seemed to the Board in 1987. With a circle apparently complete, confident the transcendental closure of time was being achieved, the Board appropriated the text as a record of a pre-cognitive intuition, a prophecy that could be mined for information. It confirmed a primary imperative and basic doctrine: foretelling the ultimate triumph of OGU and the total eradication of Lemurian insurgency. Mission had understood this well: "No quarter, no compromise is possible. This is a war of extermination."
It seems never to have occurred to the Board that Burroughs would change the ending, that their dead end would open a road to the Western Lands. The road to the Western Lands is, by definition, the most dangerous road in the world, for it is his journey beyond death, beyond the basic god-standard of fear and danger. It is the most heavily guarded road in the world, for it gives access to the gift that supersedes all other gifts: immortality. Things that should have been long finished continue to stir. It was as if a postmortem coincidence or unlife influence had vertically reanimated itself. A strange doubling occurred. Burroughs entitled it "The Ghost of Chance," masking the return of the Old Ones and his seemingly innocuous words: "People of the world are at last returning to their source and spirit, back to the little lemur people." The Board had no doubt this was a return to the true horror. Yet K insisted, for those with eyes to see, "The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar" announced its turbulent Lemurian destination from the beginning, and its final words are lost beneath the waves.
Kay's own final words to the CCRU, written on a scrap of paper upon which he had scrawled hardly in a spiderish hand that already indicated the tide of encroaching insanity, remain consistent with this unsatisfactory conclusion: "Across the time rift, termination confuses itself with eddies of latent spiral current."