Welcome back in this section 1.3 Lemurian Time War and Hyperstition. I'm going to cover two relatively big CCRU theories and ideas. One based on the whole Lemurian thing and the Lemurian Time War piece and later I'll get into Hyperstition. First we turn to a very small and very overlooked text in relation to CCRU history, a short fiction story by William Burroughs, who plays a big role in influencing the CCRU and their work. The story is called The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, which I believe was expanded or is taken from the full novella by Burroughs called Ghost of Chance. The story accounts Captain Mission, whose past we only know about from a text within The Ghost
in Madagascar called A General History of the Most Notorious Pirates. The story follows the story of Mission as he founds a free colony called Levitatia, a purely truly libertarian colony which has no interference in anyone's affairs, there's no slavery, there's no capital punishment. In the native language of the area, Lima means ghost, we find this out. Mission is prohibited from killing the ghosts or the lemurs on penalty of expulsion from the settlement where and from the island with a potential of the death penalty for killing a lemur. Basically lemurs are upheld within this culture as something sort of divine or of worship and people are relatively wary of
them they're extremely sort of elusive. Mission inquires about the large lemurs and he's warned about the the evil lizard which changes colors and if you fall under its spell you'll change colors too black with anger green with fear red with sex etc etc eventually the black lemurs of the island begin to appear as just a mission ring-tailed cat lemurs appeared parading back and forth around one another tails quithering about their heads then whisk they were gone drawing back the space where they had been away with them so the spatio-temporality and paranoia that sort of sets in at this moment for mission and of the whole story is sort of fuel for the radical kantian fire of the ccriu and the way in which the lemurs are described in terms of
the way they affect space and they affect time so they simply appear somewhere and then they draw back the space where they'd been is sort of a literary metaphor of a kantian setting and i believe the ccriu have taken on this story because it plays around with these ideas of representation and the inside the outside and the lemurs at this point and much later on in these lectures to do with the pneumogram, the lemurs and Lemurian sort of time sorcery is able to flicker around with time and flicker around the inherent dynamics of Kantian space-time. So, Mission eventually begins to live amongst the lemurs, naming one of the larger ones Ghost.
From this point onwards, the lemurs consistently reveal themselves to Mission. Mission himself, though this is quite cryptic comes across a text called the ghost lemurs of madagascar a text which states that the lemur people are older than homo sapiens much older they date back 60 million years to the time when madagascar split off from mainland 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 towards time in sequence and causality. They find these concepts repugnant and difficult to understand. And later on in the text, it states, time is a human affliction, not a human invention, but a prison. So what is the meaning of 60 million
years without time? Lemurs don't need it. 60 minutes, 60 million years, no difference. Nothing is happening. Man was born in time. He lives and dies in time. Wherever he goes, he takes time with limb and imposes time so then you can see here that from this story the ghost limb of madagascar there is a direct influence and inspiration for the ccriu with regards to understanding time and understanding the representation of time so the sort of influence here is the idea of something which wouldn't have to adhere to time which it considers a human affliction and the the lemurs in this case aren't oriented towards time and sequence and causality so they don't have any
notion of time which we would consider definitional or conceptually correct in the way that we define it because we define it in terms of sequence causality and linearity. So the CCRU are utilising this text as a means to understanding the sort of lock-in that is applied to humans once you understand the Kantian framework that you're within. So this text is found within Lemurian Time War, a piece within the CCIU writings, and it is what I consider to be singularly the most important piece of CCIU writing in history and output, and a close reading of this text allows one to find all manner of hidden treasures, and a very very close reading of this text with some background knowledge would allow one to actually outline many of the aims of the CCIU. But at
current I'll only be reading it in relation to the Kantian inside-outside transcendental system I've previously outlined. So the account given in CCRU writings is regarding William Burroughs' involvement in an occult time war. So William Burroughs was the primary or a primary figure of the Beat Generation, a postmodernist author, a junkie and someone who dipped their toe into sort of every kind of occult weirdness imaginable. Now Burroughs' influences are utilised by the CCIU multiple times and what opens up here is very cryptically a covert factual account of Kantian critique applied at an anthropological and existential level. That is to say the CCIU are using fiction as a way to imminently understand the reality of human existence
after camp. Once you read the critique of pure reason, you can't go back. This is what the CCI you're trying to say. So back to the ghost lemurs of Madagascar, it's referred to as within the Lemurian time war as Burroughs Necronomicon. Now if we were to expand this out, it's an understanding that it's much more than meets the eye to the ghost lemurs of Madagascar story. And it may very well in fact, much like H.P. Lovecross's Necronomicon, be able, or already is able, to expand its reach into our reality, according to the CCRU. This is an early example of what is known as hyperstition. Now, we simply can't say if this is the first time the term hyperstition is used within CCRU text. There is arguably a vague history of hyperstition in relation to
ideology and especially utopias. One only has to look at the work of someone such as William Morris to understand that fictional political ideas are constructed and charged in such a way that they are simply waiting for certain wills to turn them into a reality. But first I'll unpack this idea of hyperstition because it is one of the key ideas created by the CCIU and will be heavily used in later lectures. So hyperstition is a portmanteau of superstition and hyper and it's a conception which tracks and adheres to the evolutionary success of an idea within culture, or the abstract definition of the way in which an idea infects culture from the outside. Not only are hyperstitians successful ideas, but they influence the course of events and their nodes of possible futures.
Hyperstitional ideas are assimilated into culture under the covert mainstream mechanism of fiction, much like the way that they are infecting culture via both the CCRU writings text which many of you will be reading and via the ghost limits of Madagascar and the fact that the CCRU writings and the CCRU work inherently intertwines real life examples and texts and theories into their fictional accounts is a mode of hyperstition in itself. Now hyperstitional ideas are assimilated into this way. They're assimilated into culture and they act as if fictional. In this manner, the future can be sort of retroactively traced by the analysis of fiction becoming fact. Religious or mystical teaching, occult conspiracies, theories, sci-fi, mutated
fantasies, socio-economic predictions, crypto-political prophecies all begin their lives as minute fictions emanating from both creative cultural anxiety and moments of outsideness invasion. Now, by moments of outsideness invasion, what I mean to say is commonplace happenings or events, which are often subsumed into the contemporary psychological guise of coincidences, which is the materialist way of saying, or sorry, the rationalist way of saying, we can't really explain what happened, but the outside isn't real, so it can't be that. Ultimately, hyperstitians couldn't care less about whether or not you believe in them. It doesn't matter if you believe in the monsters, it only matters if they believe in you. anyway hyperstitians don't really care at all they're most aptly described as imminent
symbolisms communed with via fiction so when i previously spoke about the idea of symbols and synthetic knowledge coming from the outside that synthetic knowledge is imbued and connected and intertwined with fiction as a way for it to infect the culture and infect reality when one looks at a clear leap forward within history one will find retroactively attached to it a fiction that is to say what is now fact was always once fiction quite lazily then hyperstition has entered culture itself as self-fulfilling prophecy or the law of attraction but both these terms humanize its trajectory and i think this is why the ccriu never really mentioned these because the ccriu aren't working on a human level they're working on an inhuman level
and self-fulfilling prophecy and the law of attraction in terms of humanism leave their purposes as suspiciously clear whereas in actuality what we witness when such a hyperstitional synchronicity occurs is the outside coming in and that isn't a human doing that isn't a human communication because what's on the outside can't be said to be human so sort of when one walks into a room and covertly understands that they should leave or intuits that they should not head down a set path what they are intuiting is the injection of the outside is hyperstitial feedback or when one witnesses a strange politician become president or when one witnesses something become true which was one's fiction what they're witnessing is hyperstition or in very short they are intuiting
the creation of a new reality a new reality is coming in from the outside and i actually do outline philosophically the entire theory as to how this is possible within Kantian critique later on but what you witness when hyperstition happens is the creation of a new reality or at the very least the mutation or alteration of the current reality a very sort of quick way of thinking about it is if we think of Nietzsche's eternal return and I will go into this in more depth later but if you think of Nietzsche's eternal return when a hyperstitional event happens a little break is made on the eternal circle of Nietzsche's eternal return and it's knocked out of its
centered point and begins to turn as a spiral and then again it's knocked away when another hyperstitional event happens. So as these hyperstitions are implanted into history and into time they begin to alter what we understand as the future. So hyperstition both as a transcendental practice and theory articulates and to a certain degree propagates the expulsion of hermetic, esoteric and occult history from its stratified linearity within textbook. Hypersitional mechanisms open channels to the outside, encouraging a reality of belief as opposed to a belief in a single reality. When linear westernized history comes face to face with hyperstition, it folds into itself under the weight of the outside. When you mix academic
history with hyperstition, you create a theoretical substance which acidically burns off the layers of rationalist prayer and humanist pseudo-safety. Hyperstition makes history possible. I'll leave the definition of hyperstition here. One thing that needs to be said in relation to hyperstition and Lemurian time war is quite complex, because what's going on with Lemurian time war is sort of a triple-fold complexity of hyperstition, and it's well-layered. So we have the CCRU writings texts in our hand, a very real, very material thing, a representation that we can hold and sense. We have within this text a text called Lemurian Time War, which acts as an exposition on the work
of William Burroughs, but within this story of Lemurian Time War and within the exposition of Burroughs, we're in another story. So we're four stories deep, CCRU, then Burroughs, then his story, and then within this story of Captain Mission, we have another story. We have four stories which are all trying to infect their own reality. And at a certain point, it all begins to bleed into the real. It all begins to bleed together. The ideas of Captain Mission are supposedly and cryptically ones which happen to burrows and the ideas that happen to burrows are the ones which the ccriu begin to talk about in other texts of their own so what was once fictional is given within a supposed
factual account of something which is no longer fiction fiction and fact are mixed in such a way that one becomes indiscernible from the other the future then does not hold their old definitions it only allows for the potentiality of them to become whatever they are believed to be