by Lin Carter
He staggered to his knees and crouched, gasping hoarsely. The hood had fallen back, exposing a bony neck and shaven skull whose saffron-colored skin was sallow and tight-stretched, parchment-like over naked bone. Still the black cloth masked his features from view.
With a surge of incredible strength, he clutched at the swordhilt and dragged the length of steel from his body. It came sucking out of his flesh and fell clattering against the glossy stone pave.
Now as he huddled, bent over on all fours like a dying beast, his blood came dribbling out to soil the clean marble. It was thin and vile and black and stinking, like poisonous venom. And when it dribbled over the stone it hissed and smoked and bubbled, eating through the polished marble like acid.
Mardanax fell to one side, his gaunt shaven skull striking against the pave. Even now the dregs of his super-naturally prolonged life were still within his twitching form, but his green eyes were glazed and sightless. One gloved hand clawed and scrabbled futilely against the pave like a crawling spider.
A shudder of revulsion ran through the throng. Under his breath, old Lord Mael groaned. “Aghh—Gorm! Look at that . . .”
Before their eyes, the twitching, wriggling half-dead body of the Archmagician was changing . . . aging visibly.
Saffron skin wrinkled as a ripple of hideous crawling movement went through it. Suddenly, it was crisscrossed with a net of a thousand wrinkles. Flesh fell from the skulllike head, leaving it bare bone with a thin layer of dried, leathery, parchment skin stretched over it.
Beneath the enveloping robes, the feebly struggling body shrank.
It became hunched and tiny, dwarflike, bent and diminutive as that of an incredibly ancient man.
The next instant a gasp ran through the throng as the body collapsed into naked bone. Detached from the neck, the bare skull rolled a few feet away and came to a stop, still masked in black silk.
White bone aged, blackened. Fell to dust.
The rotting breath of Time had blown over the corpse of Mardanax and he was but dust. For numberless centuries his magical powers had held Time at bay . . . now Time the Conqueror struck!
Bedraggled, smeared in gore, the dead body of Dalendus Vool lay fallen against the side of the sarcophagus. A huddle of cloth and dead dust, the remains of Mardanax of Zaar stained the midst of the pave. The days of trial and danger were over and past, the adventures and perils were ended.
On the steps, Thongor swept his queen into his arms and kissed her. Then, his arm about her shoulders as her dark head nestled breathlessly against his chest, he put his other arm about his son and crushed the grinning boy in a fatherly embrace, tousled his black mane and kissed him.
From the heights of the altar, where he stood before his gods, the trembling voice of old Eodrym the Hierarch was lifted in thanksgiving.
“Lords of Heaven and Earth, Father of Gods and Men, we thank thee from the depths of our being that thou hast spared us in our peril and saved us from committing error . . . we thank thee and praise thee that thou hast struck down the traitor and the villian in their hour of triumph ... and we bless thee that thou hast returned unto us our King, Thongor the Mighty, the Lord of the West of the World. . . .”
Arms about his beloved mate and his son, Thongor turned to greet his people and receive their homage.
Epilogue
“. . . The malice of the Evil City yet lived in Black Mardanax who fled unscathed when shadowy Zaar was whelmed, and broken under the thundering waves of Takonda Charm the Unknown Sea. With a bolt of magic he struck Thongor down and sought to usurp his throne, but all his sinister powers availed him naught, and the Gods restored Thongor to the land of the living and bore the gibbering shade of the Black Druid down into the eternal darkness. And all the peoples rejoiced and hailed Thongor the Mighty as Lord of the West, and he was great among men.”
Or so it is written in the second
chapter of the Fifth Book of
The Lemurian Chronicles . . .
THE END
The Source of the Lemurian Mythos
Some readers are willing to judge a story purely on its own intrinsic merits (or lack of merits); others can not rest until they have traced every element in the story back to its original source. They are not content to read of King Arthur or of Robin Hood, until they have probed deeply enough to uncover, in King Arthur, a certain L. Artorius Castus, prefect of the VI Legion, the “Victrix,” who was stationed at York during the Third Century and was appointed dux bellorum of a punitive expedition against an insurrection in Armorica; and to derive the original Robin Hood from the ancient Saxon name of Merlin—Rof Bréoht Woden, or “bright strength of Woden,” corrupted and Christianized into the Bandit of Sherwood Forest.
Since 1965, when the first of my Lemurian Books was published, I have been receiving letters from readers all over the world inquiring as to the sources of my Lemurian mythos. Most readers, of course, noticed what is perfecdy obvious (and I have never tried to conceal it), i.e., that the style and mood of the books are in tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels, cross-pollinated with Robert E. Howard’s splendid saga of Conan the Cimmerian. But they wanted to know where the basic data and framework came from. A few readers, including a university professor or two, asked if I had derived my Lemuria from some obscure corner of Asian mythology. For those among you who are interested in such literary detective work, here is the whole story.
Perhaps the oldest books on Earth are the Puranas of ancient India (pronounced Poor-AHN-yahz), a series of partly legendary and partly speculative epics dating from prehistoric tradition. They deal with cosmogony, stories of the gods, the sages, and the heroes, the ancient mythic histories of the Aryan peoples, and of the wars and kingdoms supposed to have existed before formal history began. The term Purana signifies “ancient” and is applied to two great literary compilations. The first of these is called the Maha-Puranas (the Greater Puranas), and they are essentially religious and philosophical in nature. Authorities say the Puranas were first written down in the lost “Aryan” language which is supposed to have predated the evolution of Sanskrit; they were translated into Sanskrit when the original Aryan proto-language was nearly forgotten.
When the scholars and the reference works discuss the Puranas at all—which they seldom do, as the later Vedas and Upanishads have almost completely replaced the authority and cultus of the Puranic school of lore, even among the Brahman priests—they are usually thinking of this group, the Maha, which are eighteen in number. These epics, such as the great Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana, are the ones most widely known, studied and translated in the West. Professor Max Muller in his famous series, Sacred Books of the East, translated some of the Maha group.
But there exists as well a subordinate, and more ancient, group called the Upa-Puranas, or the Lesser Puranas, which are historical and legendary in subject, and almost completely unknown and utterly neglected by western scholars (that mighty repository of human knowledge, the 1959 Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, devotes— would you believe, just one single sentence to the Upa-Puranas?).
So far as I have been able to discover, the complete Upa-Puranas have only been translated into English once, in a little-known edition published in 1896 in Bombay, presumably a limited private-press edition, so far as I can tell from the scanty data in my copy. The translation (into English rhymed couplets) is by an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. W. Clinton Hollister, who may have been a missionary. I have been able to find out nothing about him or his academic and scholarly qualifications, but I count myself fortunate to have picked this rare volume out of a bin of miscellaneous second-hand books in New York in 1963. I have never seen another copy.
When I first conceived of writing a Sword and Sorcery novel, I originally considered laying the scene in Atlantis. This notion I discarded for the simple reason that there have been a considerable number of novels about ancient Atlantis—but, to my knowledge, not one single novel laid in ancient Lemuria
, which I finally decided to take as my province. I explored the occult literature to see if there was anything there I could use in the way of background data, but I found nothing that seemed suited to my purposes in Col. Churchward. It was a book by W. Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, that led me to Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical movement of the late Nineteenth Century, and to her enormous and fascinating thousand-page work of occult lore, The Secret Doctrine.
According to Madame Blavatsky, the human race originated in the lost continent of Lemuria which existed in the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean before Atlantis. She was full of Lemurian lore and constantly referred back to the Puranas, which reminded me that I had Hollister’s book on my shelves, among my scanty collection of Asian literatures.
Anyone willing to read carefully through Madame Blavatsky’s cluttered pages filled with weird Buddhist, Tibetan and Sanskrit terminology, will discover that according to her (and to the occult scholars who have come after her, as I discovered through further research), the pre-Sanskrit Puranas, which are believed actually to predate as oral tradition the settling of the Aryan race in the Indian subcontinent, and to have originated while the Aryan peoples were still a wandering nomadic tribe, relate the histories of both Atlantis and Lemuria. Not under those names, of course, for “Atlantis” is the term used by the Greek philosopher Plato, and “Lemuria” was coined by an English zoologist named Philip L. Sclater with which to label the suppositional prehistoric Indo-Madagascan land-bridge whose existence had been postulated by the Austrian paleontologist Neumayr and the German biologist Haeckel.
According to the occult authorities, where the Puranas discuss Sveta-Dwipa (the Sacred Land, or the White Island), they are talking about that lost continent or group of islands we know as Atlantis, fragments of whose lost histories were preserved in Diodorus Siculus and Aelian (quoting the historian Theopompos), in the Atlantean fragments of Marcellus, and, of course, in the two famous dialogues of Plato, the Timaeus and the Critias. And where they mention Hiranya-Dwipa (the Golden Land) they are recording some of the lore of that mythic continent we know as Lemuria or Mu.
Further research disclosed the interesting information that almost universally scattered through the Near and the Far East, legend and history and epic contain echoes of these two lost lands. The destruction of Atlantis is described in the Sanskrit tale of Vaivaswata Manu, and fragments of what are believed to be the histories of lost Atlantis are contained in the Saddharma-Pundarika (available in the H. Kern translation, Oxford, 1909; see Chapter VII in particular).
As for Lemuria, it is believed to have been that mysterious land the Sumerian epics called Dilmun, which lay somewhere to the east “where the sun rises.” And the great national epic of ancient Persia, the Shah Namah or “Book of the Kings” seems to contain memories of the Lost Continent of the Pacific in its references to Kangha, the lost eastern island. As well, that cryptic volume of Tibetan myth, the Bardo Thodol (surely, one of the strangest books ever written!) seems to refer to Lemuria in its description of legendary and prehistoric geographies: in particular, in its material on the Eastern Continent known in Tibetan as Lil-pah, whose shape is crescentiform and described as 9,000 miles in diameter (see Book II, the Sidpa Bardo, for informadon on the Eastern Continent). I say this with reservations. The symbolism of the Tibetan wisdom writings are all but incomprehensible, at least to western intelligences.
The Puranas are very, very difficult to read and almost impossible to make sense out of. They do not even seem to tell a connected story in the proper time-sequence or order of events. I suppose the text has become corrupt during the dozens of centuries the Puranic epics have been told and retold, written down and later edited, translated and copied and recopied by idle monks. As I dug into them I tried to restore the original sequence of the verses into some sort of order. In particular I concentrated on the story of a Divine Hero called Mahathongoyha. He first appears (if I have rearranged the verses into the correct order) as a sort of wandering hero of mysterious and probably divine origin. He encounters a great Rishi (sage, saint or wizard, take your pick) named Sharajsha; together, summoned by Vishnu, they wage a sacred war or quest against the Nagarajahs, the Kings of the Serpent People, whom they destroy with a magic sword given to them by the god Indra. There is also a subplot. Mahathongoyha (Thongoyha the Great) rescues the Maharani Soomaia from a band of wicked fire-worshipping priests who have usurped her city of Patangha; later in the Puranas, the hero returns to overthrow these priests and free the Maharani’s city by means of the magical vahan vidya or Flying Car belonging to Indra, which had been stolen from the god by an ambitious neighboring Maharaj, Palitahooridya, who had hoped his court magician could duplicate the flying vehicle with which he planned to launch an aerial army of conquest over all of Hiranya-Dwipa.
Mahathongoyha triumphs, weds the Maharani and becomes Maharaj of Patangha; in later portions of the epic cycle he becomes a great conqueror, overthrows the evil princes of five or six other cities, placing several of his warrior comrades in the thrones of these new provinces (such as the young prince of the City by the Sea, Karamkaravasyu). He continues to go on quests and missions in service to the wishes of the gods; on one of these he makes friends with the mighty Giant Sahangota. Together they overthrow a whole kingdom of black magicians.
With the permission of the god Indra, they realize the plans of Palitahooridya and create a flying navy of the vahan vidya. While adventuring with the friendly Giant Sahangota, the great Thongoyha gains a magical weapon which fixes a blinding destructive ray. In the Vishnu Parana, the Ramayana and other works, this weapon is called Kapilaksha (the “Eye of Kapila”), or “the Destroying Light.” There is a perfectly splendid scene in the Ashtar Vidya, in which this mysterious destructive ray is fired from a flying vehicle—it blasts an entire army of 100,000 men and elephants to dust.
Much of the above material can easily be found in one or another form in the later and far better known literary works of Indian writers. The vahan vidya, or Flying Car (or Sky Chariot of the god Indra) occurs both in the Ramayana and the Rigveda. It also appears in the Persian Shah Namah as the Flying Throne of the Shah Kaikooz, and perhaps in the Arabian Nights, in Rabbincal and also in Moslem tradition as the flying carpet or King Solomon’s flying chair. In the Saddharma-Pundarika, the Great Seer Tathagata defeats the armed host of Mara with a great navy of these flying vessels. The destructive ray called the Kapilaksha reappears in later Vedic myth as the “lightning weapon of Indra” and other gods. To this day the likeness of this hand weapon or prehistoric ray gun can be seen in Tibetan painting and sculpture and tonka scrolls as the dorje, the curious globular instrument or small heavy sceptre of power carried by certain of the Tibetan saints and deities. There is a scene (duplicated in Thongor at the End of Time, Chapter 10) in which the young soldier Chenlo-visya, rescuing one of the sons of Thongoyha (who died earlier in the epic and was wandering in the Paradise of Vishnu, where he would eventually receive a great Revelation and return to Hiranya-Dwipa in another incarnation) has a thrilling battle in the clouds with a fierce Garuda Bird which he blasts with the lightnings of Indra via his Kapilaksha. The Garuda Bird will be familiar to many of my readers from Indian art and sculpture; in Tibet it is the Garukha, a flying Bird-Demon. I have called it the grakk or lizard-hawk, and describe it as a species of pterodactyl.
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As you can see, if you are familiar with the Lemurian Books, I have digested most of these long Sanskrit names into briefer, more easily remembered forms. I presume few save for the occasional Oriental purist among my readers would object too strongly if I cut down Karamkaravasyu into “Karm Karvus” or Palitahooridya to “Phal Thurid” or turn the friendly Giant Sahangota into that mighty Rmoahal warrior of the trackless East, “Shangoth of the Jegga Horde.” The Negas or Serpent Kings of Indian legend became by an easy translation of ideas, the Dragon Kings, an intelligent race of dinosaurs overthrown by the first men, whose last survivi
ng remnants Thongor and Sharajsha the Wizard of Lemuria slew with the enchanted Sword of Light. As the Puranas teem with all manner of fantastic monsters, demons and dragons, etc., I have not found it difficult to turn these into various kinds of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. My zamphs, which I describe in several places as akin to the triceratops, is simply the Indian elephant used throughout the Puranas as a beast of burden. I thought it would be a bit of an anacronism to have elephants in the lost continent of Lemuria circa 500,000 B.C.
As for the sithurl-weapons, the lightning guns used in this novel and first introduced in the fourth of the Lemurian Books, Thongor in the City of Magicians, it was a happy coincidence that while my mythic sources depict a mysterious “Destroying Light” weapon, occultists say the Atlanteans had strange “power crystals” which they used as energy-sources for their vehicles and also adapted as weapons of war. The crystals were called tuaoi, according to the Atlantis Readings of Edgar Cayce (you can see them in action if George Pal’s enjoyable film Atlantis the Lost Continent plays in your town), and I have merely invented the idea that they were first discovered and utilized in Lemuria, before being imported into Atlantis.
And then we have the gods. The Puranas call them by such names as Vishnu, Indra, Kali, Shiva, and so on. These names I thought far too familiar for fantasy novels, so I simply invented my own. Some of the demons go back to my original source, however; the demon Yamath the Lord of Fire is the Tibetan death-god Yama, the Demon King, represented by the Buddhists as a Lord of the Inferno and usually shown wrapped in flames.
One of the Theosophical writers, W. Scott-Elliot, gave me the Rmoahal—the giant Nomad warriors of the Eastern plains. He writes “the Rmoahal race came into existence between four and five million years ago, at which period large portions of the great southern continent of Lemuria still existed.” He calls them “a dark race” but I specify their color as indigo-blue, in fond memories of Mr. Burroughs and his green Tharks. Scott-Elliot goes on to say “their height in these early days was about ten or twelve feet—truly a race of giants.” In parenthesis, let me call to your attention an amusing sidelight: Fritz Leiber once postulated the theory that Burroughs had borrowed the whole idea of the green Tharks with their towering height and many arms from Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, or Scott-Elliot. Wouldn’t it be amusing if this were so . . . in imitating Burroughs’ Tharks, I would then have gone back to the place he imitated them from, in order to call them by their proper name—the Rmoahal!
