by Lin Carter
Which reminds me of something else. In creating my Lemuria and in writing its history from the Puranas, I have trimmed away enormous amounts of miracles and wonders and religious material (exactly the sort of later, legendary material that accretes around heroes), getting down to a simple story of a wandering warrior who happens to become a great king. In reorganizing the fragmentary and corrupt narrative into a likely sequence of events, wouldn’t it be an amusing and ironic trick of fate if I had actually restored what was originally the genuine history of a genuine lost Lemurian civilization into a close retelling of the way things had actually happened! It would be one of the most classic ironies of all time, if in merely attempting to write an entertaining series of fantastic adventure stories, I had uncovered and restored a true lost chapter of Man’s past, without ever knowing it.
However, it is most unlikely. Let me add here that I am neither an occultist (Theosophist or any other variety) nor an Oriental scholar. I do not know whether there ever was an actual Lemuria or not. I doubt it. So you will understand that this Appendix is not written in order to push onto you, the reader, any private mystical or occult beliefs of my own.
The only thing I have tried to do, in the Lemurian Books already written and in those I hope to write in the future, is to create an interesting and colorful world of Sword and Sorcery, and write some exciting novels about it. I have no more noble purpose than to give you what I hope adds up to several hours of entertaining reading.
(Still . . . wouldn’t it be funny, if I had hit accidentally on the truth. . . .)
—LIN CARTER
Hollis, Long Island, New York, 1968.
