Heroines of Hyperstition, 1(00).

Monterre, Zelda Maria de (Madame Centauri). (1904-2004).

Zelda Maria de Monterre (better known as Madame Centauri) was born on December 23rd 1904 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti). Her father, Pierre de Monterre, was a French diplomat (also suspected of being a professional spy and assassin). Her mother, Estelle Lavoissier, was a respected botanist (also reliably known to have been a Voodoo priestess). The combination of her father’s career and her mother’s exotic researches meant that Zelda experienced an itinerant childhood, travelling widely and almost continuously throughout the Francophone regions of the Caribbean, Africa and East Asia.

In the fall of 1926, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, de Monterre arrived in New York to study drama at the Barakovsky School of the Performing Arts. Among the many writers, painters and musicians with whom she became involved at this time, by far the most important was Zora Neale Hurston. Originally fascinated by de Monterre’s Haitian childhood and familiarity with voodoo rituals, Hurston quite quickly became convinced de Monterre was the reincarnation of her mother, who had died in 1904. Hurston carried out various ‘tests’ to prove this hypothesis, all of which de Monterre “passed unambiguously.” Under Hurston’s dazzling influence, de Monterre was led to investigate the cultural secrets of her maternal lineage. Together they committed themselves to the comprehensive excavation of Black Atlantean magical traditions.

During this same period de Monterre met – and quickly married – the Americo-Liberian writer and political activist Ktomo Otchoko, author of the revolutionary manifesto The African Slaves of Atlantis (1927). This work - beginning with the provocative line: “The glories of Atlantis were built upon the bodies of the black race” – was almost unimaginably offensive to the orthodox Atlantean establishment, and was even said by some to have sealed Otchoko’s fate.

In 1929 de Monterre gave birth to a daughter, Aziza Isis, who Otchoko would never meet. At the time of his daughter’s birth Otchoko was in Liberia engaged in ceaseless political campaigning. Whether due to chance, to his own impetuous carelessness or to the meticulous plans of sinister forces, by the end of that year he was dead, slain by a band of Kru guerillas in the jungle outside Monrovia.

Having lost her husband, with an infant daughter – and five cats - to support, de Monterre abandoned her acting career (or, according to some, redirected it). In the autumn of 1930 she opened an occult shop (‘The Hoodoo Hut’) in central Harlem, advertizing herself as a professional fortune teller (“cartomancer, astrologer and spiritualist”). Perhaps inspired by Hurston’s peculiar obsession, she began to describe herself as the reincarnation of H.P. Blavatsky. It was also during this period that Zelda Maria de Monterre began calling herself “Madame Centauri” – often signing her name with the number ‘100.’

Her chosen name attested to a “transformative discovery” that was to illuminate her future path through the occulted regions. After painstaking hermetic researches she had come to understand the vast significance of Alpha Centauri (referred to as ‘The Star’) to all Atlantean traditions. Centauri herself associated this insight with the arrival of ‘Logobubb’ - “a wise spirit of the Centaurean Diaspora, invading telepathically from the year 2048” - with whom she would enter into consistent communication. In 1937 she completed her first major monograph, Atlantean Schism, describing the Centaurean Diaspora as a splitting of integrated Primordial-Atlantean Consciousness and outlined the quest to re-establish contact between astral and chthonic energies which she conceived as the root of Black Atlantean gnosis.

Centauri rapidly built a reputation as an occultist of extraordinary ability, along with a distinguished client list. As far as her own hermetic destiny was concerned, by far the most consequential among these contracts was undoubtedly Captain Peter Vysparov, who first came to ‘the Hut’ in 1946 seeking cartomantic insight into his bizarre experiences among the Dibbomese. Centauri’s long and ambiguous relationship with Vysparov was to provide a gateway into the doctrines and ritualistic traditions of Orthodox Atlanteanism, as well as opening the cobwebbed vaults of ‘Atlantean Black Magic’ buried in the deep shadows beneath the Atlantean Cross.

With a shared interest in the ‘supernatural fiction’ of H.P.Lovecraft (who was rumoured to have been a sporadic visitor to The Hoodoo Hut in the mid-1930s), Centauri and Vysparov met for regular meetings of the Cthulhu Club, which had been initially founded in Kingsport Massachusetts as a Lovecraft reading group and later became the principal intellectual vortex of post-war Hyperstitional and Neolemurian investigation. Centauri’s intellectual debt to Lovecraft is best expressed in her short work The True Cthulhu (1948), which attempted to establish the precise correspondence between Lovecraft’s 36 sonnets and the Great Seals worked by 18th Century occultist August Barrow, and thus implicitly with the 36 cards of the Decadence pack.

It was also through the Cthulhu Club that (in 1949) Centauri came into contact with Echidna Stillwell, Chaim Horowitz and the Lemurian Numogram. These influences were nebulously manifested during the early 1950s, when Centauri devoted herself to the intricate task of Lemuro-Atlantean synthesis, formulated in her last completed book, Loss of Atlantis (1956). This text - attributed to the Logobubb channel – was widely considered incomprehensible even among adepts of the dark arts, due to its scale (over 1,000 pages), extremely technical nature and enormous range of esoteric ethnographic material. Loss of Atlantis explored the Decadence of the ‘Sunken Continent’ whose Metatronic Tarot had fallen prey to its own unavowed Lemurian undertow.

Following the publication of Loss of Atlantis, Centauri sold ‘The Hut’ and moved to the family home of her maternal uncle (recently deceased) on the outskirts of New Orleans, where she lived with her sister Cleo for the rest of her life. From this new base she made frequent trips to Haiti, partly following in the ethnographic footsteps of Hurston and partly – so it was widely rumoured – waging magical war against the Duvalier dictatorship.

In the relative calm of Louisiana Centauri pushed ever further into her occult researches. All the strands of her life came together in her Great Work, as a decadologist, which would centrally preoccupy her for the remaining half-century of her life. The consummation of these extraordinary labours - whose mere intimation had already revolutionized late-20th Century occultism - was unveiled in a private ceremony held at the Vysparov Library in late November 1999. Fabulously illustrated under Centauri’s exact telepathic instruction by deaf-mute idiot savante collaborator ‘Bobo’ Matouche, the Old Atlantean Tarot or ‘Centauri Pack’ of decamantic cards, definitively manifested the ‘re-surfacing’ of Guinea through a rigorously modernized Black Atlantean Gnosis. While building on the mid 18th century Barrow Pack, Centauri’s cards deviated into the ‘Sinister Tradition’ of decimal cartomancy – as exemplified by the Black Egyptian Pack (or ‘Pack of Set’) – by including the four ‘blanks’ or Queens required to perform subdecadence rituals.

Shortly before Centauri’s death, an abridged and limited edition of the notes, diagrams and previously unpublished short articles produced during her many years of decadological research was released under the title Decadence of Atlantis: Collected Decamantic Writings of Mme Centauri.

On the day before Christmas Eve, 2004, Centauri’s daughter and grand-daughters (‘the quins’) gathered to celebrate her 100th birthday and perform what would be her final Decadence ritual, which she read as Logobubb calling her to make the great crossing. That night she died quietly in her sleep.

Even before her death, Centauri’s revival of Black Atlanteanism was being recognized as a major influence on Afrofuturism. Explicit references to her work are most evident in contemporary ‘Centience’ cults such as Hyper-C, and in many recent classics of apocalyptic science-fiction, such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels, and Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark.

Posted by CCRU-Shanghai at April 28, 2005 04:43 AM | TrackBack