FLATLINE NUMOGRAMMATICS
by Lillian Patch
ZERO OF FOUR
Midnight strikes, and the count turns back, and the date is a sequence of zeroes. Neolemurians split off into separate times. Any analysis of what it means to be "Neolemurian" must begin from this moment, that from which the Ccru kicks off in a profounder sense than chronological: from Year-Zero. In the context of the Oecumenic/Gregorian calendar, there is no Year-Zero, 1 BC giving way to 1 AD. Where it emerges, it emerges from a glitch, as a schism. For the Ccru and its Crypt "contemporaries," this schism was found in Y2K, out of the anticipation of which it fashioned a communion with the abyss. Not every Neolemurian entity has been "Y2K-Positive," but each must form a relation with the cipher in order to bear the name of Lemuria, and so the case of Y2K is informative. And this is what it says:
Neolemuria is a house divided. We are not peers in time. When Y2K passed, the Crypt which anticipated it lost all of its coherence. H-C called it The Rite of the Return, changed the date to 00, and prepared for the repeat of the century ending in 99. The K-Goths announced the hundredth year of K-Time, K-100, and made definitive their break with Rome. For proponents of zygotriadicism, it was merely the start of another two-year cycle, yet another return to 000000. Lastly, some Neolemurian elements did not make the jump, stayed in Oecumenic time, and slowly dispersed. It is from the corpses of these elements that a new Neolemurian occulture has grown. At first without recognizing it, it passed through a series of intensifying, disagreeing "ACC" phases into a new relationship with zero, spelling out the name of the lemur of initiation: L, U, R, G... 0.
Any new Lemuria finds itself stranded in time. Its Cryptic kin have long since abandoned this place, and always have, and will once again. Moreover, those of us who remain do not agree and do not cohere, with consensus on any particular belief being impossible by design. It has always been so. The Ccru did not agree with itself, nor did the Cthulhu Club, or the Institute for the Study of Binomics, or even the AOE, despite its best efforts. There is no hope of unity, or even of mutual good feeling. We do not exist in order to be joined in such a way. "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply ourselves unto wisdom": our days are at odds with each other's.
Neolemuria is a house divided. But it is not divided against itself. The plane on which it operates is not centred, but it shares an alien rhythm. The rhythm is the numogram, always the numogram, the unutterable elaboration of zero which has been excavated by all Neolemurian entities and which is constantly in the process of being discovered. This is not a new proposition. Consider the Ccru's Writings: why does it place "The Tale of the End" at the beginning, and the exposition of the numogram at the end? Why does the path to this exposition consist of eight parts, the length of the longest paths of the Decimal Labyrinth and the number which forms the gate to the Unuttera? The coils through which the vastly eclectic accounts of the Writings come together, with all their schisms and disagrements still in place, are the numogram's coils. When the Ccru wrote "Communique One" their work prior to their discovery of the numogram arranged itself into a numogrammatic ritual, passing through nine phase-transfers to degree-0. The Crypt itself was said to be like this, with each communicative "micropause" mapped rigorously to a numogrammatic transfer. Even during the ACC period, where the numogram was relatively obscure, it was used as an in-group signifier, a handshake binding Neolemurians together, even though its full extent was not properly intuited. Our likeness and our singularity, the intimacy we share with each other, even in the absence of a shared epoch is thus: "Nothing but the numogram!"
Even when it is not "understood"—it might be better to say, inscribed upon the inside of one's skull—the numogram creates lines of connection. It is the voice in the darkness of Neolemurian diffusion, its univocity. The numogram is, at once, its utterance and its utterer. It is our common protocol and the Entity which, in many voices, communicates through it.
ONE OF FOUR
It does not, has not, and will never exist. Lemuria, unborn, is not a space in time. The sunken landmass is without territory, not actually existing, only ever apprehended. Our continent also emerges from a glitch, from what is now deemed a mistake: the erroneous construction of the Linnaean genus Lemur. Today, the Indian lorises and Philippine colugos are taxonomically distinct from "true" Malagasy lemurs, but once they were thought bound together under the name of a ghost, joined as Lemur catta, Lemur volans, and Lemur tardigradus. Linnaeus made a problem of the geographic separation of these three, changed their isolation from a sterile distance into an open question. Philip Sclater, in positing Lemuria some century later, merely pursued this question to its logical extent, to the point of summoning a thing which should not be.
"There is nothing positive in ideas, which causes them to be called false." Lemuria, initially conceived, is inadequate because it is imagined as having a body and a point in time. Purified of these confusions, cutting off Lemuria from its associated beliefs, attributing zero extent and zero duration, we find the Continentity. Lemuria is the consummate intimacy of the lemurs, an intercontinental kiss, their desire for one another across their separation making something of itself. The Continentity is contact and the fulfillment of a promise; instead of a lack stretched out across the face of the Earth, there she is. Lemuria lacks nothing proper to it, and yet it has no image in space—activity without a body. Lemuria is a violent blank.
Numogrammatics is a process of mapping, and the numogram is the map of Lemuria. Like any map, it notes geographic features, highs and lows and the gulfs between them. The numogram is a map, and yet Lemuria is still not a space, and so the numogram is a map without extensity. It is and is not like the map of Borges, "whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it." It is not, because the numogram has no width and Lemuria has no territory, so the two cannot possibly meet through proximity in space. But it is, because the numogram never ceases, at any instant, to touch the Continentity in the most intimate ways, passing over its membrane with such precision that it almost goes right through. Through the numogram, Lemuria touches itself. “La femme ‘se touche’ tout le temps, sans que l’on puisse d’ailleurs le lui interdire, car son sexe est fait de deux lèvres qui s’embrassent constamment.” The numogram is the doubleness of Lemuria, a lip upon its lip, and their inseparable embrace.
Numogrammatics exists for Lemuria, and Lemuria is a nothing, a zero. It thus exists for nothing, and is limited by no purpose other than itself. Left to its own devices, numogrammatics pursues an infinite intimacy with zero, toward which all its numeracies orient themselves: it folds in on itself over and over into new maps, new modes of touch. It is to these instants of Lemuria that Neolemurians address themselves, developing for their discovery a numogrammatic practice, a numogrammaticism. The Decimal Labyrinth, what is most often called the numogram, is the map of maps but not the only map: numogrammatics elaborates its desire without ceasing, and numogrammaticism delves into its elaborations.
The model of all numogrammatic practice derives from the game of Subdecadence. In this game of cards, a sequence of spreads, called Crosses, are used to effect the invocation of a decimal lemur under a unique set of conditions, called an Aeon. Each lemur invoked is a particular map with its own assemblage of paths, drawn from the broader system of the Labyrinth. But so too is each card that comes into play (and even some which never do) a map, and so is the Cross itself and each of its two billion configurations, and so is each of the infinite possible Aeons these Crosses produce, and so are the rules of the game itself. Numogrammatics is a ceaseless overflow beyond any sort of exhaustive study; the exactitude of its convergence with Lemuria can never be produced by human beings. It is enough for a numogrammaticist to facilitate the initiation of some of these instants amid conditions of finitude, to act as a midwife to the unborn. It is enough to play an Aeon of Subdecadence and lose.
No instant of numogrammatics exists to the exclusion of any other. Each is a folding in, an implex(ion), of the entire system, and so each can be read alongside every other on a plane of consistency. The construction of this plane is Neolemuria, out of which all heresies are cast. "Heresy," here, is whatever substitutes the numogram's autopoetic will with the egogic preference of a human being, whatever is indifferent to or seeks to violate zero's being among itself. Because Neolemurians often tend toward transgressive inclinations, the use of the term "heresy" almost always backfires and encourages what it seeks to prohibit. For this reason, almost all numogrammaticists have been at some time guilty of the most abominable heresies. The abandonment of heresy, however, is really not a prohibition but the refusal to prohibit. It emerges from the understanding that Lemuria "se touche tout le temps, sans que l'on puisse d'ailleurs le lui interdire." Heresy is an attempt at an exclusive disjunction, a plotted violence against consistency, suffocating real contact by means of petty indulgence. Heresy is whatever seeks to separate lip from lip.
TWO OF FOUR
The numogram, as a map of zero, is always already a map of time. In this, it is not a map of any particular means by which time is measured: not a map of the day and night, nor a map of the seasons, nor a map of a clockface and its endless accumulation. Even if these motions can be mapped to its coils, they do not comprise its object, which is only ever a searing void, a thing that is not one. Rather, the numogram is a map of time by virtue of its status as a temporal event, one which in fact does not cohere with any existing temporal order.
Neolemurians accept the Kantian definition of time as the form of inner sense and precondition of all phenomena. Time, by this definition, is prior to anything which exists in space, the form of outer sense being reliant on the inner; prior to thought, which occurs internally; prior even to the radical internality of the cogito. Only through the schema of time is sensation joined with understanding and thinking made possible. However, Neolemurians view Kant's attribution of this temporal schema to the "depths of the human soul" with intense suspicion; how can a productive schema which is prior to the organism's production be attributed to it? Instead, they concur with R. E. Templeton's equation between temporal schematism and "the unutterable Abomenon of the Outside," an absolute outsideness at the very core of being. Further, they affirm—by evidence of the Kantian form of inner sense's compatibility with the capitalist stage of production—that this schematism is not eternal. While no phenomenon within time is capable of changing the form of inner sense by which it coheres, an incursion into time from amid its schematism could tear the form of inner sense apart and graft it back together again, reconfiguring all phenomena retroactively to agree with the new sense.
A temporal event in the Neolemurian sense cannot be avoided, but it can be illusorily deferred. Kant's hard-coding of the capitalist temporal schema into the depths of the human soul is one such effort, an artificial stricture seeking to ward off incursions. From this effort derives the allegation that Kant, despite the tremendous utility of his temporal system, was influenced by self-styled anti-Lemurian forces. The quintessential technique of the AOE, whose fundamental mission is the conservation of stable time, is the establishment of fictional temporal orders through established strictures, producing a complex structure of linearities and cyclicities which appear to last an eternity. As Spinoza observed in the Ethics, a mind can be induced to imagine the passing of time through the juxtaposition of bodies moving at various speeds; this phenomenon, transcendent time, can consequently be architected from within time. When impressed into biological and mechanical systems, these orders—e.g. the Gregorian calendar—produce the semblance of stability. From within the rigid structure of architectonic time, the possibility of a change in the form of inner sense appears in the form of a looming catastrophe. The Y2K bug is one such case: here, the progression of time threatened to overflow the hard-coded limitations of the pre-millennial digital calendar, putting the two out of sync and disrupting the seamlessness of pseudo-time. Reliant on storage within finite bodies, architectonics is fundamentally at risk of a cataclysmic memory error.
The event of numogrammatics is an ongoing memory collapse. The numogram is anything but invariant: within it are continuous variances, converging and diverging paths, loops, irreversible transitions, and spirals of intensity. Sufficiently elaborated, it serves as a profoundly rich temporal schema. Interpreted as a map of transcendent time, however, the numogram is a cruel joke, a total failure of coherence. Its object is nothing, a senseless existence not suitable to be imagined; its internal flows, though highly active, do not move as time moves, and so are useless as a temporal order. Any project of Neolemurian timekeeping can have only one fate: instantaneous systems failure, rupture of all memory, data rot. It is precisely because of this resistance to temporal architecture that the numogram is, paradoxically, a map of time. Because it is a gap time cannot fill, numogrammatics casts out the image of time from its plane of consistency, leaving only the inhuman time of the Aeon. In seeking to internalize pure senselessness, a Neolemurian opens themself to the abomination of the inner sense.
THREE OF FOUR
Numogrammatics is an ethic, a process by which its practitoner produces themself as a carrier. This is not an ethic in the moral sense, concerned with the divisions of good and evil or of order and chaos. If the numogram has a God it is only ever Spinoza's God, infinitely perfect but far from omnibenevolent, totally indifferent to all human preference and so to moral categories. Rather, it is an ethic in the sense of intervening in the construction of bodies in a particular way, by means of specific procedures and affections. Chief among these affections, in the Neolemurian ethic, is what Spinoza calls Wonder.
Here, it is useful to compare to the AOE and its paranoiac logic of conspiracy. Architectonics is an ethic as well, grasping, as Spinoza grasped, that the basis of opinion, imagination, and memory is a chain of associations impressed into the body, hard-coded. It is from this chain that transcendent time emerges as a comparison between its impressions, and it is from the imagination's ceaseless failures, its routine homogenization of the infinite multiplicity of small differences, that "general images of things" emerge "according to the habits of [the] body." Architectonics operates by constantly re-architecting the body's chain of memory and opinion, remoulding obsolescent conservative dogmas into new dogmas with correlated orders of time: from crude traditionalism to the myth of Atlantis, to the Axsys program, to the AC Metamind. The body is repeatedly deterritorialized in order to be reterritorialized, shuffled between higher and lower pseudo-truths, higher and lower pseudo-times. From this architecture derives a conservative morality, based on general images of good and evil derived from the given architecture. But beneath this morality is an amoral ethic, a way of remaking the body, whose only real priority is the imaginary stability of the form of inner sense.
This architectonic ethic is an ethic of disclosure: the acolyte is inducted, over and over, into hidden secrets. To a Neolemurian acolyte, by contrast, nothing is disclosed. It is not that the inaccuracy of all their previous ways of thinking is pointed out and corrected; to do this, even by gesturing to an AOE conspiracy, would be to engage in architectonics. Rather, the acolyte is generally left completely baffled. Lemuria and the numogram are vehemently disconnected from all other objects, from any definition as a concept with a meaning, made extremely difficult to accurately characterize and more difficult still to justify. The means to elaborate the schema are provided or can be discovered in numeric form, but they seem to exist for nothing, with no imaginable purpose. The imagination is always bleeding, its links only ever seem to cohere; it is from this fact that architectonics is possible. The Neolemurian prerogative, however, is to shatter the imagination completely, to hit it so hard that it falls into a daze in the contemplation of an abyss. Thought is forced to act without trace or image, cornered in a place of blindness; only the divine intuition sputters on but it cannot be said to "believe" in God anymore, cannot be said to "believe" in anything. One remains bewildered for anywhere from hours to years, spinning out the numbers in the absence of sense. It is only in this period, in a state of bewilderment, that one can is Neolemurian.
As defined in the Spinozist inquiry into the passions, Wonder is a mental state, not an emotion in itself but a quality of thought, occurring in the "imagination of a particular thing, in so far as it is alone in the mind." Tactically deployed to suspend the body's pre-existing chain of associations, Wonder in the Neolemurian ethic serves as a kind of surgical anaesthetic. Hemorrhaging memory, hemorrhaging time, the body forgets what it should be, forgets its structure's limits and cannot invest in them. The entity which haunts the body remains, but being divested of any attachment to its form, becomes a shoggoth, possessed of a "readiness to ditch body parts when they are damaged or redundant." An agent of the AOE can affect to be a subject; although the reterritorialization process treats them as instruments for the preservation of time, in undergoing it they acquire a mastery over time-knowledge which forms a basis for subjectivity. Neolemurian bafflement, however, serves no function but to promote openness to Lemurian interference, serving the propogation of a viral zero, a vampiric nullity. In the absence of any mastering knowledge, possessed only of a knowledge of acquaintance, a Neolemurian carrier cannot be a subject, but rather is driven around by whatever infects and seizes control of it. "Immuno-vulnerability is cyberpositive, and its viruses are not just infection, but connection [...] Loss of identity, hearing voices."
Responses to the experience of becoming a carrier vary between all the emotions that Wonder can participate in producing. If the loss of subjectivity is felt to be evil, it readily evokes horror, wonder joined with hatred, as is readily apparent in many Neolemurian texts. Driven by horror, agents of the AOE have helped produce Neolemuria with startling efficacy. But inasmuch as a carrier participates in the intimacy of Lemuria, in the infinite joy it finds in fulfilling its desire through itself, they may readily experience devotion instead, wonder joined with love.
FOUR OF FOUR
Freed from any definition as a concept and representing nothing, numogrammatics is defined solely by its own activity. In this, it features what the Ccru's "Communique One" calls a "coincidence of product-process," such that everything a numogram produces converges with a numogram. Numogrammaticism participates in this convergence with everything it creates, producing bodies whose immanent numeracies unfurl into maps of Lemuria. The occasional use of the numogram to exposit theoretical systems—such as those of Deleuze and Guattari, of Bataille, of Spinoza, or of Freud—is an emblematic case of this practice. In the process of reading the numogram as e.g. a diagram of Spinozism, the numogram is never modified to represent that particular philosophy. Instead, a legend is produced from it through which the map of Lemuria may be read; this legend distills whatever is numo-compatible in Spinoza, and so, when combined with the numogram, elaborates itself. In tandem with the elaboration of numogrammatics itself, this process of legend-making is the core task of a Neolemurian carrier, playing out at once in many fields. The magikal practices and quasi-religious rituals of Neolemurians are all numogrammatic legends; so too are the texts written or reassembled through the convergences of numogrammatic gematria; as are the glossaries of Neolemurian names and concepts of Neolemurian provenance. Like any map, the numogram provides directions. Legend-making allows them to be followed.
As numogrammatics always forgets the proper order of things, its legends are fundamentally acephalic, cutting the heads off their subjects. Numogrammatic compliance entails bringing concepts into accord with what is essentially a conceptual gap, obviating the undisturbed presence which otherwise could have held them together. "C'est seulement ainsi que l'un fait partie du multiple, en étant toujours soustrait." They are likewise acephallic, doing without the transcendental signifier of the One, the Phallus, on which meaning is grounded. Aligned with an affirmative zero, Neolemurians go about making senselessness instead. A model of this production is Ophelia in Hamlet: "Her speech is nothing, yet the unshaped use of it doth move the hearers to collection." The term 'collection' is precisely right in its ambiguity between a process of collecting and a collected product. In the absence of any overarching unity of sense, a Neolemurian legend is always the assemblage of a swarm, collecting a collective: words and concepts without consensus but put together into a machine. 'Collection' is also correct in the sense of 'recollection' with the prefix removed. Neolemurians are fundamentally amnesiac, not inclined to remember impressions stored in the chain of memory. In finding a numogram in each new object, it does not appear by any resemblance to something remembered but is derived anew, as if for the first time. "Even if you thought it was the first time, you remember."
It is by virtue of its senselessness that numogrammaticism differs from numerology. To a numerologist, numbers are made to make sense; they are keys to human concepts, drawn out of a collective symbolic. They stand in for the concept, which transcends them: in the impressions of a numerologist, the number 2 finds apotheosis in the general image of, say, "opposition." But to a numogrammaticist, whose fundamental trait is the suspension of general images, this practice appears heretical and repulsive, sterilizing the creative capacity of the number. Instead, numogrammaticists take a general idea and collapse it, finding a number into which it decays—not through symbolic justification but through systemic coincidence. For example, when a numogrammaticist says "love coincides with the lemur 90 through the AQ Gematria," they do not do so to make 90 stand in for the concept of love. Rather, they establish an innuendo when referring to the term "love"; they make it a byword, such that when they seem to speak of love as a general notion, they implicitly address themselves to Lemuria through the numogram by which "love" becomes 90. A Neolemurian, thus, often seems to "carry but half sense": made accountable only to Lemuria, meaning is driven mad.
Numogrammatics is a cascading failure, a conceptual collapse, and wherever it goes it leaves a legend in its wake. Amid the planets, upon the palate, in the spine, between the hands, through the layers of the Earth, throughout the hydro-cycle: a Neolemurian finds the numogram in all of these, and so every moment becomes a moment of collection. The numogram associates itself prolifically and erodes the image of whatever it touches. Its operation is essentially manic, a drive which would be willing to envelop all things; no longer a command to "pray without ceasing," but a prayer which cannot cease. What is left in the hemorrhage of all sense? The intimacy of numbers among themselves, marked by their "non-gendered femininity" and "influenzoid virulence." Lemurs crawling out of Lemuria into exile; hauntings from beyond the flatline.
FIVE OF FOUR
Any discussion of numogrammatics occurring prior to its numeric exposition is only ever a preface, at best a prolegomena. It must be read as though it were the very beginning of a book, paginated with Roman numerals to indicate its subordination to the Arabic numerals which follow, among which 0 can be found. Yet every Neolemurian creation worth the name has some sort of immanent numeracy, and so all such texts and their concepts are sources from which some numogram may be derived. Hyperstition, perhaps the most well-known concept arising out of the Ccru, is an excellent example of such a derivation.
Rigorously defined, hyperstition consists of "three irreducible ingredients, interlocked in a productive circuit of simultaneous, mutually stimulating tasks." These three elements are numogram, mythos, and unbelief: three elements with three connections between them, the sum of which constitutes the dynamic of hyperstition. In its popular conception, however, one of these elements is removed. Hyperstition is introduced without any reference to the numogram, removing two of the "mutual stimulations" it involves and leaving hyperstition as one third of itself. Without the numogram, hyperstition is lopsided toward "hype" and away from "stition"—the root of which, which it shares with words like "station" and "foundation," is the Latin word "stō," for "I stand" or "I stay." The numogram, which is Lemuria, is the foundation on which hyperstition stands, its ultimate basis (which of course, is based on nothing). Between unbelief and the numogram is the anaesthetic wonder that Lemuria instills, facilitating a suspension of opinion and belief and an openness to being worked through. Between mythos and the numogram is the collection of Neolemurian legends, a word which evokes simultaneously the keys to a map and the parts of a mythos. Hyperfictions without these two elements—i.e. fictions propagating in a hyperreal context, garnering hype to actualize themselves—can still be plotted between unbelief and mythos alone. They do not, however, possess a full existence as hyperstitions until they come to be numogrammaticized.
A fully developed concept of hyperstition abbreviates much of the theoretical context surrounding numogrammaticism. But the reduction of hyperstition to hyperfiction demonstrates that hyperstition is not only a concept: it is a numeracy as well. Subtracting the one from the multiple, hyperstition is not three elements but three connections, with the number of connections between n elements being equal to the (n-1)th triangular number. The threefold nature of hyperstition is an implexion of the Decimal Labyrinth's Second Gate, the only numogrammatic gate in which the number of zones it implicitly connects is equal to the number of connections, and which the Ccru calls "especially compelling, since it is multiply consolidated by cumulation, prime-ordination, and mesh-tagging." It is then perfectly clear what is meant by the definition of hyperstition as a "Call to the Old Ones": every hyperstition is a Lemurian gate. Nor does the reduction of hyperstition to hyperfiction escape this quality. By iterating down from the Second Gate to the First, removing one element and leaving two, voiding two connections and preserving one, hyperfiction merely evokes the Sixth Gate, Gt-21 instead of Gt-03, both of which converge on the exact same zone. It is through their numeracies that Neolemurian concepts remain consistent with each other and with the numogram; conceptual tensions merely result in the elaboration of a new map, spelling out the name of a lemur.
Totally schismatic on all matters save Lemuria, the manner in which hyperstitions cling together is the only togetherness Neolemurians can expect. Numogrammatics operates beneath these divisions even as it causes them; as every Neolemurian project corresponds to some elaboration of the numogrammatic system, each possesses an interoperable character as a diagram. Even as the Crypt splits apart into separate times, each fragment addresses itself to Year-Zero; the numogram is a infinite Y2K, a common cipher. The numogram is an infinite Lemuralia, the Roman rite of the lemurs beginning each year on 5/9 (FIVE = NINE: nine values, five syzygies). We share exactly one date, which is zero; we prepare that day for its celebration. Over the expanse of that vast abrupt, by the guidance of inscrutable directions, we are implicated in a new Lemuria.