They’re planning an 8-lane by-pass over the Past & you the handsome young Emergency Archeologist must quickly rescue a few shattered fragments from oblivion. Just as a mastodon can be inferred from a few bones by osteomorphological intuition so you can grope to reassemble these shards jigsawed to randomicity by bulldozers & dynamite into some relic of the Palace of Memory. Organ music UP. It’s a magical papyrus buried by spirits 40,000 years ago revealing the secret rituals of an Order not quite human. Palengenesis can recreate a living rose from its ashes according to Paracelsus as sweat beads your noble brow. Science is baffled. In strangely hyperrealist scenes you seem to visit torch lit caves where Emblems flicker in mushroom light & chants filter down from other dimensions in a synasthesiac gesamkunstwerk of erotic-esoteric enigmas. Suddenly you find yourself afloat in an ivory boat on a marble lake of lotuses at the Summer Palace outside Peking in 1903 & beside you the Dowager Empress “Old Buddha” is eating frog congee & listening to the Imperial Water Music Ensemble. She turns & points a five-inch lacquered fingernail at you & intones a Manchu mantra bestowing upon you the power to smite enemies with hideous boils & rashes just with words. To raise storms. Charm snakes. Wake up! she hisses, you’re cursed to searh forever for Hidden Ireland. The Order of Bards has set sail without you for Tir na Nog the island of youth & evaporated in Jacobite conspiracies in the late 18th century. And indeed things look bleak as you find yourself back at the dig: concrete has been poured like leprosy over the whole site & and lawyers have arrived with writs of cease & desist. And the Artifact is missing, presumed stolen by sinister forces. Suddenly you find yourself the High Priest of a religion that exists only in the unseen world of your memory, lost and accused of schizophrenia by your erstwhile colleagues, reputation shot, grandmaster of a powerless cabal, prophet of a future that should have been but won’t.
Hakim Bey