Lin Carter - Under the Green Star

Under the Green Star

Lin Carter

CONTENTS

As I sit writing these words, a weird sensation of unreality sweeps through my being.

Beyond the bay window before which h my desk is drawn I can see green fields and tall treeshickory and mountain laurel, pine and yellow poplar. And beyond those fields and hills lies the waking world, filled with busy and teeming cities, with ordinary people who lead everyday liveslives that seldom touch on mystery and marvel.

Which is realthe fantastic adventure I feel compelled to relateor the world beyond my windows? Have I only dreamed that I have stood where no man of my race has ever set foot before, or is this dull world of tax returns and ball-point pens, of air pollution and TV talk shows, itself but a dream? Are both worlds real?

Are neither?

Perhaps I could begin my story in earliest youth, when wide reading brought the first intimations of the occult within the reach of my speculative imagination. ButnoI shall begin this narrative with the first moment I took into my hands that immeasurably ancient and incredibly precious book from the secret heart of Asia.

The long-dead hand that inscribed these yellowed and wrinkled vellum pages in queer crooked characters called this book the Kan Chan Ga. For a thousand years it lay in a jeweled box of gold in the most secret archives of the holy Potalathe TemplePalace of the Dalai Lama in hidden Lhasa itself. Before that...no one can say for certain. The Commentaries say it was found in a prehistoric stone tomb in the foothills of the Trans-Himalayas long centuries before even the first God-King ruled from the Lotus Thronebut no one really knows. There were empires before Egypt, and cities older than Ur, and the sages whispered of lost lands and forgotten realms long before Plato dreamed of Atlantis and set those dreams down to excite the imagination of men forever.

The title, Kan Chan Ga, is not Tibetan. Neither are the odd, crooked little rune-like letters wherewith the vellum pages are thickly lined. The Commentaries say the book is written in Old Uighur, a language that was forgotten before Narmer the Lion brought the Two Lands together under one crown and ruled as the first Pharaoh. And certain obscure and ancient texts hint there was once an Uighur Empire amidst the trackless sands of the Gobi in Central Asia...long. long ago when all that desert was a blooming garden, before the Poles changed. I neither know nor care.

The book cost me two hundred thousand dollars and seven years. When holy Lhasa fell to the invading hordes from Red China. and the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India, the Kan Chan Ga, and certain other priceless treasures, were taken into hiding. In those confused, horrible days, when the snowy peaks of ancient Tibet were crimson with the flames of burning lamaseries and scarlet with the blood of murdered sages, the book was lost. It was to have traveled west with the Panchan Lama and his retinue. But in the snowstorms, with the roar of machine guns echoing from the rocky cliffs, one party of lamas went astray. The book was hidden in the crypts beneath a minor lamasery of little consequence, from which, after years of searching, my agents found and rescued it.

And now I held it in my hands...the book that the most ancient sages speak of with awe and reverence as The Key of The Liberation of The Soul...

My father invested wisely and well in the Market and left me with a private fortune large enough to permit me to indulge my curiosity in the occult sciences.

I am thirty years old, tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, and strongly-built. I have blond hair and gray eyes and am accounted a handsome man. But strength and health and handsomeness are a mockery to me, for since I was six years old I have not taken a single step without the help of mechanical aids.

All my fathers fortune could not purchase a cure for polio in the twenty years before the perfection of the Salk vaccine.

Being a cripple, it was perhaps natural that I should turn my attention inward. The lore of the occult attracted me from my earliest youth. I had the finest tutors, and mastered Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. The ancient Eastern science called eckankarsoul-travel, the projection of the so-called astral bodyfascinated me. In my search for the secrets of this lost art, this forgotten science, I went far. A thousand books hinted of the secret, but none could reveal it.

In that strangest of all books, the Bardo Thodol, I first heard of the old book in Uighur. The Bardo Thodol, which may be described as a geography of the travels of the soul after death and before birth, whispered of the Kan Chan Ga. Crumbling scrolls from an old abandoned monastery in the Sinkiang province of China, smuggled out through Hong Kong, told me more. A hundred agents searched the Orient at my behest, and at length the book was unearthed. The seventh of the living gods of Tibetthe Gupcha Lama himselftranslated the Uighur for me, on my promise that the sacred book would be returned to the Dalai Lama once I possessed the wisdom that I sought. This has now been done.

I read the translation of the odd, crooked characters with an inner excitement that my reader can only dimly imagine. If the secret lay in these ancient pages, then 1, who had not taken an unaided step in twenty-four years, could travel the earth as swift-winged as thought itself. Unseen, I could walk the thronged bazaars of Rangoon. peer up at the smiling enigma of the Sphinx by moonlight, gaze upon the carven stone ruins of jungle-grown Angkor Vat, explore the mysterious ruins of elder and cryptic Tiahuanaco amidst the plateaus of the Andes.

Bit by bit, the secret emerged from the strange manuscript. Man is more than body and mind and soul, the nameless sage of the Gobi had written. His nature is sevenfold: the animal flesh, the material body itself; the vitalizing life-force that animates that flesh; the ego that is the conscious I of every man; the memory, that contains a record of all that each man has seen and felt and known: the astral body, the vehicle of the higher soullevels on the second plane; the etheric body, that is the chalice contained within the astral vehicle; and, seventh and last, the immortal soul itself, that is the precious flame within the chalice.

Subtly linked together are these seven selves, which make up the individual man. In deep sleep or in hypnotic trance, the astral body sometimes...wanders...causing strange dreams of far-off places and visions of distant friends. But only a stern discipline can release the etheric body and the soul it contains, together with the conscious ego. That was the secret I had sought so long; and I stood upon its threshold at last.

Night after night, mind-weary from the occult disciplines I had practiced, I lay in my bed and stared wistfully up at the stars. If I could master the ancient art of soul-travel, no more would I be chained and earthbound, locked in a helpless, crippled prison of flesh. I would be free...free as few men have ever been...and how I hungered for that freedom!

Day after day I practiced the inner concentration, the Loosening of the Bonds. Few even of the holy sages of old Tibet had ever in truth mastered eckankarbut few of them had been driven by the motive that goaded me on.

I shall not bore my reader with a description of my labors. Nor shall I tell of the heartbreaking moments of failure and despair that overcame me at times. The task was long and arduous...it is no easier to train the muscles of the body to Olympic skills, than to train the mind and soul and spirit in this occult science. But at last the day came when I deemed myself ready for the experiment.

Having fasted and performed certain austerities and calmed my mind with the recitation of certain mantras, I informed my housekeeper that on no account was I to be disturbed, and locked myself within the upper portion of my ancestral house which served as my private quarters and library.