Our Lady of Darkness - The Occult Science

The Occult Science

As featured in Leiber's novella, megapolisomancy is the art of predicting and manipulating the future through the existence of large cities. The primary practitioner of the pseudoscience of megapolisomancy is fictional occultist Thibaut de Castries, whose seminal work, Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, concerns the physical, psychological and paramental (spiritual) effects of certain substances, including steel, electricity, paper, and so forth as they accumulate in cities. This book was primarily a book of occult theory; De Castries preserved all of his actual methods for practicing megapolisomancy in a second book, which he referred to as his Grand Cipher or Fifty-Book. The latter book contained a series of 50 astrological and astronomical signs and other cryptic sigils.

According to De Castries, excessively large cities pose a clear danger to the people living in and near them by allowing mass quantities of certain substances (city-stuff) to accumulate, which in turn draw the attention of paramental forces. Through the manipulation of the paramental forces, a megapolisomancer could predict and alter the future.

"The electro-mephitic city-stuff whereof I speak has potencies for achieving vast effects at distant times and localities, even in the far future and on other orbs, but of the manipulations required for the production and control of such I do not intend to discourse in these pages." - De Castries

While large cities have always been present, he argued that the future would become vastly more dangerous as the number of megapolitan areas skyrocketed.

"At any particular time of history there have always been one or two cities of the monstrous sort -- viz., Babel or Babylon, Ur-Lhassa, Nineve, Syracuse, Rome, Samarkand, Tenochtitlan, Peking -- but we live in the Megapolitan (or Necropolitan) Age, when such disastrous blights are manifold and threaten to conjoin and enshroud the world with funebral yet multipotent city-stuff. We need a Black Pythagoras to spy out the evil lay of our monstrous cities and their foul shrieking songs, even as the White Pythagoras spied out the lay of the heavenly spheres and their crystalline symphonies, two and a half millennia ago." - De Castries

De Castries even goes so far as to hint that practitioners could extend their own lives by predicting and manipulating the paramental forces present in cities, but only at a significant cost: "Since we modern city-men already dwell in tombs, inured after a fashion to mortality, the possibility arises of the indefinite prolongation of this life-in-death. Yet, although quite practicable, it would be a most morbid and dejected existence, without vitality or even thought, but only paramentation, our chief companions paramental entities of azoic origin more vicious than spiders or weasels."