Zelda Maria de Monterre

Zelda Maria de Monterre (better known as Madame Centauri) was born on December 23rd 1904 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) occult researcher and practitioner, sorcerer and a key member of the Cthulhu Club.

## Biography

### Early years (1904 - 1920)

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, traveling widely and almost continuously throughout the Francophone regions of the Caribbean, Africa and East Asia.

### 1920s

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”.

### 1930s

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. 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.

### 1940s

Centauri rapidly built a reputation as an occultist of extraordinary ability, along with a distinguished client list. By far the most consequential among these contracts was Captain Peter Vysparov, who first came to ‘the Hut’ in 1946 seeking 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.

### 1950s

During the early 1950s, Centauri devoted herself to the intricate task of Lemuro-Atlantean synthesis, formulated in her last completed book, *Loss of Atlantis* (1956). 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 rumored – waging magical war against the Duvalier dictatorship.

In the relative calm of Louisiana Centauri pushed ever further into her occult researches.

## Cthulhu Club

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

## Centauri Pack

All the strands of her life came together in her Great Work, 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 that deviated into the ‘Sinister Tradition’ of decimal cartomancy,

## Death

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.

## Bibliography

* *Atlantean Schism, 1937*
* *The True Cthulhu*, 1948.
* *Loss of Atlantis,* 1956
* *Decadence of Atlantis: Collected Decamantic Writings of Mme Centauri*. Zero Books, 2012

## Black Atlanteanism

Under Hurston’s 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. 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*.

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*.

## Personal Life

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). In 1929 de Monterre gave birth to a daughter, Aziza Isis, who Otchoko would never meet.