Karmic Cycles and the Repetition of History

Karmic Cycles and the Repetition of History is the novel’s vision of the past as an active pattern that keeps shaping the present. In Doc Sportello’s acid vision, the Vietnam War becomes the latest turn in an ancient conflict between Lemuria and Atlantis; in the rain-soaked Southern California of the present, the return of water makes that recurrence seem to break through the landscape itself. History is not merely remembered: it rises again, entangling wars, geography, exile, and the possibility of a world remade by what was once driven out of sight.

The Ancient Conflict Within the Present

In Doc’s vision, the United States occupies a fateful middle position between the oceans into which Atlantis and Lemuria disappeared. The war in Indochina appears not as a conflict freely chosen in the present but as a repetition of the rivalry between those lost civilizations. Nixon is imagined as descended from Atlantis and Ho Chi Minh from Lemuria, making the contemporary war another proxy struggle in a conflict said to reach back tens of thousands of years. The vision carries this chain of repetition further back than modern nations or written history, imagining the pattern as older than the Catholic Church and the Buddha.

The war’s apparent political and geographic boundaries therefore become unstable. What looks like a present-day American decision is recast as an inherited position in a much older contest, with the United States caught between two vanished worlds. The vision does not offer a conventional historical explanation or evidence for this genealogy; its force comes from the way it overlays ancient myth on contemporary war, making the present feel both immediate and already repeated.

Exile and the Sacred Stone

The vision gives this long recurrence a material history through three Lemurian holy men who flee the inundation that destroys their homeland. They carry a stone pillar rescued from their temple and establish it at the heart of their new life in exile. Known as the sacred stone of Mu, it becomes an anchor for continuity amid displacement: a fragment of a submerged world made present in another land.

As invading armies come and go, the stone is repeatedly removed for safekeeping and later raised somewhere else. Its changing location turns survival into a cycle of concealment and return. From the beginning of French colonization of Indochina through the United States’ occupation, however, the stone remains invisible, withdrawn into its own space. The pattern thus contains both recurrence and interruption: the past persists, but its central object can elude the powers that would locate or possess it.

Floodwater as Historical Return

A related pattern emerges in the rain that transforms the present-day landscape. Watching an empty, flooded rectangle, Doc sees its edges slide inward until it resembles a doorway, or the entrance to a great wet temple. The old river that once ran through the town has been canalized and tapped dry, a local history of water controlled and withheld. In the storm, Doc imagines it filling to its concrete rim and overflowing, as though what has been denied passage were returning without restraint.

The imagined flood spreads beyond the riverbed: pools overflow, streets and flats disappear, and separate waters join into an inland sea that becomes an extension of the Pacific. This vision makes urban development and environmental transformation part of the same logic. The landscape’s carefully managed divisions—channels, concrete edges, private pools—cannot guarantee that water will remain contained. What has been diverted comes back as a force that erases the boundaries built to hold it.

Lemuria Returns in Dreams and Weather

The rain also changes how Sortilège understands Lemuria. Becoming absorbed by the lost civilization and its final days, she tells Doc that she dreams of it and sometimes wakes with a strong sense that she has been there in a former life. She and Spike, she says, are beginning to share the same dreams. Their inability to find a way back to Lemuria is reversed in the possibility that Lemuria is returning to them, rising from the ocean into the present.

This return is not simply the recovery of a lost place. Sortilège insists that Lemuria is not just a place, leaving its nature open even as its presence seems to press closer. The shared dreams make private memory porous, while the rain gives the ancient inundation a contemporary counterpart. Together with Doc’s vision of the Vietnam War as an old proxy conflict and the sacred stone’s history of concealment, the motif suggests that recurrence can cross the boundaries between personal experience, political history, and physical geography. Yet the return remains unsettling rather than redemptive: what comes back may be recognized only partially, and may arrive as flood, war, or an elusive presence rather than as a recoverable past.