Charles Musès
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Charles A. Muses (1919-2000), a figure who wrote articles and books under various pseudonyms (including Musès, Musaios, Kyril Demys, Arthur Fontaine, Kenneth Demarest and Carl von Balmadis), was the founder of the Lion Path, a shamanistic movement. He held unusual and controversial views relating to mathematics, physics, philosophy, and many other fields.
Muses was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and grew up in Long Island, New York. His father abandoned the family when Muses was a young boy forcing his mother to support Muses and a large, extended family on a school teacher's salary. Years later he would remark in lectures that if his mother hadn't had an overarching faith in "young Charlie" he might never have been able to escape the confines of his impoverished youth.
Muses' earned an M.A. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1947, followed by a Ph.D. in 1951.
Muses had no success in attaining a tenured position as a faculty member at an institution of higher education. Forced to give lectures in order to earn a living, he wrote books and began traveling the world. He continued these pursuits for the remainder of his life.
Muses eventually proposed an astrological method called 'chronotopology,' which he claimed could measure the qualitative multidimensional structure of time. He published a book on this subject titled "Chronotopology: Destiny and Control in Human Systems." It is currently out of print.
Muses also envisioned a mathematical number concept, Musean hypernumbers, that includes hypercomplex number algebras such as complex numbers and split-complex numbers as primitive types. He assigned them levels based on certain arithmetical properties they may possess. While many open questions remain, in particular about defining relations of these levels, Muses pictured a wide range of applicability for this concept. Some of these are based on properties of magic squares [1], and even related to religious belief. He believed that these hypernumbers were central to issues of consciousness.
To date, none of these visions have been realized, and his reliance on subjective experience to support models that are otherwise not verifiable or falsifiable places much of his work into the realm of pseudoscience (as it is not following the scientific method).
Quotations
"The word astronomia, even the word mathematicus, meant someone who studied the stars, and in Kepler's sense they calculated the positions to know the qualities of time. But that's an independent hypothesis. The hypothesis of chronotopology is whether you have pointers of any kind -- ionospheric disturbances, planetary orbits, or whatnot -- independently of those pointers, time itself has a flux, has a wave motion, the object being to surf on time."
"The contemplation and use of hypernumber forms and properties will prove and already has proved both by self-experience and teaching to be a most efficacious and irreplaceable method of evolving into conscious access the powers and capabilities of our superconscious selves. And that way man's future lies."
"If you take a moment of time, this moment cuts through the entire physical universe as we're talking. It holds all of space in itself. But one point of space doesn't hold all of time. In other words, time is much bigger than space."
"It is the moment of evolutionary truth for the master race, and what man does with that moment will be more important than the events of the previous millennium. Failure is not an option."