Another minor update

Finally found an image of the original front board design for Cultus Arborum, vol. 4 in the 1889-91 "Nature Worship and Mystical Series" (someone was selling a first edition with the front board intact, but the spine apparently gone as it seems from the photo to be held together with tape, on Ebay for US$20), so this has replaced the substituted cover on the Unspeakable Press (Leng) release.

I should also mention that a zip file with all ten volumes of this series (though not the latest releases because it's something of a pain to re-gen and re-upload the entire archive every time one gets changed) can be downloaded from Megaupload.

This month's excuse

Uploaded a slight fix to Albert Pike's Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite to Scribd (dealt with a layout problem in the 3° lecture). This is one of a small selection of works of Masonic interest issued by Celephaïs Press / Unspeakable Press (Leng). While there are already many e-texts of this work on the Internet (contrary to the more idiotic statements of some of Pike's critics, the contents of this book were never a "secret" of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction 32°, as the Preface makes clear), this one (a) reproduces page layout, all illustrations and text in exotic fonts and (b) includes the Index, a later but valuable addition, originally sold as a book in its own right before being bound up in later printings of Morals and Dogma.

The other Masonic works issued are:
Manual of Freemasonry by Richard Carlile. Early 19th-century English exposure.

The Craft Degrees Handbooks by J.S.M. Ward. Short esotericist commentaries on the English craft degrees (early 20th century); originally published as The Entered Apprentice's Handbook, The Fellow-Craft's Handbook and The Master Mason's Book.

The Lost Key by Prentiss Tucker. Early 20th-century esotericist commentary on an American working of the Craft degrees.

Lectures of the Antient and Primitive Rite, translated and compiled by John Yarker (comprises Lectures of a Chapter, Senate and Council and Masonic Charges and Lectures).

"The Antient and Primitive Rite" from Jeremiah How's Freemason's Manual; a short and uncritical account of this fringe "high-grade" system.

Omissions?

[The following is adapted from a note previously appearing on the CP Geocities site.]

Some of you (I occasionally like to delude myself that there are a few fans of CP out there) may have noticed a glaring omission from the materials I have posted on Scribd or discussed in this blog. Celephaïs Press editions of works by Aleister Crowley have not been uploaded to Scribd by me, or linked to here. These works are — certainly in the UK, and in the case of materials first published after 1923, in the US as well — still in copyright, and are so for another eight years. E-texts of several (including Equinox vol. I and vol. III no 1, Konx Om Pax, The Sword of Song, The Book of Lies, Book Four, Magick Without Tears, Liber Aleph, Tannhäuser, 777 Revised, Little Essays Toward Truth, The Heart of the Master and about 75% of the extant numbered libri) were prepared in the mistaken belief that the general policy of the holders to the copyrights in them was — with the exception of some works which were not written for publication in the first place — to tolerate non-commercial webpostings as long as their copyright was acknowledged; experience has shown that this is not the case, in fact it is within my knowledge that various website administrators, including the management of Scribd, have been requested to remove CP editions of Crowley’s works from their sites. Copies of most of these works still exist online in various places not under my control; however since about 2005 the only postings under my direct control have been limited to revised or corrected editions of works I had previously posted and not been reprimanded for or ordered to take down.

So far so good . . .

The CP presence on Scribd now has 93 subscribers and has logged over 200,000 individual document reads.

Somewhat off topic, but . . .

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Back in July, I mentioned that the hard part would be deciding what I was going to do about the Nu Isis Working Group.

For those of you unfamiliar with this:

As some of you may be aware, and other may have managed to work out, I am and have been for some years, affiliated with a fraternal society known as the O.T.O., which like any other enterprise involving more than one person, occasionally suffers from internal politics.

In 2000 or 2001, I can't actually remember, the official local group of the society in Leeds, known as Sunwheel Oasis, was closed down due to the person who ran it having resigned from O.T.O. and none of the other local members being suitable to take over running it. The Nu Isis Working group was established as "a provisional O.T.O. working group," i.e. an unofficial ad hoc body to keep activity going in the city until such time as a new official body could be established. Owing to a certain amount of bitterness on my own part, the name was lifted from the "New Isis Lodge," established in 1955 as an O.T.O. group under a charter which was revoked by the then head of the order shortly after he read their initial proclamation.

In practice NIWG turned into three or four people meeting in someone's living room, and myself maintaining (after a fashion) a website on Geocities with assistance from the other members (mainly in the form of letting me use their Internet connection, I only got broadband myself a couple of years ago). Meetings ceased after about a year, if that, but the website staggered on and apparently managed to get a reputation as a useful resource.

Unfortunately, I got largely sick of maintaining it some years ago. With the exception of a couple of pages of links (not including the main "links" page which is something of a joke), I generally only edited it when specific mistakes were pointed out to me. Anyway, earlier this year, the Yahoo! corporation finally decided that Geocities was based on a problematic business model and gave notice that they were closing it. This blog was one consequence thereof; but the way I was running the C.P. site was more suited to the blog format than the NIWG site.

To get to the point.

I haven't decided what I'm doing with / about the NIWG site, but since there seems to be a reasonable level interest in the site continuing to exist, I haven't definitely decided to let it stay dead. nu-isis.blogspot.com will be used for any annoucements.

Love is the law, love under will.

T.S.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar . . .

The study of the various forms, some gross and palpable, some subtle and elusive, in which the sexual instinct has moulded the religious consciousness of our race, is one of the most interesting, as it is one of the most difficult and delicate tasks, which await the future historian of religion.

J. G. Frazer, Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild (The Golden Bough, part V), Preface (1912). Emphasis added.

The second of the quotations heading the previous post might have given a clue to the studies that led me into the morass of the nineteenth-century Phallicist school of History of Religions. Besides the works of Thomas Inman and General Forlong, Knight et al. on the worship of Priapus, and the Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial of Hargrave Jennings (who might get his own entry at some point), a number of minor works of this school, of greater or lesser interest, have been issued on the Celephaïs Press and Unspeakable Press (Leng) imprints. Details follow:

Sellon, Edward: Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindüs. London: privately printed, 1865; reprinted 1902; various modern reprints.

After a brief military career in British-occupied India, Edward Sellon supplemented his income as a prolific writer of pornography; but he also produced a short pamphlet and a couple of journal articles (originally delivered as papers to a dodgy bunch of blokes called the Anthropological Society of London) on aspects of Indian religion, particularly the "phallic worship" linga-pûja rite and the beliefs and practices of the S'âkta sects. While of doubtful value as a source of information on their ostensible subject, Sellon's writings appear to have played an important role in the (mis) understanding of Tantrik doctrine and ritual in the West. The present edition includes all three of these works.

Rocco, Sha (pseudo.): The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship. New York: Asa K. Butts, 1874; reprinted London (s.n.), 1898, New York: Commenwealth, 1904, &c., &c., &c.

A slim octavo or duodecimo (about 70pp) largely deriving from Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names, save the last chapter which attempts to argue that some stone relics the author found in California are "phallic symbols" and not in fact an ordinary mortar and pestle. The authorship has been questionably ascribed to Hargrave Jennings by some commentators, although Dr. Abisha Shumway Hudson, whose name appeared on the imprint of the first edition and who according to the census and California land registry lived in the particular Californian county mentioned in the last chapter of the "Sha Rocco" book around the time it was published, seems a more likely candidate.

Anonymous: Phallic Worship: A Description of the Mysteries of the Sex Worship of the Ancients, with the history of the Masculine Cross. London: privately printed, 1880; reprinted 1886.

Title on cover and spine simply "The Masculine Cross," doubtless in a dishonest attempt to cause confusion with the "Sha Rocco" book, from which a few sections are in fact bodily plagiarised. Others are lifted from Inman, Godfrey Higgins' Anacalypsis and Knight & Wright.

Campbell, Robert Allen: Phallic Worship: an outline of the worship of the generative organs as being, or as representing, the Divine Creator, with suggestions as to the influence of the phallic idea on religious creeds, ceremonies, customs and symbolis, past and present. St. Louis: Robert Campbell, 1887, various reprints.

This volume of about 200 octavo pages is again digested from earlier writers, but draws on a wider range of sources than Rocco / Hudson.

Anonymous: "Nature Worship and Mystical Series," a.k.a. "Phallic Series." 10 vols; London, privately printed (Arthur Reader), 1889-1891. Individual volumes have had various reprints.

A series of short and mostly rather dull, diffuse and repetitive digests or miscellanies, with a marketing campaign apparently designed to insinuate that they were borderline pornography; actually, they contain nothing more outrageous than what had previously appeared in this country in works with the author's and publisher's names attached. In fact, most of their contents had appeared, word for word, in works (books and journal articles) with the author's and publisher's names attached.

The authorship of this series is frequently assigned to Hargrave Jennings, and some reprint editions are credited to him. The main basis for the ascription seems to be that no. 7, Nature Worship and no. 9, Phallic Miscellanies (pretty much the nadir of the series) are ascribed on their title pages to "the Author of Phallicism," and Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial was an admitted work of Jennings. The mention in the preface to the first volume of the series, of "the old and familiar motto, 'evil be to him that evil thinks'" on which, in its Old French from, Jennings has much to say in his The Rosicrucians, probably reinforced the suggestion. Judgement on style is problematic where the bulk of the text is verbatim from earlier writers, but it seems likely that the whole series is of common authorship (to use the term loosely).

Against this, it must be pointed out that:

• The first volume, while called Phallism on the title page (and the cover and spine of the first edition) is referred to in the advertisements in other volumes, and in places in the text of these volumes, as Phallicism. Specifically, the preface to Nature Worship, one of the two credited to "the Author of Phallicism" refers to the first volume by that title.
• Hargrave Jennings died in March 1890, before at least half the series was published. While it is not a priori impossible that, assuming him to have been the author, he had delivered the MSS. of the remaining volumes to the publisher before his death, this would imply that the series of ten volumes was planned either from the beginning, or at least from shortly after the issue of the first or second volume; this in turn is not a priori impossible but raises the question of what the publisher hoped to gain by falsely stating in the preface to vol. 5 that it represented "for now, the concluding volume" of the series, or in the preface to vol. 7 that it had been put together after the original edition of Phallism had been sold out. Conversely, insinuating that Jennings, who was reasonably well-known among Reader's target audience, and who was too dead to object, was the real author, could credibly have served to shift additional copies.
• Jennings had a fairly distinctive writing style; except in passages identifiably lifted from admitted works of his (e.g., the opening of cap. 8 of Nature Worship is verbatim from cap. III of Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial), nothing in the Nature Worship and Mystical Series remembles this. This is not itself a particularly conclusive argument.
• There is no trace of Jennings' distinctive ideas. Throughout his major works we find the recurring theme of the "Fire-Philosophy" and the notion of a universal pyro-phallic (as it were) cult as the uniting theme of all religions. Vol. 5 of the "Phallic Series" was titled Fishes, Flowers and Fire and over half its page-count is devoted to "fire-worship"; yet we find therein no references to the "Fire-Philosophy" (there is a passing reference to "Fire-philosophers" in a later volume in the series) and no sign of the enthusiasm for the subject found in Jennings' admitted works. In vol. 2, Ophiolatreia, is printed an extensive letter concerning egg and serpent symbolism in Egyptian hieroglyphs and religious art, representing largely the point of view of mainstream Egyptology of the period; whereas Jennings in The Rosicrucians and elsewhere was openly contemptuous of the interpretations of the hieroglyphs produced by Egyptologists since Champollion.
• There is implicit criticism of Jennings in various places. In cap. V of Phallism (p. 60 of the 1892 second edition on which the Unspeakable Press (Leng) issue is based) there is quoted and criticised ("not only extravagant but absurd") a passage from Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled representing the "tablets of the Law" displayed in Christian churches as "phallic symbols"; which passage in turn cites The Rosicrucians, their Rites and Mysteries in support of such an interpretation. Vol. 8 of the series was titled Mysteries of the Rosie Cross. Unlike Hargrave Jennings' best-known book, it actually makes some attempt to treat of the "Rosicrucian" phenomenon in an historical sense, and no overt attempt to interpret Rosicrucianism or Rose+Cross symbolism in sexual terms. The story from Jennings' book, chapter "Singular Adventure in Staffordshire" (p. 6 of the fourth edition) was reprinted with the remark that (a) it could not be found in the work to which he sourced it (which had been previously pointed out by A. E. Waite in Real History of the Rosicrucians) and (b) it was in any case a retelling with variations of a story which had appeared in print two years before the date given in the Rosicrucian manifestoes for the death of the founder of their fraternity.

Volume 10 of the series is called, in full, The Masculine Cross or a History of Ancient and Modern Crosses and their connection with the Mysteries of Sex Worship, also an Account of the Kindred Phases of Phallic Faiths and Practices. Like the anonymous 1880 digest, this title was likely intended to cause confusion with the 1874 "Sha Rocco" work; in this respect it succeeded and has even led some modern commentators to infer that it was simply a reprint thereof, and that therefore "Sha Rocco" was Hargrave Jennings.

Howard, Clifford: Sex Worship: an Exposition of the Phallic Origin of Religion. Washington, DC: privately printed for the author, 1897; second edition, 1898.

Another short digest (215 pp. in the original edition, whose layout and pagination I for once made no attempt to reproduce owing to generally low number of words per page) with a brief excuse for a bibliography at the end.

Anyway, back to that quote.

The "Order" referred to was the Ordo Templi Orientis, founded by Theodor Reuss about 1906 c.e. by merging a variety of fringe Masonic rites and occultist groups (Reuss later stated he had held discussions with one Carl Kellner in 1895 around forming an "Academia Masonica" to collect, condense and communicate the teachings of various Masonic and quasi-Masonic systems, but nothing came of it at the time, supposedly owing to Kellner's dislike of some of Reuss' then associates). While regarded by orthodox Masonic historians as a swindler who sold worthless degrees in irregular and clandestine rites, Reuss appears at least to have been sincere in his belief that he had discovered a unifying theme in religious, hermetic and Masonic symbolism. In the same year he promulgated the Constitution of his new Order, Reuss also published Lingam-Yoni; oder die Mysterien des Geschlechts-Kultus which was essentially a German translation with some new prefatory material of Phallism: a Description of the Worship of Lingam-Yoni in various Parts of the World, and in different Ages: with an account of Ancient and Modern Crosses, particularly of the Crux Ansata (or Handled Cross) and other Symbols connected with the Mysteries of Sex Worship, the first volume of the "Nature Worship and Mystical Series." A few of the other works mentioned above appeared on lists of recommended reading issued by Reuss to his disciples.

More to follow if I can be bothered. Now to try and proof a few more pages of Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names . . .

Lack of progress report . . .

I cannot help regarding the sexual element as the key which opens almost every lock of symbolism . . . — Thomas Inman, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism Exposed and Explained (second edition, 1874)

Our Order possesses the KEY which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic secrets, namely, the teaching of sexual magic, and this teaching explains, without exception, all the secrets of Nature, all the symbolism of Freemasonry and all systems of religion. — Theodor Reuss, "Our Order" in Der Oriflamme, "Jubilee" issue (1912).

While, over the course of a distinguished career, Thomas Inman, M.D. (1820-1876) produced a number of popular and scholarly works on medical subjects, outside of his profession he is probably better known ("better" being here somewhat relative) for his writings on "Ancient Faiths" which began (on his account, at least) as an attempt to trace out the origins of English family and given names and ended as a highly destructive exercise in Old Testament criticism, interspersed with bitter polemic against priesthoods in general and the Jewish religion and various Christian churches in particular, on his way attempting to read a sexual meaning into just about all religious nomenclature and symbolism. Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names (2 vols., 1868-9, second edition 1872-3) represents the first detailed presentation in English of the Phallicist theory of History of Religions.

This last statement may seem strange to those who have heard of Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus by Richard Payne Knight et al., but there is an important difference. Payne Knight, in his discourse on the worship of Priapus, looked at the grotesque classical figure with exaggerated and permanently erect phallus, images of satyrs copulating with goats, and the sexually graphic temple frescos of India which shocked the first British colonists to find them, and saw the mystic theology of the ancients, the great active and passive principles of nature combining to produce all things. The anonymous authors of the "Essay on the Worship of the Generative Powers in the Middle Ages of Western Europe" (believed to be Thomas Wright with assistance from George Witt, James Emerson Tennant and John Camden Hotten, the publisher of the 1865 combined edition) were less philosophical, but still treated of undisguised sexual symbols in religious, or assumed to be religious, iconography and customs, and illustrated their essay with engravings sufficiently graphic that the work had to be privately printed for subscribers in accordance with the conventions of the time.

Dr Inman, with no desire for himself or his publisher to be prosecuted for obscenity, started with names and emblems thought fit to print in works intended for general circulation, or even to be spoken or displayed in church, then tortured logic, Hebrew and the principles of symbolic interpretation to read a sexual meaning into the most innocuous, going on to use these interpretations as grounds for general condemnation. The passage from his Symbolism quoted above, continues ". . . and however much we may dislike the idea that modern religionists have adopted emblems of an obscene worship, we cannot deny the fact that it is so, and we may hope that with a knowledge of their impurity we shall cease to have a faith based upon a trinity and a virgin—a lingam and a yoni. Some may cling still to such a doctrine, but to me it is simply horrible—blasphemous and heathenish."

A re-set of Ancient Faiths is in something that might laughably be called progress and has been for about two years; since this work runs to nearly 2000 octavo pages, contains a massive amount of pointed Hebrew and appears to have a SAN cost, I am currently less than a third of the way through the page count.

Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism Exposed and Explained was originally issued in 1869 and comprised the plates and inline illustrations from Ancient Faiths and their explanatory text, with various rants and digressions interspersed. This edition is now rare. An expanded second edition was released in 1874, with the addition of an essay on 'The Assyrian "Grove" and other emblems' by a friend of the Doctor's called John Newton; this edition has been reprinted many times. In 1876 there appeared the Doctor's final salvo on the subject, Ancient Faiths and Modern, represented in its first printing as a third volume of Ancient Faiths . . . Ancient Names, and described on its title page as "a dissertation upon worships, legends and divinities in central and Western Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, before the Christian era, showing their relations to religious customs as they now exist." Whatever the Doctor may have intended on starting it, by the time he was finished any notion of a descriptive account of "ancient faiths and modern" had been entirely subordinated to polemic against the Jews and their religion, and various Christian churches (primarily, but not solely, the Roman and Anglican). Throughout its pages Inman repeatedly challenged various real or imaginary critics to a public debate on his theories; even had any been inclined to pay him the slighest attention, no such debate took place since Dr. Inman died in May 1876.

Yeah, I've been writing this entry because my patience with Ancient Faiths . . . Ancient Names ran out again after about 13 pages (even before doing the pointed Hebrew). Anyway, if you want to read it, the page images can be found on the Internet Archive.

Gerald Massey's Lectures

“We learn as we come to a knowledge of joy, that all sorrow and suffering are but the passing shadows of things mortal, and not the enduring or eternal reality.” — Gerald Massey, “The coming Religion” (ca. 1887)

"Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains." — Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law (1904)

After letting the thing gather dust under a table for over a year, finally fished out my rebound first edition of A Book of the Beginnings and managed to scan all of 20 pages. Don't expect the re-set any time soon. In the meantime, though, I made another attempt to put Massey's lectures on Scribd and this time it worked.

Massey, Gerald: Gerald Massey's Lectures. London: privately printed, n.d. (ca. 1900); many reprints. The ten lectures previously privately published as inidivual pamphlets (late 1880s).

This collection comprises "The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ," "Paul the Gnostic Opponent of Peter," "The Logia of the Lord," "Gnostic and Historic Christianity," "The Hebrew and other Creations fundamentally explained," "The Devil of Darkness in the Light of Evolution," "Luniolatry Ancient and Modern," "Man in search of his Soul during 50,000 years, and how he found it," "The Seven Souls of Man and their Culmination in Christ" and "The Coming Religion."

These lectures were intended as popular exposition of Massey's theories on the Egyptian origin of Christianity (and just about everything else) as well as being frankly polemical in a number of places; these theories are outlined in greater detail with at least a semblance of argument and presentation of evidence in his three major works, the (to steal a phrase) "Typhonian trilogy" of A Book of the Beginnings (1881), The Natural Genesis (1883) and Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World (1907).

While there is much to fault in Massey's works, and many of his arguments have been undermined by subsequent findings in Egyptology, linguistics and paleoanthropology, these is nevertheless material of value; and his championing of an African origin for humanity at a time when the mainstream, even those not promoting crude Aryanism, were obsessing with central Asia, marked him as ahead of his time (and endeared him to the "black pride" and "Afro-centric" movements of the latter half of the 20th century c.e.).

Electronic editions of the latter two of these major works have been issued by Celephaïs Press:

The Natural Genesis: Or, a Second Part of a Book of the Beginnings, containing an attempt to recover and reconstitute the lost origines of the myths and mysteries, types and symbols, religion and language, with Egypt for the mouthpiece and Africa as the birthplace.
Vol. 1
Vol. 2
(I note that vol. 1 is far and away the most-read CP title on Scribd, although vol. 2 has logged less than half the number of hits . . . I suppose most readers give up before then)

Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World
Vol. 1
Vol. 2

The omission here of A Book of the Beginnings is unfortunate; it was planned as a CP release for some time, but shortly after acquiring a decent copy-text I went through a period of general minor depression and could never face even scanning the whole thing (about 1200 pages); in any case, a complete HTML version with revisions and corrections by a modern editor can be read at a site called Masseiana.org which also has much supporting material, e-texts of some of the more obscure works Massey references, etc. A Book of the Beginnings is on one level vital to the whole scheme of the trilogy, but without some understanding of the system of Typology developed in The Natural Genesis, much of it looks like nonsense; Ancient Egypt, on the other hand, is written in a comparatively easy style which may mislead casual readers into thinking they understand it.

NOTE 2018.02.05: Masseiana.org apparently went offline recently; looking at the archived copy on the Wayback Machine (archive.org), it appears the editor gave up on the project and stopped updating the site in 2015.

A New Era of Thought: another update

Finished re-setting this; the re-set version has now replaced the page images on Scribd.

Now to go and catch up on Guild Wars . . .

Tweaks and fixes

Actually took a look at Hartmann's Cosmology (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians) following the discovery of last weekend and fixed a couple of points; one of the "glory" effects on part 1 plate 6 was in front of and thus obscured some text, this has now been rectified and I've updated the introduction to give a possible explanation for the major omission.

Also fixed a typo in Forlong's Synchronological Chart of the Religions of the World, and discovered when the corrected copy was uploaded that now all the text on it displays in iPaper, presumbably because of improvements made to the software since I first put it on scribd. Also uploaded another copy of said chart, split onto two pages for printing purposes (assuming you can find a print shop that can do A0 full colour . . .)

Still bored . . .

Fungi from Yuggoth and others by H. P. Lovecraft.

Originally issued January 2007 as a printed pamphlet with a grand total of 5 hand-sewn copies given away to various friends; now turned into an e-text.

Besides the 36 sonnets of "Fungi from Yuggoth," contains the poems "Nemesis," "The Messenger" and "Astrophobos" and the prose-poems or fragments "Nyarlathotep," "Memory," "Ex Oblivione," "What the Moon Brings" and "The Crawling Chaos." Also three illustrations by the editor.

Bored now.

A coupla more uploads to Scribd, but nothing really new in either.

The Principles of the Yoga-Philosophy of the Rosicrucians and Alchemists.

This formed an appendix to Franz Hartmann's In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom (1890), the body of which was a short, diffuse, inaccurate and mystifying work purporting to be an historical account of the "Rosicrucian" phenomenon. Hartmann represented this appendix as having been originally intended to form the basis for a work titled A Key to the Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians (see previous post) which project was abandoned. These two chapters appear to comprise an interpretation of Rosicrucian and Alchemical symbolism from the point of view of the theosophical schools of the nineteenth century; Hartmann's involvement in the German occultist circles from which the Ordo Templi Orientis emerged, and Reuss' various favourable references to him (he was for example cited as a Saint in a version of Crowley's Gnostic Mass which Reuss issued in German translation) suggests that this work may also shed light on how this symbolism was viewed in the early O.T.O.

The "Roscicrucian" section has been published on its own as a pamphlet under the title "Rosicrucian Symbols."

The Public Contents of the Book of Shadows.
An edition of the collection of Gardnerian Wicca rituals from ca. 1949-1961 as compiled by Aiden A. Kelly which has been doing the rounds of the net since the mid-90s. Only really scores over (?) the many existing copies (a dozen at least were on scribd already, most deriving from the HTMLs on sacred-texts.com) by slightly neater presentation, gratuitous use of the "Mason" typeface for headings and a number of pedantic or sarcastic footnotes by yrs truly.

Now re-set all of part I of A New Era of Thought, but that was the easy part (no complex tables and very few diagrams).

Grr . . .

One of the more ambitious projects of a few years back was an e-text of an English translation of the Geheime figuren der Rosenkreuzer, a famous German alchemical-Rosicrucian work of the late eighteenth century. While I have in fact prepared a re-set, with most of the figures coloured, of the George Engelke translation, first published in Chicago by the American Rosicrucian society AMORC, since this edition on examination turns out to be still in copyright, and in any case is now freely downloadable as black and white page images on AMORC's web site, I am no longer circulating the CP re-set. Instead, in the course of an insanely ambitious project of preparing etexts of works from the "General Reading" section of "Curriculum of A.'.A.'." in Crowley's Equinox, I prepared an e-text of Franz Hartmann's travesty of this volume, first issued in 1888 under the snappy title Cosmology or Universal Science, Cabala, Alchemy containing the Mysteries of the Universe regarding God, Nature, Man, the Macrocosm and Microcosm, Eternity and Time, explained according to the Religion of Christ by means of the Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which omits two of the shorter alchemical texts, 11 of the 36 plates (this material correspondes to the "drittes und letstes Heft" in those copies of the original German which were bound in three rather than two parts), much text on the plates that are included, and the bulk of the text of the "Golden Treatise," instead adding a rambling 16-page introduction which says absolutely nothing about the work to which it is prefixed, a "glossary of occult terms" of doubtful use and a few misleading notes to the "Golden Age Restored" and the "Parabola" from the "Tractatus Aureus." 

Anyway, to get to the point. While I long ago ceased to be bothered by people mirroring CP titles across the Internet or sticking them in ebook torrents, turns out that last October someone using the name "First Class Publishing House LXXVIII Isle of Paths," operating out of a PO box in Norway, went rather further, took the Celephaïs Press re-set of Hartmann's Cosmology &c., removed the CP name and logo (while leaving in the whole of my editorial introduction), stuck on their own imprint, copyright notice and front and back covers and are now selling it for US$50 on amazon.com. Check out the "look inside" option and go to the first page after the front cover for fairly clear proof of what's been done. Oh, they also scaled it down to 6" x 9" from the original folio size, so you're gonna need a magnifying glass to read all the text on the plates. The publisher's website seems to indicate that they intend to issue other texts from the A.'.A.'. general reading list. I will be following with interest. . . P.S.: so far they've also done it to the Unspeakable Press (Leng) edition of Blavatsky's Voice of the Silence: compare the copy on scribd with these previews at lulu.com; note the ham-handed substitution of their own name in the imprint, while leaving in the reference to an "electronic edition." Also to vol. I of the CP edition of Forlong's Rivers of Life (changing the title on the main title page to "Streams of Life" for no clear reason). The latter will be clearly distinguishable from a facsimile of the first edition by the large number of sarcastic footnotes initialled "T.S." which accompany the main text.

The Star in the West: update

Finished re-setting Fuller's The Star in the West, the re-set has replaced the page images on scribd. Unlike the e-text by "HKA" which has been doing the rounds for five years (for which I provided some graphics), this reproduces as far as possible the layout and pagination of the print edition.

Next up is Hinton's A New Era of Thought; currently up to about p. 50 (not including figures).

Iä! Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!

My French is a bit rusty, but the following appears in the course of a lengthy article by one Remi Sussan on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythology, specifically in a section discussing Yog-Sothoth.

From La Spirale: An eZine for the Digital Mutants:

Pour invoquer l’ouvreur de portes, les sectateurs de Yog-Sothoth vont donc aujourd’hui utiliser toute l’armada des concepts mathématiques bizarroïdes et irréguliers. En premier lieu, les solides non platoniciens, comme en témoigne ce "rituel des 9 angles" écrit par Michael Aquino pour l’Eglise de Satan. Les plus courageux tenterons eux de se perdre dans la "quatrième dimension" à coups de visualisation non euclidienne ou escherienne. Au XIXème siècle, un mathématicien nommé Charles Hinton avait ainsi créé des petits cubes colorés qui devaient selon lui permettre de visualiser la quatrième dimension. Ce livre est maintenant disponible en ligne, publié par une petite maison d’édition nommée, qui s’en étonnera, Celephais Press (Celephais est le nom d’une importante cité du monde du rêve, dans la nouvelle de Lovecraft A la recherche de Kadath).

Whether the author of this had come across the Rite to Call Yog-Sothoth issued on the CP imprint (where the double-octogram tesseract projection is used as the basis for a magic circle, marked on the ground with 200' of string and sixteen tent pegs) is unclear. Still, if I ever actually get round to making my own Hinton cubes, it would be the perfect thing to consecrate them with . . .

That logo . . .

The "double octagram" design behind the "CP" monogram, which has been used on most Celephaïs Press productions since about 2004, is of course a projection into two dimensions of a four-dimensional hypercube. This specific projection, as far as I am aware, first appeared in the works of Claude Fayette Bragdon, an American architect and theosophist who was influenced by C. H. Hinton (probably in his 1913 work A Primer of Higher Space; it also features in the 1915 Projective Ornament).

The various placenames on our imprint are, with the exception of Leeds, taken from the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the "Dreamlands" cycle which includes the short stories "The Cats of Ulthar," "The Other Gods," "The White Ship," and of course "Celephaïs," and the novel The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. All these locations belong to a kind of world formed from the dreams of our world's inhabitants, which has achieved some vague kind of ontological stability.

There is a kind of origin myth for CP, originally written in connection with a Call of Cthulhu background.

According to this story, CP began life as Celephaïs University Press, and had offices in the out of town campus of the univeristy (only the nice looking bits of Celephaïs University, based on dreams of the older Oxford and Cambridge colleges and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe are actually allowed within the city limits).

Unfortunately the out of town campus is somewhat less morphically (not to say ontologically) stable than the Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork, and the press had the misfortune to be allocated rooms in a building formed from dreams of some of the grimmer examples of British educational architecture from the 1960s and 1970s (if you know Leeds University, think "Red Route"; otherwise, "lots of concrete and right angles" just about sums it up). King Kuranes, who has rather strong ideas on the subject of architecture and aesthetics, happened to notice said building while on an official visit to the out of town campus, at which point it was unceremoniously banished to scrubland the other side of the Tanarian Hills, and underwent a complete existence failure a few hours later, taking all the stock, archives, printing presses, type, &c., of Celephaïs University Press with it. The Department of Misapplied Metaphysics and the entire Faculty of Disputed Sciences lost all their offices, laboratories and classrooms the same way.

The University trustees refused to give the press any more rooms or fund their reconstruction, so the staff decamped, and unable to afford office space in Celephaïs itself (despite the name, the only presence in the city beyond the Tanarian Hills is a brass plate and a mailbox in the business district, from which post is collected on an extremely haphazard basis) set up in the small town of Ulthar some way to the west, and started rebuilding. It is not clear just what purposes the offices in Sarkomand and Inquanok serve, especially since the former city is ruined and inhabited by gribbly things who tend to either eat, or sacrifice to disreputable gods, any humans they can get their appendages on. The office in Leeds, Yorkshire, England is ostensibly concerned with bringing works produced by the other offices into mani(n)festation in the waking world but tends to go its own way most of the time.

IRL, the name was probably suggested by Kadath Press of East Morton, a British small press / distro of the 70s and 80s (the name has more recently been used by a Canadian small press).

A New era of thought: update

Turns out somebody has also uploaded (about a month ago) a rather ropy copy of this one to archive.org; while generally poorer quality than the images I used, it did contain the page missing in the Australian copy; I have thus been able to complete the reconstruction of this page in the copy on scribd. The editors' introduction to this book slightly glosses over why Hinton left Britain before getting the MSS. into a publishable form. In 1886 he was effectively forced into exile for having unconventional domestic arrangements, after failing to convince the English criminal courts that Maude Weldon and Mary Ellen Boole were simply two different intrusions into our three-dimensional universe of a single four-dimensional being. It is suggested that the cubic-grid climbing frames which you still occasionally see around (where they haven't been torn down on Health and Safety grounds after too many small children getting concussed or losing teeth by banging their heads on the heavy steel pipes of which they're constructed), patented in the 1920s in the USA under the name "Jungle Gym" by one Sebastian Hinton, are based on another of C. H. Hinton's exercises, originally inflicted on his children in the 1880s when he was living in Japan. Tried earlier today to upload J.E. Erdmann's History of Philosophy as page images but Scribd refused to convert the first two volumes, apparently as being too long.

Science and the Infinite

Klein, Sydney Turner: Science and the Infinite: or, through a Window in the Blank Wall. London: William Rider 1912, reprinted 1917.

Read online at Scribd.

Another early CP release (2003), previously posted on one of my Geocities pages. This little volume comprises a series of meditations on connections between then-recent scientific theories and mystical ideas particularly as represented by the western theosophical schools of the late nineteenth century; it was resonably favourably reviewed in The Equinox and was placed on the "serious study" section of the Curriculum of A.'.A.'. in 1919. Klein followed this one up in 1917 with From the Watch Tower, or Spiritual Discernment and Way of Attainment in 1924 (the title of the last possibly suggested by remarks in the Equinox reviews of the earlier volumes).

The somewhat rough presentation of this e-text characterised many of my earlier productions; but right now I have better things to do than give it a makeover.

A New Era of Thought

Hinton, Charles Howard: A New Era of Thought. London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1888; reprinted 1900.

Read online at Scribd.

Charles Howard Hinton is probably best remembered for his speculative writings on the subject of the Fourth Dimension. His best-known work on the subject, the repeatedly-reprinted The Fourth Dimension was an early Celephaïs Press e-text (the first to bear the current logo, I believe) and is now on the CP Scribd page for the first time (this release changes the cover to be roughly uniform with other CP editions of Hinton's works but is unchanged as to the text). A New Era of Thought was an earlier treatment of the topic, and is believed to have introduced the word "tesseract" to refer to a four-dimensional hypercube. This book contains the original presentation of the infamous Hinton Cubes, with a system of 81 colours (reduced to 16 in The Fourth Diemsnion) which would make the task of preparing a set an exercise on a par with painting the Vault of the Adepts.

The present copy is based on a set of page images posted on the National Library of Australia, with the exception of the cover scan which was posted on Wikipedia Commons. The NLA scans have been split into single pages (they were originally presented as one page spread of the book to a page of the online copy), deskewed and cleaned up slightly. Unfortunately one page in the last appendix was missing in the copy-text; it will be theoretically possible to reconstruct it from other information in the book, but to do so fully will take some time; in the posted copy, only the easy bits have been done.

CP intends to issue a re-set of this work at some point. Watch this space.

The two collected volumes of Hinton's Scientific Romances, comprising seven essays from around this period plus two slightly later novellas, have also been issued by CP and can be read on Scribd:

First Series
(comprises "What is the Fourth Dimension," "The Persian King," "A Picture of Our Universe," "A Plane World" and "Casting out the Self.")
Second Series
(comprises "The Education of the Imagination," "Many Dimensions," "Stella" and "An Unfinished Communication.")

Short Studies in the Science of Comparative Religions

Forlong, Major-General J.G.R.: Short Studies in the Science of Comparative Religions, Embracing all the religions of Asia. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1897.

Read online at Scribd.

First issued this one on CP a while ago but previous attempts to put it on Scribd ran into problems. This release is the same as to the text but replaces the black & white versions of the plates with colour or greyscale images from a copy found on the Internet Archive.

Forlong is perhaps better known for a larger work issued 14 years prior to this one, under the title Rivers of Life: or sources and streams of the faiths of man in all lands &c. &c. &c. (2 quarto volumes plus a 7-foot long coloured chart summarizing its conclusions in diagrammatic form), described obliquely by Aleister Crowley as "an invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation" ("Curriculum of A.'.A.'.") and cited by the same author in support of his Grand Unified theory of Religions. Short Studies is far saner and more focussed; it grew out of a plan for a "Glossary or Polyglot Dictionary" of world relgions past and present, to be accompanied by a series of monographs on individual world religions, or on the religious practices and beliefs of various peoples, and comprises ten essays of 26 to 100 pages on particular aspects of Asian religion from Palestine to China, rounded up by a 93-page medley of rather insipid free-verse renderings of religious and ethical teaching from those times and lands for which records were available when he was writing.

This work obviously represents the scholarship in its field of the time, i.e. over a century ago (plus the General's own personal observations in various British colonial holdings in South Asia) and so should not be taken as completely reliable.

Celephaïs Press has also issued electronic editions of the General's other major works on History of Religions:

Rivers of Life
In which the General purports to trace the "Evolution of Faiths" from roots in tree, phallic, serpent, phallic, fire, phallic, solar, phallic, ancestor and phallic worship.
Vol. 1
Vol. 2
Appendix: Synchronological Chart of the Religions of the World
Appendix: Map of the ancient world
Appendix: Map of India and neighbouring lands
Appendix: Synoptical Table of Gods and God-Ideas

Faiths of Man: A Cyclopædia of Religion.
The manuscripts for the General's projected "Glossary" and monographs were assembled after his death by an anonymous editor and printed in 1906 in three octavo volumes totalling nearly 1700 pages. Entries range from a single line to thirty-page essays.
Vol. 1: A-D
Vol. 2: E-M
Vol. 3: N-Z
Similar caveats apply as to Short Studies, and many articles are frankly polemical; caution should be excerised when using this as a work of general reference.

Ah well . . .

Seems we no longer have "followers" on Scridb, only "subscribers." One can perhaps understand why the nomenclature was changed, but it was an amusing ego-boost while it lasted.

Scotch [sic] Rite Masonry Illustrated

[The following are now redundant: far superior scans of both volumes (from a 1905 reprint) were uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2011 from copies in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.]

Blanchard, Jonathan: Scotch Rite Masonry Illustrated (2 vols). Chicago: Ezra A. Cook, 1882. Many reprints.

Vol. 1 (4°-18°)
Vol. 2 (19°-33°)

Something I've so far held off doing with the CP Scribd account is uploading unmodified works found elsewhere on the web. These volumes however are in my view (a) of sufficient interest and (b) comparatively hard to find online (compared with say Ordo Ab Chao, Duncan's, the Morgan exposure, etc.), so I'm breaking with policy on this count.

This work contains what is purported to be the ritual of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite from the fourth to the thirty-third degree inclusive, interspersed with a hostile, not to say demented, commentary by Blanchard. At the time it was published there were in the USA two well-established "Supreme Councils" of AASR, whose rituals differed and had been repeatedly revised, in some cases quite radically, since the original foundation of the Supreme Council, Southern Masonic Jurisdiction in 1801. Blanchard's book does not represent the ritual used under either; it represents the "Cerneau" rituals; based on those of Morin's rite (see for example The Francken Manuscript) and other AASR workings in some respects, different in others (most notoriously in Kadosh).

Joseph Cerneau, like the founders of the SMJ Supreme Council, had been a 25° member and Deputy Inspector General of Morin's Rite of the Royal Secret (sometimes known as the Rite of Perfection) and in 1807 organised a "Sovereign Grand Consistory" in New York, which later turned into a "Supreme Council 33°" in imitation of Mitchell and Dalcho's Charleston operation. The SMJ refused to recognise this body, and in 1813 supported the establishment of the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction in opposition to Cerneau. Cerneau's original body was eventually (1867) absorbed by the "regular" NMJ council; however in the previous year one Harry Seymour, after being kicked out of the Scottish Rite under NMJ for involvement in Memphis-Misraim, got himself a Cerneau charter and later went on to charter John Yarker (expelled from AASR in 1870 by the Supreme Council for England and Wales, apparently also for involvement in Memphis-Misraim), from whom the "Cerneau" rite passed to Theodor Reuss and Aleister Crowley; thus the very fact which makes Blanchard's work more or less worthless for the study of the "regular" Scottish Rite makes it more useful than the likes of Ordo ab Chao or Pike's Magnum Opus for the study of the Masonic influences on the O.T.O.

Unfortunately the format in which I found these made any serious tidying up of the PDFs, deskewing of pages, &c., impossible, or at least non-straightforward. These are scans, presented one page spread for each page of the PDF, and have been run through an OCR process; text (unproofed) is selectable if you download the PDFs, but not images.

NB: There were problems with the original upload, in running a conversion on the PDF files some pages in both volumes were rotated and overcropped by Ghostscript; this should now have been fixed.

The Golden Bough

Just uploaded page images of the complete 3rd edition of J.G. Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion to Scribd. Some of the scans are a bit ropy but all should be entirely readable. I may as well state now that I have no intention of issuing a re-set of this lot. Links to read online follow:

Part I: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (vol 1)
Part I: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (vol 2)
Part II: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul
Part III: The Dying God
Part IV: Adonis Attis Osiris: Studies in Oriental Religion (vol 1)
Part IV: Adonis Attis Osiris: Studies in Oriental Religion (vol 2)
Part V: Sprits of the Corn and of the Wild (vol 1)
Part V: Sprits of the Corn and of the Wild (vol 2)
Part VI: The Scapegoat
Part VII: Balder the Beautiful (vol 1)
Part VII: Balder the Beautiful (vol 2)
Bibliography and general index

The 1936 supplement, Aftermath, is omitted as being still in copyright in the US where Scribd's servers are located.

Star in the West

The Star in the West: a Critical Essay upon the Works of Aleister Crowley by Captain (as he then was) J. F. C. Fuller can now be read online at Scribd. The current copy consists of page images, scanned from the 1976 Neptune Press reprint, and includes the frontispiece plate, omitted in the existing Internet copy. A re-set may be prepared at some point.

This is a lengthy study of Crowley's early poetry and philosophy (as expressed in the writings collected in his 1905-7 Collected Works). Some might question the "critical" part; even AC was occasionally embarassed by the excesses of Fuller's praise, as witnessed by his ca. 1910 poem "The Convert (a hundred years hence)":

There met one eve in a sylan glade
A horrible Man and a beautiful maid.
"Where are you going, so meek and holy?"
"I'm going to temple to worship Crowley"
"Crowley is God, then? How did you know?"
"Why, it's Captain Fuller that told us so."
"And how do you know that Fuller was right?"
"I’m afraid you're a wicked man; Good-night."

While this sort of thing is styled success
I shall not count failure bitterness

The symbolic design on the cover, which later appeared as an example Lamen in Book 4 Part II has itself raised questions, since a similar design (lacking "666," "418," "T.A.R.O." and "V.V.V.V.V." and with a sunburst in a triangle in the centre) appears in O.T.O. literature issued by Reuss apparently prior to his association with Crowley (see for example Starr, "Aleister Crowley, Freemason" AQC 108, note 5) and also appears as one of the seals on AC's O.T.O. charter. It is possible that both are independent modifications of an earlier original; a similar design is used by a modern group claiming to derive from Mathers' Alpha et Omega (see www.golden-dawn.com).

Just in case . . .

. . . you came here from somewhere else, the Geocities site can be reached here while it still exists.

Of course, migrating CP will be the easy bit. The tricky bit will be deciding what to do about the Nu Isis Working Group.

Welcome to the new home of CP

As soon as I get the hang of using this service, this blog will be what passes for the homepage of Celephaïs Press and Unspeakable Press (Leng), since Geocities is closing down in a few months. If I ever manage to stay off Guild Wars for long enough to complete any more e-texts, details and links to download or read online will be posted here. Also expect to see occasional ramblings, rants and if I'm feeling really bored some of the pages of tedious scholia on Forlong, Massey, Inman and others which I left out when web-publishing their books.

You have been warned.

In the meantime, most of the catalogue can be viewed at Scribd.com