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).