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own part, the name was lifted from the "New Isis Lodge," established in 1955 as an O.T.O. group under a charter which was revoked by the then head of the order shortly after he read their initial proclamation.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.