We apologize for the inconvenience.

Celephaïs Press is again on hold. I need to put my life back together.

Hæc bilanx pendet in loco qui non est

Just uploaded a minor improvement of Mathers, Kabbalah Unveiled, mainly fixing an issue with page headers in one section, but making a few other stylistic changes and re-arranging my endnotes slightly.

While I have no intention of ever issuing a re-set (the thing runs to over 2000 pages and the typography is such as is likely to defeat most of the more readily available OCR software), complete page images of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata, the seventeenth-century compilation of Christian Cabala from which Mathers took the Latin translations of the three minor tracts from the Zohar which form the bulk of Kabbalah Unveiled, are also on Scribd:

Vol. 1.

Vol. 2.

It was largely in order to preserve pagination and avoid making an unreadable mess of the whole thing that my many sarcastic notes to Mathers' Introduction were omitted in the CP release. Having had some training in formal logic and philosophy of language, it is difficult to remain calm when I see someone translate "qui non est" with the literally meaningless "is negatively existent" and then sink deeper and deeper into a metaphysical and semantic swamp in the process of explaining, or rather making excuses for not explaining, what he means by "negative existence."

Divide, add, multiply and extract square roots. There will be a test at the end of the Æon.

Finally got round to giving a once-over to William Stirling's The Canon, for the first time since about 2004 (the copies which other people have put on Scribd appear to be the original 2003 release). Largely limited to correcting some minor typos, re-setting the whole in something that isn't Times New Roman, re-scanning some of the pictures on a slightly less broken scanner and giving it cover and back board designs that doubled the file size (but meh, disk space and bandwidth is cheaper now than it was in 2003, and half-title pages don't make for good thumbnails).

Aleister Crowley in the "Curriculum of A.'.A.'." described this as "the best text-book of Applied Qabalah" (it had previously been favourably reviewed in The Equinox, some years after its original (1897) publication). Possibly this was meant as "the best available example of how you can prove anything with 'Cabala' (Stirling's preferred spelling) if you try hard enough." To obtain equivalences, the author routinely adds or subtracts one from the numerical value of a word or phrase (or alternatively, adds or subtracts one for every word in the phrase), squares or extracts square roots, divides or multiplies by 2, 4, the square root of 2, half the square root of 3, pi, 9.5, &c., &c., &c., rounding up or down depending on what suits his case, arbitrarily includes or omits Greek definite articles, in at least once instances uses the higher value of a Hebrew 'final' on one word in a phrase but not in another, and generally makes Kenneth Grant's use of Gematria look rigorous.

Oddly, the domain aiwaz.net, where I found the illustrated HTMLs of this work on which the CP release was originally based, is still hosting material on sacred-geometry themes, though the copy of The Canon vanished from there years ago.

Cumulative catalogue of Celephaïs Press titles

Should probably have done this when I started the blog. Meh. The following list includes works issued on both the Celephaïs Press and Unspeakable Press (Leng) imprints; there was originally a distinction of a kind in my mind between the two labels but it has become increasingly blurred since I started using the latter name on works being generally published. Most hotlinks in the entries below are to copies on Scribd. With the exception of Massey's Book of the Beginnings which I intend to ultimately re-set, uploads of page images, either scanned by myself or lifted from elsewhere on the Web, are not included below. Provided I remember, this entry will be updated as new titles are released, hence it is linked in the "permanent (?) links" box of this blog.

Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius (spurious attrib.): De Occulta Philosophia, seu de Cæremoniis Magicis, Liber Quartus.  To which is added, Heptameron seu Elemental Magica.  Based mainly on the 1559 first edition, though not reproducing layout, pagination, &c.

Anonymous works

-- Ars Theurgia-Goëtia.  The second book of the Lemegeton.

"Nature Worship and Mystical series." Ten volumes (often questionably attributed to Hargrave Jennings), comprising:

• Phallism: A Description of the Worship of Lingam-Yoni &c. &c. &c. (Crux Ansata) (based on 1892 "second edition")
• Ophiolatreia, or Serpent Worship
• Phallic Objects, Monuments, and Remains
• Cultus Arborum, or Phallic Tree Worship
• Fishes, Flowers and Fire and elements and deities in the phallic faiths
• Archaic Rock Inscriptions
• Nature Worship
• Mysteries of the Rosie Cross
• Phallic Miscellanies
• The Masculine Cross, or a History of Ancient and Modern Crosses (not to be confused with two earlier works of a similar title).

-- Phallic Worship: A description of the Mysteries of the Sex Worship of the Ancients, with the History of the Masculine Cross (title on cover simply The Masculine Cross).

-- Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians (English translation by George Engelke). Withdrawn for copyright reasons. See also Hartmann, Cosmology &c.

Arnold, Edwin: The Song Celestial (Bhagavadgita).

Ashmole, Elias (et al.): Longobardus.  A transcription of BL Sloane MS. 3824.  In preparation.

Avalon, Arthur. See under John Woodroffe.

Blavatsky, H. P.: The Voice of the Silence.

Burton, Richard Francis: The Kasidah of Hâjî Abdû el-Yezdî (based on a 1924 illustrated edition).

Campbell, Robert Allen: Phallic Worship: an outline of the worship of the generative organs &c. &c. &c.

Carlile, Richard: Manual of Freemasonry (based on 1845 and later 1-volume edition).

Crowley, Aleister: 777 Revised.
-- Book 4 (part I).
-- Book 4 (part II).
-- The Equinox of the Gods (was designated part IV of Book 4 some time after publication)
-- Konx Om Pax, Essays in Light.
-- Little Essays Towards Truth.
-- Magick in Theory and Practice (part III of Book 4).
-- Tannhäuser.

-- (et al.): The Equinox vol. III no. 1 ("The Blue Equinox.")

(see also this post for links to many of the shorter "Libri").

Fabre d'Olivet, Antoine: The Golden Verses of Pythagoras Explained &c. (English trans. by N. L. Redfield).

Forlong, J. R. G.: Faiths of Man: a Cyclopædia of Religions (3 vols.: Vol. 1. / Vol. 2. / Vol. 3.)

-- Rivers of Life, or Sources and Streams of Faiths of Man in all Lands (2 vols. plus chart, maps and tables).

• Vol. 1.
• Vol. 2.
• Chart of the Religions of the World.
• Table of Gods and God-Ideas.
• Map of the ancient world.
• Map of India.

-- Short Studies in the Science of Comparative Religions, embracing all the Religions of Asia.

Fuller, J. F. C.: The Star in the West: a critical essay on the works of Aleister Crowley.

Gardner, Gerald Brosseau et al.: "The public contents of the Book of Shadows."

Hartmann, Franz: (ed. / trans.) Cosmology or Universal Science &c. &c. &c. (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians).

-- "The Principles of the Yoga-Philosophy of the Rosicrucians and Alchemists" (extract from In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom).

Higgins, Godfrey: Anacalypsis, or an attempt to draw aside the veil of the Saïtic Isis &c. &c. &c. (front matter and first few chapters of vol. I only)

Hinton, Charles Howard: The Fourth Dimension (includes the pamphlet "A Language of Space")

-- A New Era of Thought.

-- Scientific Romances (first series)

-- Scientific Romances (second series)

How, Jeremiah: "On the Antient and Primitive Rite" (excerpt from the author's The Freemason's Manual).

Howard, Clifford: Sex Worship: an exposition of the phallic origin of religion.

Huxley, Thomas Henry: Hume, with helps to the study of Berkeley (Collected Essays, vol. 6).

Inman, Thomas: Ancient Faiths and Modern

-- Ancient Faiths embodied in Ancient Names (2 vols.: Vol. 1. / Vol. 2.)

-- Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism exposed and explained (based on second edition).

Jennings, Hargrave: Illustrations of Phallicism.

-- The Indian Religions, or results of the mysterious Buddhism (based on second edition)

-- Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial (includes the supplement of illustrations)

-- The Rosicrucians, their Rites and Mysteries (based on fourth edition)

King, C. W.: The Gnostics and their Remains, ancient and mediæval (based on second edition)

Klein, Sydney T.: Science and the Infinite.

Knight, Richard Payne et al.: Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus.

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips: The Call of Cthulhu.

-- The Festival.

-- Fungi from Yuggoth and others.

Massey, Gerald: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World (2 vols.: Vol. 1 / Vol. 2).

-- A Book of the Beginnings (2 vols.: Vol. 1 / Vol. 2). [Vol. 2 currently page images only]

-- Gerald Massey's Lectures.

-- The Natural Genesis (2 vols.: Vol. 1 / Vol. 2).

Mathers, S. L. "MacGregor" (ed. / trans.): The Kabbalah Unveiled.

Mathers, S. L. "MacGregor" & Crowley, Aleister (eds.): Goetia.

Mead, G.R.S.: Chaldæan Oracles (Echoes from the Gnosis, VIII & IX).

-- (ed. / trans.): Hermetica (extracted from his Thrice Greatest Hermes).

-- (ed. / trans.): Pistis Sohpia, a Gnostic Miscellany (based on second edition).

Pike, Albert: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (includes the later "Digest-Index")

Rocco, Sha (Abisha S. Hudson): The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship.

Sellon, Edward: Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus (also includes his papers "Linga Puja" and "Sakti Puja")

Spencer, Herbert: First Principles (based on sixth edition, the last revised by the author).

Stirling, William: The Canon: an Exposition of the Pagan Mystery perpetuated in the Cabala as the Rule of all the Arts.

T[ripudians] S[tella], Frater (pseudonym of the present writer): "Bibliographia Enochia"

-- "Hinton's Cubes" (instruction in making the things)

-- "The Holy Table of Dr. Dee"

-- "Levity's Vestments: a study in creative plagiarism" (a.k.a. "The Sources of the 'Charge of the Goddess'").

-- "The Rite to Call Yog-Sothoth"

-- (ed.) "The Angelicall Alphabet of Dr. Dee" (mostly consists of excerpts from Dee's spirit diaries).

-- (trans.) "Ecclesiæ Gnosticæ Catholicæ Canonis Missæ redactio in linguam Latinam" (original by Aleister Crowley)

-- (ed.) On the Invocation of Angels.  Typeset of various 17th-century English works on Angel Magic.

Tucker, Prentiss: The Lost Key: an Explanation of Masonic Symbols.

Villars, Abbé N. Montfauçon de: Comte de Gabalis, or Discourses on Secret Sciences (English translation by "The Brothers" but shorn of their waffling and redundant commentary)

Vivekananda, Swami: Bhakti Yoga

-- Raja Yoga (includes a translation with commentary of the Yoga-Aphorisms of Patanjali).

Waite, Arthur Edward: Real History of the Rosicrucians

Ward, J. S. M.: The Craft Degrees Handbooks (originally published in three separate volumes in the "Masonic Handbook Series")

Westcott, W. Wynn (ed. / trans.): Chaldæan Oracles.

Westropp, Hodder M. & Wake, C. S.: Ancient Symbol Worship (a.k.a. Phallism in Ancient Worships).

Woodroffe, John: The Garland of Letters: Studies in the Mantra-S'âstra.

-- Introduction to Tantra-S'âstra.

-- S'akti and S'âkti: Essays and Addresses on the S'âkta Tantra-S'âstra (based on third edition).

Yarker, John (ed. / trans.): Lectures of the Antient and Primitive Rite (originally published in two volumes as Masonic Charges and Lectures and Lectures of a Chapter, Senate and Council).
-- (ed.) Manual of the Degrees of the Antient and Primitive Rite.

-- Speculative Freemasonry: a Historical Lecture.

Book of the Beginnings, continued.

Finished scanning vol. 2 of Book of the Beginnings, page images have now been uploaded to Scribd. Actually completing a re-set of this monsterpiece will take a while, though.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (2)

Going back through the blog archives, I discover that I omitted to mention at the time (back in March) that I completed and posted on Scribd an edition of Phallism in Ancient Worships (a.k.a. Ancient Symbol Worship) by Hodder M. Westropp, C. S. Wake, and Alexander Wilder. The two essays comprising the bulk of this were originally papers presented to a dodgy bunch of blokes called the Anthropological Society of London, who were also the original audience for Edward Sellon's ramblings on Indian "phallic worship." On which subject, I've just uploaded a slight update of Sellon's Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus. This mainly fixes a few previously unnoticed OCR errors in the "S'akti Puja" paper, and slightly expands one of my notes.

As I almost got round to explaining in a post last year under this title, what started me on the trek through this morass, which with the CP release of Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names is more or less over (I do not count Gerald Massey or Godfrey Higgins as Phallicists) was my interest in the works of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, and the quasi-Masonic association the Ordo Templi Orientis, which he took over in the 1920s and which is now widely associated with his name and ideas.
Theodor Reuss, the founder of the O.T.O., echoing the words of Thomas Inman's Symbolism, claimed for his order the possession of a "KEY" to explain all religious, Masonic and Hermetic symbolism, namely "the teaching of sexual magic." Crowley, who even prior to his association with Reuss was at least aware of the Phallicist school of History of Religions, enthusiastically embraced this scheme of interpretation, and while keeping the precise nature of this teaching a secret, reserved for the higher degrees of the order, recommended works like General Forlong's Rivers of Life, Payne Knight et al. on the Worship of Priapus, and Hargrave Jennings' The Rosicrucians to his students even in writings intended for publication.

There is one very important difference between Reuss and Crowley on the one hand, and Dr. Inman in particular on the other. The Doctor, whose own religious position seems to have been a vague Theism, revering a self-contradictory abstraction he called "the Almighty" and rejecting any kind of religious symbolism or ritual as a blasphemous insult to the divine majesty, used the presence of supposed "phallic" elements in the doctrine, ritual, iconography and nomenclature of existing religions as grounds for violently denouncing them. Reuss and Crowley, on the other hand, accepting the arguments of the Phallicists as to the intimate and indissoluble connection between sexuality and religion, deduced from these the divinity of the human sexual instinct and the "solar-phallic" cult as the one true religion:

[In] the Macrocosm is one sole God, the Sun [. . .] in the Microcosm, which is Man, the vicegerent of the Sun, sole giver of Life, is the Phallus.

-- Crowley, Liber 228, "De Natura Deorum."

[The] only rational God is the Sun, who is in the Macrocosm what the Phallus is in the Microcosm.

-- Crowley, Liber 888, "The Gospel according to St. Bernard Shaw."

Book of the Beginnings, further progress of a sort.

Well, ended up staying out yesterday for longer than I originally intended, so have only just finished scanning vol. 1 of A Book of the Beginnings. Anyway, the complete page images are now on Scribd. Next up is seeing if I can scan vol. 2 without doing quite as much damage to it in the process.

In Man we Trust? (5)

Scribd seems to be playing silly buggers again, for some reason vol. 1 of Dr. Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names is not showing up on my public feed or the list of documents accessible from the main link on this blog. This would probably explain why it's had less than half as many hits as vol. 2.

Ah, and I see we have "followers" again. 298 so far.

A Book of the Beginnings (progress of a sort report)

Scanned another couple of chapters of A Book of the Beginnings; these page images have been appended to the copy on Scribd. This still only amounts to about half the page count of vol. I, and my copy is rapidly falling apart.

Later: Now added cap. 7, but had enough of this for today.

Later later: A few hours break & some food, and managed to face scanning another chapter. Might finish scanning vol. 1 tomorrow -- 134 pages to go. My copy-text will probably be wrecked beyond repair by the time I'm finished though, not only have a number of complete signatures become detached from the binding but many individual pages, the paper horribly brittle after 130 or so years, are now seriously torn. Tired now . . .

Ironies abound . . .

A staunch materialist and mechanist whose sole use for occultist beliefs and practices is as background or plot devices, to be used sparingly, in the stories by which he gives expression to the dreams into which all irrational and inexplicable elements in his psyche are forced to find their outlet, a few decades after his death is found to inspire occultist groups worldwide, more than one naming itself after a cult, sect or clique from his fiction.

Similarly, decades previously, a radical poet turned amateur Egyptologist fills his writings with such glamours that the volumes which he put forth as a naturalistic and evolutionist account of human history are enthusiastically quoted by the same kind of theosophists and esotericists who are roundly abused throughout their pages; and while the mainstream forgets him, the interest of occultists ensures his books remain in print a century after his death.

Or, in other words, in the course of another attempt to break my online game addiction without carving tally-marks on my forearms with a Stanley knife in the process, I've hauled my copy of A Book of the Beginnings off the shelf where it's been gathering dust for a year or two and managed to scan all of another 70 pages (since it still hasn't become available on Google Books or the Internet Archive). These volumes would appear to be vital to Massey's attempt to prove the Egyptian origins of everything, although without some understanding of the system of Typology developed in The Natural Genesis, the whole thing will probably look like nonsense.

Anyway, when I've done as much of this as I can face tonight, the images will be posted on Scribd.

(A bit later): Done. Front matter and chapters 1-4 (pp. 1-179 of 503).

In Man we Trust (4)

One general comment I will make about Ancient Faiths embodied in Ancient Names, though. Despite the great level of learning and ingenuity displayed, it is as a whole a polemical and not a scholarly work. Leaving aside the repetitive rants into which many of the longer articles degenerate, for much of it the Doctor appears to have had in mind some actual or hypothetical opponent who believed in the literal truth and divine inspiration of the Bible as its text now stands, the unitary authorship of the Pentateuch, &c., &c. To this end he frequently employs what might be called "irony"; rather than attack these premisses directly, he attempts in places to show that they lead to contradictions and absurdity, or at least to other consequences, such as implying things about God that he assumes his opponent would be unwilling to accept. Hence there are passages which appear to start from the assumption that this or that biblical personage was a real person who bore the name assigned them in the narrative from infancy (usually in order to argue against the interpretation of that character's name found in the standard Hebrew-English lexicons), interspersed with others which treat the narrative as at best false and propagandistic as to details and at worse entirely mythical, or fabricated to suit the interests of one or another priesthood.

Another point to consider when noting apparent contradictions in this book, is this: Inman was writing long before the age of desk-top publishing. Setting a book of 1800 octavo pages up in type is not a quick or simple task, and once a section of the book had been typeset, it would not have been as straightforward a task to change it as it would be to go back and change a document in a word processor. Inman's ideas and views continued to develop and in some respects change over the course of however many years he was working on Ancient Faiths (a paper on aspects of his theories in regard to English personal names was presented to the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society in February 1866, and printed in vol. XX of the Society's Proceedings), and even after vol. 1 had been printed.

In Man we Trust (3)

The complete re-set of Dr. Thomas Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names has now been uploaded to Scribd.
Vol. 1
Vol. 2
It appears, looking at the date stamps on some of the workfiles, that I started on this re-set over six years ago; that I ever finished it can only really be attributed to some bizarre kind of intellectual sadomasochism. While I could fill many pages with detailed pedantic criticisms of the Doctor's methods and conclusions, I doubt anyone is interested; even in his own time Inman does not seem to have ever been taken very seriously away from the fringe, and 140 years of archæological discoveries around the peoples, languages and religions of the ancient Near East have shown many of his conjectures to be at best ingenious but wrong. Instead I will once again direct readers to the comments I made on another blog last year.

Doubtless there are many uncorrected OCR errors in the above documents; but right now I really can't face giving them even another skimming over.

In Man we Trust? (2)

Finished re-setting the main text of Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names, now just got to re-type the Indexes . . . so a while yet, as said Indexes include quite a lot of pointed Hebrew.

In Man we Trust?

Owing to what can probably only be described as intellectual masochism, I recently went back to Thomas Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names and managed to re-set the rest of the main text of vol. i, and a large part of vol. ii (though the indexes will probably need to be typed out completely). It is thus possible that this project will be completed by the end of this year. Watch this space.

O circule stellarum . . .

For C.H.B. -- just uploaded my Latin translation of the Gnostic Mass to Scribd. Earlier versions of this have been webposted on the now-defunct Nu Isis Working Group site (mirrored here), on Hermetic Library's EGC pages, and on the OpenBuddha blog. The posted copy is set out for printing onto A4 for ritual use, and as such has the rubric entirely in the original English and only has the short list of Saints (largely because I never finished Latinising the long list).

In writing it I had in mind the reconstructed classical Latin pronunication that can be found in Latin dictionaries and grammars. The rendition of the Anthem, though, makes no pretence at any Latin verse metre; treat it as if it were English iambic pentameter. I am still far from satisfied by my rendition of the Quia Patris.

In accordance with the short comment on The Book of the Law I am not going to discuss issues of interpretation arising from my translation of quotations from Liber Legis in the Mass. This does not extend to correction of simple grammatical errors.

To my knowledge, this ritual has been performed twice, the first time being by AVoD Oasis OTO in March 2005. There are currently tentative plans for a third performance at the Gnosis IVxviii gathering later this year.

This is it, which philosophie dreameth of (2)

Forgot to mention this on the blog at the time, but have uploaded some more materials relating to "Enochian Magic" to scribd.

The Holy Table of John Dee gives a full-colour overview of the Tabula Sancta or Table of Practice based on the final corrected design in the Dee diaries and the description as to colours and dimensions left by Elias Ashmole who had a chance to examine the original table (believed to have been subsequently destroyed in a fire); also includes actual-size images (broken up into parts to fit on A4 pages) of the border, central block and Ensigns of Creation that can be printed then cut out and either stuck together or used as template for painting your own.

The Angelicall Alphabet of Dr. Dee shows the letters of the "Enochian" alphabet based on Dee's copy of the corrected final forms, along with relevant excerpts from the Spirit Diaries concerning the "primitiue diuine or Angelicall speche" and the names of the letters (several of which Regardie and those copying him managed to get wrong).

Bibliographia Enochia is simply a bibliography of primary and secondary sources on the subject, under sporadic review / update. It makes no pretence to completeness, and is limited to works on the subject in English.

The photograph shows a half-size rendition of the Table of Practice plus other accessories made by yours truly (I can occasionally be induced to actually make physically manifested things), the table being backed onto a folding game-board for portability.

Falsely attributed? (3)

At a bit of a loose end (Guild Wars is offline today for server maintenance) and turned up this blog post on the subject of Dr. Abisha S. Hudson, presumed author of The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship, mentioned some months back in an overview of Phallicist works on History of Religion issued by CP / UP(L).

While I completely agree with the author's case that the identification of "Sha Rocco" with Hargrave Jennings is utterly implausible, it seems he was still caught up in confusion arising from (a) some deliberately dishonest titling by opportunistic publishers of the late 19th century and (b) Cat Yronwode's comments in 2003 or earlier on a book which she had not actually read at the time.

Ascribing the association between "Sha Rocco" and "Abisha S. Hudson" to an "anonymous librarian" suggests that the only basis for it is a manuscript note on the title page of one library copy—in fact, on the reverse of the title page of the 1874 Masculine Cross it was stated that Hudson had entered the book "in the office of the Librarian of Congress," and the only plausible reason for the name of Dr. Hudson (for whom there is far more biographical data now generally available than Ms. Yronwode was able to find in 2003) being on the copyright notice, other than his being the author, or at the very least personally associated with the author, was that he was an employee of the New York based publisher, which is not credible given what is known about him (e.g., that he was a doctor living variously in Ohio and California).

The connection of The Masculine Cross with the 1889-91 "Nature Worship and Mystical Series," is not as simple as Ms. Yronwode assumed. The tenth and last volume of that series had on its cover the title Masculine Cross. It was not, however, a reprint of the 1874 work; rather an opportunistic re-use of the earlier volume's short title. It seems likely that the 1874 Masculine Cross, while being distributed across the USA, was for some time known more by reputation than actual acquaintence in Britain, and that in 1880 an opportunistic publisher in London stole the name and several passages of the text for a small octavo volume called on its title page, Phallic Worship: A Description of the Mysteries of the Sex Worship of the Ancients with the history of the Masculine Cross, but simply The Masculine Cross on the front board and spine. The binding of this latter volume is similar but not identical to that later adopted for the NW&MS and internal typographical and layout style is completely different.

(Page images of the 1874 and 1891 works (in their 1904 reprints) may be found on the Internet Archive. The 1880 work appears rarer and just has a brief entry on Google Books with a spurious attribution to Jennings.)

My reasons for rejecting the widespread attribution of the "Nature Worship and Mystical Series" itself to Hargrave Jennings have been discussed at length in various places, including the endnotes to the Unspeakable Press (Leng) editions of those volumes and in an earlier post on this blog, and include considerations of style, ideas, and dates.

What I have not examined is the question of, since Abisha S. Hudson was a real person and not a pseudonym of Jennings, and also alive at the time the NW&MS was published, could he have been the author of the series, as the author of the post that prompted these ramblings (on a blog about Emma Hardinge Britten, the Spiritualist) seems to assume? Part of Cat Yronwode's argument for Rocco / Hudson being Jennings was that Ophiolatreia, the second volume of the NW&MS was ascribed to "Abisha S. Hudson" by Gershon Legman, a generally reputable bibliographer; and internal references within the series indicate it as being all by one author.

This I cannot answer definitely at the moment, but it seems unlikely; while judgements on style are of limited value given how much of the NW&MS was verbatim from earlier works, style of those passages which do seem to be due to the actual "author" is unlike that found in the Rocco / Hudson Masculine Cross, and the sources employed and general focus of the studies (specifically the recurring emphasis on India as a supposed centre of "phallic worship" tending to suggest a hidden agenda of justifying British colonial policy there as a so-called civilising force) as well as the simple fact that the whole series was published in London make it more likely that the author was British, and a wide range of sources was used whereas the 1874 Masculine Cross was, saving the last chapter, almost entirely cribbed from Dr. Thomas Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names.

Falsely attributed? (2)

Further to the last: the GD site mentioned also has a copy of an early CP release of Liber 777, with the front matter excised, and again linked to with the remark "falsely attributed to Aleister Crowley." This is a slightly more ambiguous case. It is worth mentioning, however, that (a) the first edition of 777 was published anonymously, (b) the bulk of the page count of the revised edition, the first to have Crowley's name on the title page, consisted of additional material not in the first edition whose authorship has not been seriously disputed, (c) the title page of 777 Revised described it as "A reprint of 777 with much additional matter by the late Aleister Crowley" which can be parsed as only attributing the "additional matter" to AC, especially since (d) the editor's preface to the revised edition stated: "It is not, however, entirely original. Ninety per cent of the Hebrew, the four colour scales, and the order and attribution of the Tarot trumps are as taught in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with its inner circle of the Rose of Ruby and the Cross of Gold (R.R. et A.C.)," and in fact this source is indirectly acknowledged in Crowley's original introduction, when he discussed previous attempts to tabulate knowledge.

The specific claim that the tables of 777 were lifted almost in their entirity from a GD MS. titled "General Correspondences" was made by Pat Zalewski in Kabbalah of the Golden Dawn (xiii, 92 n.); Zalewski referred again to "General Correspondences" in later books; however unless and until a copy of this MS. predating the publication of 777 is published or otherwise made available for general examination it will be impossible to tell for certain just how much if anything in the tables of 777 was due to AC.

Falsely attributed?

Just turned this up: on the website of an organisation calling itself the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is a copy of the CP edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia, linked with the remark that it was "falsely attributed to Aleister Crowley." While Crowley's claim on the title page to have "edited, verified, introduced and commented" the whole work may be somewhat overblown, his actual contribution to the main text likely limited to providing a few hostile or sarcastic footnotes, the major false attribution in that edition is the "translator" credit to S.L. Mathers; as documented by Joseph Petersen in his edition of the Lemegeton, the BL MSS. on which Mathers drew are all in English. I am also at a complete loss as to by whom Ben Rowe's edition of the Theurgia-Goëtia, also mirrored on that site, was "falsely attributed to Aleister Crowley" -- certainly not by Rowe.

P.S.: To clarify: the full name of the organisation alluded to above is "The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Outer Order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega." It is apparently not the same as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (R) established by Charles "Chic" Cicero. Neither should be confused with the historical organisation of that name which was established in London in 1887 or 1888 and messily imploded a little over a decade later.

Scribd issues

As some of you have probably noticed, Scribd recently migrated from the Flash-based iPaper embedded reader to an HTML based system. While an improvement in some respects, it appears to have caused issues with a number of CP titles; a few appear (at least in the browser -- Firefox 3.6.3 -- which I'm using) not to display at all, others have type alignment issues on some pages. All should display as intended if you download the PDFs. Hopefully this is just a teething problem with the new reader software and will be sorted soon.

UPDATE 2010.06.07: If a document is not displaying in the new HTML view, it can still be viewed in iPaper, but this involves selecting the "change your reading preferences" link, and then clearing the tickbox "Display documents in HTML mode (recommended)." Obviously it *also* involves having Flash enabled which the known security issues with current versions of Flash is something you may not want to do.

Divide, add, multiply and understand.

Going through some more old stuff, and thought perhaps I should explain in more detail why I tampered with the text of the Chemical Wedding embedded in A. E. Waite's Real History of the Rosicrucians. One of the characters in this strange work is a "most beautiful Virgin" who supervises the narrator and other guests in the castle where the main action takes place. Towards the end of the narrative of the "Third Day" (Waite, p. 142), after the discussion of a series of moral dilemmas, the narrator asks her name and is met with a numerical riddle:

My name contains six and fifty, and yet hath only eight letters; the third is the third part of the fifth, which added to the sixth will produce a number, whose root shall exceed the third itself by just the first, and it is the half of the fourth. Now the fifth and seventh are equal, the last and first also equal, and make with the second as much as the sixth hath, which contains four more than the third tripled.

As originally printed by Waite, and apparently in the first publication (1690) of the English translation, this read "contains five and fifty" (I have not had a chance to consult the German original). The amendment had nothing to do with the line in Liber Al vel Legis, and everything to do with the solution to the riddle presented by Waite in his 1924 Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, (p. 168 note) which makes her name ALCHIMIA, taking the number of each letter as its ordinal position in the English or German alphabet. While Waite's reasoning depends on her response to a later question of the narrator, that the seventh (and thus also the fifth) letter "contains . . . as many as there are lords here," the riddle is soluble without this information, thus: Call the letters of her name a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. These sum to 56. Since "the fifth and seventh are equal, the last and first also equal"

2a + b + c + d + 2e+ f = 56

"the third is the third part of the fifth," to 3c = e, so

2a + b + 7c + d + f = 56

"the third . . . added to the sixth, will produce a number whose root shall exceed the third itself by just the first", so,

sqrt(c + f) = c + a

". . . and it [the root of c+f, or c+a] is half the fourth" so d = 2(c + a), so

4a + b + 9c + f = 56

"the sixth . . . containeth four more than the third tripled" so f = 3c + 4, so

4a + b + 12c + 4 = 56, and sqrt(4c + 4) = c + a, which latter can be rewritten as sqrt 4(c + 1) = c + a, or 2 sqrt (c + 1) = c + a

"the last and the first are also equal, and make with the second, as much as the sixth have." 

Slightly ambiguous, could mean a (or h) + b = f, or a + h + b (= 2a+b) = f. 

If the former (call this case i) then a + b = 3c + 4, so 3a + 15c + 8 = 56, so 3a + 15c = 48, a + 5c = 16. 

If the latter (call this case ii), 2a + b = 3c + 4, so 2a + 15c + 8 = 56, 2a + 15c = 48. 

The reference of numbers to letters strongly suggests that a positive integer solution for all the variables is expected.  At this point, c + 1 has to be a perfect square; which could make c 3, 8, 15, &c.  However if c is more than 3 and a third, a will be negative.  So c = 3.  In case i, a + 15 = 16, so a = 1.  In case ii, 2a + 45 = 48, so a = 1.5, suggesting that the case i reading of the constraint was correct. 

So h = 1, e = 9, g = 9, f = 3 x 3 + 4 = 13, b = 12, f = 2(1+3) = 8, giving 1, 12, 3, 8, 9, 13, 9, 1.

By ordinal position in the German or English alphabet (i.e. treating i and j as different letters), ALCHIMIA. 

If we do not make the assumption about positive integers, it is not possible to resolve the ambiguity noted. Assuming case 1, we take the equations

2 sqrt (c + 1) = a + c, and a + 5c = 16

from the latter, a + c = 16 - 4c; so we can substitute in the first, giving

2 sqrt (c + 1) = 16 - 4c, or sqrt (c + 1) = 8 - 2c c + 1 = 4c^2 - 32c + 64 4c^2 - 33c + 63 = 0

which has two real solutions for c, 3 and 5.25.

This is it, which philosophie dreameth of

In connection with some studies I've recently been revisiting, posted on scribd some PDFs of Sloane MS. 3191, the digests of John Dee's "Enochian" magic system. Quality on some of these is a bit dodgy owing to Dee's scrawl, deterioration of the MSS. over 400 years, contrast issues in the original microfilm photographs and a somewhat ropy digitisation of the microfilm, but these just about manage to be readable with much use of the zoom function.

Comprising:
48 Claves Angelicæ
The "Enochian" Keys or Calls; Romanised Angelic text with intralineal English translation.
Liber Scientiæ, Auxillii et Victoriæ Terrestris
The table of the 30 Ayres and 91 Parts of the Earth
De Heptarchia Mystica
A system of planetary magick, written / received before the "Enochian" material more narrowly so called. The handwriting on this one is significantly harder to read than the others and some text was lost at the page folds when the MS. book was photographed.
A book of supplications and invocations
Conjurations of the Angels &c. of the Tables of the Watchtowers.

Gotten bored with Anacalypsis at about p. 180 (of 867) of vol. 1. Vol. 2 will be easier but is on scribd as page images from the 1927 reprint already. A bit more of Inman's Ancient Faiths done too, but not much.

I note a few comments consisting entirely of irrelevant links have gotten through the spam filters on this blog. These have been, and will continue to be, deleted on sight. Unfortunately the blog options do not appear to include blocking hyperlinks in comments.

EDITED MANY YEARS LATER: The documents that were linked above have been deleted.  The BL's own website now hosts digitised images of Sloane MS. 3191 of far higher quality.  See this post.

Tired now . . .

Another project that was started several years ago will quite possibly never be finished; Anacalypsis, an attempt to draw aside the veil of the Saïtic Isis, or, an inquiry into the origin of languages, nations and religions by Godfrey Higgins (first published 1836 in two quarto volumes totalling over 1400 pages), a monsterpiece of speculative prehistory which seems to have had an influence exceeding its comparatively small original print run (200 copies of which many were allegedly destroyed unsold).

So far I have managed to re-set a bit over a tenth of this work (the preliminaries and first three "books" of vol. i); this can now be read on scribd. Maybe I'll do some more some time; but right now I really need to get a day job.

Hear thou the voice of the Fire (2)

Uploaded a re-set of G.R.S. Mead's work on the Chaldæan Oracles to Scribd. This was originally published in 1908 as nos. VIII and IX in a series of pamphlets titled "Echoes from the Gnosis" issued through the Theosophical Society. While less than satisfactory as an edition of the texts (about a third of the fragments which appeared in the Westcott edition are omitted, and those which are presented are interspersed in long passages of commentary), Mead had taken advantage of contemporary scholarly work on the material, and generally shows himself far less credulous than Westcott and Bullock did (it is amusing though, to see him quote the "Sword of Dardanos" from PGM IV, a coercive agôgê spell, as an invocation of the "Chaste and Holy Divine Love"). I made no attempt to retain the layout of the print edition on this one.

Also uploaded a revision of the Westcott rendition, mainly fixing a few stylistic inconsistencies and related issues, also clarifying a few of my notes. Percy Bullock's "Introduction" is still omitted from this copy.

I have noticed other re-sets of the Mead edition on Scribd, but they only include the first volume.

Hmm . . .

Well, been feeling a bit low of late, so looking for an ego-boost ran a Google search on "Celephaïs Press" and turned up a couple of things.

Seems someone in Germany has put a copy of the final version of the Geocities page on their homepage. This site is rather heavy with pop-up ads and is flagged yellow by McAfee Site Advisor, so be warned. None of the "direct download" links work either as the only files actually mirrored were the page itself and the logo at the top (not even the stylesheet).

http://janee.cwsurf.de/celephais.press/

And the edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia I re-set and annotated is being cited in the Polish Wikipedia page on the Lemegeton. Go figure.

Hear thou the voice of the Fire.

Just completed a re-set of William Wynn Westcott's edition of the Chaldean Oracles ("Oracles of Zoroaster") and uploaded to Scribd. This copy omits the rambling essay by Percy Bullock ("L. O.") which formed an introduction to the print edition. It may be restored in a later edition, but I doubt it; neither Westcott nor Bullock was even in the same league as G.R.S. Mead when it came to capacity for solid scholarship.

Now when will someone reprint (or possibly just pirate and place online) Ruth Majercik's edition of the Oracles which is practically unobtainable?

Verum sine mendacio, certum et verissimum

The re-set of Mead's Hermetica can now be read on Scribd, shorn of his waffling commentaries and most of the textual apparatus. The "alchemy session" line in the last post alluded to a remark which accompanied the original (?) web-posting of Mead's translation of C.H. I-XIII back in the late 1990s. Actually, sacred-texts put a complete HTML of Thrice Greatest Hermes up recently while I wasn't paying attention.

My head hurts . . .

In case anyone's in the middle of an alchemy session waiting for these, update re: the Mead Hermetica; currently done all of the Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius and all bar the last three of the Stobæus excerpts; of course those "last three" include the Korê Kosmou which is one of the longest pieces in the whole collection. Should be finished in a few days.

Thought in me becoming on a time concerning the Entities . . .

After several months of slackness made a start on re-setting G.R.S. Mead's translation of the Hermetica. These were originally published in 1906 as part of a three-volume work under the title Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis (London and Benares: The Theosophical Publishing Society). At some point subsequently, Mead's Englishing of the Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius or Perfect Sermon was extracted and issued in some form, shorn of apparatus and commentary, with an introduction by J. M. Greer. An electronic edition containing Greer's introduction and C.H. I-XIII only has been doing the rounds for some years; the present project should include not just the whole Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepuis but also the Hermetic excerpts from the anthology of Stobæus. In the meantime, I have placed page images of the three volumes of Thrice Greatest Hermes on Scribd: Vol. 1: Prolegomena Vol. 2: Corpus Hermeticum; Asclepius Vol. 3: Stobæi Hermetica; fragments and citations from writers of late antiquity