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.
No comments:
Post a Comment