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).