Minor updates, continued.

Gave a once-over to, and fixed some typos in, Franz Hartmann's Yoga-Philosophy of the Rosicrucians and Alchemists.  In the process of trying to work out why there were apparently two omissions in a numbered list of "Rosicrucian Symbols" I ended up spending a few hours going through page images on Google of a couple of 18th-century Roman Catholic devotional emblem books.  I'm really not sure it was worth it.

The only value I ever saw in those two chapters was that Hartmann's involvement in the German occult circles from which the Ordo Templi Orientis emerged (he was an associate of Reuss in the latter's Memphis-Mizraim lodge and was included in the list of Saints in a German version of Crowley's Gnostic Mass which Reuss prepared around 1917) suggested that this might shed some light on how Rosicrucian and Alchemical symbolism was viewed in the early O.T.O.  Crowley's "Liber Agapé," a somewhat cryptic instruction paper for the IX° of O.T.O., drew heavily on the Geheime Figuren and Hartmann's edition was included in the "Curriculum of A.'.A.'." in 1919, described as "An invaluable compendium."

As indicated in the preface to the Celephaïs Press release of 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 16th and 17th Centuries, the major omission compared to the Altona printing of the Geheime Figuren is the most easily explained; some copies were bound up in three sections rather than the two on which the AMORC edition was based, and everything in the "Drittes und leztes Heft" is missing in Cosmology. Hartmann it seems later acquired a copy of that section from somewhere, since one of the plates from it was reproduced in In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom and another (according to M. P. Hall in Codex Rosae Crucis) in a 1908 magazine article.

The George Engelke translation can be read online or downloaded for free as PDFs of page images, from AMORC's web site.  This copy, like most print copies of that edition, unfortunately lacks the colour on the symbolic figures making up the bulk of the work.  AMORC recently (2015) released a limited coloured reprint of the Engelke translation; additionally, high-quality page images of a complete copy of the Altona printing (hand-coloured like most of the original release) have been posted on the website of the University of Wisconsin.

Minor updates

Got sidetracked from Book of the Beginnings again (currently a little over halfway through vol. I, and vol. II is longer), but in the process turned up something that enabled me to do an upgrade on the two texts uploaded way back relating to the Antient and Primitive Rite, a 19th-century fringe-Masonic order which was one of the currents feeding into Theodor Reuss' Ordo Templi Orientis.

Specifically, turns out someone stuck a hastily prepared PDF of page images of Yarker's Manual of the Degrees of the Antient and Primitive Rite, as published in the Collectanea of the Grand College of Rites of the USA in 2005-7, on the web a few years back.  Not going to link to it for fairly obvious reasons, and disentangling the public domain material from in-copyright editorial & transcription  / typesetting work owned by GCR won't be entirely straightforward, but the information in it enabled me to do a bunch of updates to the piece on the A & P Rite from How's Freemason's Manual and well as the collection of A. & P. lectures translated by Yarker.  The former has also been expanded by the inclusion of some material from a thinly-disguised promotional piece for the Rite at the end of Yarker's 1872 Notes on the Scientific and Religious Mysteries of Antiquity which gave a slightly different version of the Degree scheme to that found in How and the Manual.

In the volume of Lectures I have removed the section explaining the basis on which I assigned the "charges and lectures" in the first part to Degrees (the 1880 printing did not have the lectures in degree order and not all were explicitly referred to degrees in their titles or text).  Since the full text of all the lectures can be found embedded in the ritual scripts in the Manual, this is no longer in question.  One lecture turned out to have been incorrectly assigned in the previous edition; this has been rectified.  (There were also some slight omissions in a few of the discourses as printed in Masonic Charges and Lectures, which have not as yet been restored).

Many years ago, on having certain A. & P. degrees irregularly* conferred on me by name, I was told the rituals of those degrees "are now open for you to study."  Only took me over a decade to find the damn things, although to be fair for much of that time I wasn't looking very hard.

* Actually, not sure I want to get into this argument; but generally, Masonic appendant bodies & "high grade" systems (including the A. & P. Rite, according to the only copy of its constitution I've seen) require that the candidate be a Master Mason in good standing under some recognised Grand Lodge, which I'm not & never have been.

By the way, the book Lectures of the Ancient [sic.] and Primitive Rite of Freemasonry being sold as a print-on-demand paperback by "Cornerstone Book Publishers" since 2008 is pirated from the 2005 CP release of Lectures of the Antient and Primitive Rite and will almost certainly perpetuate all the OCR errors I missed in that release.  Since I released the thing into the public domain, not a lot I can do about it other than advise people not to waste their money.

EDITED 2018.02.28: dammit, somehow I managed to delete all the bookmarks from the PDF before uploading it.  Fixed now.

Back to the Beginnings (2) (or, putting the "LOL" in "Philology")

Currently re-set Book of the Beginnings to about the middle of ch. 4, i.e. a little over an eighth of the main text.  In an attempt to mitigate boredom and SAN loss, flipping between that and going over the  rest of Massey's major works.  I now have access to decent copy texts of vol. i. of Natural Genesis (from archive.org) and both volumes of Ancient Egypt (online at Hathi Trust but only downloadable a page at a time to discourage people from hammering their servers).  What I don't have is a copy text of vol. ii of Natural Genesis; the set of crappy page images I used as the basic for my e-text fell victim to my slackness in backing stuff up years ago, and there don't appear to be any page images readily accessible on the clearweb.  And gods, the CP edition is certainly in need of going over, I didn't realise just quite how horribly riddled with typos and OCR errors the thing is.

EDIT: and now it turns out that all my remaining copies of my Word document of Nat. Gen. vol. ii have gotten corrupted.

Back to the Beginnings

Many years ago I acquired a print copy of A Book of the Beginnings, the first part of Gerald Massey's monumental work seeking to prove the Egyptian origin of everything, with the intent of preparing a re-set to go alongside the CP releases of The Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt: the Light of the World.  As can be seen from previous posts, this did not go as planned and all I ever uploaded was a set of page images.  

At the time I was able to console readers with the fact that a complete HTML version of Massey's major works with extensive annotations was online at a site called masseiana.org.  Unfortunately at some time in the past few months this site appears to have vanished from the web due to its hosting having expired (the domain registration still has a couple of months to run).  Examining an archived copy of the front page on the Wayback Machine at archive.org indicates that the site's editor finally decided he'd had enough of the project in 2015.  I can sympathise.

In any case, I've resumed work on A Book of the Beginnings and also plan on giving the other major works a once-over.  Currently bogged down in the "Comparative Vocabulary" of ch. ii which pretty much needs to be typed from scratch.

Next up . . .

OK, more fool me for not doing more thorough research.  Turns out there's a first-party plugin for the antiquated version of MS Office I'm using that can be downloaded for no further charge & enables saving documents as PDFs, thus obviating the need to spend hours fixing formatting in Libre Office.

Fixed a bunch of typos in the 2004 CP release of Book 4 part I & posted on Scribd.  Part II to follow along with a bunch of short texts from the Equinox referenced in these works.  Part III appears (according to this page on US copyright terms) to be another 7 years or so away from public domain in the USA so will not be going on Scribd.  [EDIT: this of course presumes that the copyrights were validly renewed at the appropriate point, which seems unlikely.]

EDITED TO ADD: Part II now up as well.  The Equinox libri can wait, not like they're not all over the Web already.