2018-02-24

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.

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