After summer is winter, after winter summer.

Once again mundane considerations have intervened & put ongoing projects on hold.  I had started on giving a once-over to the edition of Equinox vol. I that I typeset way back from some plaintexts that had been doing the rounds for a while.  I might just upload the existing PDFs to Scribd in the meantime, although there are flaws in most of them that need fixing.  [Translation: I have had to move out of the flat I've been living in for 18 years and my Equinox reprints are currently in a box at the bottom of a stack of 5 of 6 banana boxes filled with books.]

Edit: In the meantime you could do a lot worse than check out the "Keep Silence" edition of the Equinox -- these are page images from the first editions (also sold as physical copies in a print on demand edition), complete with all advertisements &c.  Same site also has AC's Collected Works, and first editions of Book 4 parts I & II, The Book of Lies & a few others.  Obviously such a project would have been impossible back when those plaintexts were originally created and impractical (in terms of cost / availability of Internet bandwidth, hosting &c.) when I started work on the CP re-sets.

Link not related.

Clarification re: Scribd

Scribd, while it has been increasingly pushing its subscription service in recent years (and removing functionality such as the ability to "follow" other users and comment on posted texts), still allows documents that are not marked as premium content -- which should be the case with all CP titles -- to be read online without the need to make an account (an increasing number of documents on Scribd these days only display the first few pages as a "preview" to users without a subscription).

To actually download PDFs requires either (a) creating and signing in to a free Scribd account or (b) linking to a Google or Facebook account.  I'd suggest the former.

Issuu.com, on the other hand, does not allow downloading of PDFs posted on a basic account, which is why I hardly uploaded anything there.

EDITED TO ADD: On the plus side, I haven't had to contest any false-positives from Scribd's copyright enforcement bot for nigh on two years.

To protect our indiscretions from the profanities of the mysterious (3)

The history of the Antient and Primitive Rite is tortuous, tortured and largely mythical

J.M. Hamill, "John Yarker: Masonic Charlatan?" — Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, no. 109 (1996).

The amount of hedging and vagueness in the brief account of the history of the Rite of Memphis and A. & P. Rite prefaced to the Manual of the Degrees reflects the sketchy and frequently contradictory nature of the accounts of the rites which I have managed to find in printed and online sources (the Wikipedia pages in particular are poorly-sourced and appear to have been a victim of edit-warring).

For instance, the date for Marconis handing over control of the Rite of Memphis to the Grand Orient of France is variously given as 1852 and 1862; the G.O. is variously characterised as having Memphis "effectively closed down," forbidding working all but its first three degrees, or mandating the reduction of the 90+ degrees to 33; some commentators on the Rite have questioned whether Seymour actually received a character from Marconis making him 96° and authorising him to establish the Rite in the U.S.A.  Hamill (op. cit.) ascribes the reduction to Marconis; the anonymous author of the "Publisher's Introduction" to a reprint (1990s) of an English translation of Marconis' Sanctuary of Memphis claims that Seymour was responsible for the reduction and speculates that he was motivated by a desire to compete with the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (who expelled him in 1865).  Still others state that Seymour was not merely expelled from AASR by the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, but also kicked out of the Cerneau group he subsequently joined (of course, it is possible that this was after said Cerneau group was absorbed by the "regular" NMJ Supreme Council).

Yarker had apparently at some point by 1876 obtained an authority for the Rite of Mizraim of 90°; this was originally distinct from the Rite of Memphis, indeed the two were frequently at odds; Marconis repeatedly denounced Mizraim in his Sanctuary of Memphis.  Be that as it may, an account of the Mizraim degrees of unclear provenance, in Internet circulation as scans of a printed text, is prefaced by an edict from Yarker authorising conferring of Mizraim degrees by name upon members of his A. and P. operation (the 4°-46° on 11°s, the 47°-66° on 20°s, the 67°-86° on 30°s and the final four degrees on members of the roughly corresponding official grades 31°-33° of the A. and P. system).

For the record, Hamill's study of Yarker in AQC concludes by answering the question posed by its title with a firm negative.

"The charge of being a degree-monger was a spiteful slur on his character put about by those who did not know him. [...] A charlatan is by definition dishonest, the last word that could be used against Yarker."

To protect our indiscretions from the profanities of the mysterious (2)

And, done.  Probably riddled with OCR errors I missed, but for now just glad to have this one out of the way.  At least it gave me an excuse to knock up a graphic of the Unspeakable Press spider framed by the Square & Compasses.

The subject line of this post parodies a pompous phrase in the openings of some of these rituals (e.g. the 6° and 7°), which, along with other parts of that opening, was borrowed by Aleister Crowley for one of the rituals of the Ordo Templi Orientis.

To protect our indiscretions from the pronfanities of the mysterious

Main typesetting of Manual of the Degrees of the Antient & Primitive Rite is almost done -- just the last couple of rituals to do, then set up page headers, design a cover & possibly give the text a second pass to ensure a suitable admixture of pedantic / sarcastic footnotes, tho' I might just get lazy & copy-paste a few more from Lectures of the Antient & Primitive Rite.

Like, why the hell is Charon showing up in the judgement scene from the Book of the Dead, and why, instead of taking two small coins from the Can. as traditional, does he instead give him a small coin and a dog-biscuit?  Why is Hermes there, not identified with either Anubis as psychopomp or Thoth as scribe of the gods and the intellectualised Divine Wisdom, but distinct from both?  Why does a Rite that repeatedly bangs on in high-sounding language about religious tolerance take sides in a sectarian squabble between two rival groups of Yahveh-worshippers?  How can someone who has even read Herodotus and the books of Kings and Chronicles claim in all seriousness that from the construction of Solomon's Temple to the Persian conquest of Egypt there was a general state of peace in the ancient Near East? Why did I stay up all night working on this stuff?

I needed time to think, to get the memories from my mind

A few more additions and minor updates to the collection of Crowley Libri.  Added links to Libri V (the ritual of the Mark of the Beast), 185 (Liber Collegii Sancti), 335 (Adonis, a short play published in the Equinox), 850 (the Rites of Eleusis), 860 (John St. John, A.C.'s magical diary from a stay in Paris in October 1908); fixed an error in the notes to Liber XIII.

In respect of the last, I hereby apologise to Richard Kaczynski for uncritically repeating (or possibly simply imagining) the attribution to him of the heavily flawed typed transcript of Crowley's "Ritual CXX: of Passing through the Tuat" that has been doing the rounds for decades.  My own typeset of that ritual, fixing the lacuanæ in the earlier transcription and adding detailed & pedantic notes identifying which Book of the Dead chapters Crowley was borrowing from, along with sarcastic comments about ten and a half foot long green porcelain boats, is being held over for copyright reasons (the text not having been published during the author's lifetime, it did not enter the public domain at the end of 2017, and every indication is that the current holders of the copyright do not want it published).

Currently slightly over halfway through re-setting Manual of the Degrees of the Antient & Primitive Rite.

Apropos of the post title.

EDIT: fixed broken YouTube link.