2019-10-31

After summer is winter, after winter summer (4)

Got sidetracked from Massey & gave another once-over to the C.P. Blue Equinox; now much more closely conformed to the print edition as regards pagination, layout & style, and a few more typos / transcription errors / OCR errors in various texts fixed.  Advertisements still omitted.

2019-10-26

Back to the Beginnings (5)

The works of Gerald Massey are, of course, in many respects products of their time.  In particular, of the Egyptology of the time; while Massey's conclusions were not those of the mainstream either then or now, he was still relying on the texts, translations & work on the language then available.  In many passages, the argument depends on now-rejected translations and transliterations, or on getting originally distinct glyphs confused, or has been shown to be nonsense by later discoveries.

For example, owing to the demonisation of Set during the Late Period, many of his names and images were systematically effaced, and it took a while for them to be positively identified. This had the effect that when Egyptologists in the mid nineteenth century were trying to identify which Egyptian deity classical Greek writers were talking about when they used the name "Typhon" (who in Greek myth is the son of Tartarus and Gé, and apparently a personification of destructive powers of nature, either volcanic or atmospheric), some ... mistakes ... were made.  Samuel Sharpe, who also managed to mis-identify an inscription showing the eighteenth-dynasty Aten cult as belonging to the period of Persian rule, in his Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity (1863) and elsewhere, identified an image of a hippopotamus-goddess, possibly Tawaret or Ipet (the hieroglyphic caption does not match either name: it is consistent with her being "Sheput" (Špwt), mentioned in passing in Budge's Gods of the Egyptians), as "Typhon."  This may have had the knock-on effect of spawning an entire school of speculation.

The main hieroglyphic dictionary and translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (generally cited as simply Ritual) cited in A Book of the Beginnings and The Natural Genesis was that by Samuel Birch, which was originally published in 1867 as an appendix to a monumental work called Egypt's Place in Universal History by C.K.J Bunsen, occupying a substantial part of the page count of the fifth volume.

The Book of the Dead version translated by Birch is late -- it is a Ptolemaic-era copy of the "Saïte Rescension" which had became more or less standardised during the Late Period.  It is from this copy that the numbering of the first 165 "Chapters" or spells in Egyptological literature derives.  New Kingdom papyri do not follow this order (though chapters are not arranged at hap-hazard and there is evidence of both sequence and thematic grouping).

For Ancient Egypt, Massey also made use of a translation by P. le Page Renouf (mainly based on New Kingdom papyri), which had been published by instalments in the Transactions of the Society for Biblical Archaeology from 1892 onwards.  It was unfinished at the time of Renouf's death (1897); the remaining chapters were translated by E. Naville and the whole published in book form in 1904.  Massey also occasionally cites an early edition of E. A. Wallis Budge's translation (first published 1890).  His comments on the Papyrus of Nu seem to miss the point that, while the person for whom the papyrus roll was prepared was quite credibly named for the god of the primæval abyss of water, "the Osiris Nu" referred to that person and not a compound God, and the texts in which that name appeared would be the same if it was the Osiris Nu or the Osiris Ani or the Osirs Bes-n-Mut.

The translation of the Book of Enoch (I Enoch, or Ethiopic Enoch) cited is that by Richard Laurence, first published in 1821 ("revised and enlarged" third edition, 1838).  Chapter numbering in this translation differs slightly from that in the more recently translation by R. H. Charles, a critical text using more manuscript sources than Laurence.

Progress update:
Book of the Beginnings -- proofed / formatted to vol. ii p. 128 (of 684)
Natural Genesis -- current pass at vol. ii. p. 272 (of 535)
Ancient Egypt -- current pass at p. 691 (i.e. a bit over a third of the way through vol. ii).

2019-10-24

Back to the Beginnings (4)

As you might have surmised, my work on Massey's major works ground to a halt shortly after the last post I made under this head.  I think it was about that time that my computer's mainboard died.  I still do not have a decent copy-text for vol. ii of The Natural Genesis and my last two backups of the Word document appear to have gotten corrupted meaning the whole thing will need to be reconstructed.

Book of the Beginnings, vol. i seems to be basically done.  Vol. ii is done to p. 84 of 684.

The Natural Genesis, vol. i -- looks like I managed to finished the latest pass on that.  Vol. ii -- hang on, it loaded this time.  Odd.  Done to p. 68 of 535.

Ancient Egypt.  Current pass is a third of the way through vol. i; this is a much quicker process than for Nat. Gen. as the original text was someone else's key-entry & generally accurate save for a few lines missed by eye-skip, mainly I'm just going through making sure layout & pagination matches print edition.

[UPDATED RATHER THAN MAKING A NEW POST.]
A Book of the Beginnings -- vol. i has now been assembled and uploaded.  Done another 40 or so pages of vol. ii.
The Natural Genesis -- vol i. assembled and uploaded (replacing the 2008 issue).  Done another 50 pages or so of vol. ii.
Ancient Egypt -- vol. i. assembled and uploaded (replacing the old issue); about a fifth of the way through vol. ii.

2019-10-22

Yet by-and-by I hope to weave a song of Anti-Christmas Eve

The CP edition of Crowley's The Sword of Song (aka Liber LXVII, Class C), with layout & style completely re-done from the old version (& hopefully more readable) and many,  many transcription errors fixed (I think the 'g' key on my keyboard was broken when I first typed it) can now be read on Scribd.  Going to give it a proper cover some time with the '666' design and AC's name in Hebrew from the first edition, but for now all the actual text should be there (the "epilogue" in the old typeset wasn't part of the orignal work but was mistakenly included from vol. ii. of Crowley's Collected Works).

2019-10-14

After summer is winter, after winter summer (3)

On the one hand, the existence of the Equinox scans at keepsilence.org makes re-doing the CP re-sets possible without the need to dig out my physical copies of the reprints.  On the other hand, it also makes doing it somewhat redundant.

They don't have any of the Equinox issues after III (1), though.

III (2) was not issued as intended -- Crowley ran out of money after it reached page proof stage.  The full contents list has not to my knowledge been made public, but many of the works intended for it are known and some, probably amounting to well over half the full page count, have been published in one form or another -- "The Gospel According to St. Bernard Shaw" a.k.a. Liber 888 a.k.a. "Jesus" a.k.a. Crowley on Christ and "Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli" (Liber VII) being the major ones; "Liber Collegii Sancti" (Liber 185) and Crowley's versification of the Khing Kang King (Liber XXI) were also reportedly included.  The most notable as-yet-unpublished text known to have been part of this would have been the continuation of Liber 165, "A Master of the Temple" (Achad's magical diaries).  It was claimed in 2003 that a reconstruction from surviving page proofs was in preparation; this was mentioned again in an editorial note to a 2006 revised edition of Aleister Crowley and the Practice of the Magical Diary (which included the published part of Liber 165), where that volume's editor, James Wasserman, stated it would also include Achad's "Liber 31," but nothing has been heard of it since.

III (3) was The Equinox of the Gods (London: O.T.O., 1936), which consisted of The Book of the Law (typeset and reproduction of manuscript) and Genesis Libri AL, the latter being an outline autobiography of Crowley up to around 1904 and an account of the circumstances of the writing of Liber AL, originally prepared and typed up during the 1920s to serve as an introduction to the full commentary on the book.  It was later declared to be part IV of Book 4 (it was not so designated on publication).

III (4) was Eight Lectures on Yoga (London: O.T.O., 1939) which does exactly what it says on the tin.

III (5) was The Book of Thoth (London: O.T.O., 1944), a work on the Tarot sometimes designated Liber LXXVIII (it was not so designated on publication, but fits the description of a projected work under this number mentioned in the Blue Equinox).

III (6) was Liber Aleph (West Point, California: Thelema Publishing Company, 1962).  Crowley had attempted to get this into print on a few occasions previously; it had been advertised in the first English edition of The Heart of the Master (1938) as Equinox III (4), and in the first edition of Eight Lectures on Yoga as III (5); it was one of a number of previously unpublished Crowley works, or expanded editions of works published during his lifetime, issued under the direction of Karl Germer who succeeded Crowley as head of the O.T.O.  This work is presumably still in copyright, being first published in the USA and almost certainly validly renewed at the appropriate time (given it came up for renewal shortly after McMurtry's group won their court case over the Crowley copyrights, and a corrected edition was issued a few years later).

III (7) was probably the shortest volume published in the series, Crowley's Shi Yi, a verse-paraphrase of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching with . . . well, not much else; a brief note, an index of the hexagrams and a description of AC's preferred method for creating the hexagrams (while faster than the traditional methods, it generates exactly one "changing" line per hexagram rather than the 0-6 from the 3-coin or yarrow stick methods); issued in 1971 by H. P. Smith's Thelema Publications, it is now rare and has apparently never been reprinted.

III (8) was Crowley's mucking-about of the Tao Teh Ching.  Crowley had attempted to get his rewrite of Legge's translation into print during the 1940s, and an optimistic advertisement in the first edition of Eight Lectures on Yoga described it as "ready shortly," apparently to be bound up with his Liber XXI, a verse-paraphrase of the Khing Kang King (to use the now-obsolete Romanisation), a short Taoist writing which appeared in translation in an appendix to Legge's Texts of Taoism.  These plans fell through, and the work remained unpublished until 1976 when it was issued as a new number of the Equinox series by H. P. Smith's Thelema Publications in California, and nigh-simultaneously by Askin in London, edited by Stephen Skinner.  A new edition in 1995 included Liber XXI as an appendix.

Between 1975 and 1981, an organisation claiming to represent the A.'.A.'., under the direction of Marcelo Motta (an A.'.A.'. student / disciple / "Follower" of Germer, who had done most of the leg-work for the original publication of Liber Aleph), issued four numbers of "Equinox vol. V," arguing that all even-numbered volumes of the series were intended to be "Volumes of Silence."  The first of these contained an edited version of Crowley's commentaries on The Book of the Law with additional commentaries by Motta.  The bulk of the second was taken up by a commentary on Liber LXV.  The third, The Chinese Texts of Magick and Mysticism comprised Crowley's paraphrases of the Yi Jing, Dao De Jing and Jin Gan Jing (to use the Romanisations employed on the dust-jacket of that volume) with commentaries by Crowley and Motta.  The fourth, Sex and Religion included the "Paris Working" and Crowley's Bagh-i-Muattar, both with commentaries by Motta, "The Wake World" from Konx Om Pax, Ida Craddock's Heavenly Bridegrooms (an erotic-mystical work which had been favourably reviewed by Crowley in the Blue Equinox) and a preface in which Motta verbally abused various Thelemites, writers on occultist subjects and former members of his organisations, prompting a successful action for libel by some of the people attacked.

The Holy Books of Thelema (or simply ΘΕΛΗΜΑ) a compilation of the A.'.A.'. "Class A" publications, first published in 1983, was retroactively designated Equinox III (9) in later reprints.

In 1986, Equinox III (10) was issued by the O.T.O. under William Breeze, who the previous year had succeeded as head of the organisation as revived by Grady McMurtry in the 1970s.  A significant part of the page count of this number was taken up with reprints of public O.T.O. documents and A.'.A.'. "Class E" papers from the Blue Equinox, as well as a summary report of a court case between McMurtry, his organisation and some of his associates on the one hand and Marcelo Motta and his organisation on the other, which barring a few rejected claims of libel (one from Breeze) was conclusively won by McMurtry et al.

In 1992, one number of Equinox vol. VII was issued by one of the various groups claiming succession of Marcelo Motta's organisations.  It contains nothing that warrants mention here (and my copy is currently buried in a stack of banana boxes).

(The above is not to be confused with The Equinox Vol. VII: British Journal of Thelema, some 11 numbers of which have been published from 1988 onwards.  This derived from the New Equinox which began publication in the 1970s and included some of the earliest published writings on Chaos Magick.)

In 1996, the O.T.O. under Breeze, in alliance with a group claiming to represent the A.'.A.'. under some former students of Marcelo Motta (including Breeze himself) who fell out with him in the 1970s, issued Commentaries on the Holy Books and other papers as Equinox IV (1).  The bulk of this was Crowley's commentary on Liber LXV, although it also contained the illuminated manuscript of Liber Pyramidos, rarely seen before that, shorter commentaries on other "Class A" texts (mostly reproduced from Crowley marginalia to the Equinox and his copies of the original Θελημα), some other A.'.A.'. texts and a largely redundant re-issue of Crowley's commentary on Blavatsky's Voice of the Silence.

A second number of Vol. IV appeared in 1998, as The Vision and the Voice with Commentary and other papers; the bulk of this, as indicated by the title, was the text of Liber 418 with Crowley's extended commentary (previously published by Germer in the 1950s); it also included the "Paris Working" (Liber 415) as well as the "Abuldiz Working" (records of the communications with a discarnate entity which led to the writing of Book 4) and the "Bartzabel Working" (the record of an evocation of the Spirit of Mars, the ritual script for which had previously been published in Equinox vol. I no. 9).

A third number has been repeatedly advertised as being in preparation, originally as The Urn and Other Papers, later as The American Diaries, to include Crowley's magical diaries from his time in America and related texts (besides "The Urn" (Liber LXXIII), it is believed these are to include "The Amalantrah Working" (Liber 729), "Σταυρος Βατραχου" (Liber LXX) and the surviving portions of "The Hermit of Aesopus Island" and "The Book of the Great Auk"; possibly also "Rex de Arte Regia" which was part-published in The Magical Record of the Beast 666 in 1972).  In 2013 it was described as being nearly ready for the press.  It has not so far manifested in the waking world.  [EDIT May 2023: Still no word of it, some 20 years after it was first publicly said to be in "proofreading and editorial."]

At the same time as IV (3) was said to be nearly ready for press, a planed fourth number of volume IV was said to be in preparation as The Early Diaries (it had previously been mentioned in the 2006 edition of Aleister Crowley and the Practice of the Magical Diary, where it was specifically stated to cover Crowley's diaries 1898-1908).  Nothing has been heard of it since.

2019-10-12

Lege — iudica — atque ride

Gave a once-over & some stylistic improvements to the edition of Crowley's Book of Lies I prepared way back when & uploaded to Scribd.  Also some minor tweaks to a few of the other shorter libri, but nothing worth specifically noting here.

2019-10-05

After summer is winter, after winter summer (2)

Some things I can still work on.  While I'm currently using a cheap low-end laptop, it's a 2018 cheap low-end laptop and most of the app software I'm using is a decade older so not super demanding.  Just given a once-over to my edit of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice and stuck on Scribd (it looks like earlier releases are still doing the rounds, and have even been cited in works issued by what I previously regarded as reputable publishers).