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  The most notable as-yet-unpublished text known to have been part of this would have been the continuation of Liber 165, "A Master of the Temple" (Achad's magical diaries).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.

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