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.

When the Neophyte enters upon the Path of Evil (2)

Konx Om Pax, Essays in Light by Aleister Crowley. Early editions of this e-text go back to the beginnings of Celephaïs Press ca. 2003 and a number of copies are doing the rounds. This one fixes a few more typos but I couldn't face the level of re-doing the formatting that would be necessary to set it in something that isn't Times New Roman.

When the Neophyte enters upon the Path of Evil . . .

Working on carrying out the promise / threat of the previous post. Running into all kinds of issues.  The version of Acrobat I previously used to build & edit the PDFs has compatibility issues with Windows 7 & later, and in any case the installation disc appears to have degraded over the past 15 years to the point of being unreadable.  

Current versions of Libre Office appear to be able to do at least some of what I need, though, but 'twill take me a little while to learn how to use all the relevant functionality.  

Once I do get it working, first up will be Konx Om Pax which is definitely public domain now (gods, I really managed to mis-spell "Yorkshire" on the imprint and failed to notice it for so long . . . embarrassing).

Hello, hello, hello -- is there anybody in there?

CP activity has for a while been more or less limited to me contesting false positives from Scribd's copyright bot, and that only when I actually remember to check the largely abandoned email account to which the notifications get sent.

Speaking of copyright issues, as far as my understanding of UK copyright law stands, term for written works of known authorship is still author's life plus seventy years.  As such, the works by Aleister Crowley mentioned in this posting from 2009 are, or will very shortly be, public domain in this country or any where similar rules apply.

Since US copyright terms are a convoluted mess, some of the works in question have already been public domain in the States as first published pre-1923 and some posthumously published titles will remain in term there for decades, so not everything will be put on Scribd; 777 Revised, Magick Without Tears, the commented edition of The Book of Lies and others will need to find non-US hosting.  Watch this space.

EDITED TO ADD: a slight clarification -- the UK life + 70 years term excludes certain unpublished and posthumously published works, though not, given the dates involved, the three specifically mentioned above.

EDITED AGAIN: In the case of Magick Without Tears (also Liber Aleph), the "term in country of first publication takes precedence" rule applies.  Those two works in particular were almost certainly validly renewed in the 1980s.

Further to the last

The three texts removed by Scribd's copyright bot have been restored.

Here we go again.

Scribd's copyright bot strikes again. First Principles by Herbert Spencer (d. 1903), Ancient Symbol Worship a.k.a. Phallism in Ancient Worships by Westropp & Wake (pub. 1875) and the Introduction to Tantra Shastra of John Wooderoffe (d. 1936, first published as the introduction to a translation of the Mahanirvana Tantra in 1913) have been pulled as suspected copyvios. I have appealed the removals, hopefully they will be restored as soon as someone human can actually consider the matter.