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.

As threatened.

In between sessions working on the major works of Massey, I've been going over, making minor fixes and stylistic adjustments to my re-sets (mostly done years & years ago) of a large number of short texts ("Libri") by Crowley from Vol. I of the Equinox or published around the same time, and uploading them to Scribd.  The sheer number of these makes adding all the individual links to the general catalogue a bad idea.

A list with outline descriptions of these, extracted from the Equinox and bound up with the "Curriculum of A.'.A.'." may be found here.

Individual links follow.  This post will be updated with links as more texts are added.

"Class A" texts.

These are "inspired" writings, "of which may be changed not so much as the style of a letter"; five were first printed in the 1909 first edition of Θελημα, the remainder were first published in Vol. I of the Equinox.

Liber B vel Magi sub figurâ I.
Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli sub figurâ VII.
Liber Porta Lucis sub figurâ X.
Liber Trigrammaton sub figurâ XXVII.
Liber Cordis Cinti Serpente vel LXV sub figurâ אדני.
Liber Stellæ Rubeæ sub figurâ LXVI.
Liber Tzaddi vel Hamus Hermeticus sub figurâ XC.
Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni sub figurâ CLVI.
Liber AL vel Legis sub figurâ CCXX.
Liber Arcanorum των Atu του Tahuti &c. &c. &c. sub figurâ CCXXXI.
Liber A'ash vel Capricorni Pneumatici sub figurâ CCCLXX.
Liber Tau vel Kabbalæ Trium Literarum sub figurâ CD.
Liber DCCCXIII vel Ararita sub figurâ DLXX.

"Class B" texts.

These are represented as "the result of ordinary scholarship, enlightened and earnest" and comprise a mixture of essays, works of reference and instructions in magical / mystical practices.

Liber O vel Manus et Sagittæ sub figurâ VI.
Liber E vel Exercitiorum sub figurâ IX.
Liber XXI: Khing Kang King, the Classic of Purity.
Liber Libræ sub figurâ XXX.
Liber LVIII: an article on the Qabalah.
Liber Israfel sub figurâ LXIV.
Liber LXXI: the Voice of the Silence &c. (by H.P. Blavatsky with a commentary by Crowley).

Liber Chanokh (LXXXIV): a brief abstract of the symbolic representation of the Universe &c. &c. &c.  (Higher-quality versions of some of the illustrations uploaded as a separate document.)

Liber Gaias (XCVI): a Handbook of Geomancy.
Sepher Sephiroth sub figurâ D.
Liber Βατραχοφρενοβοοκοσμομαχια sub figurâ DXXXVI.

Liber DCCLXXVII (777) vel prolegomena symbolica ad systemam sceptico-mysticae &c. &c. &c.  Revised edition with explanations of attributions and some supplementary essays.

Liber Viarum Viæ sub figurâ DCCCLXVIII.
Liber תישארב, Viæ Memoriæ sub figurâ CMXIII.
The Heart of the Master.
Little Essays Toward Truth.

"Class C" texts.

Works in this category "are to be regarded rather as suggestive than anything else" and include a number of poems, plays and pieces of prose fiction.

Liber XXXIII: An Account of A.'.A.'. (worked over by Crowley from one of the letters in von Eckartshausan's The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary).

Liber XLI: Thien Tao.  (Also in Konx Om Pax.)
Liber LV: The Chymical Jousting of Brother Perardua.
Liber LIX: Across the Gulf.
Liber LXVII: The Sword of Song.
Liber XCV: The Wake World.  In Konx Om Pax.
Liber CXLVIII: The Solider and the Hunchback.
Liber CXCVII: The High History of Good Sir Palamedes the Saracen Knight.
Liber CCCXXXV: Adonis, an Allegory.
Liber CCCXXXIII: The Book of Lies (chapter 25, 36 and 44 are in Class D)
Liber Os Abysmi vel Daäth sub figurâ CDLXXIV.
Liber DCCC: The Ship.
Liber DCCCLX: John St. John.
Liber MMCMXI: A Note on Genesis (Allan Bennett, edited by Crowley)

"Class D" texts.

These comprise official rituals and instruction papers of the A.'.A.'., a magical / mystical fraternity established by Crowley with George Cecil Jones and promoted in the pages of the Equinox.

Liber III vel Jugorum.
Liber V vel Reguli, the Ritual of the Mark of the Beast.

Liber NV sub figurâ XI.

Liber XIII: Graduum Montis Abiegni.

Liber XVI: Liber Turris vel Domus Dei.

Liber XXV: The Star Ruby.

Liber XXXVI: The Star Sapphire.

Liber XLIV: The Mass of the Phoenix.

Liber LXI vel Causæ: The Preliminary Lection including the History Lection.

Liber Astarté vel Berylli sub figurâ CLXXV.

Liber Collegii Sancti sub figurâ CLXXXV.
Liber Resh vel Helios sub figurâ CC.

Liber Ru vel Spiritus sub figurâ CCVI.

Liber HHH sub figurâ CCCXLI.
Liber A vel Armorum sub figurâ CDXII.

Liber H A D sub figurâ DLV.
Liber Samekh sub figurâ DCCC (this copy is bound up with Liber VIII which is short and deals with the same subject).

Liber Yod sub figurâ DCCCXXXI.

"Class E" texts.

These are manifestos, broadsides, rants and other public statements, aimed at promoting or expounding the "Law of Thelema," a religious / ethical / philosophical system founded on Liber AL vel Legis.  The first four were all published in the "Blue Equinox" in 1919; two had been previously issued as pamphlets and printed in The International, a New York based magazine for which Crowley was writing 1916-17.

Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion.

Liber CL: De Lege Libellum.

Liber CCC: Khabs Am Pekht.

Liber DCCCXXXVII: The Law of Liberty.
The Equinox of the Gods.

Others

(A note: I am not individually posting documents primarily relating to the O.T.O.  Some can be found in the Blue Equinox, most of the others I have are still in copyright, as not having been published until the 1970s or later, and were not written for publication.  As I have no desire to have this blog or my Scribd account shut down by DMCA strikes,  I will not be publishing them, not to mention that doing so would also entail my burning certain bridges.)
Liber DCXXXIII: De Thaumaturgia (essay first published in The International)
Liber DCCCL: The Rites of Eleusis. (ritual scripts published in The Equinox)
"Time" and "The Excluded Middle" (essays from AC's Collected Works).
"Eleusis" (essay from AC's Collected Works).
"The Revival of Magick" (essay first published in The International in 1917).
"Good Hunting" (essay first published in The International in 1918).
"The Crisis in Freemasonry" (essay first published in The English Review in 1922).

Magick Without Tears is definitely still in copyright in the USA (first published 1954, copyrights validly renewed in 1982 by O.T.O. under McMurtry) & I have also noticed what appears to be a sneaky attempt to extend the copyrights further: letters 6-8 comprise "The Three Schools of Magick," an essay which had previously been published in German translation by Thelema Verlag ca. 1927; these are internally credited to Gérard Aumont, a Tunisian journalist who had translated The Book of the Law into French, but had been generally regarded by bibliographers and scholars (Gerald Yorke, Martin P. Starr and others) as being by Crowley himself (one point of the essay  at the time of its original composition and first publication was to promote Crowley as "World Teacher" against the claims being made for Jiddu Krishnamurti by the Theosophical Society).  A news post dated April 2018 on the O.T.O. International Headquarters site (a) states that O.T.O. has acquired the copyrights to Aumont's works (which are still in term pretty much everywhere) and (b) argues for Aumont being the actual author of "The Three Schools of Magic."

Back to the Beginnings (3)

Quick update in case anyone was wondering -- now a bit over a third of the way through the total page count of A Book of the Beginnings, and making faster progress since I discovered that Acrobat 6's "paper capture" function produces text that needs significantly fewer corrections from the same scans than whatever OCR program I used for chapters 1-8 (probably something that came bundled with a cheap scanner a long time ago).

EDIT 2018.03.07 -- volume I now done, but need food & sleep, and vol. II is longer & has more hieroglyphics, Hebrew &c. to typeset.

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.

Minor updates

Got sidetracked from Book of the Beginnings again (currently a little over halfway through vol. I, and vol. II is longer), but in the process turned up something that enabled me to do an upgrade on the two texts uploaded way back relating to the Antient and Primitive Rite, a 19th-century fringe-Masonic order which was one of the currents feeding into Theodor Reuss' Ordo Templi Orientis.

Specifically, turns out someone stuck a hastily prepared PDF of page images of Yarker's Manual of the Degrees of the Antient and Primitive Rite, as published in the Collectanea of the Grand College of Rites of the USA in 2005-7, on the web a few years back.  Not going to link to it for fairly obvious reasons, and disentangling the public domain material from in-copyright editorial & transcription  / typesetting work owned by GCR won't be entirely straightforward, but the information in it enabled me to do a bunch of updates to the piece on the A & P Rite from How's Freemason's Manual and well as the collection of A. & P. lectures translated by Yarker.  The former has also been expanded by the inclusion of some material from a thinly-disguised promotional piece for the Rite at the end of Yarker's 1872 Notes on the Scientific and Religious Mysteries of Antiquity which gave a slightly different version of the Degree scheme to that found in How and the Manual.

In the volume of Lectures I have removed the section explaining the basis on which I assigned the "charges and lectures" in the first part to Degrees (the 1880 printing did not have the lectures in degree order and not all were explicitly referred to degrees in their titles or text).  Since the full text of all the lectures can be found embedded in the ritual scripts in the Manual, this is no longer in question.  One lecture turned out to have been incorrectly assigned in the previous edition; this has been rectified.  (There were also some slight omissions in a few of the discourses as printed in Masonic Charges and Lectures, which have not as yet been restored).

Many years ago, on having certain A. & P. degrees irregularly* conferred on me by name, I was told the rituals of those degrees "are now open for you to study."  Only took me over a decade to find the damn things, although to be fair for much of that time I wasn't looking very hard.

* Actually, not sure I want to get into this argument; but generally, Masonic appendant bodies & "high grade" systems (including the A. & P. Rite, according to the only copy of its constitution I've seen) require that the candidate be a Master Mason in good standing under some recognised Grand Lodge, which I'm not & never have been.

By the way, the book Lectures of the Ancient [sic.] and Primitive Rite of Freemasonry being sold as a print-on-demand paperback by "Cornerstone Book Publishers" since 2008 is pirated from the 2005 CP release of Lectures of the Antient and Primitive Rite and will almost certainly perpetuate all the OCR errors I missed in that release.  Since I released the thing into the public domain, not a lot I can do about it other than advise people not to waste their money.

EDITED 2018.02.28: dammit, somehow I managed to delete all the bookmarks from the PDF before uploading it.  Fixed now.

Back to the Beginnings (2) (or, putting the "LOL" in "Philology")

Currently re-set Book of the Beginnings to about the middle of ch. 4, i.e. a little over an eighth of the main text.  In an attempt to mitigate boredom and SAN loss, flipping between that and going over the  rest of Massey's major works.  I now have access to decent copy texts of vol. i. of Natural Genesis (from archive.org) and both volumes of Ancient Egypt (online at Hathi Trust but only downloadable a page at a time to discourage people from hammering their servers).  What I don't have is a copy text of vol. ii of Natural Genesis; the set of crappy page images I used as the basic for my e-text fell victim to my slackness in backing stuff up years ago, and there don't appear to be any page images readily accessible on the clearweb.  And gods, the CP edition is certainly in need of going over, I didn't realise just quite how horribly riddled with typos and OCR errors the thing is.

EDIT: and now it turns out that all my remaining copies of my Word document of Nat. Gen. vol. ii have gotten corrupted.