A New Era of Thought: another update

Finished re-setting this; the re-set version has now replaced the page images on Scribd.

Now to go and catch up on Guild Wars . . .

Tweaks and fixes

Actually took a look at Hartmann's Cosmology (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians) following the discovery of last weekend and fixed a couple of points; one of the "glory" effects on part 1 plate 6 was in front of and thus obscured some text, this has now been rectified and I've updated the introduction to give a possible explanation for the major omission.

Also fixed a typo in Forlong's Synchronological Chart of the Religions of the World, and discovered when the corrected copy was uploaded that now all the text on it displays in iPaper, presumbably because of improvements made to the software since I first put it on scribd. Also uploaded another copy of said chart, split onto two pages for printing purposes (assuming you can find a print shop that can do A0 full colour . . .)

Still bored . . .

Fungi from Yuggoth and others by H. P. Lovecraft.

Originally issued January 2007 as a printed pamphlet with a grand total of 5 hand-sewn copies given away to various friends; now turned into an e-text.

Besides the 36 sonnets of "Fungi from Yuggoth," contains the poems "Nemesis," "The Messenger" and "Astrophobos" and the prose-poems or fragments "Nyarlathotep," "Memory," "Ex Oblivione," "What the Moon Brings" and "The Crawling Chaos." Also three illustrations by the editor.

Bored now.

A coupla more uploads to Scribd, but nothing really new in either.

The Principles of the Yoga-Philosophy of the Rosicrucians and Alchemists.

This formed an appendix to Franz Hartmann's In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom (1890), the body of which was a short, diffuse, inaccurate and mystifying work purporting to be an historical account of the "Rosicrucian" phenomenon. Hartmann represented this appendix as having been originally intended to form the basis for a work titled A Key to the Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians (see previous post) which project was abandoned. These two chapters appear to comprise an interpretation of Rosicrucian and Alchemical symbolism from the point of view of the theosophical schools of the nineteenth century; Hartmann's involvement in the German occultist circles from which the Ordo Templi Orientis emerged, and Reuss' various favourable references to him (he was for example cited as a Saint in a version of Crowley's Gnostic Mass which Reuss issued in German translation) suggests that this work may also shed light on how this symbolism was viewed in the early O.T.O.

The "Roscicrucian" section has been published on its own as a pamphlet under the title "Rosicrucian Symbols."

The Public Contents of the Book of Shadows.
An edition of the collection of Gardnerian Wicca rituals from ca. 1949-1961 as compiled by Aiden A. Kelly which has been doing the rounds of the net since the mid-90s. Only really scores over (?) the many existing copies (a dozen at least were on scribd already, most deriving from the HTMLs on sacred-texts.com) by slightly neater presentation, gratuitous use of the "Mason" typeface for headings and a number of pedantic or sarcastic footnotes by yrs truly.

Now re-set all of part I of A New Era of Thought, but that was the easy part (no complex tables and very few diagrams).

Grr . . .

One of the more ambitious projects of a few years back was an e-text of an English translation of the Geheime figuren der Rosenkreuzer, a famous German alchemical-Rosicrucian work of the late eighteenth century. While I have in fact prepared a re-set, with most of the figures coloured, of the George Engelke translation, first published in Chicago by the American Rosicrucian society AMORC, since this edition on examination turns out to be still in copyright, and in any case is now freely downloadable as black and white page images on AMORC's web site, I am no longer circulating the CP re-set. Instead, in the course of an insanely ambitious project of preparing etexts of works from the "General Reading" section of "Curriculum of A.'.A.'." in Crowley's Equinox, I prepared an e-text of Franz Hartmann's travesty of this volume, first issued in 1888 under the snappy title 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 Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which omits two of the shorter alchemical texts, 11 of the 36 plates (this material correspondes to the "drittes und letstes Heft" in those copies of the original German which were bound in three rather than two parts), much text on the plates that are included, and the bulk of the text of the "Golden Treatise," instead adding a rambling 16-page introduction which says absolutely nothing about the work to which it is prefixed, a "glossary of occult terms" of doubtful use and a few misleading notes to the "Golden Age Restored" and the "Parabola" from the "Tractatus Aureus." 

Anyway, to get to the point. While I long ago ceased to be bothered by people mirroring CP titles across the Internet or sticking them in ebook torrents, turns out that last October someone using the name "First Class Publishing House LXXVIII Isle of Paths," operating out of a PO box in Norway, went rather further, took the Celephaïs Press re-set of Hartmann's Cosmology &c., removed the CP name and logo (while leaving in the whole of my editorial introduction), stuck on their own imprint, copyright notice and front and back covers and are now selling it for US$50 on amazon.com. Check out the "look inside" option and go to the first page after the front cover for fairly clear proof of what's been done. Oh, they also scaled it down to 6" x 9" from the original folio size, so you're gonna need a magnifying glass to read all the text on the plates. The publisher's website seems to indicate that they intend to issue other texts from the A.'.A.'. general reading list. I will be following with interest. . . P.S.: so far they've also done it to the Unspeakable Press (Leng) edition of Blavatsky's Voice of the Silence: compare the copy on scribd with these previews at lulu.com; note the ham-handed substitution of their own name in the imprint, while leaving in the reference to an "electronic edition." Also to vol. I of the CP edition of Forlong's Rivers of Life (changing the title on the main title page to "Streams of Life" for no clear reason). The latter will be clearly distinguishable from a facsimile of the first edition by the large number of sarcastic footnotes initialled "T.S." which accompany the main text.

The Star in the West: update

Finished re-setting Fuller's The Star in the West, the re-set has replaced the page images on scribd. Unlike the e-text by "HKA" which has been doing the rounds for five years (for which I provided some graphics), this reproduces as far as possible the layout and pagination of the print edition.

Next up is Hinton's A New Era of Thought; currently up to about p. 50 (not including figures).

Iä! Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!

My French is a bit rusty, but the following appears in the course of a lengthy article by one Remi Sussan on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythology, specifically in a section discussing Yog-Sothoth.

From La Spirale: An eZine for the Digital Mutants:

Pour invoquer l’ouvreur de portes, les sectateurs de Yog-Sothoth vont donc aujourd’hui utiliser toute l’armada des concepts mathématiques bizarroïdes et irréguliers. En premier lieu, les solides non platoniciens, comme en témoigne ce "rituel des 9 angles" écrit par Michael Aquino pour l’Eglise de Satan. Les plus courageux tenterons eux de se perdre dans la "quatrième dimension" à coups de visualisation non euclidienne ou escherienne. Au XIXème siècle, un mathématicien nommé Charles Hinton avait ainsi créé des petits cubes colorés qui devaient selon lui permettre de visualiser la quatrième dimension. Ce livre est maintenant disponible en ligne, publié par une petite maison d’édition nommée, qui s’en étonnera, Celephais Press (Celephais est le nom d’une importante cité du monde du rêve, dans la nouvelle de Lovecraft A la recherche de Kadath).

Whether the author of this had come across the Rite to Call Yog-Sothoth issued on the CP imprint (where the double-octogram tesseract projection is used as the basis for a magic circle, marked on the ground with 200' of string and sixteen tent pegs) is unclear. Still, if I ever actually get round to making my own Hinton cubes, it would be the perfect thing to consecrate them with . . .