At a bit of a loose end (Guild Wars is offline today for server maintenance) and turned up this blog post on the subject of Dr. Abisha S. Hudson, presumed author of The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship, mentioned some months back in an overview of Phallicist works on History of Religion issued by CP / UP(L).
While I completely agree with the author's case that the identification of "Sha Rocco" with Hargrave Jennings is utterly implausible, it seems he was still caught up in confusion arising from (a) some deliberately dishonest titling by opportunistic publishers of the late 19th century and (b) Cat Yronwode's comments in 2003 or earlier on a book which she had not actually read at the time.
Ascribing the association between "Sha Rocco" and "Abisha S. Hudson" to an "anonymous librarian" suggests that the only basis for it is a manuscript note on the title page of one library copy—in fact, on the reverse of the title page of the 1874 Masculine Cross it was stated that Hudson had entered the book "in the office of the Librarian of Congress," and the only plausible reason for the name of Dr. Hudson (for whom there is far more biographical data now generally available than Ms. Yronwode was able to find in 2003) being on the copyright notice, other than his being the author, or at the very least personally associated with the author, was that he was an employee of the New York based publisher, which is not credible given what is known about him (e.g., that he was a doctor living variously in Ohio and California).
The connection of The Masculine Cross with the 1889-91 "Nature Worship and Mystical Series," is not as simple as Ms. Yronwode assumed. The tenth and last volume of that series had on its cover the title Masculine Cross. It was not, however, a reprint of the 1874 work; rather an opportunistic re-use of the earlier volume's short title. It seems likely that the 1874 Masculine Cross, while being distributed across the USA, was for some time known more by reputation than actual acquaintence in Britain, and that in 1880 an opportunistic publisher in London stole the name and several passages of the text for a small octavo volume called on its title page, Phallic Worship: A Description of the Mysteries of the Sex Worship of the Ancients with the history of the Masculine Cross, but simply The Masculine Cross on the front board and spine. The binding of this latter volume is similar but not identical to that later adopted for the NW&MS and internal typographical and layout style is completely different.
(Page images of the 1874 and 1891 works (in their 1904 reprints) may be found on the Internet Archive. The 1880 work appears rarer and just has a brief entry on Google Books with a spurious attribution to Jennings.)
My reasons for rejecting the widespread attribution of the "Nature Worship and Mystical Series" itself to Hargrave Jennings have been discussed at length in various places, including the endnotes to the Unspeakable Press (Leng) editions of those volumes and in an earlier post on this blog, and include considerations of style, ideas, and dates.
What I have not examined is the question of, since Abisha S. Hudson was a real person and not a pseudonym of Jennings, and also alive at the time the NW&MS was published, could he have been the author of the series, as the author of the post that prompted these ramblings (on a blog about Emma Hardinge Britten, the Spiritualist) seems to assume? Part of Cat Yronwode's argument for Rocco / Hudson being Jennings was that Ophiolatreia, the second volume of the NW&MS was ascribed to "Abisha S. Hudson" by Gershon Legman, a generally reputable bibliographer; and internal references within the series indicate it as being all by one author.
This I cannot answer definitely at the moment, but it seems unlikely; while judgements on style are of limited value given how much of the NW&MS was verbatim from earlier works, style of those passages which do seem to be due to the actual "author" is unlike that found in the Rocco / Hudson Masculine Cross, and the sources employed and general focus of the studies (specifically the recurring emphasis on India as a supposed centre of "phallic worship" tending to suggest a hidden agenda of justifying British colonial policy there as a so-called civilising force) as well as the simple fact that the whole series was published in London make it more likely that the author was British, and a wide range of sources was used whereas the 1874 Masculine Cross was, saving the last chapter, almost entirely cribbed from Dr. Thomas Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names.
While I completely agree with the author's case that the identification of "Sha Rocco" with Hargrave Jennings is utterly implausible, it seems he was still caught up in confusion arising from (a) some deliberately dishonest titling by opportunistic publishers of the late 19th century and (b) Cat Yronwode's comments in 2003 or earlier on a book which she had not actually read at the time.
Ascribing the association between "Sha Rocco" and "Abisha S. Hudson" to an "anonymous librarian" suggests that the only basis for it is a manuscript note on the title page of one library copy—in fact, on the reverse of the title page of the 1874 Masculine Cross it was stated that Hudson had entered the book "in the office of the Librarian of Congress," and the only plausible reason for the name of Dr. Hudson (for whom there is far more biographical data now generally available than Ms. Yronwode was able to find in 2003) being on the copyright notice, other than his being the author, or at the very least personally associated with the author, was that he was an employee of the New York based publisher, which is not credible given what is known about him (e.g., that he was a doctor living variously in Ohio and California).
The connection of The Masculine Cross with the 1889-91 "Nature Worship and Mystical Series," is not as simple as Ms. Yronwode assumed. The tenth and last volume of that series had on its cover the title Masculine Cross. It was not, however, a reprint of the 1874 work; rather an opportunistic re-use of the earlier volume's short title. It seems likely that the 1874 Masculine Cross, while being distributed across the USA, was for some time known more by reputation than actual acquaintence in Britain, and that in 1880 an opportunistic publisher in London stole the name and several passages of the text for a small octavo volume called on its title page, Phallic Worship: A Description of the Mysteries of the Sex Worship of the Ancients with the history of the Masculine Cross, but simply The Masculine Cross on the front board and spine. The binding of this latter volume is similar but not identical to that later adopted for the NW&MS and internal typographical and layout style is completely different.
(Page images of the 1874 and 1891 works (in their 1904 reprints) may be found on the Internet Archive. The 1880 work appears rarer and just has a brief entry on Google Books with a spurious attribution to Jennings.)
My reasons for rejecting the widespread attribution of the "Nature Worship and Mystical Series" itself to Hargrave Jennings have been discussed at length in various places, including the endnotes to the Unspeakable Press (Leng) editions of those volumes and in an earlier post on this blog, and include considerations of style, ideas, and dates.
What I have not examined is the question of, since Abisha S. Hudson was a real person and not a pseudonym of Jennings, and also alive at the time the NW&MS was published, could he have been the author of the series, as the author of the post that prompted these ramblings (on a blog about Emma Hardinge Britten, the Spiritualist) seems to assume? Part of Cat Yronwode's argument for Rocco / Hudson being Jennings was that Ophiolatreia, the second volume of the NW&MS was ascribed to "Abisha S. Hudson" by Gershon Legman, a generally reputable bibliographer; and internal references within the series indicate it as being all by one author.
This I cannot answer definitely at the moment, but it seems unlikely; while judgements on style are of limited value given how much of the NW&MS was verbatim from earlier works, style of those passages which do seem to be due to the actual "author" is unlike that found in the Rocco / Hudson Masculine Cross, and the sources employed and general focus of the studies (specifically the recurring emphasis on India as a supposed centre of "phallic worship" tending to suggest a hidden agenda of justifying British colonial policy there as a so-called civilising force) as well as the simple fact that the whole series was published in London make it more likely that the author was British, and a wide range of sources was used whereas the 1874 Masculine Cross was, saving the last chapter, almost entirely cribbed from Dr. Thomas Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names.
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