Showing posts with label Aleister Crowley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aleister Crowley. Show all posts

2019-11-01

It is the number of a man.

Fixed some errors in The Sword of Song (mostly some forced line-breaks and hyphens left over from my previous ill-advised attempt to conform layout to the Collected Works printing while still having the thing set in Times New Roman) & gave it proper front & back board designs based on those from the original edition.

Current progress on Massey:

A Book of the Beginnings: vol. ii.. up to p. 208 of 684.  Later: Stalled because I got annoyed at Massey's abuse of the Book of Enoch (I Enoch), specifically using the preamble to a section which deals in an undisguised manner with  astronomical matters and the calendar to argue that a different (and on various evidences, probably somewhat later) section of the compilation being a pure astronomical allegory and not in fact an account of the mythical and actual history of the Israelites and their ancestors, mixed up with traditions contained in the "Book of Watchers," the first section of I Enoch.
The Natural Genesis, vol. ii: up to p. 340 of 536.
Ancient Egypt: up to p. 869 of 944 (pagination is continuous between vols. i & ii).

2019-10-31

After summer is winter, after winter summer (4)

Got sidetracked from Massey & gave another once-over to the C.P. Blue Equinox; now much more closely conformed to the print edition as regards pagination, layout & style, and a few more typos / transcription errors / OCR errors in various texts fixed.  Advertisements still omitted.

2019-10-22

Yet by-and-by I hope to weave a song of Anti-Christmas Eve

The CP edition of Crowley's The Sword of Song (aka Liber LXVII, Class C), with layout & style completely re-done from the old version (& hopefully more readable) and many,  many transcription errors fixed (I think the 'g' key on my keyboard was broken when I first typed it) can now be read on Scribd.  Going to give it a proper cover some time with the '666' design and AC's name in Hebrew from the first edition, but for now all the actual text should be there (the "epilogue" in the old typeset wasn't part of the orignal work but was mistakenly included from vol. ii. of Crowley's Collected Works).

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.

2019-10-12

Lege — iudica — atque ride

Gave a once-over & some stylistic improvements to the edition of Crowley's Book of Lies I prepared way back when & uploaded to Scribd.  Also some minor tweaks to a few of the other shorter libri, but nothing worth specifically noting here.

2019-10-05

After summer is winter, after winter summer (2)

Some things I can still work on.  While I'm currently using a cheap low-end laptop, it's a 2018 cheap low-end laptop and most of the app software I'm using is a decade older so not super demanding.  Just given a once-over to my edit of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice and stuck on Scribd (it looks like earlier releases are still doing the rounds, and have even been cited in works issued by what I previously regarded as reputable publishers).

2019-09-23

After summer is winter, after winter summer.

Once again mundane considerations have intervened & put ongoing projects on hold.  I had started on giving a once-over to the edition of Equinox vol. I that I typeset way back from some plaintexts that had been doing the rounds for a while.  I might just upload the existing PDFs to Scribd in the meantime, although there are flaws in most of them that need fixing.  [Translation: I have had to move out of the flat I've been living in for 18 years and my Equinox reprints are currently in a box at the bottom of a stack of 5 of 6 banana boxes filled with books.]

Edit: In the meantime you could do a lot worse than check out the "Keep Silence" edition of the Equinox -- these are page images from the first editions (also sold as physical copies in a print on demand edition), complete with all advertisements &c.  Same site also has AC's Collected Works, and first editions of Book 4 parts I & II, The Book of Lies & a few others.  Obviously such a project would have been impossible back when those plaintexts were originally created and impractical (in terms of cost / availability of Internet bandwidth, hosting &c.) when I started work on the CP re-sets.

Link not related.

2019-09-10

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.


EDIT: fixed broken YouTube link.

2018-03-07

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 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).

"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.

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."

2018-02-01

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.

2018-01-30

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.

2018-01-28

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).

2017-12-25

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.

2010-11-07

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (2)

Going back through the blog archives, I discover that I omitted to mention at the time (back in March) that I completed and posted on Scribd an edition of Phallism in Ancient Worships (a.k.a. Ancient Symbol Worship) by Hodder M. Westropp, C. S. Wake, and Alexander Wilder. The two essays comprising the bulk of this were originally papers presented to a dodgy bunch of blokes called the Anthropological Society of London, who were also the original audience for Edward Sellon's ramblings on Indian "phallic worship." On which subject, I've just uploaded a slight update of Sellon's Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus. This mainly fixes a few previously unnoticed OCR errors in the "S'akti Puja" paper, and slightly expands one of my notes.

As I almost got round to explaining in a post last year under this title, what started me on the trek through this morass, which with the CP release of Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names is more or less over (I do not count Gerald Massey or Godfrey Higgins as Phallicists) was my interest in the works of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, and the quasi-Masonic association the Ordo Templi Orientis, which he took over in the 1920s and which is now widely associated with his name and ideas.
Theodor Reuss, the founder of the O.T.O., echoing the words of Thomas Inman's Symbolism, claimed for his order the possession of a "KEY" to explain all religious, Masonic and Hermetic symbolism, namely "the teaching of sexual magic." Crowley, who even prior to his association with Reuss was at least aware of the Phallicist school of History of Religions, enthusiastically embraced this scheme of interpretation, and while keeping the precise nature of this teaching a secret, reserved for the higher degrees of the order, recommended works like General Forlong's Rivers of Life, Payne Knight et al. on the Worship of Priapus, and Hargrave Jennings' The Rosicrucians to his students even in writings intended for publication.

There is one very important difference between Reuss and Crowley on the one hand, and Dr. Inman in particular on the other. The Doctor, whose own religious position seems to have been a vague Theism, revering a self-contradictory abstraction he called "the Almighty" and rejecting any kind of religious symbolism or ritual as a blasphemous insult to the divine majesty, used the presence of supposed "phallic" elements in the doctrine, ritual, iconography and nomenclature of existing religions as grounds for violently denouncing them. Reuss and Crowley, on the other hand, accepting the arguments of the Phallicists as to the intimate and indissoluble connection between sexuality and religion, deduced from these the divinity of the human sexual instinct and the "solar-phallic" cult as the one true religion:

[In] the Macrocosm is one sole God, the Sun [. . .] in the Microcosm, which is Man, the vicegerent of the Sun, sole giver of Life, is the Phallus.
-- Crowley, Liber 228, "De Natura Deorum."
[The] only rational God is the Sun, who is in the Macrocosm what the Phallus is in the Microcosm.
-- Crowley, Liber 888, "The Gospel according to St. Bernard Shaw."

2010-07-16

Falsely attributed? (2)

Further to the last: the GD site mentioned also has a copy of an early CP release of Liber 777, with the front matter excised, and again linked to with the remark "falsely attributed to Aleister Crowley." This is a slightly more ambiguous case. It is worth mentioning, however, that (a) the first edition of 777 was published anonymously, (b) the bulk of the page count of the revised edition, the first to have Crowley's name on the title page, consisted of additional material not in the first edition whose authorship has not been seriously disputed, (c) the title page of 777 Revised described it as "A reprint of 777 with much additional matter by the late Aleister Crowley" which can be parsed as only attributing the "additional matter" to AC, especially since (d) the editor's preface to the revised edition stated: "It is not, however, entirely original. Ninety per cent of the Hebrew, the four colour scales, and the order and attribution of the Tarot trumps are as taught in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with its inner circle of the Rose of Ruby and the Cross of Gold (R.R. et A.C.)," and in fact this source is indirectly acknowledged in Crowley's original introduction, when he discussed previous attempts to tabulate knowledge.

The specific claim that the tables of 777 were lifted almost in their entirity from a GD MS. titled "General Correspondences" was made by Pat Zalewski in Kabbalah of the Golden Dawn (xiii, 92 n.); Zalewski referred again to "General Correspondences" in later books; however unless and until a copy of this MS. predating the publication of 777 is published or otherwise made available for general examination it will be impossible to tell for certain just how much if anything in the tables of 777 was due to AC.

2010-07-13

Falsely attributed?

Just turned this up: on the website of an organisation calling itself the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is a copy of the CP edition of the Mathers-Crowley Goëtia, linked with the remark that it was "falsely attributed to Aleister Crowley." While Crowley's claim on the title page to have "edited, verified, introduced and commented" the whole work may be somewhat overblown, his actual contribution to the main text likely limited to providing a few hostile or sarcastic footnotes, the major false attribution in that edition is the "translator" credit to S.L. Mathers; as documented by Joseph Petersen in his edition of the Lemegeton, the BL MSS. on which Mathers drew are all in English. I am also at a complete loss as to by whom Ben Rowe's edition of the Theurgia-Goëtia, also mirrored on that site, was "falsely attributed to Aleister Crowley" -- certainly not by Rowe.

P.S.: To clarify: the full name of the organisation alluded to above is "The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Outer Order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega." It is apparently not the same as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (R) established by Charles "Chic" Cicero. Neither should be confused with the historical organisation of that name which was established in London in 1887 or 1888 and messily imploded a little over a decade later.

2009-11-10

Omissions?

[The following is adapted from a note previously appearing on the CP Geocities site.]

Some of you (I occasionally like to delude myself that there are a few fans of CP out there) may have noticed a glaring omission from the materials I have posted on Scribd or discussed in this blog. Celephaïs Press editions of works by Aleister Crowley have not been uploaded to Scribd by me, or linked to here. These works are — certainly in the UK, and in the case of materials first published after 1923, in the US as well — still in copyright, and are so for another eight years. E-texts of several (including Equinox vol. I and vol. III no 1, Konx Om Pax, The Sword of Song, The Book of Lies, Book Four, Magick Without Tears, Liber Aleph, Tannhäuser, 777 Revised, Little Essays Toward Truth, The Heart of the Master and about 75% of the extant numbered libri) were prepared in the mistaken belief that the general policy of the holders to the copyrights in them was — with the exception of some works which were not written for publication in the first place — to tolerate non-commercial webpostings as long as their copyright was acknowledged; experience has shown that this is not the case, in fact it is within my knowledge that various website administrators, including the management of Scribd, have been requested to remove CP editions of Crowley’s works from their sites. Copies of most of these works still exist online in various places not under my control; however since about 2005 the only postings under my direct control have been limited to revised or corrected editions of works I had previously posted and not been reprimanded for or ordered to take down.