Current progress on Massey:
Ancient Egypt: up to p. 869 of 944 (pagination is continuous between vols. i & ii).
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 The most notable as-yet-unpublished text known to have been part of this would have been the continuation of Liber 165, "A Master of the Temple" (Achad's magical diaries).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.
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.
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.
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.
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."