Falsely attributed? (3)

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.

Another minor update

Finally found an image of the original front board design for Cultus Arborum, vol. 4 in the 1889-91 "Nature Worship and Mystical Series" (someone was selling a first edition with the front board intact, but the spine apparently gone as it seems from the photo to be held together with tape, on Ebay for US$20), so this has replaced the substituted cover on the Unspeakable Press (Leng) release.

I should also mention that a zip file with all ten volumes of this series (though not the latest releases because it's something of a pain to re-gen and re-upload the entire archive every time one gets changed) can be downloaded from Megaupload.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar . . .

The study of the various forms, some gross and palpable, some subtle and elusive, in which the sexual instinct has moulded the religious consciousness of our race, is one of the most interesting, as it is one of the most difficult and delicate tasks, which await the future historian of religion.

J. G. Frazer, Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild (The Golden Bough, part V), Preface (1912). Emphasis added.

The second of the quotations heading the previous post might have given a clue to the studies that led me into the morass of the nineteenth-century Phallicist school of History of Religions. Besides the works of Thomas Inman and General Forlong, Knight et al. on the worship of Priapus, and the Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial of Hargrave Jennings (who might get his own entry at some point), a number of minor works of this school, of greater or lesser interest, have been issued on the Celephaïs Press and Unspeakable Press (Leng) imprints. Details follow:

Sellon, Edward: Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindüs. London: privately printed, 1865; reprinted 1902; various modern reprints.

After a brief military career in British-occupied India, Edward Sellon supplemented his income as a prolific writer of pornography; but he also produced a short pamphlet and a couple of journal articles (originally delivered as papers to a dodgy bunch of blokes called the Anthropological Society of London) on aspects of Indian religion, particularly the "phallic worship" linga-pûja rite and the beliefs and practices of the S'âkta sects. While of doubtful value as a source of information on their ostensible subject, Sellon's writings appear to have played an important role in the (mis) understanding of Tantrik doctrine and ritual in the West. The present edition includes all three of these works.

Rocco, Sha (pseudo.): The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship. New York: Asa K. Butts, 1874; reprinted London (s.n.), 1898, New York: Commenwealth, 1904, &c., &c., &c.

A slim octavo or duodecimo (about 70pp) largely deriving from Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names, save the last chapter which attempts to argue that some stone relics the author found in California are "phallic symbols" and not in fact an ordinary mortar and pestle. The authorship has been questionably ascribed to Hargrave Jennings by some commentators, although Dr. Abisha Shumway Hudson, whose name appeared on the imprint of the first edition and who according to the census and California land registry lived in the particular Californian county mentioned in the last chapter of the "Sha Rocco" book around the time it was published, seems a more likely candidate.

Anonymous: Phallic Worship: A Description of the Mysteries of the Sex Worship of the Ancients, with the history of the Masculine Cross. London: privately printed, 1880; reprinted 1886.

Title on cover and spine simply "The Masculine Cross," doubtless in a dishonest attempt to cause confusion with the "Sha Rocco" book, from which a few sections are in fact bodily plagiarised. Others are lifted from Inman, Godfrey Higgins' Anacalypsis and Knight & Wright.

Campbell, Robert Allen: Phallic Worship: an outline of the worship of the generative organs as being, or as representing, the Divine Creator, with suggestions as to the influence of the phallic idea on religious creeds, ceremonies, customs and symbolis, past and present. St. Louis: Robert Campbell, 1887, various reprints.

This volume of about 200 octavo pages is again digested from earlier writers, but draws on a wider range of sources than Rocco / Hudson.

Anonymous: "Nature Worship and Mystical Series," a.k.a. "Phallic Series." 10 vols; London, privately printed (Arthur Reader), 1889-1891. Individual volumes have had various reprints.

A series of short and mostly rather dull, diffuse and repetitive digests or miscellanies, with a marketing campaign apparently designed to insinuate that they were borderline pornography; actually, they contain nothing more outrageous than what had previously appeared in this country in works with the author's and publisher's names attached. In fact, most of their contents had appeared, word for word, in works (books and journal articles) with the author's and publisher's names attached.

The authorship of this series is frequently assigned to Hargrave Jennings, and some reprint editions are credited to him. The main basis for the ascription seems to be that no. 7, Nature Worship and no. 9, Phallic Miscellanies (pretty much the nadir of the series) are ascribed on their title pages to "the Author of Phallicism," and Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial was an admitted work of Jennings. The mention in the preface to the first volume of the series, of "the old and familiar motto, 'evil be to him that evil thinks'" on which, in its Old French from, Jennings has much to say in his The Rosicrucians, probably reinforced the suggestion. Judgement on style is problematic where the bulk of the text is verbatim from earlier writers, but it seems likely that the whole series is of common authorship (to use the term loosely).

Against this, it must be pointed out that:

• The first volume, while called Phallism on the title page (and the cover and spine of the first edition) is referred to in the advertisements in other volumes, and in places in the text of these volumes, as Phallicism. Specifically, the preface to Nature Worship, one of the two credited to "the Author of Phallicism" refers to the first volume by that title.
• Hargrave Jennings died in March 1890, before at least half the series was published. While it is not a priori impossible that, assuming him to have been the author, he had delivered the MSS. of the remaining volumes to the publisher before his death, this would imply that the series of ten volumes was planned either from the beginning, or at least from shortly after the issue of the first or second volume; this in turn is not a priori impossible but raises the question of what the publisher hoped to gain by falsely stating in the preface to vol. 5 that it represented "for now, the concluding volume" of the series, or in the preface to vol. 7 that it had been put together after the original edition of Phallism had been sold out. Conversely, insinuating that Jennings, who was reasonably well-known among Reader's target audience, and who was too dead to object, was the real author, could credibly have served to shift additional copies.
• Jennings had a fairly distinctive writing style; except in passages identifiably lifted from admitted works of his (e.g., the opening of cap. 8 of Nature Worship is verbatim from cap. III of Phallicism, Celestial and Terrestrial), nothing in the Nature Worship and Mystical Series remembles this. This is not itself a particularly conclusive argument.
• There is no trace of Jennings' distinctive ideas. Throughout his major works we find the recurring theme of the "Fire-Philosophy" and the notion of a universal pyro-phallic (as it were) cult as the uniting theme of all religions. Vol. 5 of the "Phallic Series" was titled Fishes, Flowers and Fire and over half its page-count is devoted to "fire-worship"; yet we find therein no references to the "Fire-Philosophy" (there is a passing reference to "Fire-philosophers" in a later volume in the series) and no sign of the enthusiasm for the subject found in Jennings' admitted works. In vol. 2, Ophiolatreia, is printed an extensive letter concerning egg and serpent symbolism in Egyptian hieroglyphs and religious art, representing largely the point of view of mainstream Egyptology of the period; whereas Jennings in The Rosicrucians and elsewhere was openly contemptuous of the interpretations of the hieroglyphs produced by Egyptologists since Champollion.
• There is implicit criticism of Jennings in various places. In cap. V of Phallism (p. 60 of the 1892 second edition on which the Unspeakable Press (Leng) issue is based) there is quoted and criticised ("not only extravagant but absurd") a passage from Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled representing the "tablets of the Law" displayed in Christian churches as "phallic symbols"; which passage in turn cites The Rosicrucians, their Rites and Mysteries in support of such an interpretation. Vol. 8 of the series was titled Mysteries of the Rosie Cross. Unlike Hargrave Jennings' best-known book, it actually makes some attempt to treat of the "Rosicrucian" phenomenon in an historical sense, and no overt attempt to interpret Rosicrucianism or Rose+Cross symbolism in sexual terms. The story from Jennings' book, chapter "Singular Adventure in Staffordshire" (p. 6 of the fourth edition) was reprinted with the remark that (a) it could not be found in the work to which he sourced it (which had been previously pointed out by A. E. Waite in Real History of the Rosicrucians) and (b) it was in any case a retelling with variations of a story which had appeared in print two years before the date given in the Rosicrucian manifestoes for the death of the founder of their fraternity.

Volume 10 of the series is called, in full, The Masculine Cross or a History of Ancient and Modern Crosses and their connection with the Mysteries of Sex Worship, also an Account of the Kindred Phases of Phallic Faiths and Practices. Like the anonymous 1880 digest, this title was likely intended to cause confusion with the 1874 "Sha Rocco" work; in this respect it succeeded and has even led some modern commentators to infer that it was simply a reprint thereof, and that therefore "Sha Rocco" was Hargrave Jennings.

Howard, Clifford: Sex Worship: an Exposition of the Phallic Origin of Religion. Washington, DC: privately printed for the author, 1897; second edition, 1898.

Another short digest (215 pp. in the original edition, whose layout and pagination I for once made no attempt to reproduce owing to generally low number of words per page) with a brief excuse for a bibliography at the end.

Anyway, back to that quote.

The "Order" referred to was the Ordo Templi Orientis, founded by Theodor Reuss about 1906 c.e. by merging a variety of fringe Masonic rites and occultist groups (Reuss later stated he had held discussions with one Carl Kellner in 1895 around forming an "Academia Masonica" to collect, condense and communicate the teachings of various Masonic and quasi-Masonic systems, but nothing came of it at the time, supposedly owing to Kellner's dislike of some of Reuss' then associates). While regarded by orthodox Masonic historians as a swindler who sold worthless degrees in irregular and clandestine rites, Reuss appears at least to have been sincere in his belief that he had discovered a unifying theme in religious, hermetic and Masonic symbolism. In the same year he promulgated the Constitution of his new Order, Reuss also published Lingam-Yoni; oder die Mysterien des Geschlechts-Kultus which was essentially a German translation with some new prefatory material of Phallism: a Description of the Worship of Lingam-Yoni in various Parts of the World, and in different Ages: with an account of Ancient and Modern Crosses, particularly of the Crux Ansata (or Handled Cross) and other Symbols connected with the Mysteries of Sex Worship, the first volume of the "Nature Worship and Mystical Series." A few of the other works mentioned above appeared on lists of recommended reading issued by Reuss to his disciples.

More to follow if I can be bothered. Now to try and proof a few more pages of Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names . . .