Book of the Beginnings, further progress of a sort.

Well, ended up staying out yesterday for longer than I originally intended, so have only just finished scanning vol. 1 of A Book of the Beginnings. Anyway, the complete page images are now on Scribd. Next up is seeing if I can scan vol. 2 without doing quite as much damage to it in the process.

In Man we Trust? (5)

Scribd seems to be playing silly buggers again, for some reason vol. 1 of Dr. Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names is not showing up on my public feed or the list of documents accessible from the main link on this blog. This would probably explain why it's had less than half as many hits as vol. 2.

Ah, and I see we have "followers" again. 298 so far.

A Book of the Beginnings (progress of a sort report)

Scanned another couple of chapters of A Book of the Beginnings; these page images have been appended to the copy on Scribd. This still only amounts to about half the page count of vol. I, and my copy is rapidly falling apart.

Later: Now added cap. 7, but had enough of this for today.

Later later: A few hours break & some food, and managed to face scanning another chapter. Might finish scanning vol. 1 tomorrow -- 134 pages to go. My copy-text will probably be wrecked beyond repair by the time I'm finished though, not only have a number of complete signatures become detached from the binding but many individual pages, the paper horribly brittle after 130 or so years, are now seriously torn. Tired now . . .

Ironies abound . . .

A staunch materialist and mechanist whose sole use for occultist beliefs and practices is as background or plot devices, to be used sparingly, in the stories by which he gives expression to the dreams into which all irrational and inexplicable elements in his psyche are forced to find their outlet, a few decades after his death is found to inspire occultist groups worldwide, more than one naming itself after a cult, sect or clique from his fiction.

Similarly, decades previously, a radical poet turned amateur Egyptologist fills his writings with such glamours that the volumes which he put forth as a naturalistic and evolutionist account of human history are enthusiastically quoted by the same kind of theosophists and esotericists who are roundly abused throughout their pages; and while the mainstream forgets him, the interest of occultists ensures his books remain in print a century after his death.

Or, in other words, in the course of another attempt to break my online game addiction without carving tally-marks on my forearms with a Stanley knife in the process, I've hauled my copy of A Book of the Beginnings off the shelf where it's been gathering dust for a year or two and managed to scan all of another 70 pages (since it still hasn't become available on Google Books or the Internet Archive). These volumes would appear to be vital to Massey's attempt to prove the Egyptian origins of everything, although without some understanding of the system of Typology developed in The Natural Genesis, the whole thing will probably look like nonsense.

Anyway, when I've done as much of this as I can face tonight, the images will be posted on Scribd.

(A bit later): Done. Front matter and chapters 1-4 (pp. 1-179 of 503).

In Man we Trust (4)

One general comment I will make about Ancient Faiths embodied in Ancient Names, though. Despite the great level of learning and ingenuity displayed, it is as a whole a polemical and not a scholarly work. Leaving aside the repetitive rants into which many of the longer articles degenerate, for much of it the Doctor appears to have had in mind some actual or hypothetical opponent who believed in the literal truth and divine inspiration of the Bible as its text now stands, the unitary authorship of the Pentateuch, &c., &c. To this end he frequently employs what might be called "irony"; rather than attack these premisses directly, he attempts in places to show that they lead to contradictions and absurdity, or at least to other consequences, such as implying things about God that he assumes his opponent would be unwilling to accept. Hence there are passages which appear to start from the assumption that this or that biblical personage was a real person who bore the name assigned them in the narrative from infancy (usually in order to argue against the interpretation of that character's name found in the standard Hebrew-English lexicons), interspersed with others which treat the narrative as at best false and propagandistic as to details and at worse entirely mythical, or fabricated to suit the interests of one or another priesthood.

Another point to consider when noting apparent contradictions in this book, is this: Inman was writing long before the age of desk-top publishing. Setting a book of 1800 octavo pages up in type is not a quick or simple task, and once a section of the book had been typeset, it would not have been as straightforward a task to change it as it would be to go back and change a document in a word processor. Inman's ideas and views continued to develop and in some respects change over the course of however many years he was working on Ancient Faiths (a paper on aspects of his theories in regard to English personal names was presented to the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society in February 1866, and printed in vol. XX of the Society's Proceedings), and even after vol. 1 had been printed.

In Man we Trust (3)

The complete re-set of Dr. Thomas Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names has now been uploaded to Scribd.
Vol. 1
Vol. 2
It appears, looking at the date stamps on some of the workfiles, that I started on this re-set over six years ago; that I ever finished it can only really be attributed to some bizarre kind of intellectual sadomasochism. While I could fill many pages with detailed pedantic criticisms of the Doctor's methods and conclusions, I doubt anyone is interested; even in his own time Inman does not seem to have ever been taken very seriously away from the fringe, and 140 years of archæological discoveries around the peoples, languages and religions of the ancient Near East have shown many of his conjectures to be at best ingenious but wrong. Instead I will once again direct readers to the comments I made on another blog last year.

Doubtless there are many uncorrected OCR errors in the above documents; but right now I really can't face giving them even another skimming over.

In Man we Trust? (2)

Finished re-setting the main text of Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names, now just got to re-type the Indexes . . . so a while yet, as said Indexes include quite a lot of pointed Hebrew.