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.

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.

Scribd issues

As some of you have probably noticed, Scribd recently migrated from the Flash-based iPaper embedded reader to an HTML based system. While an improvement in some respects, it appears to have caused issues with a number of CP titles; a few appear (at least in the browser -- Firefox 3.6.3 -- which I'm using) not to display at all, others have type alignment issues on some pages. All should display as intended if you download the PDFs. Hopefully this is just a teething problem with the new reader software and will be sorted soon.

UPDATE 2010.06.07: If a document is not displaying in the new HTML view, it can still be viewed in iPaper, but this involves selecting the "change your reading preferences" link, and then clearing the tickbox "Display documents in HTML mode (recommended)." Obviously it *also* involves having Flash enabled which the known security issues with current versions of Flash is something you may not want to do.

Divide, add, multiply and understand.

Going through some more old stuff, and thought perhaps I should explain in more detail why I tampered with the text of the Chemical Wedding embedded in A. E. Waite's Real History of the Rosicrucians. One of the characters in this strange work is a "most beautiful Virgin" who supervises the narrator and other guests in the castle where the main action takes place. Towards the end of the narrative of the "Third Day" (Waite, p. 142), after the discussion of a series of moral dilemmas, the narrator asks her name and is met with a numerical riddle:

My name contains six and fifty, and yet hath only eight letters; the third is the third part of the fifth, which added to the sixth will produce a number, whose root shall exceed the third itself by just the first, and it is the half of the fourth. Now the fifth and seventh are equal, the last and first also equal, and make with the second as much as the sixth hath, which contains four more than the third tripled.

As originally printed by Waite, and apparently in the first publication (1690) of the English translation, this read "contains five and fifty" (I have not had a chance to consult the German original). The amendment had nothing to do with the line in Liber Al vel Legis, and everything to do with the solution to the riddle presented by Waite in his 1924 Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, (p. 168 note) which makes her name ALCHIMIA, taking the number of each letter as its ordinal position in the English or German alphabet. While Waite's reasoning depends on her response to a later question of the narrator, that the seventh (and thus also the fifth) letter "contains . . . as many as there are lords here," the riddle is soluble without this information, thus: Call the letters of her name a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. These sum to 56. Since "the fifth and seventh are equal, the last and first also equal"

2a + b + c + d + 2e+ f = 56

"the third is the third part of the fifth," to 3c = e, so

2a + b + 7c + d + f = 56

"the third . . . added to the sixth, will produce a number whose root shall exceed the third itself by just the first", so,

sqrt(c + f) = c + a

". . . and it [the root of c+f, or c+a] is half the fourth" so d = 2(c + a), so

4a + b + 9c + f = 56

"the sixth . . . containeth four more than the third tripled" so f = 3c + 4, so

4a + b + 12c + 4 = 56, and sqrt(4c + 4) = c + a, which latter can be rewritten as sqrt 4(c + 1) = c + a, or 2 sqrt (c + 1) = c + a

"the last and the first are also equal, and make with the second, as much as the sixth have." 

Slightly ambiguous, could mean a (or h) + b = f, or a + h + b (= 2a+b) = f. 

If the former (call this case i) then a + b = 3c + 4, so 3a + 15c + 8 = 56, so 3a + 15c = 48, a + 5c = 16. 

If the latter (call this case ii), 2a + b = 3c + 4, so 2a + 15c + 8 = 56, 2a + 15c = 48. 

The reference of numbers to letters strongly suggests that a positive integer solution for all the variables is expected.  At this point, c + 1 has to be a perfect square; which could make c 3, 8, 15, &c.  However if c is more than 3 and a third, a will be negative.  So c = 3.  In case i, a + 15 = 16, so a = 1.  In case ii, 2a + 45 = 48, so a = 1.5, suggesting that the case i reading of the constraint was correct. 

So h = 1, e = 9, g = 9, f = 3 x 3 + 4 = 13, b = 12, f = 2(1+3) = 8, giving 1, 12, 3, 8, 9, 13, 9, 1.

By ordinal position in the German or English alphabet (i.e. treating i and j as different letters), ALCHIMIA. 

If we do not make the assumption about positive integers, it is not possible to resolve the ambiguity noted. Assuming case 1, we take the equations

2 sqrt (c + 1) = a + c, and a + 5c = 16

from the latter, a + c = 16 - 4c; so we can substitute in the first, giving

2 sqrt (c + 1) = 16 - 4c, or sqrt (c + 1) = 8 - 2c c + 1 = 4c^2 - 32c + 64 4c^2 - 33c + 63 = 0

which has two real solutions for c, 3 and 5.25.

This is it, which philosophie dreameth of

In connection with some studies I've recently been revisiting, posted on scribd some PDFs of Sloane MS. 3191, the digests of John Dee's "Enochian" magic system. Quality on some of these is a bit dodgy owing to Dee's scrawl, deterioration of the MSS. over 400 years, contrast issues in the original microfilm photographs and a somewhat ropy digitisation of the microfilm, but these just about manage to be readable with much use of the zoom function.

Comprising:
48 Claves Angelicæ
The "Enochian" Keys or Calls; Romanised Angelic text with intralineal English translation.
Liber Scientiæ, Auxillii et Victoriæ Terrestris
The table of the 30 Ayres and 91 Parts of the Earth
De Heptarchia Mystica
A system of planetary magick, written / received before the "Enochian" material more narrowly so called. The handwriting on this one is significantly harder to read than the others and some text was lost at the page folds when the MS. book was photographed.
A book of supplications and invocations
Conjurations of the Angels &c. of the Tables of the Watchtowers.

Gotten bored with Anacalypsis at about p. 180 (of 867) of vol. 1. Vol. 2 will be easier but is on scribd as page images from the 1927 reprint already. A bit more of Inman's Ancient Faiths done too, but not much.

I note a few comments consisting entirely of irrelevant links have gotten through the spam filters on this blog. These have been, and will continue to be, deleted on sight. Unfortunately the blog options do not appear to include blocking hyperlinks in comments.

EDITED MANY YEARS LATER: The documents that were linked above have been deleted.  The BL's own website now hosts digitised images of Sloane MS. 3191 of far higher quality.  See this post.

Tired now . . .

Another project that was started several years ago will quite possibly never be finished; Anacalypsis, an attempt to draw aside the veil of the Saïtic Isis, or, an inquiry into the origin of languages, nations and religions by Godfrey Higgins (first published 1836 in two quarto volumes totalling over 1400 pages), a monsterpiece of speculative prehistory which seems to have had an influence exceeding its comparatively small original print run (200 copies of which many were allegedly destroyed unsold).

So far I have managed to re-set a bit over a tenth of this work (the preliminaries and first three "books" of vol. i); this can now be read on scribd. Maybe I'll do some more some time; but right now I really need to get a day job.

Hear thou the voice of the Fire (2)

Uploaded a re-set of G.R.S. Mead's work on the Chaldæan Oracles to Scribd. This was originally published in 1908 as nos. VIII and IX in a series of pamphlets titled "Echoes from the Gnosis" issued through the Theosophical Society. While less than satisfactory as an edition of the texts (about a third of the fragments which appeared in the Westcott edition are omitted, and those which are presented are interspersed in long passages of commentary), Mead had taken advantage of contemporary scholarly work on the material, and generally shows himself far less credulous than Westcott and Bullock did (it is amusing though, to see him quote the "Sword of Dardanos" from PGM IV, a coercive agôgê spell, as an invocation of the "Chaste and Holy Divine Love"). I made no attempt to retain the layout of the print edition on this one.

Also uploaded a revision of the Westcott rendition, mainly fixing a few stylistic inconsistencies and related issues, also clarifying a few of my notes. Percy Bullock's "Introduction" is still omitted from this copy.

I have noticed other re-sets of the Mead edition on Scribd, but they only include the first volume.