I am he, the Truth, who hate that iniquity be wrought in the kosmos

 

Uploaded a bunch of revisions and corrections to the version of Crowley's Liber Samekh on Scribd.  Mainly this means that the text of the "Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist" (the Graeco-Egyptian ritual of exorcism which was turned, via various layers of translation, paraphrase, mis-copying and creative mangling, into Samekh), has been re-set in Greek Unicode, many typos in my previous transcript fixed and a few notes on the text added.

As alluded to in my previous post, it turns out that digital photographs of the whole of London Papyrus 46 a.k.a. PGM V can be found on the British Library website; based on these images I have expanded my notes on the text, added a more accurate rendition of the "beneficial sign" & decided that I no longer agree entirely with either Preisendanz's or Goodwin's transcriptions.

[Header image taken from photographs of London Papyrus 46 fol. 2 ro., source as link above.]

This is it, which the Angels have issued a DMCA strike on

To be clear, the post title is hyperbole and I *haven't* been issued with a DMCA strike in connection with the images of the BL microfilms of Sloane 3191 that I posted on the CP Scribd page a decade ago; I deleted them voluntarily as they are now entirely redundant.

I recently discovered, initially while working on improvements to my re-set of Crowley's "Liber Samekh," that high-quality digital photographs of selected items from the British Library's manuscript collection are now viewable online (bl.uk/manuscripts).  In addition to London Papyrus 46, a.k.a PGM V, this includes the whole of Sloane MSS. 3188 (Dee's early spirit diaries) and 3191 (the digests, containing the Angelic Keys, De Heptarchia Mystica, Liber Scientiæ Auxilii & victoriæ terrestris and the book of supplications and invocations) are now viewable, and these are far superior quality to those digitised microfilms; so now you only have Dee's scrawl and 400+ years of deterioration to the manuscripts to worry about.

EDIT: the addition of Sloane MS 3188 was apparently relatively recent (September last year), per this BL blog post.  The pseudo-Dee "Rosie Crucian Secrets" (Harley MS. 6485) has apparently been up since 2015 or earlier.

Quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superius.

Missed this when I last posted an update of the Mead Hermetica, but turns out that in 2018 Cambridge University Press published Hermetica II, represented as a continuation of Brian Copenhaver's 1992 (many reprints) translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius.

This comprises annotated translations of the 29 Hermetic excerpts and fragments from the anthology of Stobæus that were in tom. iii & iv of Nock & Festugière's 1946-54 edition of the texts, as well as the "Vienna fragments" mentioned by Copenhaver, fragments of Hermetic texts from a papyrus at Oxford discovered in 1991 and multiple brief quotations and references by writers of late antiquity, as well as citations from early mediæval Arabic writers, and the famous Emerald Tablet.

Litwa, M, David: Hermetica II: the Excerpts of Stobaeus, Papyrus Fragments, and Ancient Testimonies in an English Translation with Notes and an Introduction.  Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Unfortunately this has yet to see the kind of accessible paperback reprint that Copenhaver got; the print edition lists for over £70 new.

Ten ni noberu, ryū ga gotoku

 Gods, has it really been over a year since the last update?  And what a year . . .

The last two uploads on the CP Scribd account are . . . something of a departure from most of what has gone before, being guides for a PlayStation 3 video game that was only ever released in Japan: Ryū ga Gotoku: Kenzan! (龍が如く：見参), a 2008 spin-off from the Sega franchise better known in English speaking markets as Yakuza.

Fortunately for those of us whose knowledge of Japanese is limited to a few stock social phrases & insults from watching subtitled anime, a comprehensive English guide for the game was posted on a site called Gamefaqs in 2009.  Unfortunately, owing to the limits of that site at the time, the guide is entirely in ASCII plaintext, whereas the game contains hardly anything in Roman script apart from "Press Start Button," "Level Up" and "Game Over."

Annotated Maps – maps of the main city areas and a general overview of the game world; locations are marked in Japanese script on each map with transliterations / translations in the tables following.

Sub-story guide – extracted from the Gamefaqs guide, edited, formatted & with relevant Japanese text for story titles, dialogue options &c. inserted.

More minor updates.

Progress on Book of the Beginnings vol. ii is still at an absolute crawl, largely because I keep getting distracted.  Finished giving a once-over to The Natural Genesis vol. ii; that has now been uploaded, along with a bunch of corrections to the Mead Hermetica and the text sections of Hartmann's butchery of Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians (I no longer have the use of the graphics software I used to re-set and partially colour the plates, so no further improvements there; I did however replace the crappy re-drawings of two emblematic figures from a largely unconnected [1] German alchemical work which Hartmann used as header images for the text sections with better versions from a copy of the Azoth sive Aureliae Occultae Philosphorum on Google Books).

While the "16th century" part of the full title of the Geheime Figuren is questionable, many of the known sources can be dated to the first half of the 17th century, with one of the earliest (the emblematic figure Mons Philosophorum and its accompanying text) appearing in a German alchemical compendium first published in 1604, Alchymia Vera [2].  The figure "Poculum Pansophiæ" appeared in a Rosicrucian work printed in 1618, the Speculum Sophium Rhodostauroticum of "Theophilus Schweighardt."  The two alchemical tracts, Tractatus aureus de lapide philosophorum and Aureum Seculum Redivivum were both printed in German in 1625 or earlier, and were translated into Latin and bound up in the collection Musaeum Hermeticum ("Restored and Enlarged" edition 1678, English translation in two vols. 1893, many reprints).  The figure accompanying the text of the "Emerald Tablet of Hermes" appeared in the Azoth sive Aureliæ Occultæ Philosophorum, also known as Von den verborgenen Philosophischen Geheimnussen der heimlichen Goldblumen u.s.w., printed in both Latin and German versions at Frankfurt in 1613, although comparing the German texts of the Emerald Tablet in the latter volume and the Geheime Figuren suggests the latter was back-translated from the Latin translation of the German of "Basil Valentine" (which had in turn probably been made from an earlier Latin version).  The versified "explanation" of the Emerald Tablet is not identical to that in von den verborgenen u.s.w. or Azoth, unless very loosely paraphrased / back-translated.  About half the symbolic diagrams derive from a work which circulated in manuscript in German in the 18th century known as the "D.O.M.A. text," an early copy of which has been dated to "around 1650." [3]

[1] The work in question does, in fact, appear to have been one of the sources of the Geheime Figuren although the material specifically drawn from it, being in the "drittes und letzes Heft" of those copies of the Altona printing that were split into three sections, was omitted in Cosmology.  It also contains two emblematic figures which later appeared in Eliphas Levi's Histoire de la Magie and subsequently in the Portal ritual of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as "The Great Hermetic Arcanum" and (slightly modified), the "more ancient form" of Tarot Trump XIV ("Hermetic Magic" in Levi).

[2] Pointed out for example by Christine Eike in a 2018 article about the sources of the Geheime Figuren at pansophers.com.  EDIT: Adam McLean previously pointed this out in a discussion in 1999 on the Alchemy website: see discussion archive here (search the page for "Mons Philsophorum").  Since the date of "1604" on the figure also appears on the title page of the book it was printed in, a reference to the myth in the Fama (pub. 1614) is unlikely, nor indeed is it clear that the compiler of the Geheime Figuren took it in such a sense; the various elements composing the figure are part of the stock symbol-set of alchemical emblem-works of the period and have no specific connection to Rosicrucianism.

[3] Rafel T. Prinke, "Lampado Trado"; published in the Hermetic Journal in 1985 and posted on the AlchemyWeb Site.

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).

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.