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Section I |
Section II Addenda |
Section III |
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To see what we've been doing, visit The Change Page! |
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Section I |
Section II Addenda |
Section III |
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The
Book of the Law
One of the central books of study, included here for your convenience. Online text here from "dowhatthouwilt.org" |
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Zanoni, by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. Crowley remarked: "Valuable for its facts
and suggestions about Mysticism." The Gutenberg project has published an online edition. The Victorian Web has a page on the life of Bulwer-Lytton and analyses of his works. Amazon critics say: "This book, written in 1842, is one of the finest examples of Spiritual Fiction and influenced the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Divided in seven sections, the fourth, entitled, "The Dweller of the Threshold" is an extremely profound expression of profound occult facts and experiences recognized as true by anyone possessing spiritual insight." From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "We will be discussing A Strange Story (1862) and Zanoni (1845), the two magical novels of Lord Lytton. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first baron Lytton, besides being one of the most popular novelists of nineteenth century England, was a Member of Parliament and Colonial Secretary before being elevated to the peerage. In a letter to Dr. W. Wynn Westcott on 24th March 1881, the Masonic scholar Kenneth Mackenzie wrote 'It has taken me a quarter of a century to obtain them [the 'real degrees' of Rosicrucian freemasonry] and the whole of the degrees are different to anything known to the Roci. Society of England --- those few who have these degrees dare not communicate them. Read H. Jennings again, and Zanoni. Even Lytton, who knew so much, was only a Neophyte and could not reply when I tested him years ago.' MacGregor Mathers, who led the early Golden Dawn along with Westcott, was so impressed with Lytton's Zanoni that his wife Moina called him 'Zan' around the house, and was thought by their friends to be following the example of the novel's heroine, Viola." |
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Strange
Story
Last
Days of Pompeii
The
Coming Race
VRIL |
A Strange Story, by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.
Crowley remarked: "Valuable for its
facts and suggestions about Magick."
(Couldn't find an English online link, but here is a German
one.) (The books below do have online texts, and the link will take you to them.) From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Thelema Lodge Section Two reading group will meet to discuss and read selections from Lytton's novel A Strange Story (1862). Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, created the first Baron Lytton of Knebworth, died in 1873 at the age of seventy, and during his own century seemed to rank with his contemporaries Dickens, Collins, Trollope, and Thackeray among the foremost mid-Victorian novelists. His works range from high-fashion stories of wealthy life, and serious novels of Victorian social criticism, to crime stories, supernatural fiction, and works of pure fancy. He also wrote many historical novels and romances, some of which included substantial scholarly and archaeological data, especially The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). The mythos of the Golden Dawn and its Secret Chiefs was imprinted by Lytton's 'Rosicrucian tale' Zanoni (1842), which so fascinated MacGregor Mathers that his wife used often to call him 'Zan' around the house. More influential on Crowley himself was Lytton's last and most interesting novel, The Coming Race (1871), a utopian fantasy of the hollow earth, where a race of winged supermen have been evolving along Darwinian lines, adapting to harsh subterranean conditions, until they conquer the secret and explosive force of natural life known as VRIL, (provided by the Sacred Text Society) and begin to arm themselves for an invasion of the surface world. Besides earning a living writing novels -- before his mother, who cut off his income when he married, died and released his inheritance -- Lytton was not only a profound student of the occult, recognized as an adept and befriended by Eliphas Levi, but a very effective and successful politician as well. First elected a Member of Parliament in 1831, he eventually served several years as Colonial Secretary in the Tory government of Lord Derby, which led to his peerage. His collected Works were published in a thirty-eight volume edition during the year following his death. The Strange Story is subtitled An Alchemical Novel, though it is in many ways a typical melodramatic and contrived travesty of romantic psychology, as other significant novels of the early 1860s (such as The Woman in White (e-text by Bibliomania.com) or Great Expectations) [Study materials provided by UCSC] tend to be. There is a Paracelsian aura of medical mystery also present, however, as the handsome young genius Dr. Allen Fenwick probes 'the great principle of animal life' in response to his beloved Lillian's mysterious lapses into trance, which -- like the much earlier Frankenstein (1818) -- significantly foreshadows the central themes of science fiction writing in our own century. There are interesting discussions of drug use (including nitrous oxide in chapter 71), numerous metaphysical footnotes, and a veiled Australian priestess named Ayesha (after a wife of Muhammad; the same name which Rider Haggard used twenty-five years later for his goddess She). Crowley also recognized this book as an antecedent to some of his own formulations, and listed it with Zanoni at the head of its section in the A.'. A.'. reading list, where it is recommended as 'valuable for its facts and suggestions about Magick.' "Full e-text of Great Expectations from Bibliomania. Full e-text of The Incantation, which includes the character Margrawe from Strange Story. |
| The Blossom and the
Fruit, by Mabel Collins. Crowley said: "Valuable for its
account of the Path."
Online text here. The publisher, in 1997, said, "This strange story has come from a far country and was brought in a mysterious manner; we claim only to be the scribes and the editors. We therefore ask that the reader will accept the theory of the reincarnation of souls as a living fact." From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Blossom and the Fruit, is by a relatively obscure novel by Madame Blavatsky's close friend, the pop-Theosophist and psychological 'ladies' novelist' Mabel Collins (1851-1927 e.v.), who published a prolific stream of fiction and non-fiction of appeal to esoteric enthusiasts at the turn of the aeon. Her novels include The Idyll of the White Lotus [e-text], Through the Gates of Gold, and The Star Sapphire, as well as The Blossom and the Fruit (1889) [e-text], which Crowley recommended as 'valuable for its account of the Path.' Originally published with the subtitle A True Story of a Black Magician, the novelist and her anonymous co-author 'claim only to be the scribes and the editors' of a 'strange story . . . brought in a mysterious manner' which outlines a 'theory of the re-incarnation of souls.' " (Here is a link to some brief commentary on many of these works from the Blavatsky archives.) Light on the Path e-text |
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| Satyricon,
by Gaius Petronius Arbiter. (Link
to Gutenberg e-text)
From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Gaius Petronius, an
imperial civil servant and celebrated "fashion arbiter" in Roman high
society, writing in the middle of the first century of the past aeon,
ended his career by suicide on orders from the Emperor Nero in the year
66. His work, an extensive collection of stories, essays, and poems,
linked by a picaresque narrative thread, has survived only in fragments.
The Satyricon follows the travels and adventures of Encolpius, who
is pursued by the wrath of Priapus and wanders through the empire amid
scenes of greed and fortune, viewing society from the bottom up." Amazon's Ingram Reviews: The most celebrated prose work to have survived from the ancient world, THE SATYRICON recounts the sleazy progress of a pair of literate scholars as they wander through the cities of the southern Mediterranean in the age of Nero, encountering type-figures whom the author wishes to satirize. P.G. Walsh captures the spirit of the original in this new and lively translation Just for fun, a link to Fellini's movie, Satyricon, described at Amazon as: Amazon.com essential video Trippy is as trippy does, even when you're talking about a movie set in ancient Rome. This 1969 Fellini opus was among the most visually arresting entries in a year when the psychedelic experience was trying to claw its way into every movie coming down the pike. But Fellini, in telling a negligible story about two young men tasting the various pleasures of Nero's hedonistic and priapic reign, aimed for images that jarred as well as seduced. He found humor in freakishness, contrasting beauty and ugliness while effortlessly passing judgment on the emptiness of a life devoted to sensation and personal freedom. More of a fever dream than a linear story, Fellini Satyricon crystallized the director's reputation as a visionary--but may have trapped him into spending the rest of his career (with the exception of Amarcord) trying to top himself in reaching new levels of outrageousness. --Marshall Fine Description Encolpius is a Roman student who begins by arguing with his friend Ascyltus over the affections of androgynous youth Giton. Ascyltus wins, whereupon Encolpius embarks upon an odyssey, partaking in a drunken orgy and being kidnapped by a bisexual sea captain and his concubine. Encolpius eventually rejoins Ascyltus to visit a suicidal Roman couple, join in a plot to kidnap a "sacred" hermaphrodite, and much more. Loosely based on the book "Satyricon" by Gaius Petronius, the "Arbiter of Elegance" in the court of Nero, Federico Fellini wrote and directed this tongue-in-cheek hymn to the "glories" of pagan times via a bizarre journey through the decadence and debauchery of Nero's Rome. |
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| The Golden Ass, by Apuleius. (Parallel English and Latin texts here) Link to an analysis
of The Golden Ass From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Join the Section Two Reading Group at Oz House for a literary discussion of The Golden Ass. The pagan philosopher and magician Apuleius was a Roman African, educated at Carthage and Athens, writing in the second half of the second century of the past aeon. A number of his works have been influential: De Deo Socratis [link to a Latin e-text] [Concerning the Daemon of Socrates] is the most comprehensive classical account of the 'genius' spirit or Holy Guardian Angel; the Apology outlines his successful defense against legal persecution for magical practices. The Golden Ass (an informal name for the prose narrative originally entitled The Metamorphosis) retells an older tale of the tribulations of a Greek named Lucius, whose magical curiosity gets him transformed into a donkey. To this Apuleius adds a detailed account of pagan redemption in the cult of Isis, and a series of interpolated stories, most notably the classic account of the romance of Eros and Psyche. Several translations of the Ass are easily available, though few are accurate with regard to the details of technical magick it contains, nor concerning the erotic descriptions." The Doo-Yoo bookstore in England has customer reviews, and here is one for this work: "Lucius Apuleius's 'The Golden Ass' is a bawdy, ribald and hilarious story of magic and erotica from the 2nd century A.D. But don’t let the date put you off—this book is unique, entertaining and thoroughly readable, with a very modern feel. Not stuffy in the least, I assure you! 'The Golden Ass' (sometimes known as 'The Metamorphosis') tells the story of Lucius, a young libertine, whose curiosity and fascination for sex and magic result in his transformation into a donkey. After suffering a series of trials and humiliations, he is eventually returned to human form by the kind intervention of the goddess Isis. Simultaneously a blend of erotic adventure, romantic comedy, and religious fable, 'The Golden Ass' is one of the truly seminal works of early European literature, with a distinctly Eastern flavouring and a very modern feel. "Lucius Apuleius lived and wrote in Latin in Romanised North Africa around the middle of the 2nd century A.D. He was well versed in the popular Greek writing of the time, and shows in all his prose a strong interest in the supernatural, in Eastern religions, and in magic. In fact he was accused of casting spells on his wife by her family, and defended himself in the legal defense, or Apologia is still existent. His interest in Greek philosophy led to the writing of a book of philosophical extracts, the 'Florida', an essay on Plato, another on Socrates' theology." Latin & English translations of Apologia online, along with several scholarly analyses. Latin e-text and commentaries of Florida, (no English translations are known to exist online) Page discussing Apuleius' life and linking to the various works above.
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| Le Comte de
Gabalis. (Link
to a French manuscript reproduction and a French online
text.) Crowley remarked: "Valuable for its hints of those things
which it mocks." (Have not been able to find an English text online.) From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "First published anonymously in Paris in 1670, bearing the subtitle The Extravagant Mysteries of the Cabalists, expounded in Five pleasant Discourses on the Secret Societies, this oddly unbalanced satirical treatise touches upon elemental sex magic, and was quickly banned in France after selling out several editions in its first few months. Written by an obscure cleric called the Abbé Nicholas P. H. de Montfaucon de Villars (born 1635, ordained 1667, assassinated 1673), who had come to Paris from Toulouse, The Extravagant Mysteries of the Comte de Gabalis became popular again in English translation early in the following century. Along with several imitations and related works, it created a popular interest in erotic contacts with elemental spirits, which continued to raise eyebrows as these ideas were absorbed back into the folk-tale tradition." The Abredor bookstore in France sells an attractive version (in French, alas!). Here is an extract from that edition. |
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| The Rape of the Lock, by Alexander Pope.
The University of Massachusetts has a whole
page devoted to Pope and, specifically, this poem. Carnegie Mellon
has also put up the text. From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Alexander Pope's satire of heroic poetry, one of the most skillful pieces of verse in the language, was written and revised between 1711 and 1714 of the past aeon. The story is based upon a scandal among London fashion celebrities of the period, and involves not the forceful insertion of a key, but the covert clipping of a lock of hair. We will examine the poem in light of Crowley's recommendation that, like Undine, it is valuable for its account of elementals. The following comes from the Twickenham Edition of Pope's poems: 'The families concerned in the Rape of the Lock--the Fermors, Petres, and Carylls--were prominent members of that group of great intermarried Roman Catholic families owning land in the home counties, most of whom came within the circle of Pope's friends and acquaintances and to whom Pope considered his own family to belong. Some time before 21 March, 1712, when Pope sold his poem to Lintott, Robert, Lord Petre had cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair, and John Caryll had suggested to Pope that he should write a poem to heal the estrangement that followed between the two families: "The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor's hair, was taken too seriously, and caused an estrangement between the two families, though they had lived so long in great friendship before. A common acquaintance and well-wisher to both, desired me to write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was with this view that I wrote the Rape of the Lock."A brief biography of Pope: "Pope was born 21 May, 1688, in London. His father was a cloth merchant living in the City (a part of London); both his parents were Catholic. It was a period of intense anti-Catholic sentiment in England, and at some point (ca. 1700) in Alexander's childhood, the Pope family was forced to relocate to be in compliance with a statute forbidding Catholics from living within ten miles of London or Westminster. They moved to Binfield (Berkshire). Pope's early education was affected by his Catholicism: Catholic schools, although illegal, were allowed to survive in some places. Prior to the move to Binfield Pope spent a year at Twyford, where he wrote 'a satire on some faults of his master,' which led to his being 'whipped and ill-used...and taken from thence on that account.' (Spence). From Twyford Alexander went to study with Thomas Deane, a convert to Catholicism (who lost his position at Oxford as a result of his religious beliefs). After the Pope family moved to Binfield Alexander became self-taught. Pope's disease--apparently tuberculosis of the bone--became evident when he was about twelve. Later in Pope's life, Sir Joshua Reynolds described him as 'about four feet six high; very humpbacked and deformed.' (A sketch of Pope) A more recent biographer (Maynard Mack 155-6) has written that Pope was 'afflicted with constant headaches, sometimes so severe that he could barely see the paper he wrote upon, frequent violent pain at bone and muscle joints...shortness of breath, increasing inability to ride horseback or even walk for exercise....' Pope moved to his villa in Twickenham in 1717. While there he received visitors (just about everyone), attacked his literary contemporaries (just about everyone, although notable exceptions were Swift and Gay, with whom he had close friendships), and continued to publish poetry. He died on 21 May, 1744, at Twickenham." |
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Undine (May 2002 ed)at Amazon
at Amazon In the box below are links to other works by de la Motte Fouque, and analyses of his works. If you click on a link, a new window will open. |
Undine, by de la Motte Fouque. (Link to the Gutenberg project English
translation.)
From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "We will be looking this month at Undine, by Friedrich Freiherr de la Motte Fouqué,
a fairy-tale novella originally published in German in 1811. Exploring the
possibilities for relations between elemental water spirits and humans,
this story was seen frequently in dramatic adaptation throughout the last
century, especially in opera and ballet. Its author was a Prussian
military officer who wrote prolifically in the German Romantic
manner." Link to the Project Gutenberg English and German edition. Links in the paragraph below are to e-text versions of the texts mentioned. Catherine Yonge, in her biography of Fouque, says this in the introduction: "Four tales are, it is said, intended by the Author to be appropriate to the Four Seasons: the stern, grave 'Sintram', to winter; the tearful, smiling, fresh 'Undine', to Spring; the torrid deserts of the 'Two Captains', to summer; and the sunset gold of 'Aslauga's Knight', to autumn. Of these two are before us. The author of these tales, as well as of many more,
was Friedrich, Baron de la Motte Fouque, one of the foremost of the
minstrels or tale-tellers of the realm of spiritual chivalry--the realm
whither Arthur's knights departed when they 'took the Sancgreal's holy
quest,'--whence Spenser's Red Cross knight and his fellows came forth on
their adventures, and in which the Knight of la Mancha believed, and
endeavoured to exist. "This genius is especially traceable in his two masterpieces, Sintram and Undine. Sintram was inspired by Albert Durer's engraving of the 'Knight of Death,' of which we give a presentation. It was sent to Fouque by his friend Edward Hitzig, with a request that he would compose a ballad on it. The date of the engraving is 1513, and we quote the description given by the late Rev. R. St. John Tyrwhitt, showing how differently it may be read. ' 'Some say it is the end of the strong wicked man, just overtaken by Death and Sin, whom he has served on earth. It is said that the tuft on the lance indicates his murderous character, being of such unusual size. You know the use of that appendage was to prevent blood running down from the spearhead to the hands. They also think that the object under the horse's off hind foot is a snare, into which the old oppressor is to fall instantly. The expression of the faces may be taken either way: both good men and bad may have hard, regular features; and both good men and bad would set their teeth grimly on seeing Death, with the sands of their life nearly run out. Some say they think the expression of Death gentle, or only admonitory (as the author of 'Sintram'); and I have to thank the authoress of the 'Heir of Redclyffe' for showing me a fine impression of the plate, where Death certainly had a not ungentle countenance--snakes and all. I think the shouldered lance, and quiet, firm seat on horseback, with gentle bearing on the curb-bit, indicate grave resolution in the rider, and that a robber knight would have his lance in rest; then there is the leafy crown on the horse's head; and the horse and dog move on so quietly, that I am inclined to hope the best for the Ritter.' "Thus he lived, felt, and believed what he wrote, and though his dramas and poems do not rise above fair mediocrity, and the great number of his prose stories are injured by a certain monotony, the charm of them is in their elevation of sentiment and the earnest faith pervading all. His knights might be Sir Galahad –
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| Black Magic, by Marjorie
Bowen. Crowley remarked: "An intensely interesting story of
sorcery."
( There is a portrait of Ms. Bowen (as well as commentary in German) at a page entitled "SPEURTOCHT NAAR DE GÓTHS: het verhaal van twee portretten " From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Crowley described Marjorie Bowen's historical fantasy of the dark ages (originally published in 1909 e.v.) as "an intensely interesting story of sorcery." Black Magic, however, is apt to strike modern readers as a shallow and conventional narrative, written quickly by a precocious nineteen-year-old, and relying for its interest on its sensational themes: the reign of Anti-Christ within the Roman Catholic church, the millennium, and the legendary Pope Joan. Approach the novel as an exercise in speed-reading. As an indication of the conflicting responses provoked by this book, we reprint here the brief review of it which Crowley published the year after it appeared.
"I have always admired your work so greatly — I think 'Love' one of the best stories ever written — that I ordered your autobiography with a great deal of excited interest. I didn't expect to be so much moved. I don't mean only that it is wonderful for you to have developed your art in such adverse circumstances. I mean also that you have had the courage to admit that you have been unhappy and have been the victim of continuous misfortune. The world is more hostile to such admissions than to any confession of guilt. You have to pretend that you've never been unlucky and that people have not been cruel, for no other reason than that the world is too ungenerous to like feeling pity. | |
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Unabridged Audiobook
Downloadable
In the box below are links to other works by Balzac, and analyses of his works. If you click on a link, a new window will open.
 |
Le Peau de Chagrin, by Honoré de Balzac.
Crowley remarked: "A magnificent magical allegory"
From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: " 'A magnificent magical allegory' is Crowley's
recommendation of Balzac's novel Le Peau de
Chagrin, the title of which is variously rendered in English as The Magic Skin, [plain text English link at
Gutenberg with lots of Gutenberg promo material at the front], The Wild Ass's Skin, The Deadly Skin etc., and
perhaps literally means 'the sorry pelt.' We will be reading and
discussing this very enjoyable supernatural tragedy. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), author of the grand series of nearly fifty novels and many short and long stories, collectively known as The Human Comedy, [another plain text English link at Gutenberg with lots of Gutenberg promo material at the front] was an almost scientific novelist, systematically recording the complexities of sensibility and the developing styles and values of French culture during his lifetime. Although especially concerned with the psychology of social manners, the Balzac oeuvre also contains precisely formulated studies of mystical and philosophical problems, with the story of the magic skin (a beautiful piece of onager hide which has been charged as a talisman) outstanding among the latter category. The novel was first published in 1831, but Balzac loved to go back and revise his work, and issued seven new versions of this book through 1845. The story explores the human faculty of will, about which Balzac enjoyed speaking in grandiose, confidant, and progressive nineteenth-century terms as a potential 'material force similar to steam-power.' It would become capable of powerful new achievements when refined by the development of subtle techniques in new directions of research involving ethereal mechanics, animal magnetism, mental electricity, and other marvels of the day. In another story a Balzac character claims of the human will that 'nothing in the moral world could resist it when a man trained himself to concentrate it, to control the sum of it, and constantly to direct upon other men's minds the projection . . .' of his will ('Louis Lambert' in Le Livre mystique, 1835)." From The March 2000 Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The collection of Amusing Tales by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) will be our subject for reading and discussion together. Join Caitlin for a good look at this classic imitation of late medieval narrative styles, comprising thirty stories in the tradition of Boccaccio and Rabelais. Balzac devoted most of his career to the dozens of stories and more than thirty novels depicting early nineteenth century French life, known collectively as the Human Comedy. Renowned for this overarching and interwoven fictional chronicle of his times, Balzac was not content to let his 'modern' fictional studies drift without an anchor to the traditional range of French narrative attitudes from the past. Thus the Droll Stories lie outside the bounds of the great 'comedy' of Balzac's France; as their author expressed the relationship, 'like a laughing child' he strung up 'the arabesque' of these old- style comic stories around the established structure of his great fictional project. "This month's entry by Balzac, which includes the
shocking tale of 'The Succuba,' comes down to
us with the Artemis Iota seal of approval."
(Here is
an excerpt from The Succuba in one of the Northern
European languages. I don't think it's German....)
This link
is to an interesting essay linking Lilith to the myth of the succubae.
(Hosted by the United Satan Covenire. Pop-up warning.)
The Literature Network has a biography and a
comprehensive link to many of his works in e-text, and is well worth
exploring.
Here is
an excerpt from the biography on that site: "French journalist and writer, one of the creators of
realism in literature. Balzac's huge production of novels and short
stories are collected under the name La Comédie
humaine, which originated from Dante's The
Divine Comedy. Before his breakthrough as an author, Balzac wrote
without success several plays and novels under different pseudonyms. |
| No.
19 by Edgar Jepson. Crowley remarked: "An excellent tale of modern
magic."
(No
Online or in-print text has been found yet, but the E-Book Mall claims they will stock Jepson
Soon.) From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "No. 19 is one of the most obscure works on Crowley's original bibliography of secondary and 'suggestive' occult writings. Jepson was primarily a humor writer on the staff of the original Vanity Fair magazine, which was edited in London by Frank Harris and numbered Aleister Crowley among its contributors. He also published several popular novels, but is hardly remembered at all today, although No. 19 is an enjoyable occult thriller, interesting as a possible influence upon the concept and structure of Crowley's Rites of Eleusis. It appeared in the spring of 1910 e.v. and went through two editions in its first season, portraying ceremonial magic as a serious and effective study involving discipline, dedication, and enormous risk. We learn gradually from a concerned neighbor's narration about a series of rites being celebrated in the back garden of No. 19 Walden Road in Hertford Park, an otherwise respectable London suburb. There are seven rites, each invoking a different ancient god, and in addition to tedious recitations they involve periodic libations from a shared cup of drugged wine, orgiastic dancing, and the concluding embodiment of chaos as the great god Pan (with destructive results). They are produced seasonally, year after year, by organized magical students in robes at night according to a lunar schedule, and led by an accomplished, sincere, but dangerously obsessed world-traveling magus. It is very likely that Crowley and some of his students read and enjoyed No. 19 very shortly before writing and producing The Rites of Eleusis during the summer and autumn of that same year. Although the weaker participants fail in terror as the operation proceeds, those who are pure of heart, and able to keep the power of their wills concentrated, not only survive these rites but successfully channel the power generated in the ritual to their own good, discovering in the end that 'woman is the key of the ultimate lock.' Only those who become distracted, or complain during rehearsals, or are not able to learn their lines properly, end up driven mad or crushed by the sacred forces, or scared to death by the results. 'Uncle! Uncle! There's something horrible in the garden!'" Arsin Lupine by Jepson is available in several sites on the Net. | |
Dracula
(MassMarket Paperback) at Amazon
Contexts, Reviews, and Reactions Dramatic and Film Variations Criticism (Norton Critical Edition) at Amazon  Edward Gorey's Dracula: A Toy Theatre: Die Cut, Scored and Perforated Foldups and Foldouts |
Dracula, by Bram Stoker. (This link is to the
Norton edition, as the one Sr. Petra prefers.) Crowley remarked: "Valuable
for its account of legends concerning vampires."
From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Thelema Lodge Section Two (Suggestive Literature)
Reading Group will discuss the initiated implications of vampirism as
presented in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.
Abraham Stoker of Dublin was a civil servant, drama critic, and the
manager of the period's greatest actor, Henry Irving. Dracula, his only significant literary
production, was published to immediate success in 1897. Thematically, as
the story of the nearly apocalyptic introduction of a foreign personality
of supernatural evil into Victorian England, Dracula is prototypical of the "horror" genre of
popular literature. As a novel it is skillfully told, using a narrative
technique of stringing together fictional journals, letters, reports, and
depositions, which maintains the reader close to the characters" momentary
impressions. (This manner of constructing a novel had been developed
thirty years earlier by Dickens" friend and partner, Wilkie Collins,
perhaps the greatest narrative craftsman of the mid-Victorian novelists.)
Stoker, who was not associated with the Golden Dawn (as claimed in the
careless French best-seller of 35 years ago, Morning of the Magicians), was an infamous Irish
lecher, much concerned with syphilis (from which he suffered). This can be
relevant to a reading of Dracula, where
vampirism threatens the "decent" characters very much in the manner of a
venereal infection, so consistently that the book can easily be read as an
allegory of sexually transmitted disease, as well as an epitome of the
last gasp of decadent Christian theology. Online, searchable version conveniently divided into chapters by the Literature Network. The Literature Network introduction to Dracula: One of the most popular stories ever told, Dracula has been re-created for the stage and screen hundreds of times in the last century. Yet it is essentially a Victorian saga, an awesome tale of thrillingly bloodthirsty vampire whose nocturnal atrocities reflect the dark underside of a supremely moralistic age. Above all, Dracula is a quintessential story of suspense and horror, boasting one of the most terrifying characters in literature: centuries-old Count Dracula, whose diabolical passions prey upon the innocent, the helpless, the beautiful. Bram Stoker, who was also the manager of the famous actor Sir Henry Irving, wrote seventeen novels. Dracula remains his most celebrated and enduring work -- even today this Gothic masterpiece has lost none of the spine-tingling impact that makes it a classic of the genre. |
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Scientific Romances First and Second Series (2 Vols in 1) at Amazon Amazon Notes on Availability: This title usually ships within 3 to 4 weeks.  The Fourth Dimension (1904) at Amazon |
Scientific Romances, by
H. Hinton. Crowley remarked: "Valuable as an introduction to the study of
the Fourth Dimension."
(An
Excerpt, "A Picture of Our Universe" in e-text) (A complete translation into Japanese) From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Hinton was an English academic mathematician who lived from 1853 to 1907 e.v., devoting much of his energy to the popularization of fourth-dimensional concepts, especially for use in memory and modeling systems. He coined the term "tesseract" for the hypercube, and published a series of essays to explain its use in 1884-1886, which were afterwards collected as the Scientific Romances. Hinton saw his mission as the education of the imagination, working with a system of colored wooden blocks (which he designed and marketed) to illustrate concepts of "double-rotation" between dimensions. 'Start with the idea of your entire life as being a fixed object in 4-D space time, then imagine that while some second time lapses, your entire life gradually evolves into a different one.' " Here is an essay by Historian Bruce Clarke on Hinton's work. An Analysis of the stories from the e-mag Alive.
Eldritch
Press Site has e-text of many of Hinton's work, including The
Fourth Dimension. Their biography of Hinton reads: "Charles H. Hinton, (1853-1907), invented a gun used
in baseball batting practice. [Harper's Weekly, Mar. 20, 1897, 301-2.] He
is also known for his speculations on the fourth dimension. He married a
daughter of logician George Boole, but was forced to leave England after a
bigamy conviction. An instructor of mathematics at Princeton (fired) and
assistant professor at Minnesota, he served at the Naval Observatory and
as patent examiner in Washington. There he died suddenly when asked to
give a toast to "female philosophers" at the Society of Philanthropic
Inquiry meeting." |
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Illustrated Works: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, the Hunting of the Snark (Literary Classics) (Note from Sr. Petra: A great edition with super illustrations)
The
following box is a list of |
Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking
Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark,
by Lewis Carroll. Crowley remarked: "Valuable to those who understand the
Qabalah."
(Project
Gutenberg e-text of Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and Hunting of the Snark.) From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Section Two returns to Wonderland this month; our meeting will be devoted to Lewis Carroll's Alice books, along with The Hunting of the Snark. The mid-Victorian Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who published Alice to world-wide acclaim in 1865 and 1872 (the Snark following in 1876), brought a careful and complex sense of play to the numbers inside his tales. Crowley's thrice repeated recommendation of these books as 'Valuable to those who understand the Qabalah' is more teasing than elucidating, and a comprehensive assessment of the Alice Qabalah is no simple task. Indeed, it was this very challenge with which our reading group began, and now after four years of investigation into the literature of suggestion we're back for another look. We'll have to deal with being 9 feet high, having 10 hour lessons, and entering a 15 inch door, as well as abiding by Rule 42. Carroll's Qabalah is not limited to figures and sums, for it also includes proportions and alternate methods of counting. It encompasses the system of playing cards in Wonderland and the chess game beyond the Looking Glass. And it extends in all directions into nonsense, though not into chaos or gibberish or vacancy, for Carroll's nonsense is that of a perfect calculating system without any exterior references to give it relation or significance. In Qabalah, however, nothing is without reference: 'Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his 'fall' is therefore the descent of spirit into matter; and it is only too painfully familiar to us that all the king's horses and all his men cannot restore us to the height. Only the King Himself can do that! But one can hardly comment upon a theme which has been so fruitfully treated by Ludovicus Carolus, the most holy illuminated man of God. His masterly treatment of the identity of the three reciprocating paths of Daleth, Teth, and Pe, is one of the most wonderful passages in the Holy Qabalah. His resolution of what we take to be the bond of slavery into very love, the embroidered neckband of honour bestowed upon us by the King himself, is one of he most sublime passages in this class of literature' -- from the 'Interlude' in Book Four, part two.There is an interesting essay, entitled "A Theory of Qabalah and Magic -- Part One: Toward a New Definition of the Qabalah" by Nun Tzaddi 950 copyright 1997, on the Magus Books website, which discusses the Qabalah in various art works, including Lewis Carroll's. There is an odd but compelling web page comparing quotes out of Alice to the The Path between Kether and Tiphareth (1 to 6), by a woman who calls herself "An Implicate Empath in the Sun, and who provides several other pages about the Qabalah. (Tripod member, so beware Pop-ups!) As a tangent, here is a review of the Wonderland Tarot deck, at All Things Tarot, and more pictures at the "Official Wonderland Tarot Site." The Sirius-Beta site discusses how various logicians and theologians to analyze language, including using the Qabalah, and describes a new Qabalah system. Among other things, they describe the system this way: "Our simple metaphoric devices are collected in what we call GeoKabbalitter1. They are:
and to a lesser extent:
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"
The Arabian Nights(Burton Translation) at Amazon
Husain Haddawy (Introduction), Muhsin Mahdi (Editor) which really captures the Arab flavor of the stories (Sr. Petra) Finally, if you like Audiobooks, Sr. Petra and her son have really enjoyed this edition, read by male and female Arab native speakers:
[ABRIDGED] by Raad Rawi (Reader), Souad Faress (Reader), N. J. Dawood (Translator)
of Dawood Translation at Amazon In the box below are links to other works by and about Burton, and analyses of his works. If you click on a link, a new window will open. |
The Arabian Nights, translated by either Sir
Richard Burton or John Payne. Crowley remarked: "Valuable as a storehouse
of oriental Magick-lore."
E-text of
the Burton translation, from the Sacred Texts
Society. "Aeladdin and the Enchanted Lamp", e-text of Payne Translation Tales from the Arabic, e-text of the Payne Translation, which include some of the Thousand Night stories and also some other tales. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "We will continue with the 'suggestive' books, devoting an evening to oriental narrative with Burton's Arabian Nights. This collection is far too extensive for a single evening's survey, but many of the tales are familiar, and if you have a favorite, or have time to sample a few of them, your suggestions will be welcome. We hope to read a tale or two together, and share our impressions of the collection. "Sir Richard Frances Burton's sixteen volume translation of Alf Laylah Wa Laylah assembles a comprehensive collection of the Islamic storytelling traditions of the middle ages, under the name of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The volumes were issued "to subscribers only" between 1885 and 1888. Along with the stories themselves, which Burton first dared print uncensored in their details of erotic lore and carnal magick, more than ten per-cent of the work consists of the translator's commentary and notes. Burton ranks among the greatest travelers, conversationalists, geographers, linguists, and ethnographers of his century, and was also profoundly experienced in several traditions of spiritual discipline (including initiation as a Kamil or Sufi Master, entry into a Sikh worship circle, and a full appreciation for the secret world of Islam from the inside). Devoting the last thirty years of his life to the Nights, Burton supplied a wealth of data from the world of the stories, enough to qualify him easily as the Gnostic saint of footnotes." Amazon Reviewers say about the Burton Translation: "Full of mischief, valor, ribaldry, and romance, The Arabian Nights has enthralled readers for centuries. These are the tales that saved the life of Shahrazad, whose husband, the king, executed each of his wives after a single night of marriage. Beginning an enchanting story each evening, Shahrazad always withheld the ending: A thousand and one nights later, her life was spared forever. This volume reproduces the 1932 Modern Library edition, for which Bennett A. Cerf chose the most famous and representative stories from Sir Richard F. Burton's multivolume translation, and includes Burton's extensive and acclaimed explanatory notes. These tales, including Aladdin; or, the Wonderful Lamp, Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, have entered into the popular imagination, demonstrating that Shahrazad's spell remains unbroken." Amazon Reviewers Say (about the new edition): "Haddawy uses Muhsin Mahdi's widely accepted, recent, definitive edition, which is based on the 14th-century Syrian manuscript to form the first serious translation into English in more than a century." Scholar Jeff Leach says of the Dawood Translation (Audiobook source): "This book is a selection of the choicest tales from the Thousand and One Nights. The translator, N.J. Dawood, also translated the Koran for the Penguin Classics series. Dawood explains in the introduction that the first of these tales appeared in a written form around 850 C.E., in a book called, 'A Thousand Legends.' More tales, of lesser quality, were added over the years until an anonymous editor in Cairo finally codified them in the 18th century. A French version of some of the stories appeared in the 17th century, and was followed by several English versions in the 19th century; the best known adaptation came from Sir Richard Burton, in 10 volumes. The stories are a mix of Arabic, Persian, and Indian tales and appear to have been written in response to classical Arabic literature. The Arabs do not consider them part of the classic canon, and after reading these stories, I can see why. They are aggressive and highly sexualized, and are loaded with sorcery, fantasy, and criticism of authority figures. "Whatever their origins and means of transmission, these are excellent and entertaining stories. I cannot think of one tale in this selection that I did not like. Included in the book is the instantly recognizable Aladdin story, as well as the Sinbad voyages. Other tales are just as interesting: 'The Tale of the Hunchback,' 'The Tale of Judar and his Brothers,' 'The Porter and the Three Girls of Baghdad,' and many others. Many of these stories are cycles; they have stories within stories, as characters in one story tell their own stories. At the end of the cycle, the story is cleverly wrapped up, usually with a happy ending. I do not think I need to go into detail about Aladdin or Sinbad, except to say that I was surprised to see Aladdin described as Chinese. Providing details to these stories would be useless anyway because they are so detailed as to be impervious to summary. "There is no doubt that many of these stories started as oral stories, and retained that shape into the written versions. The best example is the Sinbad cycle. All of the stories in this cycle are framed in the same way. This repetition made it easier to memorize the stories, or at least the basic outline. A good storyteller could take the frame and fill in the blanks with whatever his heart desired. You often see this kind of writing in the Bible. "Social roles and class play a large part in these stories. Women are presented as wily and dangerous, but not always. Several stories show men trying to pull fast ones on the ladies, with the results much to the detriment of the men. Many stories show how the high and mighty come crashing down, or how the lowly are elevated to great status. These movements are attributed to the grace or condemnation of Allah, and the characters all act out their movements with Allah close by. "You will not go wrong with this book. These are immensely entertaining stories for both children and adults, although you might want to find a toned down version for the kiddies. Why? I am thinking about the tale where a man and some women play 'name that body part.' My only criticism of this version is that the tale of 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves' is absent. I have no idea why it is missing, but the book loses one star for this grave omission." |
 Malory's Le Morte D' Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table Keith Baines, Trs. Robert Graves, Intro.
 The Sword and the Circle Rosemary Sutcliff's juvenile edition
to Malory: Reading the Morte D'Arthur (Arthurian Studies, 20) Terence McCarthy, ed.
The Image of the Vessel in the Queste Del Saint Graal and Malory's Tale of the Sankgreal by Anne Marie D'Arcy (A new book discussing the Search for the Grail and Grail imagery in various Grail-quest stories.)
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Morte d'Arthur, by Sir
Thomas Mallory. Crowley remarked, "Valuable as a storehouse of occidental
Magick-lore."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Section Two reading group will be looking this
month at the last and greatest achievement of the medieval romance
tradition of Arthur, the archetypal King of Britain, as collected and
translated in the mid-fifteenth century by Sir Thomas Mallory. Join us for
a discussion of the myth and magic of the Arthurian world, with selected
readings from one of the greatest early masters of narrative prose in our
language. Collecting most of his stories from the elaborate French prose
romances of Arthur's knights, Mallory concentrated on their essential
elements, organizing them in dynamic progressions (as in a novel) instead
of interweaving brief incidents in the tapestry fashion of the romances.
Although his view of the supernatural tends to skepticism, his
presentation of the magical aspects of the story is intensified by the
direct precise details of the marvels he does recount. Malory's Works, written during many years of imprisonment
following a career of violent outlawry, do not make a single unified Arthuriad, but a sequence of tales, unified in
style and manner rather than in design and structure. The splendors of
chivalric fraternity which he presents are among the core values of
western civilization, but he recounts them with a haunting undertone of
elegy, a sense of approaching ruin and of the fall of princes, which
reminds us often of the proximity of chaos." E-text at the Sacred Texts site. (Arthur Rackham edition.) Painting by Carrick (Known as a Celtic Twilight Artist) E-text and Beardsley illustrations by Caxton. Selfknowledge.com's e-text and Biography and portraits of Mallory. The Luminarium has a lot of essays and materials on Malory's version of Arthur, as well as discussions on the magical meanings of some of the stories. Go to the Search page and enter "Malory" . Here is a brief excerpt from their biography of Malory: "Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire "was born into a gentry family that had lived for centuries in the English Midlands near the point where Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire meet. His father, John Malory, was an esquire with land in all three counties, but was primarily a Warwickshire man, being twice sheriff, five times M.P. and for many years a justice of the peace for that county. John married Philippa Chetwynd... and they had at least three daughters, and one son, Thomas, who was probably born within a year either way of 1416" "Of Sir Thomas Malory’s early years, "almost nothing is known." As a young man of 23, records reveal that he was a "respectable country landowner with a growing interest in politics". He "dealt in land, witnessed deeds for his neighbours, acted as a parliamentary elector, and by 1441 had become a knight" <...> "The year 1449 "was a time of increasing division and unrest in the country, which was eventually to lead to civil war". Up to this time, Malory’s life seems to have all the markings of a traditional country gentleman, but then "with the new decade," observes Field, "Malory’s life, for no known reason, underwent a startling change". What this change entailed is obvious from the following account, but the impetus behind it remains enigmatic, although party politics, as usual, may have played a pivotal role. "On January 4, 1450, "[Malory] and 26 other armed men were said to have laid an ambush for [the Duke of] Buckingham in the Abbot of Combe's woods near Newbold Revel" (116). On May 23, 1450, Malory "allegedly rapes Joan Smith at Coventry. The charge is not of abduction but of rape in the modern sense: it says cum ea carnaliter concubit, ‘he carnally lay with her.’ It was, however, brought not by Joan under common law, but by her husband under a statute of Richard II intended to make elopement into rape even when the woman consented.". "On March 5, 1451, a warrant is issued for his arrest, and a few weeks later "he and various accomplices were alleged to have stolen cattle in Warwickshire -- 7 cows, 2 calves, 335 sheep, and a cart worth 22 pounds at Cosford, Warwickshire (116-22). Buckingham, taking with him 60 men from Warwickshire, attempts to apprehend Malory, but "in the meantime Malory apparently raided Buckingham's hunting lodge, killed his deer, and did an enormous amount of damage" -- 500 pounds worth. "<...>Malory’s adventures continued. He was "bailed out several times, and on one occasion seems to have joined an old crony on a horse-stealing expedition across East Anglia that ended in Colchester jail. He escaped from there too, ‘using swords, daggers, and langues-de-boeuf’ (a kind of halberd), but was recaptured and returned to prison in London. After this date he was shifted frequently from prison to prison, and the penalties put on his jailers for his secure keeping reached a record for medieval England". "During Henry VI's insanity, when the Duke of York was Lord Protector, Malory was given a royal pardon," which the court dismissed. Once the Yorkists invaded in 1460 and had expelled the Lancastrians, Malory was "freed and pardoned. He was never tried on any of the charges brought against him". |
Gargantua and PantagruelBurton Raffel, Trans. at Amazon
Gargantua & Pantagruel J. M. Cohen, Trans. at Amazon Click here for other books by and about Rabelais at Amazon. A new window will open when you click. |
The Works of Francois Rabelais. Crowley
remarked: "Invaluable for Wisdom."
Here is a
link to online texts of Gargantua and Pantagruel, from the
Gutenberg project, both in French and English translations. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Thelema Lodge Section Two group will be reading this month from the Works of François Rabelais, the five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, written in the 1530s and '40s, and recommended to aspirants of the A.'. A.'. as 'invaluable for wisdom.' Join Caitlin to examine selected passages from this series of gigantic prose satires, including the original Thelemites in the first 'Abbey of Thelema,' as well as the virtues of 'the herb Pantagruelion' (hemp). The wonderful illustrations by Gustav Doré will also be on hand. "Although the life of this Gnostic Saint cannot be exactly dated, Rabelais' adulthood covered the first half of the sixteenth century of the last aeon. He entered the Franciscan order as a boy, transferred as a monk to the Benedictines, then left the monastery to pursue an academic career, becoming a doctor of medicine in 1537 while also ordained as a secular priest. His first great work of comic storytelling was Pantagruel, which when published in 1532 revealed Rabelais as the master of a whole new world of comic wisdom and characterization, for which he immediately became widely known. Various later installments, some successful, others censored and unpublishable in those repressive times, or abandoned incomplete, followed for the remainder of his life. "In the words of the literary historian M. A. Screech, the foundation of Rabelais' comic universe was his ideal for a new style of spiritual alignment, individually and communally, which gradually became established as one of the dominant styles of Christian life. Gargantua contrasts superstition with Evangelism and, in the Abbey of Thelema ('will'), opposes the monastic ideal with a free society of noble Evangelicals, living under self-discipline in a community where riches and beauty are good and marriage the norm.' " From the 11/2001 Thelema Lodge Calendar: " 'Faictz ce que vouldras.' In a return to the core curriculum of the original A.'. A.'. bibliography, our Section Two reading group meets this month in appreciation of the Gnostic saint and Thelemic forerunner François Rabelais. His five encyclopedic books of scholastic, social and religious satire were written in the 1530s and '40s, negotiating the complex politics between various secular and ecclesiastical authorities in France. Stringing together his endless sequence of anecdotes are the characters of Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Panurge, whom we follow at their oversized adventures in a leisurely romance fashion, amid a great deal of drinking and destruction, throughout the messy, desperate world of Renaissance France. Bring any of the multitude of translations which you may have been using (the old French original being extraordinarily difficult), and we will compare their virtues in pursuit of this enjoyable, extensive, and problematic text. "Nothing is known of his childhood, but Rabelais lived to be about sixty years old at his death in 1553. His education and early vocation was molded within two of the great orders of religion, first the Franciscan and afterwards the Benedictine, which he left to practice as a physician before pursuing his mature career as a writer, courtier, and humanist. Over the last two decades of his life Rabelais published a miscellany of narratives, commentary, and catalogues in which he satirized the excesses of his age. Its multiple volumes addressed a vast range of concerns, and were not collected into a single book until the posthumous edition of 1567. When his first great satiric adventure of Pantagruel appeared in 1532 it was formally condemned as obscene and sacrilegious by a committee of theologians at the Sorbonne. Then, following it up in 1534 with another rambunctious ramble entitled Gargantua (a 'prequel' to the earlier book, which it precedes in collected editions), Rabelais again had to run for cover to his powerful ecclesiastical and royal patrons in order to avoid the heat. In fact, each of his subsequent volumes stirred up enormous trouble, and there is evidence that he spent time in prison toward the end of his life, although before long strings were pulled to get him out. "With his huge range of interests Rabelais was one of the great minds of the Renaissance, and in the Abbey of Thelema he looked forward into our own new aeon with a vision of cultivated equality and integrated scholarship, constituted under the sole rule of 'Do what thou wilt.' 'Rabelais was a great adept, a sort of prophet of Thelema,' Crowley wrote late in 1926 e.v. to preface his essay on 'The Antecedents of Thelema,' in which he credits 'the sublime Doctor' for setting forth 'in essence the Law of Thelema, very much as it is understood by the Master Therion himself.' Earlier Crowley had afforded Rabelais pride of place at the conclusion to the magical education of his 'son' Frater Achad as outlined in Liber Aleph, where the final enigmatic lesson concerns Panurge's oracle of the bottle and its supremely magical password, 'Trinc'." |
 Kasidah (1924 edition) at Amazon  Kasidah (1991 edition) at Amazon And, here's a list of other books at Amazon by and about Burton. A new window will open if you click on any list below. |
Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi
(1924) , by Sir Richard Burton. Crowley remarked: "Valuable as a
summary of philosophy."
Links in
the text below are to online e-texts of the various works. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Soror Phoenix will lead us in a discussion of the philosophical poem by Gnostic Saint Sir Richard Francis Burton, The Kasîdah. Published pseudonymous in 1880, these couplets are written in the Sufi style of meditative verse for which the Arabic term is qasida. Burton probably wrote the verses over an extended period, beginning in 1853 while in recuperation from his daring pilgrimage to Mecca, and they express a unique syncretic religious attitude combining elements that Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî --- Burton's magical name as a Yezidi Abdullah (leader) and Islamic pilgrim (hajji) --- had explored in his many and varied encounters with spiritual communities and sacred writings. The poem, in its author's description, presents 'an Eastern Version of Humanitarianism, blended with the skeptical, or as we may now say, the scientific habit of mind.' " The Sacred Texts Site says this about Burton: This was written by Sir Richard Burton under the pseudonym of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî after his return from Mecca in 1854. Observant readers will note that the Kasîdah contains many references to 19th Century scientific and philosophical concepts, most notably the evolution of species. Nonetheless, it is a Sufi text to the core, and one of the few instances of Burton writing in the first person about his belief system, albeit under the cloak of pseudonymity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a Kasidah is a classical Arabic or Persian panegyric, which must begin with a reference to a forsaken campground, followed by a lament, and a prayer to ones comrades to halt while the memory of the departed dwellers is invoked. The same rhyme has to run through the entire composition, not matter how long the poem is. And, Drexel University says this about the period of his life when he wrote this poem: "In 1872 Burton [image] was assigned to Trieste as consul. He wrote extensively there: travel (Iceland, India, and Africa), archaeology (Italy), his own poetry (The Kasidah), and translations of Italian, Roman, Persian poetry, and six volumes of Camoens. He brought the erotica of the East in an unexpurgated form (The Perfumed Garden, The Ananga Ranga, and The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana) to the staid Victorian world, shocking and outraging them. Burton received some measure of acclaim in his later years. Queen Victoria awarded him the honor of Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George for his service to England. Burton died in Trieste on October 20, 1890. Immediately following his death, his wife burned his diaries and current manuscripts, and followed that up with her own whitewashed version of his life, depicting him as a good Catholic, faithful husband, and wronged and misunderstood adventurer. Rebuffed as unfit to be buried in Westminster Abbey with Livingstone, Burton was later buried at Mortlake [image] in London." Another brief Biography of Burton at the Invisible Basilica.William Reddy's analysis of the Kasidah, including excerpts. A Discussion of the Kasidah, in Spanish, as "The last voyage of Sir Richard Burton." For your viewing pleasure, a site offering an animated version of the Kama Sutra. And, a nice selected list of Burton's online works. |
 "Song Celestial" or Bhagavad-Gita, 1885 1991 edition at Amazon The Song Celestial hardcover 1985 edition at Amazon. And here is a list of other translations of the Bhagavad-Gita available from Amazon. A new window will open when you click on one of these links. |
Song Celestial or Bhagavad-Gita, 1885, by Sir
Edwin Arnold. Crowley remarked: "'The Bhagavad-Gita" in verse."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: The Song Celestial, Sir Edwin Arnold's Victorian blank-verse translation
of the Bhagavad-Gita. Join Caitlin for a look into one of the earliest
popularly available English versions of the basic text of Vedanta,
excerpted from the Sanskrit Mahabharata. Following his earlier success
with a poetic retelling of the life of the Buddha in 1879 (providing the
first popular exposure to those doctrines among English readers) he
repeated the same strategy over the following decade, producing poetic
versions of Hindu and Islamic texts which had been little known except
among linguistic specialists and esoteric groups. The Song Celestial appeared in 1886, and has been
frequently reprinted as a curiosity, but as it does not seem to be
currently in print, the lodgemaster will have some Xerox copies available
for readers unable to turn it up in the used book shops." Fordham University presents this introduction to the Arnold translation: "During the centuries in which Buddhism was establishing itself in the east of India, the older Brahmanism in the west was undergoing the changes which resulted in the Hinduism which is now the prevailing religion of India. The main ancient sources of information with regard to these Hindu beliefs and practises are the two great epics, the "Ramayana" and the Maha Bharata. The former is a highly artificial production based on legend and ascribed to one man, Valmiki. The latter, a "huge conglomeration of stirring adventure, legend, myth, history, and superstition," is a composite production, begun probably as early as the fourth or fifth century before Christ, and completed by the end of the sixth century of our era. It represents many strata of religious belief. "The Bhagavad-Gita," of which a translation is here given, occurs as an episode in the Maha-Bharata, and is regarded as one of the gems of Hindu literature. The poem is a dialogue between Prince Arjuna, the brother of King Yudhisthira, and Vishnu, the Supreme God, incarnated as Krishna, and wearing the disguise of a charioteer. The conversation takes place in a war-chariot, stationed between the armies of the Kauravas and Pandavas, who are about to engage in battle. "To the Western reader much of the discussion seems childish and illogical; but these elements are mingled with passages of undeniable sublimity. Many of the more puzzling inconsistencies are due to interpolations by later re-writers. "It is," says Hopkins, "a medley of beliefs as to the relation of spirit and matter, and other secondary matters; it is uncertain in its tone in regard to the comparative efficacy of action and inaction, and in regard to the practical man's means of salvation; but it is at one with itself in its fundamental thesis, that all things are each a part of one Lord, that men and gods are but manifestations of the One Divine Spirit." After this introduction follows their translation of the text.The Theosophical University Online has a complete e-text. The Sirtis Website has another version. |
 The Light of Asia at Amazon There is another hardcover version which came out in 2000, but it is generally unavailable at online bookstores.  With an introduction by Sangharakshita |
The Light of Asia , by
Sir Edwin Arnold. Crowley remarked: "An account of the attainment of
Gotama Buddha."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "This 'account of the attainment of Gautama Buddha'
takes the form of a vigorous Victorian verse epic, and was originally
published in 1879. The story of Siddhartha, the Indian prince who achieved
illumination as the Buddha and taught the Middle Path of righteousness, is
retold from several sources in a poetic version for English readers, which
helped introduce concepts such as 'Nirvana,' 'Dharma,' and 'Karma' to our
language. We will be reading selected passages from the poem's eight
books, and discussing them in the context of the imperial British
fascination with artifacts of the ancient spiritual cultures of Asia and
Africa." The Boston Friends of the Western Buddhist Order site says of the work: "This inspiring poem, though written more than a hundred years ago, retains the power to move us in a way that no prose rendering of the life of the Buddha can. We cannot but admire the courage, determination, and self-sacrifice of the Indian prince who, out of compassion, left the palace to find a remedy for the suffering of the world. Since its first publication, The Light of Asia has inspired many to learn more about Buddhism and to put its teachings into practice." The Theosophical University Online has a complete e-text. The Dharma Society has another version online. |
 Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries at Amazon. Here is a list of other books carried by Amazon by and about Jennings. If you click on one of the links below, a new window will open.
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Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries , by
Hargrave Jennings. Crowley remarked: "Valuable to those who can read
between the lines."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "We will be
reading from and discussing the significance of two classic volumes of
Victorian Rosicrucian scholarship, by Hargrave Jennings and Arthur Edward
Waite. The first, written by a Gnostic saint, is recommended as 'valuable
to those who can read between the lines.' The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries,
first published in 1870, went through several successful editions, despite
being considered by scholars and critics as inaccurate, poorly organized,
and unrealistic. The young A. E. Waite, writing in Walford's Antiquarian
Magazine, reviewed its third edition in 1887, and ended up
pronouncing it a 'worthless book.' In the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, No. 1, Autumnal Equinox 2001, in an article entitled "The Influence of Egypt on the Modern Western Mystery Tradition: The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor" by Samuel Scarborough, writes of the forming of the Rosicrucian order: "The order was very similar to the later Golden Dawn in that it had both an Outer Order or Circle and an Inner Circle. The function of this "Outer Circle" of the H. B. of L. was to offer a correspondence course on practical occultism, which set it apart from the Theosophical Society. Its curriculum included a number of selections from the writings of Hargrave Jennings and Paschal Beverly Randolph. Hargrave Jennings was a prominent Rosicrucian in Europe who wrote The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries, in 1870, one of he most influential books on the Rosicrucians to have been written at that time. It is known that Jennings was initiated into a Rosicrucian Order around 1860, possibly by Kenneth R. H. McKenzie, a famous Mason and occultist of the time. Randolph was free African-American sex magician and Spiritualist of the mid-19th Century. Randolph traveled throughout the United States lecturing on such subjects as Abolition, and as a Spiritualist. He also traveled throughout England, Europe, and the Near East, including Egypt, studying both Hermetism and Rosicrucianism. It appears that Hargrave Jennings initiated Randolph into the Rosicrucians while Randolph was in Europe. In about 1860 he originated a magickal order known as the Brotherhood of Eulis. He later reformed the group in 1874, the year before his death, as the Triplicate Order Rosicruciae, Pythianae, and Eluis." The Theosophical University Press Online published a letter from H. P. Blavatsky. Here is an excerpt concerning this work: "The ablest book that was ever written on Symbols and Mystic Orders, is most certainly Hargrave Jennings' The Rosicrucians, and yet it has been repeatedly called "obscure trash" in my presence, and that too, by individuals who were most decidedly well-versed in the rites and mysteries of modern Freemasonry. Persons who lack even the latter knowledge, can easily infer from this, what would be the amount of information they might derive from still more obscure and mystical works than the latter; for if we compare Hargrave Jennings' book with some of the mediaeval treatises and ancient works of the most noted Alchemists and Magi, we might find the latter as much more obscure than the former -- as regards language -- as a pupil in celestial Philosophy would the Book of the Heavens, if he should examine a far distant star with the naked eye, rather than with the help of a powerful telescope." The Gallery of Rosicrucian Images has the Arthurian Round Table image from Jenning's book. The "Mystae" site has a series of essays on Rosicrucian imagery, including Jennings. No complete online e-text has been found. |
 Real History of the Rosicrucians at Amazon
Real History of the Rosicrucians Garber Communications (Anthroposophic Press, 1982) |
Real History of the
Rosicrucians, by A. E. Waite. Crowley remarked: "A good vulgar piece
of journalism on the subject."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: [See the note above]
"Waite's own first volume of occult
scholarship (his 'digest' of the work of Eliphas Levi entitled The Mysteries of Magic), had enjoyed modest
success when published the previous year by George Redway, and on the
strength of the review Redway now hired Waite to prepare a rival
Rosicrucian volume. The result, The Real History
of the Rosicrucians, 'founded on their own Manifestos, and on facts
and documents collected from the writings of Initiated Brethren,' was,
Crowley conceded, 'a good vulgar piece of journalism on the subject.' The
work had, however, been thrown together at top speed by an inexperienced
writer, rushing to meet the demands of Redway's marketing scheme, so that
sections were actually being set up in type immediately upon completion,
without opportunity for any redrafting or revision. Understandably, the
reviewers again found many errors and some poor writing in the book,
although it won some praise for historical method and critical
scholarship. "Waite's book was issued with jacket artwork obviously reminiscent of Jennings' book, and the word 'Real' was added to the title (at the last minute, and without Waite's approval) as a sort of challenge to Jennings. All this upset many who saw the 'Real' book as an attack on the mythos celebrated in the earlier study. Jennings, who had himself recently published a different book with George Redway (his well-known study Phallicism) felt betrayed, especially considering the poor reviews his Rosicrucian book was receiving, and it is reported that when the two men chanced to meet in Pall Mall in London, Jennings yelled at Redway 'Et tu, Bruté!' " An article at the Antiquillum site, entitled "THE PURE BRETHREN OF BASRA: Isma'ili, Yezidi, Sufi", quotes extensively from the Waite work. Biography of Waite (in Spanish) The Rosicrucian Archives have posted an essay entitled Bacon & The Rose Cross which discusses Rosicrucian imagery and quotes extensively from Waite. "Master Mason" site lists all the works of Waite related to Freemasonry. |
 The Memoirs of Casanova, Volume II at Amazon.  Great God Pan with an introduction by M. P. Shiel (Ed Aug. 2002) at Amazon  The Great God Pan with Austin Spare (Illustrator), Jan 1995 ed. at Amazon. The Heptameron : tales and novels of Queen Marguerite of Navarre available used through Amazon  The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian by Carol Thysell, Nov 2000 at Amazon Here is a listing of many of the books Amazon carries by Machen. The titles will change from time to time. A new window will open when you click on a link. |
The Works of Arthur
Machen. Crowley remarked: "Most of these stories are of great magical
interest."
Links
below are to the e-texts of the work mentioned. From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Machen was the pen name of Arthur Llewellyn Jones (1863-1947), born into a clerical and intellectual Welsh family which was for a time too impoverished to pay the fees for his schooling, although in the 1890s an inheritance freed him to devote his time to literature. He published several important translations, including The Heptameron of Queen Marguerite of Navarre (1886) and twelve volumes of The Memoirs of Casanova (1894), which appeared in the same year as his first widely-known fictional work, a novella called The Great God Pan. In addition to novels and stories, he occupied himself with various journalistic and dramatic enterprises, until by the 1920s he had become quite well known, and his Works were collected in nine volumes. It is very likely this edition which Crowley had in mind when he recommended The Works of Arthur Machen to A.'. A.'. aspirants in the Section Two reading list. Machen was an active occultist, and was initiated into the Golden Dawn on 21st November 1899 as Frater Avallaunius. Over the following five years he attained at least to the grade of Practicus in the original Isis-Urania Temple, and he later described the Order (changing the name to the 'Twilight Star') in his autobiography Things Near and Far (1923). He carried on a friendly correspondence with A. E. Waite for most of their lives, and attended the Second Convocation of Waite's 'Independent and Rectified Rite' in April 1904 e.v." The Order of the Twilight Star has an e-text called Arthur Machen on the Kabbalah,. which is an excerpt from Things Near and Far, and about which they say "May be the only passage where Machen discusses the Kabbalah in any depth". It has some nice illustrations. They also excerpt Chapter 10 of Things Near and Far, which is about "The order of the Twilight Star." The Friends of Arthur Machen say about him: "Machen's work, both fiction and non-fiction, enjoyed high prestige both in Britain and America in the early part of this century, but the rise of modernist taste in fiction led to something of an eclipse of his reputation. Many today have come to his writing by chance, through an interest in horror and the supernatural, or in the writers of the 1890s, and have come to believe he should be recognized as a canonical writer, his reputation equal to that of currently more famous contemporaries such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The Friends Of Arthur Machen is a fellowship which exists to foster interest in Machen and his work, to aid research, and for the pleasure of its members.
Authors Directory online has a series of study materials on Machen available. It includes portraits and pictures. (Some of the pages linked to this have really annoying pop-up windows, however.) The Corridors have published a very thorough and exhaustive biography of Machen as well as a timeline and other material about his work. Warning: Geocities sites have some of the most annoying pop-ups on the net, so be prepared. The material is worth it, though. Lin Carter wrote a very discerning introduction to Machen's The Three Imposters, in the 1972 edition of that work. The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, Translated by Arthur Machen -- Project Gutenberg has released the unabridged Memoirs of Casanova, by Casanova (1725-1798). This edition is based on an 6-volume print edition, originally derived from 12 boxes of Casanova's loose manuscript discovered in the library of Dux in 1894, by Arthur Machen, with the addition of chapters discovered by Arthur Symons. That edition is now in the public domain and out of print. Great God Pan is a very commonly available book. We've listed two paperback editions. The Encyclopedia of the Self has provided an unabridged e-text of The Great God Pan, conveniently divided in chapters. The Heptameron : tales and novels of Queen Marguerite of Navarre: there are a whole lot of scholarly works about the stories, but it appears the book itself may only be available used. In our list of Amazon books we've included the Heptameron, and also an interesting book about Marguerite as a theologian, The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian. If you are interested in reading the original publication in French, the University of Virginia has a very excellent site about the 1560 publication, including facsimiles of many of the pages and illustrations. The Black Mask Online has posted each of the sections of Marguerite's memoirs, available in several formats including PDF, but it is impossible to tell who the translator was. The index is _not_ in order by day of the book, as would be normal, but it is possible to read them in the correct order. They're a lot of fun even if they aren't Machen's translation. The Women Writers Project has published an unabridged version of Marguerite's memoirs, but it is the Walter Kelly translation. |
 The Illuminated Blake: William Blake's Complete Illuminated Works With a Plate-By-Plate Commentary  The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake  A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake  Fearful Symmetry: a Study of William Blake (You can ask Lew for a review on this one -- he got it for a birthday present a couple of years ago.) The box below contains a number of biographies and analyses of Blake and his work. If you click on any of the links, a new window will open. |
The Writings of William
O'Neill (Blake). Crowley remarked: "Invaluable to all
students."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The visionary poetry, illuminations, and paintings
of William Blake will be the subject of an evening of readings and
discussion with the Section Two group. Bring your favorite Blake volumes
for reading and display. Blake (28 November 1757 to 12 August 1827) came
from a middle-class family of London tradesmen, who sent him to an
outstanding drawing school before entering him as apprentice to a
traditional engraver. Although never wealthy, he was raised comfortably in
the culture of London. Blake was not even remotely Irish, and would not
have recognized the name of "O'Neill" which Crowley attached to him in the
reading list. (The young W. B. Yeats ignorantly claimed Blake as a fellow
Irishman when a publisher allowed him to annotate Blake's works in a haze
of Theosophical and Celtic speculation.) Inspired by the rhetoric of
English non-conformist religion, the poetry of Chaucer and Milton, the
theosophy of Swedenborg, the politics of revolution, and the revival of
Gothic design, Blake charted an entire Gnostic universe of his own
creation. For Crowley, in Confessions, Blake
serves as an example of the secondary class of religious leaders: 'Such men as Blake
and Boehm claimed to have entered into direct communication with
discarnate intelligence which may be considered as personal, creative,
omnipotent, unique, identical with themselves or otherwise. Its authority
depends on 'the interior certainty' of the seer' (page 395). Most if not all of the works mentioned below can be found in e-text at either the Literary Network or the University of Georgia site listed below. The Literary Network has a very nice biography and searchable index to Blake. The biography (long, but explanatory of why Crowley admired him) says: "British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th- century. He joined for a time the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in London and considered Newtonian science to be superstitious nonsense. Misunderstanding shadowed his career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognize his importance. "Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life. His father was a successful London hosier and attracted by the doctrines of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by his mother. His parents encouraged him to collect prints of the Italian masters, and in 1767 sent him to Henry Pars' drawing school. From his early years, he experienced visions of angels and ghostly monks, he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, and various historical figures. "At the age of 14 Blake was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire. Gothic art and architecture influenced him deeply. After studies at the Royal Academy School, Blake started to produce watercolors and engrave illustrations for magazines. In 1783 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener. Blake taught her to draw and paint and she assisted him devoutly. In 1774 Blake opened with his wife and younger brother Robert a print shop at 27 Broad Street, but the venture failed after the death of Robert in 1787. Blake's important cultural and social contacts included Henry Fuseli, Reverend A.S. Mathew and his wife, John Flaxman (1755-1826), a sculptor and draughtsman, Tom Paine, William Godwin, and Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800), married to the wealthy grandson of the earl of Sandwich. "His early poems Blake wrote at the age of 12. His first book of poems, POETICAL SKETCHES, appeared in 1783 and was followed by SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789), and SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (1794). His most famous poem, 'The Tyger', was part of his Songs of Experience. Typical for Blake's poems were long, flowing lines and violent energy, combined with aphoristic clarity and moments of lyric tenderness. He approved of free love, and sympathized with the actions of the French revolutionaries until the events of 1794 sickened him. In 1790 Blake engraved THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, a book of paradoxical aphorisms and his principal prose work. It expressed Blake's revolt against the established values of his time. 'Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion.' Radically he sided with the Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost and attacked the conventional religious views in a series of aphorisms. But the poet's life in the realms of images did not please his wife who once remarked: 'I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise.' Some of Blake's contemporaries called him a harmless lunatic. "The Blakes moved south of the Thames to Lambeth in 1790. During this time Blake began to work on his 'prophetic books', where he expressed his lifelong concern with the struggle of the soul to free its natural energies from reason and organized religion. He wrote THE VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION (1793), AMERICA: A PROPHESY (1793), THE BOOK OF URIZEN (1794), and THE SONG OF LOS (1795). Blake hated the effects of the Industrial Revolution in England and looked forward to the establishment of a New Jerusalem 'in England's green and pleasant land.' Between 1804 and 1818 he produced an edition of his own poem JERUSALEM with 100 engravings. "In 1800 Blake was taken up by the wealthy William Hayley, poet and patron of poets. The Blakes lived in Hayley's house at Felpham in Sussex, staying there for three years. At Felpham Blake worked on MILTON: A POEM IN TWO BOOKS, TO JUSTIFY THE WAYS OF GOD TO MEN. It was finished and engraved between 1803 and 1808. In 1803 Blake was charged at Chichester with high treason for having 'uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as 'D-n the King, d-n all his subjects....'' but was acquitted. In 1809 Blake had a commercially unsuccessful exhibition at the shop once owned by his brother. However, economic problems did not depress him, but he continued to produce energetically poems, aphorisms, and engravings. 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,' he wrote. "From 1818 Blake started to enjoy the admiration of a group of young disciples. Blake's last years were passed in obscurity, quarreling even with some of the circle of friends who supported him. Among Blake's later artistic works are drawings and engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy and the 21 illustrations to the book of Job, which was completed when he was almost 70 years old. Blake never shook off the poverty, in large part due to his inability to compete in the highly competitive field of engraving and his expensive invention that enabled him to design illustrations and print words at the same time. "Independent through his life, Blake left no debts at his death on August 12, 1827. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the public cemetery of Bunhill Fields. Wordsworth's verdict after Blake's death reflected many opinions of the time: 'There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.' Blake's influence grew through Pre-Raphaelites and W. B. Yeats especially in Britain. His interest in legend was revived with the Romantics' rediscovery of the past, especially the Gothic and medieval. In the 1960s Blake's work was acclaimed by the Underground movement." The University of Georgia has put up a site dedicated to William Blake. On it you can find:
|
 The Shaving of Shagpat at Amazon
 The Egoist: An Annotated Text, Backgrounds Criticism (A Norton Critical Edition)  The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son (Penguin Classics) The Entire Short Works of George Meredith |
The Shaving of Shagpat: An
Arabian Entertainment, by George Meredith. Crowley remarked: "An
excellent allegory."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Shaving of Shagpat
by George Meredith, is an amazing Oriental adventure, as the barber Shibli
Bagarag of Shiraz endures the ordeals of pain and passion -- interrupted
by many a tale along the way -- in his quest to shave the hairiest and
supremely bristling, most luxuriantly piliated Shagpat, whose face has
never known the blade." Project Gutenberg has put up a complete e-text of this work. They also have an extensive collection of his other works, including those mentioned in the biography below.. The Sylvan Learning Center in conjunction with Columbia University has posted this biography: "1828–1909, English novelist and poet. One of the great English novelists, Meredith wrote complex, often comic yet highly cerebral works that contain striking psychological character studies. As a youth he attended a Moravian school in Germany and eventually became apprenticed to a London lawyer. He began his career as a free-lance journalist, contributing to newspapers and magazines in London. His first volume of poems appeared in 1851 and received the praises of Tennyson. In 1849 he married Mary Ellen Nicoll, the widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock; she left him in 1858. Modern Love (1862), a series of 50 connected poems, reflects his own experience in relating the tragic dissolution of a marriage. He married Marie Vulliamy, happily, in 1864 and settled in Surrey, the location that inspired many of his later nature poems. Although Meredith began and ended his literary career as a poet, he is best remembered as a novelist. His first distinguished work, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, appeared in 1859. His other notable books include Evan Harrington (1860), The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), The Egoist (1879), and Diana of the Crossways (1885). His famous critical essay, On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1897), was first delivered as a lecture in 1877. Meredith’s novels and poems are written in a brilliant but oblique style. Highly intellectual, his novels often treat social problems. Prominent in all his works is his joyful belief in life as a process of evolution." Amazon Reviews says of Richard Feverel: Of all nineteenth-century English novels,' claims Edward Mendelson in his Introduction to this edition, 'The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the most self-consciously literary in its style and structure and the most sexually explicit in its plot and theme.' First published in 1859, Meredith's first and most controversial novel concerns Sir Austin Feverel's misconceived attempts to educate his son Richard according to a system of his own devising--a system based on theories of sexual restraint. Exploring generational and gender conflicts, the psychology of sexual jealousy and repression, and myths of Eden and Utopia, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel shocked Victorian readers but gained for itself a cult following. 'Now that it has been freed from its reputation,' writes Mendelson, 'readers can discover again the tragic and ironic force, and the psychological and formal complexity that make The Ordeal of Richard Feverel one of the most profound, subtle, and moving works of English fiction.' A wonderfully ironic and impassioned novel of war between the sexes and the generations by a writer who 'deserves our gratitude and excites our interest as a great innovator' (Virginia Woolf)." |
 Lilith at Amazon  Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women at Amazon  The Princess and the Goblin (Puffin Classics - The Essential Collection) at Amazon  The Complete Fairy Tales at Amazon |
Lilith, by George
MacDonald. Crowley remarked: "A good introduction to the Astral."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Suggested to aspirants of the A.'. A.'. as "a good
introduction to the Astral," Lilith
(1895) was one of the last works of the prolific Scots novelist, who was a
friend of Lewis Carroll and a significant example for modern fantasy
writers from J. R. R. Tolkien to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Lilith, is similar in texture to the Alice books, although not restricted to the
sensibilities of Victorian childhood." Link to a PDF of a master's thesis which has a transcription at the end. Link to the Project Gutenberg online text. Black Planet Zero in the UK posts this biography: "George MacDonald was born at Huntly in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on the tenth of December 1824. There he spent a happy, although unhealthy, childhood in a country setting. As his mother was not always well she farmed her son out to a wet nurse. George was weaned at a very early age on the advice of his grandmother, Isabella. A letter concerning this incident, written by his mother, was preserved by George with a lock of her golden brown hair in a drawer. When George was eight years old his mother, Helen, died. This event had a significant effect on MacDonald and the traumatic loss lead to a lifelong mourning which found expression through his writings. Seven years later his father remarried. George MacDonald senior brought his six sons up firmly but with tenderness; he was devoted to them. His warm relationship with his son George continued throughout his life, despite differences of opinion. In 1842, due to family financial difficulties, George had to leave King's College, a University in Aberdeen where he was studying Chemistry and Natural Philosophy, partway through his studies. George was able to raise some money by cataloguing the library of a large house in the north of Scotland, possibly Thurso Castle. This episode left a great impression on MacDonald, although exactly what happened there remains unclear. Critics have speculated whether an important crisis or development occurred during this period, such as an abortive love affair or the first contact with German Romanticism. Throughout his novels can be found important images that relate to this experience; those of a great old house with many rooms and stairs symbolic of discovery and spiritual understanding. The image of the library is constantly made use of by MacDonald as a mysterious and marvelous place of discovery. In Lilith it is the starting point for a journey of adventure and exploration. After a return to college, MacDonald received his MA in 1845. In 1850 George felt called to become a minister and was appointed to Arundel. Accused of heresy, he resigned three years later. From then on his life fell into a pattern of writing, lecturing, and preaching." Project Gutenberg has e-text for most of MacDonald's works, such as nnals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, At the Back of the North Wind, A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of An Old Soul, David Elginbrod, Donal Grant, A Double Story, Half-Hours with Great Story Tellers, The Light Princess, Lilith, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, The Princess and Curdie, The Princess and the Goblin, Robert Falconer, Sir Gibbie, St. George and St. Michael, Thomas Wingfold, Curate, Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance, What's Mine's Mine |
 La Bas (Down There) Keene Wallace (Translator) at Amazon  The Damned: La-Bas (Penguin Classics) Terry Hale (Translator) [Note - most folks prefer the Wallace translations] at Amazon Against the Grain (A Rebours.)  Against Nature Robert Baldick (Translator) at Amazon  Becalmed at Amazon The Oblate of St. Benedict The box below contains more works at Amazon by and about this prolific writer. When you click on any link, a new window will open. |
Là-bas (Down There), by J. K. Huysmans. Crowley remarked: "An account of
the extravagances caused by the Sin-complex."
The
entire e-text in chapters is available online; this is a Keene Wallace Translation from
Paris. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "This is a the French occult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907),The novel's autobiographical central figure, called Durtal, makes his first appearance in this book, published in 1891. He will go on to shelter from his spiritual crisis in a Trappist monastery in the 1895 novel En route (also on the A.'. A.'. reading list, but long out of print), and end up an oblate in a Benedictine monastery in L'oblat (1903). We first see him here as a writer, researching the outrageous fifteenth-century crimes of Gilles de Rais, and exploring the spiritual possibilities of the nineteenth-century "black mass." Crowley considered the tale an instructive illustration of magical failure, and assigned the book to A.'. A.'. aspirants as "an account of the extravagances caused by the Sin-complex." The narrative incorporates a great deal of information about the satanic tradition at the close of the Christian era. For these perverse and guilty Roman Catholics (Huysmans himself eventually returned to the church), "without sacrilegious priests there is no mature Satanism", whether saying mass with a naked prostitute for an altar, or attempting even more fanciful alternatives such as the "aphrodisiac-pill mass," or the Spermatic Mass." Pegasos, a literature-related site in Finland, offers this critique and biography of Huysmans: Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) - original name Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans. French writer and art critic, who was first associated with Émile Zola and the naturalist group and then joined the French Decadent Movement. Huysmans' conversion through Satanism to Catholicism, from obsession with bizarre sensations to the search of spiritual life, can be followed in such works as À Rebours (Against the Grain) (1884), Là-Bas (Down There) (1891), and La Cathédrale (The Cathedral) (1898). "Indeed, each liquor corresponded in taste, he fancied, with the sound of a particular instrument. Dry curaçao, for example, resembled the clarinet in its shrill, velvety tone; kümmel was like the oboe, whose timbre is sonorous and nasal; crème de menthe and anisette were like the flute, both sweet and poignant, whining and soft. Then to complete the orchestra come kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky, deafening the palate with their harsh eruptions of cornets and trombones; liqueur brandy, blaring with the overwhelming crash of tubas, while the thundering of cymbals and the big drum, beaten hard, evoked the rakis of Chios and the mastics." (from À Rebours)Joris Karl Huysmans was born in Paris of mixed parentage. On his father's side he was of Dutch descent; his mother was a French. After his father died his widowed mother remarried when he was nine, but the early death of his father remained a traumatic childhood experience. He studied at the Lycee Saint-Louis and in 1866 Huysmans received his baccalaureate. At the age of twenty, he obtained a post at the Ministry of the Interior; there he remained for 32 year, combining writing with work. Huysmans's first book, Le drageoir aux épices (1874, A Dish of Spices), was a collection of prose poems in the manner of Charles Baudelaire. When it was rejected by several publisher he finally published it at his own expense under the name Joris Karl Huysmans. It received attention of major writers, including Emile Zola, and was followed by a number of naturalistic novels, such as Marthe (1876), Les soeurs Vatard (1879), and En ménage (1881). During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 Huysmans served in the army. The novella Sac au dos (1880), based on his experiences from this period, was published in Les Soirées de Médan with other war stories written by members of Zola's 'Médan' group. Early in 1877 Huysmans met Zola, who had admired the former's review of his L'Assommoir (The Gin Palace). Huysmans shared Zola's idea that a work of art is a "corner of nature seen through a temperament." Huysmans started to publish art critics in the 1870s and write of such Symbolist painters as Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. With A Rebours (in French) Huysmans turned his back to naturalism, and flirted with "decadent" mentality. It was the 'poisonous' yellow book to which Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray refers, and whose protagonist Dorian imitates. In the blackly comic story a wealthy aesthete, the Duc Jean des Esseintes, experiments with exotic pleasures, mostly erotic. He lives in his house as in a monastery and dreams of the progress of syphilis down the ages. Finally he is welcomed into the embrace of a femme fatale whose genitalia are made in the image of a Venus flytrap. Des Esseintes seals himself off from the world so hermetically that he does not even dare to go on a journey since he is afraid of being disappointed by reality. However, Huysmans could not fully accept his protagonist's eccentricities because he makes des Esseintes wonder whether the only salvation might not be in a return to faith. The work had a tremendous impact in decadent circles, but also the Catholic novelist Barbey d'Aurevilly paid attention to it. Of A Rebours, Oscar Wilde wrote: "The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain." Arnold Hauser sees the character in The Social History of Art as the prototype of all Dorian Grays. 'The age of nature', says Des Esseintes, 'is past; it has finally exhausted the patience of all sensitive minds by the loathsome monotony of its landscapes and skies." In his later novels Huysmans recorded the spiritual quest of a man named Durtal, his fictional alter ego. Là-Bas was a highly stylized novel of black magic practiced in contemporary Paris. In the story Durtal decides to write a biography of Gilles de Rais (1404-1440), the French marshal who was accused of Satanism and was briefly associated with Joan of Arc. Durtal is taken to a Black Mass but he finds the experience disappointing. During his flirtation with Satanism, Durtal has an affair with Hyacinthe Chantelouve, a member of the active Satanist Canon Docre. A pious bell-ringer, Louis Carhaix, aids Durtal in his research, but the disillusioned aesthete remains unable to embrace Carhaix's simple faith. Durtal feels that overanalyzation of his faith and feelings has left him without values. Là-Bas was accepted at face value by many readers. The book became a key work promoting the sensational mythology of the Black Mass. Durtal's historical researches had much in common with Jules Michelet's book La Sorcière (1862), a study about the witch-hunts and sorcery trials of the Middle Ages. However, it is possible that Huysmans never saw a Black Mass, although some of the occultists of the fin-de-siècle Paris are mentioned in the text. In the early 1890s Huysmans underwent the crisis that led to his conversion. He was readmitted in 1892 into the Catholic church. In 1895 Huysmans went to the Trappist monastery of Issigny to spent there a week. En route (1895) expressed the author's longing for monastic life. In La Cathédrale Huysmans' moved from doubts to the full acceptance of Roman Catholicism. The work was both an account of a conversion and a detailed examination of medieval art. After resigning his post in the Ministry, Huysmans retired to Liguge, where he lived near the Benedictine monastery. When the monks were expelled, he returned to Paris. Huysmans was one of the founders of the Goncourt Academy, and in 1900 he was elected its president. Huysmans died of cancer of the mouth on May 12, 1907. Huysmans had been a hypochondriac most of his life, but his final sufferings he took with Christian resignation. During the last days of his life he was afflicted with an cancer which affected the eyes and it became necessary to sew his eyelids shut. Huysmans' own spiritual history reflected the successive phases of the intellectual life of the late 19th-century France. He dealt with exoticism, eroticism, and spirituality and wrote of his protagonists' experiences in a rich, intoxicating style. The Catholic church regards him as one of its apologists. For further reading: L'estetique de Huysmans by H. Trudgian (1934); The Life of Joris Karl Huysmans by Robert Baldick (1955); The First Decadent by James Laver (1955); Des ténèbres à la lumière by P.-M. Belval (1967); Joris-Karl Huysmans by George Ross Ridge (1968); Reality And Illusion In The Novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans by Ruth Antosh (1986); Joris Karl Huysmans: Novelist, Poet, and Art Critic by Annette Kahn (1987); The Image of Huysmans by Brian R. Banks (1990); Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Fin-De-S iecle Novel by Christopher Lloyd (1991) - For further information: Against the Grain ; The Catholic EncyclopediaThis link is to the French Gutenberg project. |
Unfortunately, cover art for most of Hewlett's work is not available at Amazon or other online stores, and most of his works are available only used or special order. However, here's what we can find: The Forest Lovers: A Romance Little novels of Italy Richard Yea-and-Nay (The Best Sellers of 1901 The queen's quair, or; The six years' tragedy Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett Fond
adventures; |
The Lore of Proserpine,
by Maurice Hewlett. Crowley remarked: "A suggestive enquiry into the
Hermetic Arcanum."
There are
almost no available e-texts of Hewlett's work that I can find. The Alchemy Web site has an e-text of the Hermetic Arcanum, however. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Section Two reading group will be turning this month to Maurice Hewlett's fairy novel Lore of Persepine, when Caitlin leads our reading and discussion beginning at 8:00. Maurice Hewlett (1861-1923), born into a comfortable middle-class family, privately educated, and called to the bar in 1890, became a senior civil servant before retiring to write popular romantic adventure novels after the success in 1898 of his Arthurian book The Forest Lovers. In his later years he also published widely as a poet and essayist. Hewlett's Lore of Proserpine appeared the same year as Crowley's Book of Lies, and is one of the more obscure works on the Section Two list. It has never been reprinted, but fortunately the Oakland Public Library possesses a copy of the original edition (apparently never borrowed, since its acquisition in 1916 e.v., until requested from storage for our reading group). Crowley recommended it as "a suggestive enquiry into the Hermetic Arcanum," and does not appear to have discussed Hewlett or this book elsewhere at all." Bartleby's Online has an e-text of In The Trenches, a WWI poem by Hewlett. Yale University has a special rare books collection by and about Hewlett. Trivia: According to the TE Lawrence correspondence collection at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Lawrence particularly liked one of Hewlett's works, The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay: "During his undergraduate years Lawrence formed a taste for romantic literature about the medieval world. One book he particularly enjoyed was this historical novel by Maurice Hewlett about Richard Coeur de Lion. In the spring of 1912 Lawrence took a copy with him to Kafr Ammar in Egypt where he worked for several weeks under Flinders Petrie. Afterwards he wrote home: 'Read Yea and Nay in Egypt for the ninth time. It is a masterpiece.'" More Trivia: Here is Bowerhope House, a B&B in Scotland that once was Hewlett's home. |
 En Route |
En Route, by J. K.
Huysmans. Crowley remarked: "An account of the follies of Christian
mysticism."
Please see
our long discussion of Huysmans up above. Here is an e-text of the book, in French. The Huysmans Society has a page full of reviews (in English and French) of En Route. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "En Route is a novel published in 1895 by the Parisian civil servant Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). We follow the continuing spiritual adventures of Durtal, the central character of Huysmans' notorious 'decadent' novel Là-bas four years earlier. Both books are included on Crowley's 'suggestive and helpful' reading list of imaginative literature, probably because they were influential in the fictional presentation of ritual and of spiritual psychology. Huysmans defined a new kind of narrative figure with his hypersensitive, aesthetically motivated, morally complicated, and basically helpless, unhealthy, and unhappy hero Durtal. This autobiographical character had been drawn 'down below' to experiment with Satanism and sadism in the earlier story, criticized by Crowley as 'extravagances caused by the Sin- complex.' En Route finds Durtal in recovery, dazed from the 'black' rituals and the heartless copulations of his averse Catholicism. As any true Satanist will, he ends up a devout Christian as a punishment for his sins. Crowley calls it 'an account of the follies of Christian mysticism,' and indeed this novel captures the texture of obsessive devotion and the spiritual techniques of monastic perversion to an extent not often penetrated by nineteenth century fiction. It may not sound like good clean fun, but Huysmans is also a fascinatingly intelligent writer, throwing away ideas and researches of all kinds throughout his fiction, and En Route contains some outstanding passages on the spiritual implications of music and architecture.' " Interestingly, here is a review of an album based on this novel, Hermetic Science's En Route. |
|
I was
unable to locate a copy for sale on Amazon or other sources. |
Sidonia the Sorceress, by
Wilhelm Meinhold.
The
University of Glasgow has a facsimile edition of page 179 of the original printing of this
book. James Wappel Studios offers a portrait of Sidonia. Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898) also did a portrait of Sidonia. Case-Western Reserve University offers a PDF version of Sidonia and The Amber Witch. Blackmask Online also offers a complete text in several formats. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Sidonia the Sorceress is an the obscure German Romantic historical novel which became a late-Victorian occult best-seller. Crowley himself most likely read the combined edition of Wilhelm Meinhold's two great witch novels, published in two volumes by the Reeves and Turner company of London in 1894. Very possibly it took the place of his assigned texts in chemistry and history and philosophy for several evenings as a Cambridge undergraduate. (It seems that a good deal of what later would become the Section Two reading list for Probationers of the A.'. A.'. formed Crowley's personal undergraduate curriculum of alternate and occult education, pursued in the freedom of college scholarship at the University of Cambridge in the mid-1890s.) The two works, Sidonia the Sorceress and The Amber Witch, are recommended together on the reading list, with only the bald comment that 'These two tales are highly informative.' As the text of Sidonia is quite long and now extremely rare, we will share a Xerox copy and discuss the romance of witchcraft and the descriptions of occult practices in this story, with readings of a few selected passages. "Johannes Wilhelm Meinhold (1797-1851) was raised on the remote Baltic island of Usedom, where his father was a Lutheran pastor; he was educated and took orders in the Lutheran church, qualifying as a Doctor of Theology. After receiving an isolated parsonage he began an obscure literary career in his spare time. He took his subjects from local Pomeranian history, and produced an early tragedy and a quantity of lyric verse. A collection of his poetry was circulated in 1824, and was commended by Goethe. In a historical magazine Meinhold published a chronicle of the Thirty Years War, claiming to have transcribed it from a seventeenth century source, though in fact he had fabricated the entire text. When Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, took enthusiastic notice of the forged document and wanted to have it republished, Meinhold was forced to admit his fraud, but the king nevertheless praised the work, and financed an edition of it which appeared in 1841-2 as Die Bernsteinhexe (The Amber Witch). It fed in to a current historical controversy regarding the role of the Roman church in local German witch prosecutions before the Reformation, and hence attracted attention at first, though this turned to resentment as Meinhold's forgery of the document became known. Some critics refused to believe him, and he even showed his notebooks and rough drafts to reviewers as evidence of composition. After the controversy died down he was punished for fooling the literary establishment by being ignored completely for the rest of his life. A few years later he published a second, and even longer, work based upon another Pomeranian witch prosecution, originally entitled (after the defendant in the case) Sidonia von Bork. It appeared as volumes 5, 6 and 7 of a collected edition of Meinhold's works published near the close of his life (in 1946-8), attracting no attention whatsoever. "Meinhold remained obscure in Germany, where his
works are still ignored, and he does not rate mention in the standard
reference works. There was however a vogue for his tales among English
readers several decades after his death, and both of the Pomeranian
witch-trial accounts appeared in English translation. Sidonia the Sorceress was translated by Lady Jane
Francesca Elgee, wife of the great ocular surgeon Dr William Wilde, who in
her youth at mid-century had been a fashionable celebrity in Ireland,
publishing romantic poetry in the newspapers under the name of 'Speranza.'
Six feet tall, flamboyant and beautiful, 'a very odd and original lady,'
she was a learned woman, particularly accomplished as a linguist, and a
committed patriot who looked to future European involvement for Ireland as
an alternative to British domination there. She published thirteen books,
Sidonia being by far the most successful and
going through many editions. Her son Oscar Wilde, whom she supported and
encouraged throughout his life, became one of the greatest literary
critics, comic dramatists, and tragic victims of the 1890s, and always
admired her greatly. (From her son who admired her greatly.)"
Oscar
Wilde's mother, Lady Speranza Wilde, translated the novel into English; a
good copy of that edition sells for about $3000. |
| The Amber Witch, by
Wilhelm Meinhold.
Blackmask
Online offers The Amber Witch in several formats. This link is to the HTML one. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "This German novel by Johannes Wilhelm Meinhold (1797-1851) gives a detailed fictional reconstruction of an actual witch trial from the seventeenth century of the black aeon of Osiris. Die Bernsteinhexe was written in the form of a chronicle, and originally published as a hoax, claiming to have been transcribed from contemporary sources. Fragments first appeared in 1841-2, and attracted considerable attention; but when the fraud became known, the work faded from attention in Germany, only to be resurrected for a second vogue in English translation. We will be reading the version written in 1846 by Lady Lucy Duff Gordon. Despite its translation status, this work has been called by one critical historian of Victorian popular fiction 'the most important witch novel in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world.' " | |
In this box are many of the various versions of Midsummer's Night Dream available at Amazon. Take your pick ;-) |
Midsummer
Night's Dream
From The
Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Section Two Reading
Group declares three-way war for one night: empty-headed Athenians versus the fairy kingdom versus the proto-Masonic trade guilds. Caitlin
directs a complete group reading of A Midsummer
Night's Dream, Shakespeare's play (circa
1595) conflates the two holidays of Beltane and the summer solstice --
both associated with bonfires and copulation -- and is actually set at May
Day, despite the title. The herbal charms which abound in this play
(sometimes called "the Bard's most magical") are simply aphrodisiac drugs,
slipped to unsuspecting victims in order to violate their wills, but a
lyrical atmosphere of ceremonial magic nevertheless pervades the work,
with Oberon as the laughing magus, and the Puck (originally pronounced
"Pouck" and closely related to our word 'spook") as his super-charged
familiar spirit."
The
University of Victoria offers Quarto and Folio editions online.
The
Literature Network has a searchable version.
The
Herbal Gardens site in England discusses the Cowslip and other herbs used in this play.
Andrew
Moore's Online Teaching Guides offers an extensive set of materials discussing the play and its themes. The
advanced guide is very interesting.
Ed
Friedlander, MD, discusses the traditions behind "Midsummer" thusly: "
'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is unusual among
Shakespeare's plays in lacking a written source for its plot. The wedding
of Theseus and Hippolyta was described in Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale' and
elsewhere. The theme of a daughter who wants to marry against her father's
desires was a common theme in Roman comedy. Bottom and his friends are
caricatures of amateur players.
"Shakespeare must have derived his forest spirits from oral folk traditions. The mysterious people of the forest might be in turn helpful (household chores), mischievous (pranks, illusions), or sinister. In 'Henry IV Part I', the king relates a folk legend that 'some night-tripping fairy' might steal babies and leave a fairy child or someone else's child (a 'changeling', see II.i.23). People may have believed, or half-believed, in the fairies (elves, sprites, pixies, leprechauns, and so forth). 'Goblin' was the name of a lesser devil in 'Piers Plowman', and Puck's aliases include 'Hob Goblin' (Robert Goblin). They might also have been imaginary figures of fun that personify nature, as we speak of 'Mother Nature' and the artistic 'Jack Frost', painter of autumn leaves and creator of the beautiful ice patterns on windowpanes. "Literary trips to fairyland included 'Sir Orfeo', a retelling of Orpheus's descent to the underworld. Sir Orfeo visits a dreadful supernatural realm in which other humans are imprisoned, looking as they did at the moments of their deaths. 'Thomas of Erceldoune' met the fairy queen, who took him to her realm, full of beautiful people living in luxury -- as Satan's cattle. "So far as I know, Shakespeare is the first writer to portray the faerie folk as tiny or cute." |
In this box are many of the various versions of "Macbeth" available at Amazon. Enjoy! |
Macbeth by William
Shakespeare
The
Literature Network offers a searchable version online. From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The lodge's Section Two reading group will be spending an evening with William Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy of Macbeth. Caitlin will direct us in a complete reading through the play together, so bring your own copy of the text if possible, though we will try to have a few extras available. Written apparently in the summer of 1606 and originally performed outdoors in daylight at the Globe Theatre (quite a feat, considering that well over half of the action takes place in darkness), this is the tragedy of an assassination and high-level coup d'état which led indirectly to the consolidation of government in eleventh-century Scotland. Although the significance of the historical warrior and chieftain whom Macbeth was based upon is minor, he assumed an artificial importance three centuries later when the Stuart dynasty came to the throne of Scotland and traced its genealogical lineage back to the seventeen-year reign of "king" Macbeth. For Crowley this was one of Shakespeare's three notably magical dramas -- along with the Dream and the Tempest -- recommended to probationers as "interesting for traditions treated." Among Shakespeare's plays it is one of the shortest, and most notable for its stage treatment of visions, illusions, and hallucinations. Due to its concern with secret guilt and the disintegration of personality, its language is full of equivocation and ambiguity, as untrustworthy characters struggle to report incomprehensible events. The unseen dagger, the invisible blood, the ghosts of the murder victims, and the perfectly real Weird Sisters on stage allow the audience to draw no specific line between history and the imagination in the drama. The scene where the goddess Hecate and her feline familiar Graymalkin appear (not present in the earliest productions, and probably interpolated into the play for a revival about 1610) is one of the best known expressions of traditional witchcraft in literature: . . . at the pit of Acheron |
| The Tempest, by W.
Shakespeare. (Online link to complete text.) Crowley remarked:
"Interesting for traditions treated."
The
Literature Network offers a searchable version online. Thelema Lodge Calendar on The Tempest: "Shakespeare's last major play, The Tempest, recommended to the A.'. A.'. for its treatment of the role of the magus, the limits of enchantment and of elemental operations, and the disciplines of erotic magic, is our subject for discussion and inquiry at the Thelema Lodge Section Two reading group this month. Participants are invited to read the play beforehand if possible; we will be reading only selected scenes together as we construct an analysis of Shakespeare's myth of the magus, and its relation to the workings of John Dee and other contemporary magicians." | |
| Redgauntlet, by Sir Walter Scott. (Link is to
the project Gutenberg online text.) Also one or two other novels. Crowley
remarked: " Interesting for traditions treated."
From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Section Two Reading Group meets with Caitlin at
Oz House on Monday evening 10th October at 8:00 to discuss two novels of
Sir Walter Scott. Anyone with an interest in the A.'. A.'. reading list is
welcome to attend; the Section Two Group arranges to have some
participants study the works to be presented, in order to provide both an
overview and a taste of their literary texture to those without the time
to read ahead. This month's books are Redgauntlet:
A Tale of the Eighteenth Century (1824), which concerns the Widow's
Son and other symbolic elements of Scottish Rite freemasonry, and The
Talisman (1825), which centers on the relations between Saladin and the
crusaders. Crowley only lists the first of these stories specifically, but
his recommendation of 'also one or two other novels' as 'interesting for
the traditions treated' has encouraged us to include The Talisman, [Online text edition] which is one
of Scott's best (and briefest) books." | |
| Rob Roy, by James Grant.
Crowley remarked: "Interesting for traditions treated."
From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "One of the most obscure entries on the A.'. A.'.
reading list of 'suggestive materials' is a book with a seemingly familiar
title. But James Grant's The Adventures of Rob
Roy (1864) is different from the well-known novel Rob Roy (1818) by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832),
despite the fact that another Scott novel, Redgauntlet (1824), confusingly appears on the
list immediately preceding this entry. Walter Scott, who made such a great
success with his invention of the historical novel in the 'Waverley'
series of heroic stories from the British past, remained enormously
popular throughout the nineteenth century. In his wake, especially in the
many periodical magazines in which most Victorian fiction originally
appeared, there was a huge publishing market for historically instructive
adventure romances. The Scottish writer James Grant (1822-1887), who knew
how to spice his storytelling with Gaelic phrases and tales from folklore,
and to provide a maximum of violence and excitement for his (presumably
young) readers, has nearly faded from the reference books by now.
Publishers in his own time considered him a significant and substantial
novelist, and over a long mid-Victorian career Grant produced dozens of
'knock-off' books inspired by Sir Walter Scott, for readers who somehow
couldn't seem to get enough of these tales. Grant's The Adventures of Rob Roy is a very readable blood-and-thunder romance of the Scottish Highlands in the early eighteenth century, and might easily have been a boyhood favorite of Crowley's. He might have thought of it again later during his association with the Golden Dawn (mid-1898 to early 1900), and while working with the leader and principal magical theorist of that group. Born Samuel Liddell Mathers on 8 January 1854, this seminal occult figure had grown up fatherless, fascinated by mysticism, indulging in fantasies of a secret heritage, and at an early age became an active freemason, scholar, and Qabalist. Even in 1878, while still living with his mother, he was calling himself the Comte de Glenstrae when he could get away with it, or sometimes the Comte MacGregor, and claiming a suppressed Jacobite ancestry from the outlawed Highland clan of the MacGregors of Glenstrae. Crowley might even have included Grant's novel on the A.'. A.'. list partially out of spite, because Mathers had obviously studied the book, and may even have derived a substantial portion of his personal mythology from it. Edward Alexander Crowley had also changed his name as a teenager, however, and the unusual spelling of his adopted forename likewise figures prominently in Grant's book. Like Mathers and many others, Aleister Crowley was an Englishman unable to resist the 'Celtic Revival' styles of the late nineteenth century, and he enjoyed representing himself at various times as Irish or Scottish. Join the Section Two Reading Group for a discussion of this book, illustrated with readings of selected passages. We begin by following the MacAleister and the MacGregor as they scrutinize the landscape for omens in their journey over the heath in search of vengeance for the outrages suffered by their outlawed clan. The MacGregor finds frequent occasion to call out their motto ''S Rioghal mo dhream!' to remind them of their secret royal blood, even as they are forced to pass themselves off as common folk. . . ." | |
| The Magician, by W.
Somerset Maugham. Crowley remarked: "An amusing hotchpot of stolen
goods."
From The Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Caitlin will lead our discussion of W. Somerset
Maugham's novel The Magician, originally
published in 1908 e.v. For some samples from the text of this work, and an
analysis of the author's method in plundering standard occult studies and
Victorian novels of the marvelous for authenticity and 'atmosphere,'
written indeed by the dominant character of the story, see Crowley's own
review and our editorial note on this page." Crowley's extensive review is available at: http://www.billheidrick.com/tlc1997/tlc0497.htm#s2 | |
| The Bible, by various
authors unknown. Crowley remarked: "The Hebrew and Greek Originals are of
Qabalistic value. It contains also many magical apologues, and recounts
many tales of folk-lore and magical rites."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The little library of texts translated from Greek and
Hebrew, known to the Judeo-Christian tradition as 'the Bible,' formed the
basis for Crowley's own elementary education, and he recommended these
writings to aspirants with varying interests in Qabalah, magick, and
folk-lore. This month in the lodge's review of the A.'. A.'. reading list
we will be making the first of several stops at the Bible, beginning with
the 'great'1 fish story of the reluctant prophet.
The Book of Jonah is one of the shortest books
in the Bible, and its strikingly mythological qualities have made it so
stand out from the dreary monotony of the other 'Minor Prophets' that it
has entered the folkloric heritage of peoples all over the globe. (In
English we even have the expression 'a jonah' to denote a person whose
mere presence brings 'bad luck.') To the Christian interpreters of the Old
Testament, Jonah's story of ordeal and eventual resurgence prefigures the
crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Is there anything in these
motifs of value to Thelemites? Join the Section Two discussion group to
find out. Note: 1. The word 'great' (Hebrew 'gadol' =  = 43) is a significantly over-used adjective
in the story of Jonah  = 'dove/pigeon' =
71)."From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Join the Section Two reading group as we return to the Big Black Book of Swords and Sorcery for an evening with some of the great tribal heroes of the Bronze Age. Limp leather will spring to life beginning after the 29th Aethyr reading from Liber 418 as Caitlin guides us through the Old Testament book of Judges. In the age of the Hebrew Judges, the Promised Land was still a wild frontier, and angels brought down instructions to great heroes (of both the strong-arm and smart-ass varieties). The Book of Judges includes Gideon with his soggy fleece, Jephthah and his human sacrifice to the Lord, Samson and the secret of the honey in the lion, and many little tales like the one of Ehud's assassination of Eglon, as well as the Song of Deborah (already centuries old when the book was assembled, presumably in the early 6th century B.C.E. From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Fish Liver Smoke in the Marriage Bed. 'And the devil shall smell it, and flee away, and never come again any more: but when thou shalt come to her, rise up both of you, and pray . . .' Popular erotic, angelic, and demonic magic of the eastern Diaspora of Israel (circa 180 BCE) is depicted in the inter-testamental Book of Tobit, a favorite text among medieval angelogists and magicians for the wealth of lore it offers regarding practical interactions with spiritual beings. Found among the texts designated as the biblical Apocrypha, Tobit's story will be the subject of our Section Two reading group this month. This brief biblical folktale begins as a pious little romance of ordinary Jewish life in the exiled communities after the subjugation of Jerusalem. Tobit, a successful businessman and a good Jew, sends his son Tobias off to discharge a financial obligation in the land of Media, and hires a guide for him called Azarias, who is a disguise for 'Raphael, one of the seven holy angels.' Accompanied on the journey by his trusty pet dog, Tobias is conducted by the angel to the wondrous utopian city of Ecbatana, where he falls in love and marries a nice Jewish girl, and returns home loaded down with wealth. To claim what he wants, he has to defeat the demon Asmodeus, his rival for the affections of the maiden Sarah. 'This maid hath been given to seven men, who all died in the marriage chamber. . . . for a wicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth . . . those which come unto her.' All this is to be accomplished with fish-liver smoke (among other byproducts). The Book of Tobit is an ironic answer to the heroic tales of the Torah, to the archaic wisdom of Job, and to the strident rhetoric of the old prophets (with a special wink toward the comic prophet Jonah). Besides containing the earliest 'biblical' mention of the archangels Raphael and Gabriel and of the demon Asmodeus, Tobit's story also features the only 'nice dog' anywhere in the whole biblical canon. (All other 'bible dogs' are nasty, viscous, and disgusting, just as in Moslem tradition -- or, for that matter, in the Book of the Law!) The Book of Tobit is available in many editions of the inter-testamental Apocrypha, and participants will find it well worth reading ahead, in order to facilitate discussion. Give a glance as well to other biblical accounts of angels, and we will widen our discussion to the whole realm of preternatural creatures in the Hebrew tradition. 'And now, O Lord, I take not this my sister for lust, but uprightly . . .' " From the 12/2000 Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Yahweh's Pet. It's back to the Bible this month for the Section Two reading group, and thus back also to the second section of Crowley's original A.'. A.'. curriculum. Here 'the Bible, by various authors unknown' is recommended, among many other items of occult fiction, as 'generally suggestive and helpful' to the aspirant. Besides the 'Qabalistic value' of 'the Hebrew and Greek originals,' the Bible 'contains also many magical analogues, and recounts many tales of folk-lore and magical rites.' Join us for a discussion of the Old Testament books of Samuel and their story of King David. The 'books' known as 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel compose a single text which was simply cut into two scrolls, and gives an account of the first kings of Israel written perhaps only a generation or two after the events it chronicles. Modern scholars date the end of David's forty year reign 'circa' 970 B.C.E. and conclude that a mid-tenth century account was probably edited about 350 years later, with a further redaction in the sixth century during the Babylonian exile, to yield more or less the text which has come down to us. "The archetypal 'poet, priest, and king,' whose memory quickly became the basis for Jewish ideas of royal leadership as well as of personal religious observance, David became the model for the divine warrior 'Messiah,' expected to redeem both the religious and political traditions of his people. Personally however he seems to have conformed hardly in any manner to the accepted patterns of worship and righteousness set forth in the old Mosaic stories which established Israel's identity. A murderer, extortionist, outlaw, and liar, David was also both exhibitionist and voyeur, as well (to use a phrase applied to Aleister Crowley on the dust jacket of the new American biography) as a bisexual seducer, completely unconcerned with the moral standards or even the laws of his society. Yet his name means 'darling' and so he was treated by all, from the petulant tribal god Yahweh on high, to the armies he led, to the common people of his kingdom, including even his political enemies. His checkered career forms the narrative center of the Hebrew scriptures, and recent scholarship suggests that the books of Torah may have been first put into their literary form as a textual foundation for the royal biography of David, whose story is among the earliest near-contemporary accounts in the Hebrew texts. He may even be seen as a sort of proto- Thelemite, who identified the divine will with his own and insisted on formulating an individual law for himself accordingly. Thus David becomes a model for human participation in the divine, later cited as a warrant for the Christian 'son of god' who claimed ancestry from him. We will be discussing David's story with an emphasis upon both his heroic and his religious identities, and upon the myth of his return to kingship in the future, in which he prefigures such Gnostic saints as Arthur, Charlemagne, and Frederick II." | |
| Kim, by Rudyard Kipling.
Crowley remarked: "An admirable study of Eastern thought and life. Many
other stories by this author are highly suggestive and
informative."
From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "This tale of a British teenager gone native as a
beggar in the Punjab, who becomes the chela of
a Tibetan lama on a pilgrimage across India in search of the Holy River,
and is also trained as an agent in the imperial intelligence network, may
seem (as does so much of Kipling) easier to enjoy than to praise. Rudyard
Kipling, who was ten years older than Crowley, wrote Kim --- his greatest novel --- in Vermont and in
England after leaving India in 1889. It appeared in 1901, six years before
the award to Kipling of the first Nobel Prize for literature in
English. Crowley was often critical in his references to Kipling, whose writing is sometimes puritanical and often tainted by odd affectations, and by vulgar habits of address retained from his career as a journalist. But Crowley shared Kipling's imperialistic ethos with surprising enthusiasm; in Confessions Kipling is praised for "his general attitude about India" and the British raj there. "We conquered the peninsula by sheer moral superiority. Our unity, our self-respect, our courage, honesty, and sense of justice awakened the wonder, commanded the admiration, and enforced the obedience of those who either lacked those qualities altogether, possessed some of them and felt the lack of others, or had, actually or traditionally, sufficient of them to make them the criteria of right and ability to govern" (1969 ed., p. 285). Kipling's pervasive sense of Law, his freemasonic idealism, and his religious tolerance must also have appealed to Crowley, despite the dogged mediocrity of his moral and aesthetic ideals, and the drab regimentation which tied Kipling back to the old aeon." | |
| For Mythology, as teaching Correspondences. Crowley
recommended: Books of Fairy Tales generally. Oriental Classics generally. Sufi Poetry generally. Scandinavian and Teutonic Sagas generally. Celtic Folk-Lore generally. See the Addenda, for the works Thelema lodge chose to fulfill this recommendation. |
