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HERALD-TEPAPHONE

http://www.arcane-archive.org/societies/thelemic/ordo-templi-orientis/htl/herald-tepaphone-1.php

From: "John B. Fleming"

Subject: HERALD-TEPAPHONEDate: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 15:40:59 -0500 (EST)

A Quarterly Publication of IAO Camp, Ordo Templi OrientisVernal Equinox, 1995 e.v.Volume One, Number One

_________________________________________________________________

_Do what thou wilt shall be the Whole of the Law.__________________________________________________________________

IAO Camp,Ordo Templi OrientisP.O. Box 5793Bloomington, Indiana 47407

Personnel:

The Non-existent Brother R. B., Camp MasterSoror Shekinah, Minister of ProtocolThe Non-existent Sister R. H., TreasurerFrater In Profunda, Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda

Frater W. B., Minister of Magical Formulae

Outside Contributors:

Frater Melekh ha-ZahabA. Quiller IIIAdam Weishaupt_________________________________________________________________

The _Herald-Tepaphone_ is the quarterly newsletter of IAO Camp, a duly chartered bodyof Ordo Templi Orientis. The _HT_ is published on the Equinoxes and Solstices.

Subscriptions are $5.00 per issue or $16.00 for one year (4 issues), make checks ormoney orders payable to _Bowyer_.

Membership in IAO Camp and/or O.T.O. is not required to subscribe or to submitmaterial. Text submissions may be sent on paper or on 3.5 in. disk for WordPerfect orMicrosoft Word (preferably on Macintosh), illustrations had better be on paper at present.All copyrights reside with the individual authors.

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The opinions expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the individual authors and donot necessarily reflect those of IAO Camp, the Ordo Templi Orientis, or of anyone else.

_________________________________________________________________

In this issue...

* Notes on the History of Liber 365 or; The Bornless Ritual_________________________________________________________________

Notes on the History of Liber 365 or;

The Bornless Ritual

by the Non-existent Brother R. B.

A well-known authority on modern ceremonial Magick recently made the astonishingclaim that the _Preliminary Invocation_ which appears in the 1904 Crowley-Mathersedition of the _Goetia_ is based on the Golden Dawn paper _Bornless Ritual for theInvocation of the Higher Genius._ This is wildly inaccurate, since the _Bornless Ritual_published in _The Golden Dawn_ is not only not a G.`.D.`. paper, but is in fact based onthe _Preliminary Invocation_, not vice versa. The _Bornless Ritual_ in _The GoldenDawn_ is one of Regardie's _purely personal productions_ and was composed sometimein the latter 1930s.

I thought it might be of benefit to the well-known authority mentioned above, and to lessrenowned scholars in this field, to write up some of my notes on the history of thisimportant ritual. Please bear in mind that these are only notes, part of an ongoing study ofthe subject, and certainly not my final judgments.

The story of our ritual begins sometime around the fourth century of the Vulgar Era,when a Hellenized Egyptian writes it down as part of a _cookbook_ of magicalincantations, all of them well-seasoned with barbarous names. In fact, several of thebarbarous names employed in our ritual appear in the other incantations. The ritual, in itsoriginal form, is an exorcism. This cookbook -- or at least part of it -- ends up in theBritish Museum and is now known as _Papyrus Londonensis 46_: this is the primarysource from which the modern versions of this ceremony are ultimately descended.

The story continues with Charles Wycliffe Goodwin's _Fragment of a Graeco-EgyptianWork upon Magic_, which appears in the _Publications of the Cambridge AntiquarianSociety_, no 2, in 1852. Goodwin provides a transcription of the Greek text of P. Lond.46, with a facing-page translation and notes: this secondary source, rather than themanuscript itself, is the basis for the modern redactions of the ritual.

In 1899 E. A. W. Budge, the G.`.D.`.'s favorite Egyptologist, publishes his _EgyptianMagic_. Included in this book (a tertiary source, for those who are keeping score) is the

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opening passage of our ritual, quoted from Goodwin's translation. Some G.`.D.`. initiate I presume Mathers himself, though as yet I have no proof of this -- reads Budge's bookand is sufficiently impressed by the opening passage to look up the complete text inGoodwin's book: from the text in Goodwin he creates the redaction with which we areprimarily concerned, the _Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia_.

The earliest references (which I have found so far) to this ritual in its modern form areconnected with Crowley's performance of it in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid,November 22, 1903. On this occasion he is obliged to read the text, which suggests he isnot very familiar with the ritual at this date. Fuller's account of the event refers to theceremony as _the ritual of the Bornless One_, but Crowley himself nearly always speaksof it as the _Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia_, suggesting that he has alwaysconsidered the two as linked (and thus further suggesting that he received them togetherfrom Mathers?).

In 1904, Crowley publishes _Goetia_, including as Preliminary Invocation our ritual, as

redacted from Goodwin's text: this is, then, a tertiary source. The great difficulty with thisedition is that the Preliminary Invocation is set in Caxton Blackletter, described justly byour well-known authority as _perhaps the most illegible typeface ever devised_; it is verydifficult to read, and many letters look just like other letters except under careful scrutiny.The letter _x_, for example, is only distict from the letter _r_ by a tiny flourish at thebottom of the letter, so that if you don't know the intricacies of the typeface, the word_Abrasax_ looks like _Abrasar_.

In 1916, the American pirate publisher L. W. DeLaurence produces his unauthorizededition of the _Goetia_. This is merely a reprint of the 1904 edition, with some deletionsand a number of errors: i.e., it is a quaternary source. This edition sets the PreliminaryInvocation in an easy-to-read typeface, but the typesetter is, unfortunately, not initiatedinto the mysteries of Caxton Blackletter: where the word _Abrasax_ appears in the 1904edition, it appears in the 1916 edition as _Abrasar_. There are several other errors, allapparently due to the illegibility of the type in the 1904 edition.

In 1921, Crowley writes his personal redaction of the Preliminary Invocation, which hetitles _Liber Samekh_. Crowley's version is based on the 1904 _Goetia_, with a fewchanges which seem to be intentional. This is another quaternary source, and it ispublished in 1929/1930 as Appendix IV of _Magick in Theory and Practice_.

Next, in 1932, Regardie publishes a version of the Preliminary Invocation titling it the_Bornless Invocation_ -- in his book _The Tree of Life_. His redaction is obviouslybased on the corrupt text of the 1916 _Goetia_, but it also includes a note that seems toecho Crowley's notes to _Samekh_. It is, therefore, a quinary source based on twoquaternary sources, and it includes a few new errors of its own.

Finally we come to the redaction of the ritual which our well-known authority supposesto be the original. Sometime in the late 1930's, while an Adeptus Minor of the StellaMatutina, Regardie writes a ritual for spiritual development which he calls _Bornless

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Ritual for the Invocation of the Higher Genius_, based on his own 1932 _BornlessInvocation_. This new version corrects most of the errors unique to the 1932 version, butretains two of them, which makes this a senary source; i.e., it is a text (1941) based on atext (1932) based on a text (1916) based on a text (1904) based on a text (1852) based onthe original manuscript (4th century, more or less). Regardie includes this ritual in his

1937 - 40 _Golden Dawn_, as an example of how G.`.D.`. technique can be adapted to avariety of purposes.

The attentive reader will already have noticed that I avoid the common name for thisceremony, _the Bornless Ritual_. The reason is that the only one of these many versionswhich is actually called _Bornless Ritual_ is Regardie's personal adaptation (1937),which is considerably more elaborate than the _Preliminary Invocation_ on which it isbased. In other words, _Bornless Ritual_ should not be used as a generic term for allversions of this ceremony, because it is properly applied to only one version (which is,moreover, the least typical of all the modern versions). A more acceptable -- if lesscommon name is _Liber 365_, the official classification of the _Preliminary Invocation

of the Goetia_.

These are, let me repeat, only rough notes. Further details, possible criticisms and myresponses, evidence which might contradict my assumption that Mathers created ourmodern redaction of the ritual, comparisons of the various versions from 1852 - 1937,and comparisons of Goodwin's text with more recent scholarship, are all appropriatesubjects for future articles.