HERALD-TEPAPHONE

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From: "John B. Fleming" Subject: HERALD-TEPAPHONE Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 15:40:59 -0500 (EST) A Quarterly Publication of IAO Camp, Ordo Templi Orientis Vernal Equinox, 1995 e.v. Volume One, Number One _________________________________________________________________ _Do what thou wilt shall be the Whole of the Law._ _________________________________________________________________ IAO Camp, Ordo Templi Orientis P.O. Box 5793 Bloomington, Indiana 47407 Personnel: The Non-existent Brother R. B., Camp Master Soror Shekinah, Minister of Protocol The Non-existent Sister R. H., Treasurer Frater In Profunda, Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Frater W. B., Minister of Magical Formulae Outside Contributors: Frater Melekh ha-Zahab A. Quiller III Adam Weishaupt _________________________________________________________________ The _Herald-Tepaphone_ is the quarterly newsletter of IAO Camp, a duly chartered body of 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 or money orders payable to _Bowyer_. Membership in IAO Camp and/or O.T.O. is not required to subscribe or to submit material. Text submissions may be sent on paper or on 3.5 in. disk for WordPerfect or Microsoft Word (preferably on Macintosh), illustrations had better be on paper at present. All copyrights reside with the individual authors.

The opinions expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the individual authors and do not 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 astonishing claim that the _Preliminary Invocation_ which appears in the 1904 Crowley-Mathers edition of the _Goetia_ is based on the Golden Dawn paper _Bornless Ritual for the Invocation 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 on the _Preliminary Invocation_, not vice versa. The _Bornless Ritual_ in _The Golden Dawn_ is one of Regardie's _purely personal productions_ and was composed sometime in the latter 1930s. I thought it might be of benefit to the well-known authority mentioned above, and to less renowned scholars in this field, to write up some of my notes on the history of this important ritual. Please bear in mind that these are only notes, part of an ongoing study of the 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 magical incantations, all of them well-seasoned with barbarous names. In fact, several of the barbarous names employed in our ritual appear in the other incantations. The ritual, in its original form, is an exorcism. This cookbook -- or at least part of it -- ends up in the British Museum and is now known as _Papyrus Londonensis 46_: this is the primary source from which the modern versions of this ceremony are ultimately descended. The story continues with Charles Wycliffe Goodwin's _Fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian Work upon Magic_, which appears in the _Publications of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society_, 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 the manuscript 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 _Egyptian Magic_. Included in this book (a tertiary source, for those who are keeping score) is the

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 book and is sufficiently impressed by the opening passage to look up the complete text in Goodwin's book: from the text in Goodwin he creates the redaction with which we are primarily concerned, the _Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia_. The earliest references (which I have found so far) to this ritual in its modern form are connected 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 is not very familiar with the ritual at this date. Fuller's account of the event refers to the ceremony as _the ritual of the Bornless One_, but Crowley himself nearly always speaks of it as the _Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia_, suggesting that he has always considered the two as linked (and thus further suggesting that he received them together from 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 this edition is that the Preliminary Invocation is set in Caxton Blackletter, described justly by our well-known authority as _perhaps the most illegible typeface ever devised_; it is very difficult 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 the bottom 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 unauthorized edition of the _Goetia_. This is merely a reprint of the 1904 edition, with some deletions and a number of errors: i.e., it is a quaternary source. This edition sets the Preliminary Invocation in an easy-to-read typeface, but the typesetter is, unfortunately, not initiated into the mysteries of Caxton Blackletter: where the word _Abrasax_ appears in the 1904 edition, it appears in the 1916 edition as _Abrasar_. There are several other errors, all apparently due to the illegibility of the type in the 1904 edition. In 1921, Crowley writes his personal redaction of the Preliminary Invocation, which he titles _Liber Samekh_. Crowley's version is based on the 1904 _Goetia_, with a few changes which seem to be intentional. This is another quaternary source, and it is published 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 obviously based on the corrupt text of the 1916 _Goetia_, but it also includes a note that seems to echo Crowley's notes to _Samekh_. It is, therefore, a quinary source based on two quaternary 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 supposes to be the original. Sometime in the late 1930's, while an Adeptus Minor of the Stella Matutina, Regardie writes a ritual for spiritual development which he calls _Bornless

Ritual for the Invocation of the Higher Genius_, based on his own 1932 _Bornless Invocation_. This new version corrects most of the errors unique to the 1932 version, but retains two of them, which makes this a senary source; i.e., it is a text (1941) based on a text (1932) based on a text (1916) based on a text (1904) based on a text (1852) based on the 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 a variety of purposes. The attentive reader will already have noticed that I avoid the common name for this ceremony, _the Bornless Ritual_. The reason is that the only one of these many versions which is actually called _Bornless Ritual_ is Regardie's personal adaptation (1937), which is considerably more elaborate than the _Preliminary Invocation_ on which it is based. In other words, _Bornless Ritual_ should not be used as a generic term for all versions 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 less common 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 my responses, evidence which might contradict my assumption that Mathers created our modern redaction of the ritual, comparisons of the various versions from 1852 - 1937, and comparisons of Goodwin's text with more recent scholarship, are all appropriate subjects for future articles.