Near the end of 'Confessions', AC says that he was planning a translation and commentary of the 'Golden Verses of Pythagoras', he says "I also began an examination of The Golden Verses of Pythagoras. I was struck by the fact that it was incumbent on disciples to commit them to memory and repeat them daily. From this I deduced that the somewhat shallow meaning of their injunctions concealed the heart of the initiated doctrine. This speculation was confirmed by research. For instance, the phrase "Honour the gods" which "needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us" is proper, conceals a magical injunction of the first importance. "Tima" honour etymologically means "Estimate" or "calculate". The instruction thus is to make a scientific investigation of the formulae of the various gods, i.e., to discover the laws which express their energies, exactly as in physics to honour gravitation is senseless, but we may increase our control of nature by inquiry into its nature and action. The more I studied these verses, the more tremendous seemed their import and should I succeed in completing my translation and commentary, the long lost secret of Pythagoras should be brought to light and Greek philosophy assume an aspect hitherto hidden which must revolutionize our ideas of the ancient wisdom."
Was this translation and commentary ever completed and/or published?
93!
That's that Nagasiva-guy alright.
-"He is an embarrassing appendage and I want to destroy him entirely now"
-"No, not yet, he is still valuable. A little more."
Perhaps I'll delegate the task to someone promising.
93 93/93
Nevyn93
Oops, I should've posted this in 'Requests'. -__-;
This is from the Warburg Institute catalogue of the Yorke Collection ref.NS16
Springback folder of loose sheets
"The Golden Verses of Pythagoras. A new translation with comment by The Beast 666 9% = 2 AgAg Preface and the first eleven verses only. A. C. never finished his translation. This is believed to be all that he did."
The 9% and AgAg stuff are due to missing fonts.
OK
@OKantrair, thank you very much. 🙂
v
This was one of the things I wanted to come here to inquire about. A while ago I got into the rather marvelous work of Peter Kingsley, an idiosyncratic English non-dual mystic and scholar who's done fascinating work on some of the pre-Socratics (particularly Parmenides and Empedocles) and on linkages from them through to Egypt and then Sufism, as well as something about a Mongolian shaman who visited ancient Greece and said some ... stuff (I dunno, haven't read it, but it looks very interesting).
Anyway, after Kingsley's work had gotten me interested in the ancient Greek side of things again, I'd always been interested in this little tidbit of Crowleyiana re. the Golden Verses, and I wanted to find out more about it by asking here. Preparatory to asking, I did a little bit of searching myself and via the magic of the interwebs, it turns out that Paul Joseph Rovelli did (or claims he did? not sure, might be someone else's work) a version of this (sadly unfinished) piece from the typescript in the Yorke collection.
It's available here.
It's chock-full of wonderful stuff. It seems to be from that period in the US when AC was looking into mouth sounds and language, so it has a lot of that, and some of the "Star Sponge" and "elements gathering experience by combining into compounds" perspective of that period.
A little taster:-
Now the Universe itself is the result of the will of its Souls (or conscious elements) to add the pleasure of experience to those of perfection and peace by undertaking incarnations as above described.
"To add the pleasure of experience to those of perfection and peace" - now that's vintage AC! 🙂
Has anyone else got any other bits of knowledge to add re. this text, anything notable AC or others said about it, etc.?
Has anyone else got any other bits of knowledge to add re. this text, anything notable AC or others said about it, etc.?
Habe you read Ray Sherwin's Theatre of Magic? He does a line by line analysis of the Golden Verses in there.
Habe you read Ray Sherwin's Theatre of Magic? He does a line by line analysis of the Golden Verses in there.
No, thanks for the reference!
Another wee gem:-
Our original state is thus one of formless monistic consciousness or unconsciousness, without the antithesis of the Ego and the non-Ego. We have willed to become aware of the universe, and to do this we must represent it in form. We therefore conceive Zero as the opposition of two equal elements, and Rest as that of two equal forces. We make these “male and female” and develop from the combinations of these two ideas the complex diversity of the Cosmos. But we ourselves can only perceive our creation by partaking of its nature, and we consequently mask our eternal Godhead in minds and bodies, which are subject to the flux of things, living and dying as they do. For one cannot conceive of a thing unless one share its nature. We cannot even believe in a world where intelligence is bodiless because we have no part in it.