Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Rosa Mundi a poem...excerpts...H.D. Carr (Aleister Crowley) & Auguste Rodin... 1905







19288
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Limited edition, 488 copies printed with a full page watercolor drawing by Auguste Rodin signed in the plate.




19288-1

pencil and wash design by Auguste Rodin




1. ROSE of the World!
Red glory of the secret heart of Love!
Red flame, rose-red, most subtly curled
Into its own infinite flower, all flowers above!
Its flower in its own perfumed passion,
Its faint sweet passion, folded and furled
In flower fashion;
And my deep spirit taking its pure part
Of that voluptuous heart
Of hidden happiness!

2. Arise, strong bow of the young child Eros!
(While the maddening moonlight, the memoried caress
Stolen of the scented rose
Stirs me and bids each racing pulse ache, ache!)
Bend into an agony of art
Whose cry is ever rapture, and whose tears
For their own purity's undivided sake
Are molten dew, as, on the lotus leaves
Sliver-coiled in the Sun
Into green girdled spheres
Purer than all a maiden's dream enweaves,
Lies the unutterable beauty of
The Waters. Yea, arise, divinest dove
Of the Idalian, on your crimson wings
And soft grey plumes, bear me to yon cool shrine
Of that most softly-spoken one,
Mine Aphrodite! Touch the imperfect strings,
Oh thou, immortal, throned above the moon!
Inspire a holy tune
Lighter and lovelier than flowers and wine
Offered in gracious gardens unto Pan
By any soul of man!
...

Matchless, serene, in sacred amplitudes
Of its own royal rapture, deaf and blind
To aught but its own mastery of song
And light, shown ever as silence and deep night
Secret as death and final. Let me long
Never again for aught! This great delight
Involves me, weaves me in its pattern of bliss,
Seals me with its own kiss,
Draws me to thee with every dream that glows,
Poet, each word! Maiden, each burden of snows
Extending beyond sunset, beyond dawn!
O Rose, inviolate, utterly withdrawn
In the truth: -- for this is truth: Love knows!
Ah! Rose of the World! Rose! Rose!


excerpts from Rosa Mundi by H. D. Carr (Aleister Crowley)



Thursday, December 1, 2011

Pinax microcosmographicus...Johann Remmelin & Hara Sanshin ...Flap books





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Johann Remmelin's Pinax Microcosmographicus  1667


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Japanese version of Johann Remmelin's Pinax Microcosmographicus. Copy made by Hara Sanshin, 17c.

more early Japanese anatomical illustrations HERE



Monday, November 14, 2011

Frederick Carter... The Dragon of the Alchemists... 1918






Frederick Carter’s deep interest in alchemy and all aspects of the supernatural and the occult, led him to produce an esoteric symbolism which is apparent throughout his work. Nowhere is this displayed more clearly than in his works for The Dragon of the Alchemists. Frederick Carter provided little or no explanation regarding the significance of his imagery which combines symbols of established religion with those of mysticism and it is likely that he intended the meaning of many of his images to remain shrouded in mystery.


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Persus


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Ship of Dreams



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The Balance


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The Babe of Fire


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Silence



To-day it is maintained that a certain morbid psychological alteration in what is called "the function of reality" bears traces of archaic thought: though what is called archaic may be basic and independent of morbidity. It was accepted without hesitation in the Renaissance that myth extended the range of mental vision, and mythical incidents and classical names were so used until that mode of metaphorical expression became stereotyped. The subjective response and understanding died; a rationalised meaning took its place and nullified its appeal. But the "libido" was then, and is yet, capable of being led into sublimer paths by the use of myth, image, and metaphor: a sound mode of analogy had, as it ever has had, an impetus and a power of moving the mind that brings poetry to life. The poet was a stargazer, and found in his heaven the images of perfection.
from ~ The Dragon of the Alchemists



Saturday, November 5, 2011

Austin Osman Spare ... Illustration...1909



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Cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum 1909


from

On the Oxford circuit, and other verses  by Mr Justice Darling 1909

 
CUJUS EST SOLUM EJUS EST USQUE 
AD COELUM 

'ELUSIVE maxim! Hardly Heaven 
they hold 
Whose lands in fee to central Hell 

descend. 
Though from the soil its lords the 
stars behold, 
With the thick air extremest titles end. 




Saturday, July 30, 2011

Oskar Kokoschka... The Dreaming youths... 1907/08



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Renowned as an Expressionist painter, the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) began his career in the decorative arts, studying book illustration, printmaking and typography alongside life drawing at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts between 1904 and 1908. The Dreaming Youths, begun in November 1907 and printed the following June, was Kokoschka’s first major graphic series, produced at the age of 21 while he was still a student. It started as a commission for a children’s picture-book, but Kokoschka set aside his brief after the first illustration, adding verses to create a complex ‘picture-poem’ exploring the desires and anxieties of adolescent sexuality. He described it as ‘a kind of record, in words and pictures, of my own state of mind at the time’, in particular of his love for Lilith Lang, the sister of a fellow student, who appears with him in the final image, The Girl Li and I. He wrote later that ‘the book was my first love-letter’, although his relationship with Lilith had ended by the time it appeared.

 The Dreaming Youths was one of Kokoschka’s most significant early statements, and the frank, erotic metaphor and personal mythology introduced here would become central to his later artistic productions, both visual and literary.

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The girl Li and I 




Saturday, July 23, 2011

The Story of the Eye ...Andre Masson..book cover



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Cover sketch for George Bataille's Story of the Eye - first edition 1928 - André Masson



"And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating..."


 George Bataille's Story of the Eye


 previous post > George Bataille



Monday, July 18, 2011

Friday, July 8, 2011

Boetius Adams Bolswert. (ca. 1580-1633).. emblem..



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What is mine in heaven and so what should I want on earth from Thee?



from the Pia Desideria Emblematis Elegiis by Hugo Hermann one of the most popular spiritual love emblem book ever published, illustrated with the beautiful emblematic designs of the great baroque artist Boetius Adams Bolswert.




Friday, April 29, 2011

Austin Osman Spare ... Ugly Ecstasy ...Satyr...



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from the Book of Ugly Ecstasy 1924 - Fulgur 1996



it would be sentimental to say that the figures in Ugly Ectasy and Automatic Drawings
are happy despite theirhideous appearances....in the words of WH Audens poem, 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud' -

Down among the lost people like Dante, down
To the stinking fosse where the injured
Lead the ugly life of the rejected.

Nevertheless, Spare signed off Automatic Drawing on a defiant and innuendo-laden note: "Great is he who pleasures this difficult life," he wrote, and  "He has found wisdom who knows how to spend"*

*Victorian euphemism for ejaculation.


excerpt from Austin Osman Spare - The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist










Monday, April 11, 2011

Saturday, March 19, 2011

ATUA: Voices from La Societe Voudon Gnostique... 2011




I have the delighful pleasure to have work included in the first Journal of La Societe Voudon Gnostique, edited by David Beth and Published by Fulgur Limited


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© Jónas Sen


ATUA is the public vehicle through which the members of the S.V.G.make selected manifestations of their magico-gnostic research and experience available to an informed audience. This first anthology features essays, artwork, and prose and aims to provide insight and inspiration to practitioners on a similar spiritual path




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 Dolorosa



from Fulgur...


Contributors include: David Beth, Craig Williams, Vadge Moore, Hagen von Tulien, Dolorosa, Jonas Sen, Jessica Grote, Roberto Migliussi, Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule, Shannon Esmeralda, Peter Dyde, Ariock Van de Voorde, M.W. Burson, Marc’Aurelio Pozzi, Alan Kostencic and Zdravko Bozic. The material will be presented to our usual standard, and there will be a free audio CD supplement which will include material from Jonas Sen and Lightning Path.



Saturday, January 29, 2011

Andre Domin ...illustration for "Litanies de la Rose"...1919



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"Litanies de la Rose"
Remy de Gourmont (Author)
Paris: Editions Rene Kieffer, 1919


Rose with dark eyes,
mirror of your nothingness,
rose with dark eyes,
make us believe in the mystery,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Rose the colour of pure gold,
oh safe deposit of the ideal,
rose the colour of pure gold,
give us the key of your womb,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Rose the colour of silver,
censer of our dreams,
rose the colour of silver,
take our heart and turn it into smoke,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Remy de Gourmont




Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Lynd Ward... Mad Man's Drum.. Part 1



a few scans from one of my favourite artists, and one of the finest wood engravers of the twentieth century .. 

 Mad Man Drum ~ A Novel in Woodcuts
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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Apuleius' ... "Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass"... illustrations and translations...



'
'Lend me your ear, reader: you shall enjoy yourself'



Illustrations and translations of the Latin novel the



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Isis Revealed
illustrated by Percival Goodman. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1932.



‘Looking up I saw the full orb of the Moon shining with peculiar lustre and that very moment emerging from the waves of the sea. Then the thought came to me that this was the hour of silence and loneliness when my prayers might avail. For I knew that the Moon was the primal Goddess of supreme sway; that all human beings are vitalised by the divine influence of her light; that all the bodies which are on earth, or in the heavens, or in the sea, increase when she waxes, and decline when she wanes. Considering this, therefore, and feeling that Fate was now satiated with my endless miseries and at last licensed a hope of salvation, I determined to implore the august image of the risen Goddess.
  So, shaking off my tiredness, I scrambled to my feet and walked straight into the sea into order to purify myself. I immersed my head seven times because (according to the divine Pythagoras) that number is specially suited for all ritual-acts; and then, speaking with lively joy, I lifted my tear-wet face in supplication to the irresistible Goddess:
....

translated by Jack Lindsay





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illustrated by Percival Goodman. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1932.



“Queen of Heaven, whether you are fostering Ceres the motherly nurse of all growth, who (gladdened at the discovery of your lost daughter) abolished brutish nutriment of the primitive acorn and pointed the way to gentler food (as is yet shown in the tilling of the fields of Eleusis); or whether you are celestial Venus who in the first moment of Creation min
gled the opposing sexes in the generation of mutual desires, and who (after sowing in humanity the seeds of indestructible continuing life) are now worshipped in the wave-washed shrine of Paphos; or whether you are the sister of Phoebus, who by relieving the pangs of childbirth travail with soothing remedies have brought safe into the world lives innumerable, and who are now venerated in the thronged sanctuary of Ephesus; or whether you are Proserpine, terrible with the howls of midnight, whose triple face has power to ward off the assaults of ghosts and to close the cracks in the earth, and who wander through many a grove, propitiated in divers manners, illuminating the walls of all cities with beams of female light, nurturing the glad seeds in the earth with your damp heat, and dispensing abroad your dim radiance when the sun has abandoned us—O by whatever name, and by whatever rite, and in whatever form, it is permitted to invoke you, come now and succour me in the hour of my calamity. Support my broken life, and give me rest and peace after the tribulations of my lot. Let there be an end to the toils that weary me, and an end to the snares that beset me. Remove from me the hateful shape of a beast, and restore me to the sight of those that love me. Restore me to Lucius, my lost self. But if an offended god pursues me implacably, then grant me death at least since life is denied me.”



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Lucius restored to human shape by the Grace of Isis
illustrated by Jean de Bosschère.  London: John Lane - The Bodley Head, 1923.


Thus the divine shape breathing out the pleasant spice of fertill Arabia, disdained not with her divine voyce to utter these words unto me: Behold Lucius I am come, thy weeping and prayers hath mooved mee to succour thee. I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine, Queene of heaven, the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customes and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the æthiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the ægyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship mee, doe call mee Queene Isis…’

translated by William Adlington



Sunday, January 16, 2011

Paul Holman... poem... 3






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3


 She had been earthed
( had i earthed
her by my intrusion? )
eyes no longer turned

upon phenomena I
could not locate.
She considered me a 
plunderer, a facund man,
a madman: one who
scries alphabets
of daggers, of arrows.
Zigzagged tights in a

knot in her pocket,
the tip of each
hair luminous a fox-
fire or rotten wood,

she opened the violet
gate at her throat
to release the fractal
silhouette of Pan.



Published in a wonderful collection of esoteric poetry and essays > Datura by Scarlet Imprint 
previous POEMS
 
PAUL HOLMAN is the author of The Fabulist (1991) and The Memory of the Drift (2000). He was co-editor of Invisible Books in the 1990s.




Eric Gill.... print



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engraving from E.Powys Mathers : Procreant Hymn
One of the first Gill was to illustrate for the Golden Cockerel Press