Quoting Caduceus Books <[log in to unmask]>:
> These are issues that I have been thinking about as I have just
> started
> to publish magical texts. The ethos is to preserve and present the
> texts
> in a manner that is entirely sympathetic to the sometimes complex
> world
> view of the writer. Hence, whilst the books may be of interest to
> academics, they are definitely not academic books.
>
I don't entirely agree, I have to say, though I take your point. If you
consider various early modern grimoires of goetic magic, some of them present
ritual actions that, should they work, would to my mind be reprehensible; I am
thinking in particular of some of the spells to bring a chosen woman to the
circle ready and willing to perform sexually, which amounts to a kind of magical
rape.
If I make such texts available in accurate translations from the original
sources, I do not see that this requires me to by sympathetic to the writers.
The problem, I think, is that commonly "accuracy" and "sympathy" go hand in hand
-- in the sense, at least, that a lack of the latter leads to a disregard for
the former. If I alter the texts because I don't like them, that is bad
scholarship, academic or otherwise. Obviously there is no such thing as a
perfect translation, and in the text itself I must try to capture the original
sense as well as possible, and to this extent a kind of "sympathy" is necessary.
Perhaps this is what you meant about sympathy to the "world view" of the
writer? But it seems to me that if I am required to be sympathetic to the
writers, I cannot in good conscience translate and edit certain goetic texts,
and in that case the things will languish.
I have periodically toyed with a complete translated edition of the _Fourth Book
of Occult Philosophy_ as printed in Marburg, 1559; the various translations and
editions known to me in English are all partial. Some of these texts I find
disturbing, but they are of significant historical value, which is why I'd do
it. I gather that some practitioners find them valuable for other reasons, but
I neither can nor wish to control this.
In order to put the thing together, though, it would be necessary to write a
lengthy introduction in which I talk about the context and give some suggestions
about how to read the texts. In such an introduction, I would certainly talk
directly about my distaste for some of these texts, or some parts of them. And
I do not think that doing this should invalidate the edition for non-academic
purposes, precisely because, having discussed the issue, I would then attempt
insofar as is possible to translate and annotate the texts accurately from a
textual and historical standpoint.
Chris Lehrich
|