Thank you very much Jason, Paul, Amy, Samuel, Chas and Robert for your prompt, helpful and heartfelt responses.
I wish I could communicate on this with Carl Llewellyn Weschke himself. As a long time magician, I expected a more insightful response from his company.
I will get in touch with Falcon Press as well as search for sources of the material online. The Amazon link Paul provided to the Falcon Press edition also makes it clear I need to look again at other GD texts since it is claimed that they are not all identical.
I am juxtaposing the GD material with some very imaginatively powerful and yet simple elemental meditations created by Michael Scott in his
The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel fantasy novels series, as he takes two of his characters, Sophie and Josh, through a sequence of elemental initiations that represent wonderful poetry and suggest superb contemplative possibilities, whatever one might think of the miraculous magical acts that follow the initiations.
Works of fiction are some of the best works on magical thought and practice. I got a striking experience once from performing the Catholic rosary ritual prayer using Tolkien's superb deity descriptions at the beginning of the
Silmarilion, correlating the Catholic system and Tolkien by using Jung's theory of archetypes as an inspirational framework.
I am also approaching Scott's publishers, Delacorte Press, for permission to use his material , although that is slowed down by their insisting on discussing permissions only by surface mail. It would be more delicate to walk round the Scott material if I dont get permission for that, but even then, it should be possible to develop something of my own inspired by the Scott text and content myself with writing about Scott's text as part of an essay.
I pray I can use it, though. It is sublime. Combined with the GD meditations and invocations and the elemental expositions of the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad which link the elements with aspect of the human being and ultimately with the source of being, particularly as they are translated by W.B.Yeasts and Purohit Swami, one enters into a world in which the exquisite beauty of the universe is revealed.
Thanks again.
Toyin
On 29 September 2011 20:42, jason winslade
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Publishers are always going to give you the hard line, even if they don't own the copyright. Unfortunately, Toyin, you're on their radar now. Whether that means anything, I have no idea. I know you were probably trying to do right, but all you've done, unfortunately, is draw attention to yourself. My position on this is that the less publishers know, the better. It's not like you're plagiarizing. And Llewellyn are hardly going to scan the Internet looking for excerpts of rituals so they can waste time, money and resources pursuing a frivolous lawsuit. I think as long as you cite your source and aren't charging any money for it, you're probably covered by fair use and scholarly precedent. The worst they can do, if they
somehow find the site, is to send you a cease and desist letter or something like that.
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2011 2:33 PM
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] DIALOGUE WITH KATHY SCHNEIDER OF LLEWELLYN ON RE-USING A SMALL SECTION OF THE GOLDEN DAWN RITUALS IN A NEW RITUAL
Llewellyn said no, but as others have mentioned,
you should be able to find the material elsewhere.
There is absolutely nothing to be gained
by
further annoying Ms. Schneider, unless you wish
to convince her that writers on the Golden Dawn
are all obsessive weirdos.
However, she may well be so convinced already.
Chas
On Sep 29, 2011, at 12:40 PM, toyin adepoju wrote:
> I would like the views of any interested person on this communication between myself and a representative of Llewellyn publishers.