And a greater feast for death

As evidenced by the time that has elapsed since the last post, this project is basically dead.  Since the "messy internal politics" I alluded to in a 2010 post, I have been formally inactive in O.T.O. (I have no reason to believe they actually expelled me, and I never felt quite petty or vindictive enough to do anything that would warrant such a reaction).  Over the past six or seven years I've lost a lot of interest in and enthusiasm for these studies (paralleled by the near collapse of the Celephaïs Press project).  Do not expect any further updates to this blog.

Note on Liber 194

The notes to the copy of Liber 194 on the NIWG site are out of date. Since they were last revised, Grand Lodges of OTO under X° heads have been established in the UK and Australia and the Electoral College has been instituted (after a fashion) in the former province at least.

Mirror, Mirror (2)

Turned this up while looking for something unrelated:

www.geocities.ws/nu_isis/

This appears to be a copy of the site from shortly before Geocities closed, and postdating the last changes I ever made to it. Have not checked through absolutely everything yet, but spot-checks have so far found nothing missing (the stylesheet, graphics, PDFs, fonts &c. all seem to be there; even the MIDI files tho' most browsers will need obscure plugins to play them now). This appears to be part of a project to preserve / archive Geocities sites; it is so far unclear whether it will be possible for me to actually take control of the site.

I should perhaps mention that two of the Yorkshire OTO bodies mentioned on the front page, Shekinah Oasis, Sheffield and Templum Amoris Lodge, York, no longer exist, having been closed down due to some messy internal politics in UK Grand Lodge earlier this year. Some of the offsite links are probably non-functional, especially a few absolute links to other Geocities pages.

Regards,

T.S.

Addendum: The server-side ad scripts used by geocities.ws result in the framed version of the site not displaying in Chrome (I suppose nobody uses HTML framesets any more, bear in mind the original coding on this site was done in 2001 or so and never seriously overhauled subsequently); if using Chrome, select "no frills version" from the front page, or go directly to

www.geocities.ws/nu_isis/index_nf.html

Firefox seems to be OK with the frames version.

Amused to note that Google Ads decided that "Just Christian Dating" was clearly suitable to be stuck on the text of Liber AL.

777 Revised

The PDF of 777 Revised, as first webpublished on the NIWG site, has turned up on a radical news site in Australia (I assume based on the focus of the news content that that's where the site's run from, anyway). I am not entirely clear on why it was put there (it was attached, along with Ben Rowe's edition of Abramelin, Liber OZ, and a couple of books on Qabala, to a free-verse poem called "Visitations") but while it lasts, here's the link:

Read or download the complete 777 Revised.

Other copies have turned up on the web, but this is the only one I have found of rev. 0.996, most if not all earlier releases (there have been none later) omit the bulk of the Arabic material.

Mirror, mirror . . .

Just discovered that a partial mirror of the site has been posted here. By "partial" I mean the stylesheet, the Flash and most of the HTML are there (Magick Without Tears is missing, but that has been mirrored at Hermetic Library for years), but none of the other image files, PDFs or zip archives (the latter used for the downloadable fonts).

EDIT 2009.12.13: Just checked a bit more thoroughly: actually some of the images are there, but much less of the HTML than I first thought.

Musical jokes

Some folks liked them, some complained about them, and they don't seem to work now (at least on Firefox) probably due to me using non-standard code to embed them back in 2001. A partial list of the MIDI music tracks that played at you on viewing certain web-pages on the NIWG site followeth:

Front page: "Paint it Black," The Rolling Stones. Nicked this one from another Thelemic site, can't remember the name.

Introduction to OTO: "The Imperial March" by John Williams from The Empire Strikes Back.

Constitution of OTO: Another version of the Imperial theme, which I can't actually find on any of the Star Wars OSTs, starts slower than the above and builds up. The choice of this and the above perhaps reflects my ambivalent attitude to the Order and its leadership at the time this site was built, as well as a long-running private joke among various OTO members in Leeds, which has even resulted in the track being played for or at various senior members of the Order in this country in more recent years.

"The Degrees of OTO" and "OTO Synopsis of Degrees": "Stairway to Heaven." Yeah, well.

"Hymn to Lucifer": "Sympathy for the Devil." Removed because it was a large file and didn't really work as a MIDI sequence anyway.

Liber V vel Regula: "The Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden. Needs no further explanation.

Liber XV, "Ecclesiæ Gnosticæ Catholicæ Canon Missæ": "Temple of Love" by The Sisters of Mercy. For Templum Amoris, now the York Lodge of OTO, which was originally named for this song.

Liber 106, "Concerning Death": "Eventide," best known as the musical setting for the hymn "Abide with me" as commonly sung at funerals, Spiritualist meetings and the FA Cup final.

Liber AL vel Legis sub figurâ CCXX: "The End" by The Doors.

Liber 800, "The Ship": "Tubthumping" by popular Leeds beat combo Chumbawamba, chosen for the chorus line "I get knocked down / but I get up again / you're never gonna keep me down."

"The Daughter of Fortitude" (ink drawing by John Tindsley): "O Fortuna" from Carl Orrf's setting of the Carmina Burana. This was the artist's suggestion if I remember correctly.

No use for a title

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

This blog is not going to be a replacement for the NIWG website, which will be vanishing from the Internet shortly with the shutdown of Geocities; the blog format is not really appropriate for the kind of content that site had. It has been created as a way to post announcements concerning any new mani(n)festation of the site.

As a "group," NIWG was never anything more that 3 or 4 people meeting in someone's living room, and this activity ceased after a comparatively short time. The website persisted in hideous animation since its original establishment in 2001, although most of it has not been updated for some years. Apparently some folks have found it a useful resource, and while I personally got sick of maintaining most of it some years ago, there does seem to be a case for attempting to revive it in some form or other.

Watch this space.

Love is the law, love under will.

T.S.
Leeds, England.