FULLER, J. F. C. (his copy); SIMPSON, William.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Buddhist Praying-Wheel. First edition, with Fuller's ownership signature dated June 1901, several years before he first met Crowley and wrote The Star in the West, as well as his wide-ranging pencilled marginalia. In 1901, he was serving in South Africa in the Second Boer War and evidently using his downtime to explore occult questions of mysticism and symbolism.Fuller's signature is on the front free endpaper verso. In the margins, he remarks on topics such as the use of Ra as a surrogate for the sun throughout Africa (p. 37), referencing Charles Allen's 1897 The Evolution of the Idea of God. On page 238, beside a description of circular symbolism, he makes sketches of an Egyptian disc-and-crescent headdress and of Mercury's sceptre ("a lunar crescent on a solar disc"). Opposite page 285, containing his note on the blood symbolism of eggs dyed red, he has tipped in a newspaper clipping of a "curious ceremony in Warwickshire", and in the endnotes he offers a lengthy comment on the presence of bread and cheese in old baptism rituals as surrogates for the sacrifice of children. Concerning the sacrifice of cocks to the sun god in Slav religion, Fuller observes that "the Gauls were ardent sun worshippers. The cock still remains an emblem on French gold. A golden disc with a cock crowing in it might = the sun with as totem the cock on it." William Simpson (1823-1899) was a Glaswegian watercolour painter and a journalist. During the Crimean War, "he became a pioneering war arti

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.