Description
Tao Teh King: Liber CLVII by Aleister Crowley, Stephen Skinner, Editor – Askin Publishers 1976
A rare UK edition of Crowley’s rendering of the great Taoist classic, with Introduction by Stephen Skinner. Typescripts of Crowley’s version of the “Tao Teh King” circulated amongst Crowley’s students, but the work remained unpublished until 1976 when two editions appeared almost simultaneously: this edition which was jointly published by Askin Publishers of London & Samuel Weiser Publishing of NYC, and one by Helen Parsons Smith under her Thelema publications imprint (precedence of publication is not known).
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was uniquely qualified to produce a translation of Lao-tzus Tao Te Ching. He was called the finest English metrical poet of his generation by some of his contemporaries, and his work is anthologized in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse. He was also a profound and experienced magician, mystic, and philosopher, trained in western esotericism, Hermeticism, the Qabalah and more traditional western philosophy, but with a deep and abiding interest in the ancient philosophies of the Orient. Crowley traveled widely in the East, and he actually walked across Southern China in 1906. His first-hand experience of the Orient made him one of the first students in the West to grasp oriental philosophy on its own terms, without a Eurocentric or Judeo-Christian cultural bias. The Chinese scholar Hellmut WIlhelp acknowledged the primacy of Crowleys work in Taoist studies. Crowley had no Chinese, and his translation is that of a poet interpreting the dry and scholastic translation of James Legge, as Ezra Pound would later do with the Confucian Analects. He contributes and autobiographical and critical introduction that discusses his religious philosophy and his lifelong attraction to Taoism, and his extensive notes and commentary to his translation help to amplify the meaning of the Chinese classic.
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