Attribution of Golden Dawn Flying Rolls
It is perhaps well-known today that much of the published corpus of Golden Dawn material contains errors and altered text, some minor, some much more significant. It is likely less well-known that there are some issues with the attribution of documents. I outline two examples from the Flying Rolls below. Flying Roll XI, on Clairvoyance , is rightly attributed to Mathers, but the actual wording of it comes from Westcott, as we can see in this full title and attribution: Flying Roll XI "Clairvoyance" A MS in the words and language of G.H. Fra. N.O.M. written out from his Notes of a lecture delivered extempore By the G.H. Frater D.D.C.F. 7=4 Chief Adept of England [added in pencil: by NOM. March 1893] We see from the above that Mathers gave his lecture "extempore," which means without preparation, and Westcott took notes of this, before assembling them into this Flying Roll. This is important, because the content is from Mathers, but the...