WARREN SMITH'S AUTHENTIC DICTIONARY OF CB by Warren Smith

WE TOPPING HILLS BY POPPING PILLS!

Warren Smith jumps on the '70s CB radio fad with his AUTHENTIC DICTIONARY ... accept no substitutes on this "tour of fantastic CB land!" Smith chews the scenery with some major purple prose, reveling in cheesy trucker talk.

Award Books packages Smith's guide in the ugliest possible '70s style, with a drab brown cover that's hardly eye catching. As for "authenticity," the 10 code index printed on the back (in impossible to read brown-on-brown text) differs from the excerpt Smith quotes in text! Does 10-15 mean "message received" or is it unassigned?

According to Smith, truckers refer to Nixon's post-presidential residence of San Clemente, CA, as "Tricky Dick's" or "Elba," referencing Napoleon's exile. The cross referenced section is useful, but also allows Warren to pad his page count by almost 40 pages. Reprinting regulations for the US and Canada covers an additional 74 pages, making this an easy payday for our man Smith!

Until next time, keep your wheels on the road and don't feed the bears!

Award Books, 1976

COVER UPDATES: WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS

Some old guff to ring in the new year, with this Corgi Books reprint of T. Lobsang Rampa's occult dictionary. The back is just a list of all the Rampa titles from Corgi, which must have been selling like hotcakes given the constant reissues.

Courtesy Corgi Books, 1975 (original pub. 1970).

COVER UPDATES: WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS and LIVING WITH THE LAMA

A double dose of T. Lobsang Rampa today, beginning with the Bantam Books edition of Rampa's occult guide from 1978 (original pub. 1970). "He survived torture, imprisonment, starvation," but not really.

And another Corgi edition of Living With The Lama from 1968, which plays coy with the concept of Rampa translating his cat's biography from "the Siamese Cat language" (original pub. 1964).

Cute logo!

COSMIC DEBRIS: The Doctrine of Moles

Perhaps two lesser know fields of fortune telling, beauty marks and metoposcopy!

From The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge, by Zolar! Courtesy Popular Library, 1970.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANCIENT AND FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE by Zolar

Here's a hefty tome that promises the COMPLETE guide to the occult, from Zolar ... of course! It's a mite more impressive than previous guides we've looked at, with Zolar offering a crash course in everything from crystal gazing to the Kabbalah. The handy table of contents gives the full rundown of what to expect.

As a neophyte to these occult practices, I'm practically bowled over by the density of text. Fortunately some quick googling reveals part of Zolar's secret - plagiarism! Over at the blog Learning Curve on the Ecliptic, commenter Stella had this to say:

As a teenager, I had Bruce King's (aka Zolar's) "The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge" - one of those catch-all books with chapters on astrology, numerology, Tarot, etc.

Being young, I was very impressed with it. A friend and I even referred to it as "The Book", lol.

In later years, however, more books became available via the net. I can see now, for instance, that Zolar's crystal gazing chapter was cobbled together from bits of "A Course of Advanced Lessons in Clairvoyance and Occult Powers" by the wonderful C. Alexander (under the pseudonym "Swami Panchadasi", lol) John Melville's "Crystal Gazing and the Wonders of Clairvoyance". Entire passages are lifted almost word-for-word from both books.

It's possible that King was under pressure from the publisher to write an "occult encyclopedia", and his astrology writings may be his own, since that was his area of expertise. But I wouldn't be surprised to see them someplace else, in older books.

Stella has her own blog on card reading and fortune telling called Fate Keeps on Happening, which I recommend for her strong, eclectic perspective. You never know what you might miss if not for someone else's experience! I'll continue to dive into Zolar's encyclopedia and post excerpts as relevant in future. In the mean time, don't take any wooden nickels or xeroxed horoscopes!

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Popular Library, 1970

WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS by T. Lobsang Rampa

Another occult dictionary, this one by the fakir of fakers, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa! Rampa was in a class of his own for occult scam artists. This purported Tibetan monk who had traveled the astral plane and seen wonders beyond imagining was really a lifelong resident of Devon, UK, and was unmasked not long at all after his smash hit "biography" The Third Eye:

Rampa’s wild claims – not to mention his West Country burr – led Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer to hire a private detective. What this gumshoe uncovered surprised even his employer. Not only had Rampa never been to Tibet, he didn’t even own a passport. He was a former plumber from Devon called Cyril Hoskin who damaged his back by falling out of a tree while owl-spotting. During convalescence he had, it seems, settled on a drastic career change.

The media was scandalised; Hoskin was unrepentant. Cheerfully admitting that he’d never been to Tibet, he now claimed that as he lay semi-conscious at the bottom of a tree that fateful afternoon, half-strangled by his binoculars, an elderly lama (monk) had floated by on the astral plane and the pair had agreed to swap bodies. (Whether, in 1950s Tibet, an elderly lama ever claimed to be a West Country plumber remains unverified.)

Rampa's later books contain many peevish snipes at the media and the "press campaign" out to smear him for bringing enlightenment to the Western masses. Even here he gets some licks in with his dedication to his loyal readers who know better than to believe the lying press, and his entry for "proof" which claims that Tibetan culture is above such shallow Western things. Ironic indeed that the fake lama falls back on some moth-eaten Orientalism to defend his counterfeit mysticism. Rampa could be shameless when wriggling out of his lies:

On a subsequent occasion, Warburg greeted the lama with a foreign phrase, only to receive a blank look in return. When informed that he had been addressed with the Tibetan for “Did you have a pleasant journey?” Rampa fell to the floor in apparent agony, rising to explain that during the war, in order to prevent himself from divulging secrets to the Japanese, he had hypnotically blocked his own knowledge of Eastern languages. To that day, the sound of his native tongue was enough to reinflict their tortures. When Warburg confronted Rampa with the scholars’ objections, offering him the option of publishing the book as a work of fiction, Rampa continued to insist that it was entirely factual. Secker & Warburg then issued the book with a preface that began, “The autobiographical account of the experiences of a Tibetan lama is such an exceptional document that it is difficult to establish its authenticity”

It's astonishing now that readers believed in Rampa's authenticity in the first place, as his prose is laden with classic English treacle, forced whimsy that curdles to condescension. The startling secret knowledge he promises consists of moldy old standards like the Akashic records and astral traveling, making it clear that so much of our psychic seeking resolves into navel gazing, and that what we grasp for in the great outside is nothing more than our own reflection.

Someone at Award Books may have been feeling cheeky, as the book ends with an ad for The Talbott Agreement, a novel about an American spy who undergoes irreversible plastic surgery to look Chinese!

Above, a Corgi Books edition from 1975 and a Bantam Books edition from 1978.

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1970

AN OCCULT DICTIONARY compiled by Howard V. Chambers

An occult dictionary for the millions! Chambers warns us in the forward that this is NOT to be a definitive volume, and thank goodness he does. If you don't already know your Zabulon from your Zaebos you'd be in a peck of trouble if you had to reach for this book in the middle of a ritual! To wit: the entry for Zabulon  leaves out the demon's Biblical namesake. The focus on "parapsychology" on the cover is also odd, considering the entries obviously cover all manner of occult fields.

Occult dictionaries and encyclopedias hit it big in the midcentury. No longer dusty grimoires or specialty texts, you could find plentiful ads for these books in Fate magazine and within other paperbacks, often as enticement for book club memberships:

From a 1969 paperback

From Fate, 1973

From Fate, 1973

From now on any such text will be tagged under Guide, and no need to summon Verdelet.

An Occult Dictionary is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1966