Free Atkinson PDFs

[robertmathiesen]

All but fourteen of the Atkinson titles listed in this bibliography are available as free PDFs from the site I mentioned in my last post, The Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC):

http://www.iapsop.com/ssoc/

The fourteen titles that are not there are 1905a, 1907a, 1909a, 1909k, 1910f, 1910g, 1911a, 1911b, 1911c, 1912a, 1912b, 1913b, 1917b and 1919a.

One of these fourteen titles (1911c, The Mastery of Being) IS available on the Internet Archive.

Additionally, one of the fourteen titles listed above (1912a, The New Psychology of Healing) is claimed in one library catalog to be simply 1910b (The New Psychology of Healing) under a new title, perhaps also lightly revised.

None of these fourteen titles are available on books.google.com, or at the Hathi Trust, or at Project Gutenberg.


Since compiling parts 1-5 of this bibliography, one further Atkinson title has emerged from oblivion, though only in incomplete form (8 lessons out of 20 proposed lessons are present in the only known copy). This is

1911X William Walker Atkinson. Scientific Parenthood: The New Science of Race Improvement. (8 lessons of 20 proposed.) First publ: Advanced Thought (lessons 1-4), Progress Co. (lessons 5-8).

Comments

[temporaryreality]

Thank you for this! Is this something you've been looking into for a while or do you just pull bibliographies out of your hat from many years of practice? :D

[robertmathiesen]

I've been looking into Atkinson since the early 1990s, when I first discovered his works, and I pulled a first draft of this bibliography together sometime in the years 1996-1998.

My own family, on my mothers side, has been into esoteric stuff--Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, New Thought, Delsartism, and occult things in general--since around 1860, and when these ancestors moved from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay area in the 1880s, they found a fertile environment to nourish these interests further.

Atkinson (and Leland) are the authors who are closest to the New-Thought magical stuff I was exposed to when I was a boy in the '40s and the '50s, so once I discovered him, I wanted to find out as much as I could about the man and his work. Hence this bibliography. It's still a work in progress.

I've focused my own attention (so far) on his _Mind Power_, and on his two earlier books that he combined to produce it (_The Secrets of Mental Magic_ and _Mental Fascination_). I haven't read very many of Atkinson's other books. I expect to learn a lot from what others have to say about them. It's very good to know that there are other Atkinson enthusiasts out there. I'm really looking forward these discussions.

[temporaryreality]

I've read with fascination some of what you've written in various comments about your family's history and connection with esoteric teachings. Compared to my own mundane (Methodist with a side of lapsed-Catholic guilt) parental roots, I can't help but be a little wistful for a familial-cultural mindset that is willing to accept... mmm... how to describe?... looser edges, perhaps, compared to the tightly bound hold on Reality (tm) required of the monotheistically-inclined mind (either Mono-deity or Mono-materialism).

I'm late to the game and definitely a remedial student :)

[robertmathiesen]

"Looser edges" is a very good way to describe it ... and them. They all tended to be loose cannons, contrarians, and/or difficult people, not high-powered disciplined thinkers and practitioners, and some of them were downright frivolous in their approach to life in general and occultism in particular. It shouldn't be too surprising that they got out of New England as soon it was practical to do so, and headed for the newer, anything-goes regions around Chicago and San Francisco.

As for feeling wistful, such a family as mine looks rosier from afar than it actually was close-up. Many of my ancestors down through all the generations were dysfunctional, traumatized, scarred and crippled survivors. Henley's famous poem Invictus captures something of what it seems to have been like for us.

This may be why we turned away from mainstream ways of dealing with harsh reality and tried to gain some degree of independent mastery over our own lives by using unsanctioned means. And we may have had a measure of luck, too, helping us survive against all odds for so many centuries.

[temporaryreality]

I understand. Legacies/lineages can be full of the unspoken, encrusted and strangely strangling as well whatever lends strength to carry on. It requires some effort to figure out what's familial or inherited (incl. from society) from what's a matter of one's personal fate/karma/destiny. Maybe they're never fully separable? I know I struggle to untangle them enough to figure out what's to be dealt with/moved past, etc.

[dfr1973]

I'm surprised to see you haven't read very many of WWA's books - I was under the impression you had, and Mind Power was your favorite.

[robertmathiesen]

No, I haven't read all that many other books by Atkinson. I was more interested in his "mind-over-matter" magic and Western esoteric doctrines than in his approaches to various aspects of mental training or his work on Yoga. I'm looking forward to hearing more about these other parts of his work in the course of our discussions.

In addition to _Mind-Power_, I've carefully gone through its earlier versions (_The Secrets of Mental Magic_ and _Mental Fascination_), three of his booklets from the same years (_Practical Mind-Reading_, _Practical Psychomancy and Crystal Gazing_, _Practical Mental Influence_), and _The Kybalion_. I've also spent some time poking around in the accessible volumes of his _Arcane Teaching_ series and his _The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians_. And that's basically all so far. -- I've spent more time with Charles Leland's various writings that I have with Atkinson's.