Beschreibung:

The Worship of the Sun among the Aryan Peoples of Antiquity.
by Sir James George Frazer. Extracted from: The Worship of Nature. New York: Macmillan, 1926. 8vo (220 x 145 mm). Chapter XII, pp. 441-667 only. Contemporary French half morocco and marbled boards with gilt-stamped crest of Harry and Caresse to upper and lower covers, spine title gilt, t.e.g. Condition: spine ends and joints slightly rubbed. Provenance: Harry Crosby (small green leather and gilt book label to front pastedown, pencilled names to endpaper, crest to covers). harry crosby's heavily annotated copy of frazer's book on sun worship. Harry's "wonderful gift for carelessness" (Hemingway) was financed through a Boston banking fortune that allowed Harry and Caresse Crosby to attract the literary lights of the era to their mad orbit in Paris. Founding the Black Sun Press with the intention of publishing their own poetry, what began as a vanity publisher evolved into one of the most important small presses in 1920's Paris. The modernist lights of Pound, Hemingway, Lawrence and Hart Crane had works issued by the Cranes, and classic decadent works of Wilde and Poe carried the imprint as well. Harry's Parisian life was one of adventure and scandal, accompanied by a growing fascination in sun worship that evolved into a complicated personal mysticism influencing everything from his poetry to his interest in flying in an open cockpit and disliking to cover his head with a hat. The present volume by Frazer (whose work Harry might have been inroduced to by a fellow sun-acolyte DH Lawrence) is underlined on almost every page. Crosby has copied an extensive quote on the endpaper, "and a sixth sect worshipped an image of the sun formed in their mind. Members of this last sect spent all their time meditating on the sun and were in the habit of branding circular representations of this disc on their foreheads, arms and breasts." The preceding quote must have had a deep resonance with Crosby as the same lines turns up not only in his diaries, but in an April, 1927 letter to his mother in which he declares an end to his Decadent phase and the beginning of one that would yield the poems Chariot of the Sun . While Wolff notes that Harry cast a wide net for constructing his sun-mythology, (".adding to his stew every scrap he could find left over from the Aztecs or Pharoahs, the Greeks or Romans, Goethe or D.H. Lawrence, Rimbaud or the tarot pack…") it seems certain that the accounts found in this book must have had a profound effect on the wayward Brahmin. (see Wolff, Geoffry. Black Sun. NY: 1976).