Signal Phrases: Art Magic, its Progenitors and its....Children

As readers of Art Magic will no doubt remember, the sources of Art Magic are obscure. Or perhaps "obscured" would be a better word.

In any case, we have to rely largely on internal textual evidence to validate the complex set of claims about this text: that its author was not EHB, that the original material was written in languages other than English, that the original material consistent largely of scattered material, which was assembled according to "a hasty and fragmentary sketch of the work" provided by the author of Art Magic (who I will refer to as TAOAM).

There are few established methods for dealing with this kind of investigation, but one technique known to work is the identification and tracing of signal phrases: sentence fragments sufficiently uncommon that their recurrence in texts other than Art Magic are at least prima facie evidence of textual affiliation: the other text is either a progenitor, or a descendent, text.

Google Books is a fantastic textual base from which to work for this kind of endeavor, not least because its collections are biased in favor of texts that are out of copyright, and in favor of texts from the large depository libraries with which Google collaborates, making the density of "spiritualist" and "occultist" texts in the Google Books database very rich.

I've started that process, and having gotten through roughly 100 pages of the text, Ithought readers might like to see some of the results thusfar.

To be clear, I am not interested in questions of "plagiarism" - the academic police forces of the world can look into that, if they like. I am interested in questions of influence -- whose work influenced TAOAM, and who was influenced by Art Magic? And since exact repurposing is the sincerest expression of "the agony of influence", I look closely at exact repurposing.

For what its worth, at this point, I believe TAOAM relied heavily on the ideas of at least two works while Art Magic was being written: G. C. Stewart's The Hierophant (1859), and Robert Taylor's The Diegesis (1834).

Stewart TAOAM quotes; Taylor is not quoted.

I also believe that TAOAM may have had access to the manuscript of a "curious and rare book", Judge Robert Hewitt Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy, which itself saw the light of day in 1882, less than two years before Brown's untimely death at the age of 53.

All hypotheses, but worth noting at this point, if only so I can contradict myself later...