Abisha S. Hudson

One of the likely sources for the material on sex magic in Art Magic is a small booklet -- 70 pages in duodecimo -- by one Sha Rocco, called The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship, published in 1874 (that is, a year or more prior to the time during which AM was being assembled), in New York, by Asa K. Butts and Company, at that time operating out of their offices on Dey Street in Manhattan.

The text was available in mid-1874, and was being advertised nationwide in periodicals associated with Spiritualist, occultist and freethinker communities, as evidenced by this advertisement from June of 1874 in Common Sense, the California weekly.

The text became a staple of occult reprint libraries, more or less continuously in print through the 1920s, and a 1904 edition can be found in Google Books' digestive tract.

An anonymous librarian, in the version in Google Books -- as well as other folks -- associates "Sha Rocco" with one Abisha S. Hudson.

But here the story takes a bizarre twist -- one that could only happen in an age where amateur scholars equipped with powerful publishing technology treat the Internet like a peer-reviewed encyclopedia, rather than the rumor, speculation and disinformation mill it so often is.

In several places on the Internet, we're told that "Abisha S. Hudson" is actually a pseudonym for Hargrave Jennings.

Imagine my disappointment, on reading this, that TAOAM had -- once again -- relied on Hargrave Jennings without attribution. But when I began reading the 1909 edition of The Masculine Cross it became immediately apparent, on stylistic grounds alone, that the work could not have been written by Hargrave Jennings unless our man Hargrave got a significant linguistic deep-structure brain transplant. Hudson's prose is straightforward: his sentences are clean, simple and constructed of common English words with little or no use of tortured dependent clauses. In short, Hudson's writing is nothing like Jennings' writing (which is highly idiosyncratic, complex, and either beautiful or crapulent, depending on one's aesthetic).

Dig, dig, dig a bit, and I uncover the (nicely stated and bibliographically precise) root of the "Hudson is Jennings" myth. Because the page-maker did not see fit to give me anchors to the relevant section, I'll quote it here:

Advertisements and text in [the Nature Worship and Mystical Series] make it clear that the entire series is the work of one person. Most bibliographers attribute all nine volumes to Hargrave Jennings (q.v.), and i concur with this. The one bibliographer who believed othewrwise is Gershon Legman. He stated that "Ophiolatreia," the second volume in the set, was written by Abisha S. Hudson. Legman did not publish this theory, merely noting it on a piece of paper he slipped into his personal copy of the book in question. However, Legman's stature being what it is, his little note has entered several bibliographical databases and been published in numerous bookdealers' catalogues.

To understand why Legman reached this conclusion, it is necessary to know that the name Sha Rocco (q.v.) appears as the author of two books similar to those listed above, namely "The Masculine Cross" and "Sexual Mythology," and that Sha Rocco -- an obvious pseudonym -- is said by some bibliographers to have been the pen-name of one Abisha S. Hudson. However, no biographical data on Abisha S. Hudson has ever come to light, and it is highly likely that this was yet another pseudonym for the author of "The Masculine Cross."

Legman probably drew the conclusion that "Ophiolatreia" was written by Rocco/Hudson because (1) the writing style is the same, (2) in one edition of "Phallism" there is an advertisement for a "cream vellum binding" edition of Sha Rocco's "The Masculine Cross" which places it before "Phallism," indicating its earlier publication date, and (3) circa 1890 edition of "The Masculine Cross" is a reprint of the 1874 Sha Rocco book bound to match the "Nature Worship and Mystical Series" titles [making it #0 in the series].

No biographical data in Abisha S. Hudson?

Not the case.

First, to set the bibliographical record straight, this is not the only work published by Sha Rocco -- there are others, dealing with obscure topics, listed by Worldcat, including Abisha S. Hudson's doctoral thesis from his days at the Albany Medical College. Some of the Worldcat titles appeared after his death, and from non-US publishers, indicating (perhaps) two Sha Roccos, or (perhaps) a reprinting of Hudson's periodical work. The common;y-referenced titles published by Kessinger we have to ignore, bibliographically, as it's pretty clear those shameless creeps are doing what they often do: parting out one text and giving it different (fake) titles, to drive up their unit sales.

Now, as to Abisha S. Hudson the real historical figure and author of The Masculine Cross, here's what we know about him:

• he was born 1 May of 1819 in New York state, or Massachusetts, to Amos Hudson and Mary Fisk Hudson, the sixth of nine children
• he attended the Medical College of Albany -- his preceptor was Dr. H. Murdoch of Pulaski, NY, he was given 28 months credit for time served (presumably with Pulaski), and he was graduated with an MD after 8 months of attendance, in 1846, having written a dissertation on vision
• he participated in the founding of the Keokuk (Iowa) Medical College in 1853 (it granted degrees until 1899)
• in 1855, he married one Rose Elliott (b. 1826), and they had several children, including Harry (b. c. 1859) and May (b. c. 1861)
• he served briefly as a surgeon in the US Army's 34th Infantry division, from October 29 of 1861, until he resigned in March of 1862
• by the 1880s he was apparently maintaining a residence in the Midwest and in the San Francisco Bay area, where he and his family (including his niece Mary Parks who was the co-executor of his will) were caught in the 1880 census
• he died, either in San Francisco (his will was probated in California, and the ensuing court case was a landmark in community property law) or at Mt. Vernon, Ohio, on October 8, 1904, at the age of 86, after choking on a fig.

So, once again, just for the search engines: Sha Rocco is Abisha S. Hudson; Abisha S. Hudson is not, in any way shape or form, a pseudonym for Hargrave Jennings.

Now, why do I give a crap? Well, there's that whole setting-the-record-straight thing, but, more to my parochial concerns, Hudson is the source of the otherwise weirdly a-scholarly discussion of the Nileometer in Art Magic, and in particular the (incorrect) linking of nilometers with the Christian cross.