Errata
Before any new posts go up, a housekeeping one. This project has been running for a few years now, and the research has progressed. Some of what I wrote in the early posts is no longer accurate. Most corrections already appear as a short note next to the passage they fix, on the original post. A few had not been marked. Below is the full list, gathered in one place.
The Count's biography
In Impressions of Contemporaries, I gave Voltaire's real name as “Francois M Aroute.” The correct spelling is Arouet, François-Marie Arouet. This was a plain typo that went uncorrected for three years.
In Who was the Count of St. Germain?, I wrote, “To reveal a minor mystery, his given name was Leopold.” This was stated as settled fact. It is not. The claim comes from the Rákóczi theory, that he was a son of the Transylvanian prince Ferenc II Rákóczi, and it is one candidate among several, none of them confirmed by the Count himself. He is reported to have hinted at his real origins to the Markgraf of Ansbach, privately, but nothing survives in his own hand. No one actually knows what name he was born with.
Stanislas de Guaita's dates, given in The many manuscripts, were also wrong. I wrote 1860 to 1898. The correct dates are 1861 to 1897. The wrong figure traces back to Barrès's 1898 memorial volume rather than to Guaita's own record. This one already carries a correction note on the post.
The provenance of MS 209
Three more corrections belong to that same post.
“Frank Hollings, a 20th century London writer and antiquary” is not a person. It is a shop, a bookshop on Great Turnstile opened in 1892 by James Francis Hollings Shepherd, who named it after a family friend. After Shepherd's death it was run by William Edward Redway, whose name is the one that actually appears on the letterhead of the sale slip bound into the Getty MS 209 file. The shop survived the Blitz, moved twice, and was eventually sold to Bertram Rota Ltd in 1969. No person named Frank Hollings ever held this manuscript. Wherever “Hollings” appears in the ownership chain from here on, it refers to the firm, not a man.
The ownership chain itself, Favre, then Guaita, then “a certain Madame Barbe of Paris,” then Hollings, was presented as settled history. It is not. Every link after Guaita rests on a single undated sales slip from that shop, written no earlier than the 1930s. The same paragraph that names Favre and Barbe also invents a story about the Count running a “lodge of occult masonry” with Cagliostro as his pupil, a claim with no basis anywhere else. Since writing this, I have confirmed that a real Favre library sale took place, in Sèvres on 15 and 16 March 1896, and that occult material did pass from Favre's circle into Guaita's library around that time, but as a recorded gift rather than a purchase, and with nothing tying it to this specific book. “Madame Barbe” has no trace anywhere I have been able to find. Favre-owned material reaching Guaita by some route is plausible. The exact chain the slip describes is not proven.
On the Wellcome transcription, I wrote that the translation “was carried out for 'Mr. Potier.'” The document's own header says otherwise: prêté par M. Potier, lent by M. Potier. This makes him the owner who lent his copy to be copied, not the person who commissioned the work.
The cipher key
Ciphers & Keys describes the key's gaps, a symbol never filled in for K, no entry at all for W, corrections from “per” to “nom” and from “etc.” to “et,” and concludes that whoever kept the key “did not understand the words they were translating/deciphering.” That conclusion does not hold up. The gaps look much more like an inherited, general purpose cipher kit than a record of confusion, carrying spare letterforms the Book itself never needed. What the key is missing or doubles up on is still accurately described. What I decided that meant is not.
The same post also treats three cipher keys, the two bound into the manuscripts and the Wellcome key, as roughly equal witnesses “from different sources.” They are not equal in age. The two manuscript keys were made alongside the books themselves. The Wellcome key is a solver's own working reconstruction from around 1920, written on older paper stock but not from the period.
The Latin preface and the spirit count
Latin Preface, John King's post, builds a decoding wheel argument on there being 21 spirits named in the invocation. There are not. Counted directly from the manuscript, the four quarters give 5, 6, 3, and 3 spirits, seventeen in total, not twenty-one. The number 21 only appears once names absent from the manuscript, restored in brackets by the published English translation, are added in. The decoding wheel idea was offered as speculation at the time and remains unsupported. No ring, no index, no moving part of any kind appears anywhere in the figures. But the count behind the argument was simply wrong, regardless of what anyone makes of the wheel itself.
The magic circle
Two corrections apply across three posts about the ritual circle: The Circle, The Circle, part two, and The Circle, part three.
I described the east and west devices on the circle as “symbols of hearts with flames.” Under magnification, they are not. Each is a stem with a pair of small leaves, the same leafy flourish used elsewhere in the text as a line filler, arranged so that the outline reads as a heart. They are ornamental flourishes with a heart shaped terminal leaf, not a devotional or flaming heart. Part two and part three both already carry a note on the corner letter question below. This one had gone unmarked until now.
The corner letters themselves were also wrong. I originally read the triangle's three corners as V, P, and T, and in part two noted that P, T, and V are the 16th, 20th, and 22nd letters of the French alphabet, offered as a possible key to their meaning. Neither reading holds up. Re-examined at full resolution, both manuscripts write the third corner as an s, not a t, in the same double loop form the key uses for s elsewhere. The corners read P, V, S, and read that way they spell out, apex first, “Prolonger (ma) Vie Saine,” the Book's own stated goal, in its own words, rather than an alchemical formula. The alphabet position numbering does not fit either reading and should be dropped.
One more correction, also from part two. I quoted the circle's promise that it “will also give you the full understanding of that which is written in my revelation,” and read this as the author claiming direct authorship rather than compilation. That reading leans on a looser translation than the French supports. The line reads l'intelligence du caractère dont est écrit ma révélation, understanding of the character, or script, in which the revelation is written, not understanding of its content. It is a promise about being able to read the cipher, not a claim about who wrote the words.
The Winged Dragon
The Emblem of a Winged Dragon, also John King's, builds an argument from the ink colors of the ASIA acrostic (Alpha-Omega, Sabaoth, Izra, Akorab). The names are described as “all in black ink,” with AGLA also black, and the post suggests that reading AGLA as a stand in for the letter U might indicate the five vowels. The colors are wrong. AGLA is written in red, not black, and the “all black” impression came from faded pigment in one of the two manuscripts rather than a real pattern shared by both. The vowel argument depends on this and does not survive it. The acrostic itself, that the four names' initials spell ASIA, is unaffected and still stands. It is the color argument built on top of it that does not.
The Tea of Immortality
The Tea of Immortality presents the herbal recipe as something the Count himself “recommended to all those who sought this precious gift of long life.” This states the attribution more plainly than the evidence allows. The recipe's proportions are essentially correct: they match, part for part, a real 19th century pharmacy formula sold under the name Species Laxantes St. Germain. What is not established is the direction of the naming. No contemporary witness records a formula from the Count himself, only that he purged himself with self prepared senna, and that the resulting powder tasted of aniseed. Pharmacy formularies of the period are full of preparations named for saints and places that had nothing to do with them, and Saint-Germain is both a common Paris place name and a saint's name. Either the recipe preserves the Count's own formula, or a pre-existing senna laxative already carrying the name was attached to him later. At the moment, there is no way to tell which.
That is the list. Corrections from here will be pinned to the post they belong to, as before. This one exists to catch what the notes had missed. If you have been reading since 2023, this is what has changed since that time from research and contemplation.