What is served here now. The shelf holds 38 texts. 1 of them is served here — On the Cave of the Nymphs — and 37 are held back until its transcription is worth reading. The paragraphs below describe the shelf as a whole, the held-back entries included; a text is served when its own entry is marked published, not when the library as a whole is.
This is the shelf the readings rest on: the public-domain editions of the works the blog’s argument is made of, arranged in the order of the argument rather than in the order of a library catalogue. Each one is a transcription of a printed book — the scanner’s own characters, kept — and some carry REPAIRS, applied by the reading view and never baked into the words served. A repaired edition reads cleanly where a reading could be determined from a witness — the transcription’s own context, or a parallel edition of the same translation — and shows its damage, marked, where none could be: it never silently says anything the print does not. Every repair is a rule with the words it changes, why, and how often it fires, listed in the reader, so the two views can be read against each other and the difference between them is that list.
The four groups are the site’s own axis — the ascent from inside, the ascent performed, the ascent argued, and the counter-texts. Two more hold what is not on that line at all: the dialogues and commentaries the argument reads, and the other ascents, which walk the same route in other languages. Every text page says which edition it is, what was done to it and what was not, and which readings cite that work — so a quotation can be checked against the edition it came from.
What is not here, and why. The modern scholarly editions are not here: Majercik’s the Chaldean Oracles; Athanassakis & Wolkow’s the Orphic Hymns; Dodds’s the Elements of Theology; Clarke, Dillon & Hersh’s Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, and the current occult presses’ editions. They are not absent by oversight. They carry a living translator’s or publisher’s rights, they belong to the people who made them, and this shelf stops where their work begins. What the shelf can hold is what nobody owns any more.
Six of the roots have no public-domain English translation at all — Ficino’s three books on life, Proclus’s commentary on the Parmenides, Paracelsus’s defence of his medicine, Evagrius, Symeon the New Theologian and Hildegard of Bingen — so what is served for them is the original language. For a seventh, the Kālāma Sutta, the only English rendering is a translation of 1932, still in copyright, and the free layer is the Pali. Two more volumes here — the Patrologia Graeca of Evagrius and of Symeon — came through their transcription with the Greek flattened to Latin lookalikes: their Greek reads as noise and only their Latin is legible, which their pages state.
One text cannot be read at all. The 1827 Orphic Hymns came through as a substituted alphabet — the letters are not the letters of the print — so it is served as a stated gap rather than as noise dressed as prose.