Sacred Text
Sacred texts
The original site kept a shelf of the old texts Teeter drew on. Each is listed with the public-domain translation in which you can read it in full.
Vedic Sanskrit hymns · Late Bronze Age
The Rig Veda
The oldest of the Vedas: just over a thousand hymns in ten books, composed in an archaic Sanskrit and kept for centuries by recitation. The whole of Book Nine, more than a hundred hymns, is given to Soma, the pressed drink that was worshipped as a god.
Teeter's introduction stressed how often Soma appears across the collection and how much natural imagery the Soma hymns contain. He also noted that the hymns were traditionally copied onto birch bark, a tree that lives in partnership with the fly agaric, and read that link as a clue to Soma's identity.
Translation: Ralph T. H. Griffith, 1896
The Veda of chants
The Sama Veda
A liturgical collection made mostly of verses taken from the Rig Veda and rearranged for singing. Its chants were performed by the Udgatar priests during the sacrifices at which Soma juice was offered to the gods.
The Society's page gave Griffith's own short introduction and suggested comparing the Soma Pavamana hymns, the hymns to Soma “flowing clear”, as they appear in both Vedas.
Translation: Ralph T. H. Griffith, 1893
Scripture of Zoroastrianism
The Avesta
The sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, sometimes called the Zend-Avesta. Together with the Rig Veda it is a founding source for the study of the Indo-European languages, and the two share gods, such as Mithra and Mitra, and a pressed sacred drink: Haoma in Iran, Soma in India.
Teeter pointed out the differences as well, above all that many gods of the Vedas became demons in the Avesta. Because both traditions keep a version of the same drink rite, he concluded that the rite itself must be older than either text.
Translation: James Darmesteter and L. H. Mills, Sacred Books of the East, 1880–1887
The liturgy of the Avesta
The Yasna
The central liturgical part of the Avesta, which includes the hymns attributed to Zoroaster himself. Its ninth chapter, the Hôm Yast, opens the Haoma ceremony.
Teeter favoured a late date for Zoroaster, around 600 BC, and saw him as a reformer rather than a founder: he replaced animal sacrifice with the fire ceremony while raising the Haoma rite to the highest act of worship. He also traced ideas such as heaven and hell, resurrection and a last judgement back to Zoroaster's teaching.
Translation: L. H. Mills, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 31, 1887
Old Norse poetry and prose
The Eddas
The Poetic Edda, preserved mainly in the medieval Icelandic Codex Regius, and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda are the chief surviving sources for Norse mythology and Germanic heroic legend.
Teeter was careful to say that neither is scripture in the strict sense: they were never read in worship. So little of the old religion survives, he wrote, that most of what is known about Odin's cult comes from mythology and folk tales, including the story of the mead of poetry.
Translation: Henry Adams Bellows (Poetic Edda, 1923); Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (Prose Edda, 1916)
Early Christian hymns · 1st–2nd century
The Odes of Solomon
Forty-two early Christian hymns, of which forty-one survive, usually dated between the late first and the mid-second century. They are among the oldest Christian poetry known.
Teeter valued them as a glimpse of Christianity before it became a state religion. He read their images of a great river, a drink given from on high and “living water” as echoes of the older Soma and Eucharist tradition. His page quoted Odes 6 and 11 in James H. Charlesworth's modern translation; the public-domain translation is J. Rendel Harris's.
Translation: J. Rendel Harris, 1909–1911
The founding text of Hermetic alchemy
The Emerald Tablet
A dozen or so lines attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, known in Europe from medieval Latin translations of Arabic sources. Alchemists treated it for centuries as the summit of their art.
Teeter insisted that the Tablet is about one thing: the Philosophers' Stone, a living substance that multiplies, transforms and heals. He set this against the later spiritual and philosophical readings, which in his view forgot the Stone at the heart of the text, and recommended Hortulanus's medieval commentary.
Translation: Several versions from the medieval Latin, among them Isaac Newton's
An alchemical treatise · London, 1723
The Hermetical Triumph
“The Hermetical Triumph: or, The Victorious Philosophical Stone” is the English translation of a French alchemical treatise of 1689, attributed to Alexandre-Toussaint de Limojon de Saint-Didier. It discusses the theory of the Stone in the form of commentary and dialogue.
The Society's page carried the English translation itself, beginning with the translator's address to the reader on the want of good alchemical books in English. Since the translation is three centuries old, the archived page can be read in full.
Translation: Anonymous English translation, London, 1723