A Century of Uncredited Echoes

Being in the public domain has helped God-Man: The Word Made Flesh stay in circulation for over a century, and being reprinted by independent publishers has kept it available without doing much to keep its authorship attached to it. The book's core moves, reading the cerebrospinal fluid as a Christ-associated substance, treating the spine as the physical site of a hidden ascent, and pairing anatomy with scripture generally, recur across a long line of later writing that mostly does not cite Carey and Perry by name.

Manly P. Hall's Occult Anatomy of Man, published nine years later in 1929 and discussed on his own page, makes a related argument about the spine as Jacob's Ladder and the skull as the seat of divine contents; whether Hall drew directly on Carey and Perry's book has not been independently confirmed here, but the two works sit in the same current and appeared close together in time. A century further on, modern esoteric compilations continue to restate versions of the same basic claim, sometimes under the modern label "Christ Oil" or "the sacred secretion," and sometimes naming the claustrum, a real deep-brain structure with no established connection to the claim, as the point where the fluid is produced. This atlas has not read every such later compilation in full and does not attribute a specific uncredited reproduction to a specific later author without checking the text directly; what can be said with confidence is that the general reading Carey and Perry set out in 1920 is still alive in popular esoteric writing today, whoever is currently the one restating it.