Much of what is written today about Cyril Scott is characterised by indignant confusion over his historical neglect and assurance of his imminent revival. The approach is rarely comprehensive, and usually arises from an isolated re-discovery of one or more of his compositions, accompanied by the kind of “lost-treasure” excitement which is compounded by the passing of time. The point of access to this historical figure has therefore usually been through his music. Scott produced a prodigious quantity of compositions over his seventy-year career, including symphonies, operas, concertos, ballets, a large amount of solo piano material, songs and chamber music. But he also wrote books and pamphlets on homoeopathy and dietetics, natural medicine and mental healing, humour, politics, marriage, psychology and human nature, autobiography, comparative religion, music and the occult (as well as forewords and notes for a number of occult and homoeopathic texts by other authors); he wrote stage productions, published five volumes of his own poetry and two volumes of translations of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stefan George, respectively. Some of this material was published anonymously, but was later acknowledged by Scott as his own work. With his music generally serving as the window to his re-discovery, there has been a tendency for his literary efforts to become sidelined as oddities of his peculiar personality—quaint addendums to his main artistic practice—and ultimately a distracting force detrimental to the evaluation of his music.