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El Señor de las Tinieblas: H. P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant y la tradición mágica tifoniana
One of the most famous – yet least understood – manifestations of Thelemic thought has been the works of Kenneth Grant, the British occultist and one-time intimate of Aleister Crowley, who discovered a hidden world within the primary source materials of Crowley’s Aeon of Horus. Using complementary texts from such disparate authors as H.P. Lovecraft, Jack Parsons, Austin Osman Spare, and Charles Stansfeld Jones (“Frater Achad”), Grant formulated a system of magic that expanded upon that delineated in the rituals of the a system that included elements of Tantra, of Voudon, and in particular that of the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon, all woven together in a dark tapestry of power and illumination. The Dark Lord follows the themes in the writings of Kenneth Grant, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Necronomicon, uncovering further meanings of the concepts of the famous writers of the Left Hand Path. It is for Thelemites, as well as lovers of the Lovecraft Mythos in all its forms, and for those who find the rituals of classical ceremonial magic inadequate for the New Aeon. Traveling through the worlds of religion, literature, and the occult, Peter Levenda takes his readers on a deeply fascinating exploration on magic, evil, and The Dark Lord as he investigates of one of the most neglected theses in the history of modern the nature of the Typhonian Current and its relationship to Aleister Crowley’s Thelema and H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.
390 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2013
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514 people want to read
About the author
Peter Levenda
31 books225 followersAuthor who focuses primarily on occult history. He is best known for his book Unholy Alliance, which is about Esoteric Hitlerism and Nazi occultism, and is believed to be the author of the Simon Necronomicon, albeit without much evidence.
He was the president of the international division of Ortronics, Inc., a telecommunications company based in Asia.
He appeared in the TNT documentary Faces of Evil as an expert on Nazi history with special regard to occult and esoteric practices. He has also appeared on the History Channel special Nazi Prophecies. Levenda lives in Miami, Florida.
He was the president of the international division of Ortronics, Inc., a telecommunications company based in Asia.
He appeared in the TNT documentary Faces of Evil as an expert on Nazi history with special regard to occult and esoteric practices. He has also appeared on the History Channel special Nazi Prophecies. Levenda lives in Miami, Florida.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
January 20, 2014
Peter Levenda has done an excellent job of bringing out the points of commonality between Crowley, Lovecraft and Kenneth Grant. It is a massive undertaking and the book is mind blowing. Writing from a detached observers stance Peter Levenda has me convinced that HP Lovecraft was psychically intuned to some astral realm like most of the great magicians were. The points of coincidence between Lovecraft's writing and Crowley's revelation are too much to be ignored.
Starting off with a discussion of Aleister Crowley's Thelema we learn that the world has experienced the aeon dedicated to different Egyptian Deities. According to Crowley we are in the age of Horus. The age of Horus corresponds to that of the child. This is where individual growth takes precedence over following what patriarchal authority tells us what to do. We write our own program so to speak. Horus's twin is Set, in a sense of speaking. According to Egyptology Horus kills Osiris, Horus's father and later on Horus avenges his fathers death. According to Crowley's schema and some other interpretation Set is the other side of Horus. In the old Egyptian myth the two of them get into a nasty fight and basically tear each other apart.
Set though is somewhat different from other Egyptian deities. He has no assigned animal and he is generally thought of as a god of the foreigners. He is the god of the desert wastes, of chaos and of very wanton sexuality. He is in a sense a dark lord. Now Crowley received his revelation in Egypt by a deity or guardian angel named Aiwas. Aiwas can can be compared to Set but the origins of the Dark Lord are going back even further. Kenneth Grant would say all the way back to Sumeria. A discussion ensues on the Sumerian origins with a focus on the yezidi's who Kenneth Grant has devoted a lot to in his works.The yezidis worship Melekh taus or the Peacock God. they believe that he is Satan and and that Satan in end will be redeemed. But are the origins of Melekh Taus really in Sumeria and where did the Sumerians come from. Peacock are not native to Sumeria but rather India.
Tantric Spirituality has made several contributions to Kabballah, Alchemy and Ceremonial Magic. After a long and complex discussion we see that the possible origins for Crowley's Scarlet Queen and the Lord Chaos might be an incarnation of Shiva. The Indian Goddess is colored Red and Shiva is a Lord of Hell and Chaos in the form that brings the most enlightenment to mankind. there is also the concept of Kundalini which rises to the base of our spine which then drops down the amrita or immortality. Of course this is symbolic of Shakti rising to Shiva.Or the serpent rising up. Remember the serpent from the Bible. He enlightens Eve by telling her to eat from the tree of knowledge.
Through out this discussion references to HP Lovecraft's works are brought up. Cthulhu being the most famous of the Old Ones is described as being dead but dreaming and when the stars are right he will arise and as a priest of the old ones he will rise up and open the gates to allow for the Old Ones return. The Old Ones were here before we were and they do have their human followers. In Tantric Operation which can be very sexual there is an importance of doing sex magic at a time when the stars are in the proper position. Phases of the moon determine the spiritual power of human body fluids. The Kundalini Serpent as well lies asleep and dreaming at the base of our spine. Also there are DNA particles of every animal encoded in our cells. Remember evolution.
One of the goals of sex magic is to create a magical child . This child could be a physical child or a spiritual child that is designed to carry out some magical task. By being in the right frame of mind and opening the right spiritual doorways one can bring in the essence of other beings into a physical child and thus bring about a sort of evolution. In HP Lovecraft's writing there is talk of mating with humans and the old ones. In Lovecraft's view the offspring are strange and deformed. Crowley and Grant sorrt of welcomed it and HP Lovecraft feared it.
The analysis will require some background in Kabballah, Ceremonial Magic. Lovecraft and Tantra. Even for someone versed in these it can get confusing. The book is chocked full of material and there were parts that needed to be reread. In the end we come up with a system of magic that Grant could understand and use that was consistent with his psyche. To the objective it may make no sense. Grant also believed that we did in fact open some of those gateways and the world was feeling the effects. Great book!
Starting off with a discussion of Aleister Crowley's Thelema we learn that the world has experienced the aeon dedicated to different Egyptian Deities. According to Crowley we are in the age of Horus. The age of Horus corresponds to that of the child. This is where individual growth takes precedence over following what patriarchal authority tells us what to do. We write our own program so to speak. Horus's twin is Set, in a sense of speaking. According to Egyptology Horus kills Osiris, Horus's father and later on Horus avenges his fathers death. According to Crowley's schema and some other interpretation Set is the other side of Horus. In the old Egyptian myth the two of them get into a nasty fight and basically tear each other apart.
Set though is somewhat different from other Egyptian deities. He has no assigned animal and he is generally thought of as a god of the foreigners. He is the god of the desert wastes, of chaos and of very wanton sexuality. He is in a sense a dark lord. Now Crowley received his revelation in Egypt by a deity or guardian angel named Aiwas. Aiwas can can be compared to Set but the origins of the Dark Lord are going back even further. Kenneth Grant would say all the way back to Sumeria. A discussion ensues on the Sumerian origins with a focus on the yezidi's who Kenneth Grant has devoted a lot to in his works.The yezidis worship Melekh taus or the Peacock God. they believe that he is Satan and and that Satan in end will be redeemed. But are the origins of Melekh Taus really in Sumeria and where did the Sumerians come from. Peacock are not native to Sumeria but rather India.
Tantric Spirituality has made several contributions to Kabballah, Alchemy and Ceremonial Magic. After a long and complex discussion we see that the possible origins for Crowley's Scarlet Queen and the Lord Chaos might be an incarnation of Shiva. The Indian Goddess is colored Red and Shiva is a Lord of Hell and Chaos in the form that brings the most enlightenment to mankind. there is also the concept of Kundalini which rises to the base of our spine which then drops down the amrita or immortality. Of course this is symbolic of Shakti rising to Shiva.Or the serpent rising up. Remember the serpent from the Bible. He enlightens Eve by telling her to eat from the tree of knowledge.
Through out this discussion references to HP Lovecraft's works are brought up. Cthulhu being the most famous of the Old Ones is described as being dead but dreaming and when the stars are right he will arise and as a priest of the old ones he will rise up and open the gates to allow for the Old Ones return. The Old Ones were here before we were and they do have their human followers. In Tantric Operation which can be very sexual there is an importance of doing sex magic at a time when the stars are in the proper position. Phases of the moon determine the spiritual power of human body fluids. The Kundalini Serpent as well lies asleep and dreaming at the base of our spine. Also there are DNA particles of every animal encoded in our cells. Remember evolution.
One of the goals of sex magic is to create a magical child . This child could be a physical child or a spiritual child that is designed to carry out some magical task. By being in the right frame of mind and opening the right spiritual doorways one can bring in the essence of other beings into a physical child and thus bring about a sort of evolution. In HP Lovecraft's writing there is talk of mating with humans and the old ones. In Lovecraft's view the offspring are strange and deformed. Crowley and Grant sorrt of welcomed it and HP Lovecraft feared it.
The analysis will require some background in Kabballah, Ceremonial Magic. Lovecraft and Tantra. Even for someone versed in these it can get confusing. The book is chocked full of material and there were parts that needed to be reread. In the end we come up with a system of magic that Grant could understand and use that was consistent with his psyche. To the objective it may make no sense. Grant also believed that we did in fact open some of those gateways and the world was feeling the effects. Great book!
December 28, 2016
For the topics of this book, this is one of the most insightful books I have come across. It is well researched and brimming with ancients concepts, bizarre language, and even stranger connections. If you're not a skeptical reader, though, I fear there is a danger present here in that this could be read a little too seriously to the point where (not so much the Satanist stuff) the reader could be like one of the heroes in one of Alan Moore's comics about losing sanity while investigating Lovecraft's work.
August 22, 2013
A fascinating look at the synchronistic parallels between Aleister Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft, and the melding of the two in the ritual magic tradition of Kenneth Grant's Typhonian O.T.O. I especially enjoyed this wild, speculative ride because it chronicles the real-life material I used as the background mythology of my novel. Highly recommended to those with an interest in occult history and Lovecraft's mythos.
January 20, 2014
Peter Levenda's known for applying temperate erudition to the history of the occult. His own meddlings are kept from the reader, though it's clear as day the author is more than just a dilettante. With "Dark Lord" he plunges into the darkest pits of the occult, shunned even by disciples of the Great Beast himself as being a one-way ticket to schizophrenic insanity. Yet these feral grounds are really where the magic happens, all else is merely taking peaks into the Abyss, the real deal is a Dantesque journey through hell, Levenda tells us.
Levenda identifies the Dark Lord with Set ( and subsequently his equivalents outside of ancient Egypt as Shiva, Shaitan, Typhon etc.). Set is the archetypical Other. And as such, he is incalculable.
Every perversity is his and that which breaks down structures echoes his name.
Set is identified with the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, the North Pole, and therefore with a tradition far older than civilization, beyond recorded time into the nebulous netherworld of prehistory. Perhaps not only the time of the colloquial caveman, but of epochs long forgotten, now reemerging such as the recently discovered ruins of Gobekli Tepe and Gunung Padang. Remnants of cults that indicate a preoccupation with the stars.
The stellar tradition is the forgotten tradition. Familiar as we are with the solar and lunar, the nocturnal firmament constituted the axis mundi of man in olden days. Levenda does not go in-depth and that will give the reader the impression that the author is merely tipping the veil in this book.
This is what I got throughout the whole book. This is not an exhaustive study on the Typhonian Tradition ( is that even possible one might ask ? ), but an invitation to rethink what happened to Lovecraft and Crowley, and how much Grant might be right in theorizing that art and magic are dealing with the same source. Levenda also knows how to give us the creepers when discussing the incursions from the Trans-Plutonian and how this relates to the Typhonian tradition.
Again, he desires us to look further and do our own homework on the subject, but firstly giving us the toolkit to connect more and more dots.
Levenda also makes a good case for the often heavily critiqued, mostly among post-colonial scholars, bricolage-tendency in western spirituality. Bertiaux's voudon gnosis is one of the latest to receive some backlash over the fact that his system has little to do with 'authentic' voudon.
Levenda argues, and correctly, that historical and anthropological correctness have little function in magick. In fact, post-colonial theory forgets that this is how the occult works, worldwide, and not just in the occident. This carelesness is exactly what characterizes the Dark Lord himself. A total disregard for theology or doctrinal consistency, but a feverish search for techniques with empirically verifiable results of terrifying magnitude ( yes, terrifying ).
Occultism and purism are anathema to one another. Occultism is soley concerned with results, whatever the cost, literally and figuratively, even if it means hanging one's life in the balance.
So much so that Crowley would have loved the emergence of pastiche esotericism in our post-modern times as it would further prove his case that the New Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child is indeed upon us. That we rebel against the parental Aeons of Isis and Osiris without fully cutting the roots, but defining ourselves individually in relation to it.
Lastly, Levenda offers a short but interesting appendix on the "kalas", a subject Kenneth Grant often deals with in his trilogies, but never really extended upon in detail. These few pages will be of great use to both aspiring and experienced Typhonians desiring to delve into this topic more.
Levenda identifies the Dark Lord with Set ( and subsequently his equivalents outside of ancient Egypt as Shiva, Shaitan, Typhon etc.). Set is the archetypical Other. And as such, he is incalculable.
Every perversity is his and that which breaks down structures echoes his name.
Set is identified with the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, the North Pole, and therefore with a tradition far older than civilization, beyond recorded time into the nebulous netherworld of prehistory. Perhaps not only the time of the colloquial caveman, but of epochs long forgotten, now reemerging such as the recently discovered ruins of Gobekli Tepe and Gunung Padang. Remnants of cults that indicate a preoccupation with the stars.
The stellar tradition is the forgotten tradition. Familiar as we are with the solar and lunar, the nocturnal firmament constituted the axis mundi of man in olden days. Levenda does not go in-depth and that will give the reader the impression that the author is merely tipping the veil in this book.
This is what I got throughout the whole book. This is not an exhaustive study on the Typhonian Tradition ( is that even possible one might ask ? ), but an invitation to rethink what happened to Lovecraft and Crowley, and how much Grant might be right in theorizing that art and magic are dealing with the same source. Levenda also knows how to give us the creepers when discussing the incursions from the Trans-Plutonian and how this relates to the Typhonian tradition.
Again, he desires us to look further and do our own homework on the subject, but firstly giving us the toolkit to connect more and more dots.
Levenda also makes a good case for the often heavily critiqued, mostly among post-colonial scholars, bricolage-tendency in western spirituality. Bertiaux's voudon gnosis is one of the latest to receive some backlash over the fact that his system has little to do with 'authentic' voudon.
Levenda argues, and correctly, that historical and anthropological correctness have little function in magick. In fact, post-colonial theory forgets that this is how the occult works, worldwide, and not just in the occident. This carelesness is exactly what characterizes the Dark Lord himself. A total disregard for theology or doctrinal consistency, but a feverish search for techniques with empirically verifiable results of terrifying magnitude ( yes, terrifying ).
Occultism and purism are anathema to one another. Occultism is soley concerned with results, whatever the cost, literally and figuratively, even if it means hanging one's life in the balance.
So much so that Crowley would have loved the emergence of pastiche esotericism in our post-modern times as it would further prove his case that the New Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child is indeed upon us. That we rebel against the parental Aeons of Isis and Osiris without fully cutting the roots, but defining ourselves individually in relation to it.
Lastly, Levenda offers a short but interesting appendix on the "kalas", a subject Kenneth Grant often deals with in his trilogies, but never really extended upon in detail. These few pages will be of great use to both aspiring and experienced Typhonians desiring to delve into this topic more.
February 20, 2018
This book was intensely interesting, however, I found its implications to be frankly terrifying.
May 8, 2021
Absolute rubbish. Jesus Christ, what the Hell is wrong with people?
February 15, 2022
"Nada de esto está descrito en El horror de Dunwich, por supuesto. Es necesario leer entre lineas". Esta frase del libro resume para mi el acercamiento tramposo y torticero a su tésis sobre las conexiones entre Lovecraft y la corriente thelemica de Crowley y, especialmente, la de Kenneth Grant.
Personalmente mi principal interés es la parte de Lovecraft y, en ese sentido, el libro es terriblemente decepcionante. Supongo que para thelemitas y otros ocultistas puede que este libro esté lleno de interesantes reflexiones metodológicas o místicas... pero para mi es solo una muestra de las técnicas tramposas de apropiación por parte del autor.
El truco es hacer grandes afirmaciones de conexión, insinuaciones y paralelismos textuales, para luego reducirse a meras coincidencias tramposas de fechas (¿en serio que Lovecraft sitúe acontecimientos en la noche de Walpurgis y que organizaciones ocultistas utilicen también dicha fecha merece siquiera un comentario?) y paralelismos generales.
Levenda utiliza el espurio Necronomicon de Simon (posiblemente escrito por él mismeo) como pieza fundamental de la ligazón y si lo eliminamos de la ecuación... se queda en nada, como mucho la extraña coincidencia de la palabra Tutúlu en una de las obras de Crowley (que teniendo en cuenta la cantidad de neologismos introducidos por este y por Lovecraft entra totalmente en el campo de la coincidencia)
La conexión con Grant, y otros autores posteriores a Lovecraft, es más sencilla pero en el fondo vacía, ya que lo único que requiere es que Grant haya leído a Lovecraft para que este pueda plantar referencias en su propia obra. En ese sentido incluso podrían utilizarse fragmentos del libro para inspirar a personajes contemporáneos de terror (al igual que Lovecraft utilizo elementos de la teosofía y otras corrientes ocultas en su propia obra. Algo, por cierto, que el libro evita mencionar (y podría ser interesante) ya que explicar algunas de las similitudes (como la obsesión y malinterpretación de Lovecraft et al. con los yezidies) sin necesidad de recurrir a sueños premonitorios o secretos arcanos.
Por otro lado debo decir que me resulta especialmente sórdido el uso, por dos veces además, del suicidio de Robert E. Howard, como insinuación de algo oscuro tocado por la literatura del círculo de Lovecraft, de una forma que avergonzaría a cualquier presentador de televisión sensacionalista.
Como valor positivo decir que Levenda no escribe mal del todo y que utiliza astutamente la negación pausible para defender su argumento. Pone siempre a mano explicaciones alternativas o parece poner en duda lo que afirma... para luego construir toda su argumentación a partir de esas bases poco solidas.
Personalmente mi principal interés es la parte de Lovecraft y, en ese sentido, el libro es terriblemente decepcionante. Supongo que para thelemitas y otros ocultistas puede que este libro esté lleno de interesantes reflexiones metodológicas o místicas... pero para mi es solo una muestra de las técnicas tramposas de apropiación por parte del autor.
El truco es hacer grandes afirmaciones de conexión, insinuaciones y paralelismos textuales, para luego reducirse a meras coincidencias tramposas de fechas (¿en serio que Lovecraft sitúe acontecimientos en la noche de Walpurgis y que organizaciones ocultistas utilicen también dicha fecha merece siquiera un comentario?) y paralelismos generales.
Levenda utiliza el espurio Necronomicon de Simon (posiblemente escrito por él mismeo) como pieza fundamental de la ligazón y si lo eliminamos de la ecuación... se queda en nada, como mucho la extraña coincidencia de la palabra Tutúlu en una de las obras de Crowley (que teniendo en cuenta la cantidad de neologismos introducidos por este y por Lovecraft entra totalmente en el campo de la coincidencia)
La conexión con Grant, y otros autores posteriores a Lovecraft, es más sencilla pero en el fondo vacía, ya que lo único que requiere es que Grant haya leído a Lovecraft para que este pueda plantar referencias en su propia obra. En ese sentido incluso podrían utilizarse fragmentos del libro para inspirar a personajes contemporáneos de terror (al igual que Lovecraft utilizo elementos de la teosofía y otras corrientes ocultas en su propia obra. Algo, por cierto, que el libro evita mencionar (y podría ser interesante) ya que explicar algunas de las similitudes (como la obsesión y malinterpretación de Lovecraft et al. con los yezidies) sin necesidad de recurrir a sueños premonitorios o secretos arcanos.
Por otro lado debo decir que me resulta especialmente sórdido el uso, por dos veces además, del suicidio de Robert E. Howard, como insinuación de algo oscuro tocado por la literatura del círculo de Lovecraft, de una forma que avergonzaría a cualquier presentador de televisión sensacionalista.
Como valor positivo decir que Levenda no escribe mal del todo y que utiliza astutamente la negación pausible para defender su argumento. Pone siempre a mano explicaciones alternativas o parece poner en duda lo que afirma... para luego construir toda su argumentación a partir de esas bases poco solidas.
February 23, 2016
This is a really entertaining and well written book that really doesn't cover a whole lot of new ground, but builds on an already firm foundation. The connection between Crowley and Lovecraft was first explored by Kenneth Grant more than 50 years ago. Lavenda relies heavily on this research. Sadly much of Grant's stuff is out of print, making this volume a nice addition to a modern occult library. The new research involves the Necronomicon of 'Simon' which most occult scholars will say is none other than Peter Levenda himself! The cynic could look upon this book as an ego trip as a result, and I will hardly be putting up my copy of Grant's "Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God" for auction as a result of buying it. Still "The Dark Lord" is nicely done and was a worthwhile purchase.
May 27, 2019
So cool watching Peter's mind at work... so knowledgeable about so many things. A good third of this book wasn't of interest to me (all the Eastern religion stuff), but it was delightful how he ties the Lovecraft and Crowley stuff together. Plus he's just such a good explainer. Hours and hours listening to him on YouTube helps as well, in the personalizing of the experience.
March 12, 2018
Peter Levenda is a very good and thorough researcher, but this one kind of spent a lot of time on details that didn't seem as relevant as the kinds of things he usually digs up in research of a more political kind. I have found other topics researched by the same author to be maybe relevant to a lot more people, but this would be more recommended for those who are specifically focused on the history of magic or the horror genre perhaps.
October 6, 2013
A very thorough and informative account of the work and philosophy of Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Order.
Grant can be difficult to read, his writings a stream of consciousness which only opens up to the reader after repeated visits and increasing awareness of the underlying currents and patterns. Levenda does an excellent job of pinning down the main thrusts of the Typhonian Gnosis, making Grant accessible to a far wider readership.
The book is critical where necessary, but is largely sympathetic. It investigates all of Grant's influences, such as Thelema, Lovecraft, Tantra and Vodun. Most importantly the writer understands Grant's theories of consciousness and imagination as the key to other-dimensional reality. It is explained not only how Grant used fiction as an influence, giving it just as much weight as historical fact and tradition, but also why it was important that he should do so. Many of the criticisms levelled at Grant's approach are revealed to be shallow when dealing with these matters.
Most importantly from my perspective, the book is majestic when it comes to discussing the Dark Lord Himself, the stellar God Set, Lord of storms, foreigners, nightmares and the Other. Levenda waxes quite eloquent in the latter pages of the book when he describes the very essence of Set and the influence of this most important of Gods upon human consciousness and that which lies beyond. There is a profound understanding of the Dark Lord evidenced here.
A fascinating read, and one which may open up Grant's own writings (woefully difficult thought they now are to obtain) to a larger readership.
Grant can be difficult to read, his writings a stream of consciousness which only opens up to the reader after repeated visits and increasing awareness of the underlying currents and patterns. Levenda does an excellent job of pinning down the main thrusts of the Typhonian Gnosis, making Grant accessible to a far wider readership.
The book is critical where necessary, but is largely sympathetic. It investigates all of Grant's influences, such as Thelema, Lovecraft, Tantra and Vodun. Most importantly the writer understands Grant's theories of consciousness and imagination as the key to other-dimensional reality. It is explained not only how Grant used fiction as an influence, giving it just as much weight as historical fact and tradition, but also why it was important that he should do so. Many of the criticisms levelled at Grant's approach are revealed to be shallow when dealing with these matters.
Most importantly from my perspective, the book is majestic when it comes to discussing the Dark Lord Himself, the stellar God Set, Lord of storms, foreigners, nightmares and the Other. Levenda waxes quite eloquent in the latter pages of the book when he describes the very essence of Set and the influence of this most important of Gods upon human consciousness and that which lies beyond. There is a profound understanding of the Dark Lord evidenced here.
A fascinating read, and one which may open up Grant's own writings (woefully difficult thought they now are to obtain) to a larger readership.
March 15, 2017
Very interesting out there stuff. I wouldn't agree with everything Levanda says about this stuff. For example he claims that Crowley's Beast or Chaos corresponds to the Egyptian god Set which I've never heard of and find hard to see. It was a pretty fun read but I felt Levanda went off track into explanations of stuff within chapters too much losing focus of the basic ideas but then again that style might be whats needed when attempting to analyze Grants awesomely insane Typhonian Gnosis. Extra dimensional communications with transplutonic entities within the Mauve zone of the in between states of the qliphothic tunnels of set.
That's some Daath shit
That's some Daath shit
Want to read
April 21, 2013Totally sight unseen of the books' interior, I feel the need to mention the similarity in description and tone with the "Liber-R" materials from the Mardukite Research Organization, released in 2010 as "Necronomicon Revelations" (by Joshua Free).
December 18, 2023
I really enjoyed this book, although some of the supposed coincidences on Crowley and Lovecraft are really not believable, the rest of the information about Grant's actual beliefs and practices are really illuminating, as are his explanations about Tantra. A thing I found really useful is the appendix about the tantric Kalas, a good starting point to the true practice of Tantra
December 24, 2016
Finally some in-depth, no bullshit look at the sex magick of Crowley, Grant and Tantra sects.
April 1, 2025
Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) was a poet, novelist, and writer who met the poet and magician Aleister Crowley in 1944 and served as his personal secretary for three months in 1945. Despite their short liason, Grant impressed Crowley, who saw him as a candidate to lead his occult order, the O.T.O., in England after his death. However, Grant had a falling out with Karl Germer, Crowley’s spiritual heir, who revoked Grant’s charter to run the O.T.O. in England. Nevertheless, after Germer’s death in 1969 Grant declared himself Outer Head of the Order (O.H.O.), much as Crowley had with respect to Theodor Reuss, and was supported in this by John Symonds, Crowley’s infamous literary executor, biographer, and one time assistant treasurer of the O.T.O. Together they published several important Crowley works, notably The Confessions of Aleister Crowley and Magick, both published by Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Grant also published nine of his own works on esoteric philosophy, including The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, in which he developed an original theory, based in part on Crowley’s Law of Thelema, that all human spirituality derives from a primordial Ur-cult which Grant associated with the Greek god Typhon, a monstrous serpentine giant who is the offspring of Gaia, the earth, the ancestral mother of all life, and Tartarus, the god of the underworld, and the unbounded first-existing entity from which light and the cosmos are born. Grant sees Crowley’s Thelemic cult as a contemporary manifestation of the Typhonian tradition, as well as the fictional writings of H.P. Lovecraft, the art of A.O. Spare (who Crowley rejected as a “black brother”), and the eccentric writings of Charles Stansfeld Jones, one-time “magical son” of Aleister Crowley, who ended up rejecting the Law of Thelema and converting to Roman Catholicism, among others, including the Yazidis. Peter Levenda is an occult historian whose works include studies in Nazi occultism, H.P. Lovecraft, “American political witchcraft,” Maoism, Chinese alchemy, Qabalah, Freemasonry, Tantra, and UFOlogy. The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic is, much like the works of Kenneth Grant himself, a highly speculative, protean attempt to systematize Grant’s view of Typhonian traditionalism in relation to the work of Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft principally. As such, it is a useful introduction to Grant’s oeuvre for those who do not have the time or the inclination to wade through all nine volumes of Grant’s work (the reviewer has read four of these, The Magical Revival, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Hecate’s Fountain, and Cults of the Shadow; Nightside of Eden and Outside the Circles of Time await his perusal).
Levenda is an excellent expositor, much better than Grant, with a penchant for historical research. Lovecraft's first short story, "The Beast in the Cave," was written about the same time as Crowley’s experience of March and April 1904, when he received the dictation of the Book of the Law, which Grant/Levenda equate to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. If, they quite reasonably argue, Crowley could derive meaning from automatic writings and visions, why could Lovecraft also not have intuited the zeitgeist of the New Aeon through the medium of dreams, filtered through his personality just as Crowley’s filtered his, or Muhammad his for that matter? Thus, Lovecraft’s story, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), which inaugurated the whole Cthulhu mythos, was set on November 1, 1907, the very day that Crowley wrote chapter 3 of his inspired holy book, Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (“The Book of the Heart Girt About by a Serpent”), wherein we read, “Thou art Sebek the crocodile against Asar; thou art Mati, the Slayer in the Deep. Thou art Typhon, the Wrath of the Elements, O Thou who transcendest the Forces in their Concourse and Cohesion, in their Death and their Disruption. Thou art Python, the terrible serpent about the end of all things!” Similarly, we find the following passage in “The Call of Cthulhu”:
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (“The Book of the Heart Girded with the Serpent”) is just the second Holy Book to be penned by Crowley, the first, Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli (“Book of the Free Ones or the Lapis Lazuli”), having been written just days before on October 30, 1907 – the day before Halloween, interestingly. Nor is their surmise entirely without basis in the writings of Aleister Crowley himself. Crowley did, after all, identify himself with the Beast of the Earth, and in the Book of the Law we read, “Also the mantras and spells; the obeah and the wanga; the work of the wand and the work of the sword; these he shall learn and teach.” Obeah (or obi), from Twi ebayifo ‘witch, wizard, sorcerer’ and wanga (or ouanga), refers to voodoo sorcery, esp. a voodoo charm or spell. Clearly, a reference to Afro-Caribbean magic is implied.
Also in the final chapter of the said book, written on November 3, we read: “Accept the worship of the foolish people, whom thou hatest. The Fire is not defiled by the altars of the Ghebers [Zoroastrians], nor is the Moon contaminated by the incense of them that adore the Queen of Night,” although the reference to “the foolish people…whom thou hatest” might give us pause. But most telling of all is the significance of Set, the negative or “wrathful” counterpart of Horus. Crowley writes: “This child Horus is a twin, two in one. Horus and Harpocrates are one, and they are also one with Set or Apophis, the destroyer of Osiris. It is by the destruction of the principle of death that they are born.” Similarly, Lovecraft would write in “The Nameless City” (1921):
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet: ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die,’
referring to the return of Cthulhu, the chthonic god of primordial time, represented as a dragon or octopus, in a future aeon. Like Set, the evil brother of Osiris, Cthulhu is the half-brother of Hastur the Unspeakable.
Interestingly, Boleskine House, described in the Book of the Law as “thy house 418,” “my secret house” (Horus is speaking), and the Kaaba and the Kiblah, referring to “the Cube” which is “the vector” of attention in the New Aeon. Aiwaz/Horus predicts that “your holy place shall be untouched throughout the centuries: though with fire and sword it be burnt down & shattered, yet an invisible house there standeth, and shall stand until the fall of the Great Equinox.” Boleskine is the place where Crowley undertook the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage, and houses the temple where Crowley was instructed to establish the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-khonsu. Boleskine was in fact “burnt down and shattered” twice, in 2015 and 2019, and is now being rebuilt as a spiritual centre. 418 is the number of Abrahadabra, ��cosmic consciousness.”
Interestingly, Boleskine is on the shore of Loch Ness. Loch Ness takes its name from an old Celtic word meaning “roaring one,” and seems to be associated with an ancient Druidic sacred spring. Loch Ness has a long history as a spiritual or occult “power place.” Reports of the famous Loch ness monster go back 1,500 years. Local Buddhist monastics believe that “Nessie,” as she is called, is a naga, a serpentine deity in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain tradition, credited with guarding sacred treasures and esoteric wisdom.
In the Book of the Law, its author, Aiwaz, whom Crowley describes as a preterhuman intelligence, is declared to be the “minister of Hoor-paar-kraat,” Aiwaz itself being a Pakistani name, Turkish for “substitute.” Hoor-paar-kraat (more properly, Har-pa-khered in Egyptian) is the Greek god Harpocrates, identified with the Egyptian child god Horus, the god of silence and secrets, but, more importantly in this context, the newborn sun, identified with Typhon and Chaos. Based on the advice of Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs, e.e. cummings’s typesetter, Crowley further identified Aiwaz with Set or Saturn. Set, Sutekh, or Seth, represented as a beast, is the Egyptian god of deserts, storms, disorder, and violence.
Originally Set had a positive role, and accompanies Ra (the Sun) on his barque to repel Apep, the serpent of Chaos. He was Lord of the Red Land, balancing Horus’ role as Lord of the Black Land. Sometimes he is represented with a falcon’s head, like Horus. Set was also associated with the planet Mercury. But most importantly in this context, Set is a predynastic deity (3790-3500 BCE).
Crowley identifies Aiwaz/Set with the god of Sumer, the oldest human civilization (5500 BCE). The Sumerians were probably a non-Semitic, non-Indo European West Asian people. They traded with the Indus Valley civilization, but were older. Sumerian society was divided into free people and slaves. They had a highly relaxed attitude to sex, and practised masturbation and anal intercourse. Paradoxically, perhaps, ritual cleanliness was of great importance.
The Sumerians regarded themselves as the literal children of the gods, the Anunnaki, who came from the sky, but who were humanoid; the similarity of Sumerian drawings to the classic depiction of extraterrestrials has been noted by UFOlogists, including by Jacques Vallée. The Anunnaki are credited with creating humans to replace the Igigi who the Anunnaki used to perform forced labour. Thus, the arts, sciences, industry, manners, and law came from the Anunnaki, chiefly Enki, who is associated specifically with the constellation called the Square of Pegasus and depicted as a Serpent. 40 is his sacred number, also referenced in the Book of the Law. He is also identified with the planet Mercury, like Set.
Sumer was governed by its priests. These details are strikingly similar to the Book of the Law, especially the notorious Third Chapter, leading to the suggestion that the Age of Aquarius, ruled by Saturn = Set, represents a revival of the original human civilization, Aquarius itself being represented as a human. Set, as Satan, also figures prominently in the Hebrew bible, based on Sumerian precedents. According to the Sethian gnostics, he is said to guard the divine wisdom which confers immortality in the garden of Eden and to have shared it with Eve and Adam in order to liberate them from the thraldom of Yah, the demonic deity of the Old Testament.
The snake or serpent also figures prominently in the Book of the Law, where he is represented as the corollary of Nuit, “the Star,” who “giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir[s] the hearts of men with drunkenness.” He is “the winged snake of light,” Hadit, the latter referring to Behedite, Heru-Behdeti or Horus of Bedhet, represented as a winged solar disk. As the serpent he burns upon the brows or ajna-chakra as the “serpent flame”: “I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy.” These passages clearly refer to the Kundalini (lit. “coiled snake”), the famous “serpent power” that lies dormant at the base of the spine but, once “activated,” ascends the spine to the brain, where it activates the ajna and sahasrara chakras and induces illumination. This is, moreover, the location of the “reptilian complex” of the “triune brain,” associated with power and sex.
Just as “Set” is the original god of man, so is the basal ganglia of the reptilian complex the root of human consciousness, and its assimilation and transformation the key to enlightenment itself. This has been confirmed by psychedelic research. For example, in Jung and in Stanislav Grof’s model of individuation, the Freudian “personal unconscious” or, in Jungian terms, “the Shadow,” or the “birth trauma,” must first be penetrated and assimilated in order to hypostatise the collective unconscious that lies “behind,” as it were, rather than “above.” “The Khabs is in the Khu.” This is the doctrine of the “real self” or subconscious that Aleister Crowley explained to Frank Bennett at the Abbey of Thelema in 1921, and that caused Crowley to reject the doctrine of the “higher self” as a “damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion” in Magick Without Tears. This is of course a highly secret, occult doctrine, because of its potential for abuse.
Historically the problem of the reptilian brain has been addressed through the patriarchal formula of repression, identified by Crowley with the formula of the Dying God of the Aeon of Osiris, which dates back to the Egyptian First Dynasty (3100 BCE) or even earlier. Thus, human beings covered their nakedness with clothes, concealing their sexuality behind closed doors (the origin of territoriality, according to Buddhism), channelled into socially approved avenues, and established repressive authorities to enact laws and regulations to control, limit, and restrict their behaviour, the compensation for which appears in the tendency to psychosis (Arthur Koestler, Glynda-Lee Hoffmann, etc.) that manifests intermittently in ever more destructive wars, culminating in the Second World War (1939-1945), the most destructive war in human history, the very decade of which was predicted by Aiwaz/Set in the Book of the Law. According to the Book of the Law, this will be followed by civilizational collapse, in the course of which the accumulated karma of human history will be expiated, followed by reconstruction based on the formula of the New Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, characterized by the arising of “a new species of man” (Yeats), the “kingly man,” who has attained the knowledge and conversation of the “Holy Guardian Angel,” or “Real Self,” also known as Congressus cum Daemone (see Liber 800), “absolute individuals” entirely self-realized and autonomous (the so-called “True Will”). Thus, the New Aeon is nothing other than the process of making the unconscious conscious. This New Aeon is equated with the astrological Age of Aquarius, which Levenda says will commence in 2600 CE, although the consensus date seems to be closer to 2400, just about 500 years following Crowley’s “Cairo Working” in 1904. Interestingly, one Neptune-Pluto cycle lasts 495 years. According to Palden-Jenkins (“Astrological Cycles in History”), “they characterise an underlying driving-force behind history, an undertow of reality which marries the inevitable ram-force of Pluto with the imaginal, ideational power of Neptune. This combined force helps us define our underlying historical reality on a collective-unconscious level – this world-view being a combination of actualities and perceptions.”
Interestingly, the Age of Aquarius, the Human, called The Star in the Tarot, will be followed by the Age of Capricorn, the Goat, called The Devil in the Tarot, about 4560 CE. Capricorn is also the Midheaven of the horoscope and is also the constellation of Enki. Both Aquarius and Capricorn are ruled by Saturn (Set = Satan). Thus, we are on the verge of a 4,320 year reign of Saturn, the only occurrence of a planetary “double age” in the astrological cycle. This will be followed by the advent of the Aeon of Ma’at (corresponding to Libra, the descendent) about 11,040 CE, characterized by the universal attainment of cosmic consciousness and supreme, perfect, and absolute enlightenment (anuttarasamyaksambodhi).
Grant also published nine of his own works on esoteric philosophy, including The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, in which he developed an original theory, based in part on Crowley’s Law of Thelema, that all human spirituality derives from a primordial Ur-cult which Grant associated with the Greek god Typhon, a monstrous serpentine giant who is the offspring of Gaia, the earth, the ancestral mother of all life, and Tartarus, the god of the underworld, and the unbounded first-existing entity from which light and the cosmos are born. Grant sees Crowley’s Thelemic cult as a contemporary manifestation of the Typhonian tradition, as well as the fictional writings of H.P. Lovecraft, the art of A.O. Spare (who Crowley rejected as a “black brother”), and the eccentric writings of Charles Stansfeld Jones, one-time “magical son” of Aleister Crowley, who ended up rejecting the Law of Thelema and converting to Roman Catholicism, among others, including the Yazidis. Peter Levenda is an occult historian whose works include studies in Nazi occultism, H.P. Lovecraft, “American political witchcraft,” Maoism, Chinese alchemy, Qabalah, Freemasonry, Tantra, and UFOlogy. The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic is, much like the works of Kenneth Grant himself, a highly speculative, protean attempt to systematize Grant’s view of Typhonian traditionalism in relation to the work of Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft principally. As such, it is a useful introduction to Grant’s oeuvre for those who do not have the time or the inclination to wade through all nine volumes of Grant’s work (the reviewer has read four of these, The Magical Revival, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Hecate’s Fountain, and Cults of the Shadow; Nightside of Eden and Outside the Circles of Time await his perusal).
Levenda is an excellent expositor, much better than Grant, with a penchant for historical research. Lovecraft's first short story, "The Beast in the Cave," was written about the same time as Crowley’s experience of March and April 1904, when he received the dictation of the Book of the Law, which Grant/Levenda equate to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. If, they quite reasonably argue, Crowley could derive meaning from automatic writings and visions, why could Lovecraft also not have intuited the zeitgeist of the New Aeon through the medium of dreams, filtered through his personality just as Crowley’s filtered his, or Muhammad his for that matter? Thus, Lovecraft’s story, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), which inaugurated the whole Cthulhu mythos, was set on November 1, 1907, the very day that Crowley wrote chapter 3 of his inspired holy book, Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (“The Book of the Heart Girt About by a Serpent”), wherein we read, “Thou art Sebek the crocodile against Asar; thou art Mati, the Slayer in the Deep. Thou art Typhon, the Wrath of the Elements, O Thou who transcendest the Forces in their Concourse and Cohesion, in their Death and their Disruption. Thou art Python, the terrible serpent about the end of all things!” Similarly, we find the following passage in “The Call of Cthulhu”:
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (“The Book of the Heart Girded with the Serpent”) is just the second Holy Book to be penned by Crowley, the first, Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli (“Book of the Free Ones or the Lapis Lazuli”), having been written just days before on October 30, 1907 – the day before Halloween, interestingly. Nor is their surmise entirely without basis in the writings of Aleister Crowley himself. Crowley did, after all, identify himself with the Beast of the Earth, and in the Book of the Law we read, “Also the mantras and spells; the obeah and the wanga; the work of the wand and the work of the sword; these he shall learn and teach.” Obeah (or obi), from Twi ebayifo ‘witch, wizard, sorcerer’ and wanga (or ouanga), refers to voodoo sorcery, esp. a voodoo charm or spell. Clearly, a reference to Afro-Caribbean magic is implied.
Also in the final chapter of the said book, written on November 3, we read: “Accept the worship of the foolish people, whom thou hatest. The Fire is not defiled by the altars of the Ghebers [Zoroastrians], nor is the Moon contaminated by the incense of them that adore the Queen of Night,” although the reference to “the foolish people…whom thou hatest” might give us pause. But most telling of all is the significance of Set, the negative or “wrathful” counterpart of Horus. Crowley writes: “This child Horus is a twin, two in one. Horus and Harpocrates are one, and they are also one with Set or Apophis, the destroyer of Osiris. It is by the destruction of the principle of death that they are born.” Similarly, Lovecraft would write in “The Nameless City” (1921):
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet: ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die,’
referring to the return of Cthulhu, the chthonic god of primordial time, represented as a dragon or octopus, in a future aeon. Like Set, the evil brother of Osiris, Cthulhu is the half-brother of Hastur the Unspeakable.
Interestingly, Boleskine House, described in the Book of the Law as “thy house 418,” “my secret house” (Horus is speaking), and the Kaaba and the Kiblah, referring to “the Cube” which is “the vector” of attention in the New Aeon. Aiwaz/Horus predicts that “your holy place shall be untouched throughout the centuries: though with fire and sword it be burnt down & shattered, yet an invisible house there standeth, and shall stand until the fall of the Great Equinox.” Boleskine is the place where Crowley undertook the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage, and houses the temple where Crowley was instructed to establish the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-khonsu. Boleskine was in fact “burnt down and shattered” twice, in 2015 and 2019, and is now being rebuilt as a spiritual centre. 418 is the number of Abrahadabra, ��cosmic consciousness.”
Interestingly, Boleskine is on the shore of Loch Ness. Loch Ness takes its name from an old Celtic word meaning “roaring one,” and seems to be associated with an ancient Druidic sacred spring. Loch Ness has a long history as a spiritual or occult “power place.” Reports of the famous Loch ness monster go back 1,500 years. Local Buddhist monastics believe that “Nessie,” as she is called, is a naga, a serpentine deity in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain tradition, credited with guarding sacred treasures and esoteric wisdom.
In the Book of the Law, its author, Aiwaz, whom Crowley describes as a preterhuman intelligence, is declared to be the “minister of Hoor-paar-kraat,” Aiwaz itself being a Pakistani name, Turkish for “substitute.” Hoor-paar-kraat (more properly, Har-pa-khered in Egyptian) is the Greek god Harpocrates, identified with the Egyptian child god Horus, the god of silence and secrets, but, more importantly in this context, the newborn sun, identified with Typhon and Chaos. Based on the advice of Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs, e.e. cummings’s typesetter, Crowley further identified Aiwaz with Set or Saturn. Set, Sutekh, or Seth, represented as a beast, is the Egyptian god of deserts, storms, disorder, and violence.
Originally Set had a positive role, and accompanies Ra (the Sun) on his barque to repel Apep, the serpent of Chaos. He was Lord of the Red Land, balancing Horus’ role as Lord of the Black Land. Sometimes he is represented with a falcon’s head, like Horus. Set was also associated with the planet Mercury. But most importantly in this context, Set is a predynastic deity (3790-3500 BCE).
Crowley identifies Aiwaz/Set with the god of Sumer, the oldest human civilization (5500 BCE). The Sumerians were probably a non-Semitic, non-Indo European West Asian people. They traded with the Indus Valley civilization, but were older. Sumerian society was divided into free people and slaves. They had a highly relaxed attitude to sex, and practised masturbation and anal intercourse. Paradoxically, perhaps, ritual cleanliness was of great importance.
The Sumerians regarded themselves as the literal children of the gods, the Anunnaki, who came from the sky, but who were humanoid; the similarity of Sumerian drawings to the classic depiction of extraterrestrials has been noted by UFOlogists, including by Jacques Vallée. The Anunnaki are credited with creating humans to replace the Igigi who the Anunnaki used to perform forced labour. Thus, the arts, sciences, industry, manners, and law came from the Anunnaki, chiefly Enki, who is associated specifically with the constellation called the Square of Pegasus and depicted as a Serpent. 40 is his sacred number, also referenced in the Book of the Law. He is also identified with the planet Mercury, like Set.
Sumer was governed by its priests. These details are strikingly similar to the Book of the Law, especially the notorious Third Chapter, leading to the suggestion that the Age of Aquarius, ruled by Saturn = Set, represents a revival of the original human civilization, Aquarius itself being represented as a human. Set, as Satan, also figures prominently in the Hebrew bible, based on Sumerian precedents. According to the Sethian gnostics, he is said to guard the divine wisdom which confers immortality in the garden of Eden and to have shared it with Eve and Adam in order to liberate them from the thraldom of Yah, the demonic deity of the Old Testament.
The snake or serpent also figures prominently in the Book of the Law, where he is represented as the corollary of Nuit, “the Star,” who “giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir[s] the hearts of men with drunkenness.” He is “the winged snake of light,” Hadit, the latter referring to Behedite, Heru-Behdeti or Horus of Bedhet, represented as a winged solar disk. As the serpent he burns upon the brows or ajna-chakra as the “serpent flame”: “I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy.” These passages clearly refer to the Kundalini (lit. “coiled snake”), the famous “serpent power” that lies dormant at the base of the spine but, once “activated,” ascends the spine to the brain, where it activates the ajna and sahasrara chakras and induces illumination. This is, moreover, the location of the “reptilian complex” of the “triune brain,” associated with power and sex.
Just as “Set” is the original god of man, so is the basal ganglia of the reptilian complex the root of human consciousness, and its assimilation and transformation the key to enlightenment itself. This has been confirmed by psychedelic research. For example, in Jung and in Stanislav Grof’s model of individuation, the Freudian “personal unconscious” or, in Jungian terms, “the Shadow,” or the “birth trauma,” must first be penetrated and assimilated in order to hypostatise the collective unconscious that lies “behind,” as it were, rather than “above.” “The Khabs is in the Khu.” This is the doctrine of the “real self” or subconscious that Aleister Crowley explained to Frank Bennett at the Abbey of Thelema in 1921, and that caused Crowley to reject the doctrine of the “higher self” as a “damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion” in Magick Without Tears. This is of course a highly secret, occult doctrine, because of its potential for abuse.
Historically the problem of the reptilian brain has been addressed through the patriarchal formula of repression, identified by Crowley with the formula of the Dying God of the Aeon of Osiris, which dates back to the Egyptian First Dynasty (3100 BCE) or even earlier. Thus, human beings covered their nakedness with clothes, concealing their sexuality behind closed doors (the origin of territoriality, according to Buddhism), channelled into socially approved avenues, and established repressive authorities to enact laws and regulations to control, limit, and restrict their behaviour, the compensation for which appears in the tendency to psychosis (Arthur Koestler, Glynda-Lee Hoffmann, etc.) that manifests intermittently in ever more destructive wars, culminating in the Second World War (1939-1945), the most destructive war in human history, the very decade of which was predicted by Aiwaz/Set in the Book of the Law. According to the Book of the Law, this will be followed by civilizational collapse, in the course of which the accumulated karma of human history will be expiated, followed by reconstruction based on the formula of the New Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, characterized by the arising of “a new species of man” (Yeats), the “kingly man,” who has attained the knowledge and conversation of the “Holy Guardian Angel,” or “Real Self,” also known as Congressus cum Daemone (see Liber 800), “absolute individuals” entirely self-realized and autonomous (the so-called “True Will”). Thus, the New Aeon is nothing other than the process of making the unconscious conscious. This New Aeon is equated with the astrological Age of Aquarius, which Levenda says will commence in 2600 CE, although the consensus date seems to be closer to 2400, just about 500 years following Crowley’s “Cairo Working” in 1904. Interestingly, one Neptune-Pluto cycle lasts 495 years. According to Palden-Jenkins (“Astrological Cycles in History”), “they characterise an underlying driving-force behind history, an undertow of reality which marries the inevitable ram-force of Pluto with the imaginal, ideational power of Neptune. This combined force helps us define our underlying historical reality on a collective-unconscious level – this world-view being a combination of actualities and perceptions.”
Interestingly, the Age of Aquarius, the Human, called The Star in the Tarot, will be followed by the Age of Capricorn, the Goat, called The Devil in the Tarot, about 4560 CE. Capricorn is also the Midheaven of the horoscope and is also the constellation of Enki. Both Aquarius and Capricorn are ruled by Saturn (Set = Satan). Thus, we are on the verge of a 4,320 year reign of Saturn, the only occurrence of a planetary “double age” in the astrological cycle. This will be followed by the advent of the Aeon of Ma’at (corresponding to Libra, the descendent) about 11,040 CE, characterized by the universal attainment of cosmic consciousness and supreme, perfect, and absolute enlightenment (anuttarasamyaksambodhi).
June 8, 2019
This is an interesting investigation of Crowley, Grant, and Lovecraft. It elucidated their points of interconnection and had many intriguing stories to tie the points together. I felt like it gave me a little bit better of an understanding of Grant's work, but not much. As a secondary source for Grant (my reason for reading it), this book is mostly worthless--especially because it simplifies some of Grant's concepts to make them more easily understandable and thus obfuscates the deeper meanings (e.g. the Mauve Zone = the abyss; Cthulhu = Set) and rather then delving into the intensity of Grant's works just says things like his gematria is unintelligible, which is irritating as that takes up so much of many of his works and is a major point of confusion and elucidation for me. Levenda says to just ignore it. Really, the most interesting part was the elucidation of Lovecraft's work and interconnection with deeper, arcane mysteries. I think it's worth reading for that point alone; however, it helps a tiny bit with understanding Thelema, Crowley, and Grant, but really not much. Given it's pretty much the only secondary source on Grant, however, makes it required reading if you're looking into his work.
February 3, 2021
Looks like fiction, smells like fiction but ITS NOT FICTION. The more you read the more you try to be skeptical because you know it's true. I've been an HP Lovecraft fan since a long time ago and this is a masterpiece of a scholar that not only has references, well studied topics and discussions but merges a lot of sciences and even has discoveries of its own. Well worth the read.
September 20, 2022
The alleged author of the "Simon" Necronomicon offers a fairly juicy breakdown of the beliefs of Kenneth Grant, with particular attention given to the Cthulhu Mythos crossover. Certainly more interesting than the hoax Necronomicon ever was... Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
June 22, 2025
Cthulhu = Fire Serpent = Kundalini = Typhon = Set. While Lovecraft was afraid of opening gates for the Old Ones, Crowley and Grant actively sought to facilitate the process mostly by using eastern sex magic.
November 23, 2021
I've read 4 Grant books. I swore I would never read another. This pretty much was another Grant book.
July 2, 2022
Quite an insightful read.
March 7, 2024
Has its good moments.
I am assuming his take on Bertiaux is taken mostly from Grant's writings only and there is a lot that is incorrect about that.
I am assuming his take on Bertiaux is taken mostly from Grant's writings only and there is a lot that is incorrect about that.
June 3, 2025
Evocador y muy interesante. Abre un campo de estudio fascinante.
August 10, 2021
it gives you an insight about tantras,typhonian order and Kenneth Grant's occult ideas correspondent with Lovecraftian story and how it makes a connections with altered state of our consciousness generally. on my point of view, its a necessary and good document to learn some occult stuffs. Moreover its very understandable except some tantric rituals and practices..Great book..
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