Cults of the shadow

Typhonian Trilogies #3

by Kenneth Grant

"This book explains aspects of occultism that are often confused with 'black magic'. Its aim is to restore the Left Hand Path and to re-interpret its phenomena in the light of some of its more recent manifestations."
(From Introduction)

Genres: Occult, Nonfiction, Thelema, Magick, Religion, Esoterica, Magic

244 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Kenneth Grant was the head of several important Thelemic orders and author of the influential “Typhonian Trilogies” series (1972–2002) that includes The Magical Revival, Nightside of Eden and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God.

In 1939, Kenneth Grant chanced upon Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice and a few years later began a correspondence with the author (see Remembering Aleister Crowley, Skoob Books, 1991) that would lead to him joining the Ordo Templi Orientis. In 1946, he was initiated into the Argentum Astrum and was confirmed as an IX° in the O.T.O.

Shortly after Crowley’s death in 1947 Grant met David Curwen. Also member of the O.T.O. Sovereign Sanctuary, a keen alchemist and a student of tantra, Curwen initiated Grant into “a highly recondite formula of the tantric vama marg.” This experience further deepened Grant’s interest in oriental mysticism and he detailed his work with the Advaita Vedanta in a number of essays for Asian journals in the early 1950s (later published as At the Feet of the Guru, Starfire, 2006).

In 1948, Kenneth Grant’s wife Steffi (they were married in 1946) wrote to Austin Osman Spare and the couple began an eight-year friendship with the artist. The bookseller Michael Houghton had already introduced Grant to Spare’s opus, The Book of Pleasure, and Spare elucidated his theories with letters and enclosures of manuscripts, with Kenneth acting as amanuensis. In 1954, Spare and Grant co-founded the Zos Kia Cultus: not a cult in the objective sense, but a designation given to the creative nexus of personal magical experience (see Zos Speaks!, Fulgur, 1999).

In the same year Grant founded the New Isis Lodge, with the intention of providing a conduit for “the influx of cosmic energy from a transplutonic power-zone known to initiates as Nu-Isis.” The group ran until 1962 and various accounts of the experiences of the group may be found throughout the “Typhonian Trilogies”.

Coetaneous with the New Isis Lodge, Kenneth and Steffi Grant began work on the Carfax Monographs. This series of ten essays was issued between 1959 and 1963 with the explicit intention to “elucidate the hidden lore of the West according to canons preserved in various esoteric orders and movements of recent times.” It was the beginning of a unique 50 year contribution to Thelemic literature and art that spans poetry, biographical works, fact and fiction.

Copyright © Robert Ansell, 2007

http://www.fulgur.co.uk/authors/grant/

Reviews

[Yaag Ghael · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of Grants books are amazing, he was cavalier, and boisterous, and in many ways larger than life. This is because the visible physical form of the man only revealed a small fraction of who he was or the realms of experience he had access to. He willingly crossed several important boundaries and the set off in fevered pursuit of the highest wisdom available in the realms that opened for him. He provides a great deal of practical details for working the unusual system he doccuments, to make it easier on the practitioner he also creates a coherent reality model which makes the working of the system easier and quicker. This book is extraordinary in every sense, it can quickly open realms of experience and states of consciousness not available through any other system. Part of the wonderful genius of Grant is that his writings are overtly initiatory workings in their own right, and simply reading them can cause significant and transformatory effects on the reader. He certainly learned some wonderful secrets from Spare as to the ways art can be an effective means of transmission for an initiator current. This book is very insightful and oddly practical though much of it's history and Qabala are spurious when perceived in relation to this universe without conciliation to the fact that Grant was primarily concerned with working with a different universe entirely. The best of the strange orders which have manifested in this world as a result of Grants works continue his rabid exploration and innovation. Many of the sinister traditions active in the western world have become increasingly informed and inspired by the Typhonian Trilogies and this should be recognized as a serious and valid aspect of practice whether or not it was initially perceived as such during it's initial reception or its subsequent reviews over the last 40 or so years. Some really wonderful orders independent of prior organizations now exist based on these revelations and they are worthy of exploration and have a lot to offer those involved in them. Some very strange things influenced the writings of the Typhonian Trilogies and are still influencing this universe. Reading these books will be an entertaining and influential experience.

[Äsruþr Cyneaþsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grant provides a mixed quality effort here.

The sections of this work which deal with archaic African religions and their use of physical alignments of the sephiroth is valuable. Grant elsewhere devolves into the utterance of a biased and unverifiable UPG that is largely useless. The notion of the LHP contained herein is written from a RHP persepctive and fails in its claims towards a depiction of a LHP system as it is inherently alleocentric. In this respect, Grant, like Crowley, lacked the will and strength to embrace the LHP wholly.

[Sara 🦷 · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow didn’t know that female fluids are called “moon juice”
anyways…

This quotation has caught my attention a lot:

“Many individual students of the occult seem to think that homosexuality is due to there being a female soul in a male body, or the reverse. This does not seem to be true if one means that a soul with a sexual disposition has reincarnated in a body having a sexual disposition other than the disposition of the soul, for the soul sheds sexuality at death.”

This is a great argument on the whole “Man trapped in a woman’s body” and vice versa argument in the queer community/ the whole anti-binary situation created by my fellow non-binaries, and also a greater way to see it on a more metaphysical level.

[Gaze Santos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps I've read enough of Kenneth Grant's books that they are now easier for me to understand. Whatever the case, this was an easier read than some of his other books. He seemed to stay on topic and I felt there was less of his suspicious gematriatic analysis. The general thesis of this book is to trace the magical lineage of the so called Left Hand Path. He argues that it started in the tribal and shamanic magic of Africa. And from there is was refined in India through the Kaula Circle Tantric practices. From here, he goes on to trace the evolution of the LHP through the various magical philosophies of Aleister Crowley and Thelema, Achad and his Ma-ion, Michael Bertiaux and his cult of the Coulevre Noire, and finally A.O. Spare and his Zos Kia Cult. Throughout the book he makes some interesting comparisons and observations between the different systems, and does actually seem to find a throughline between all of them. Still, I can't help thinking that these books (including the rest of the Typhonian series) are an attempt to consolidate his influences into his own grand Typhonian magical system. In doing so, he is very much repeating other religious systems that, while taking care not to discount the systems before it, present themselves as the most up to date and accurate system of belief. All the same, there is much magical insight to glean in this book if you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grant is clearly obsessed with the psychosexual nature of occultism. It’s one means but by no means “the one and true way”. And even so, his approach and obsession is the gross and perverse LhP approach. He makes a lot of outrageous claims with little to no evidence and his use of Gemetria to justify his ideas is misguided. He’s pushing a left hand path psychosexual ideology while proclaiming it to be the most profoundest of mysteries and how the right hand path approach is unbalanced, which is ever and always the claims of LhP people who think they’re special and possessing of some arcane secret knowledge only to be gained by the perverse and dark. He even uses fiction such as Hp Lovecraft to justify ideas.

I don’t care for this approach one bit. That said, the book is not for beginners. Some knowledge of the esoteric traditions of the east and west is necessary. And if you understand the esoteric grades you’ll also understand that those who claim to be an Ipsissimus or claim that certain other people were, you’ll know they have no idea what that grade truly means. Another thing is how this guy worships Crowley and completely ignores and disregards the state of Crowley at the end of his life. If you take such a person like that as a god, your discernment is severely lacking.

I was curious about his works but after reading this book, my curiosity is sated. There’s a reason why people largely regard him as a madman.

[Johnny Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible work here. Grant is a mesmerist par excellence. He has the unique ability to draw the reader into a hypnotic trance with his fascinating and creative use of gematria. His prose style is both dreamlike in its ease of command and incredibly lucid even in the midst the difficult subject matter this volume presents. His treatment of Michael Bertiaux's Couleuvre Noire order and the inner mysteries of the Tantric Kaula Circle were illuminating to say the least. My favorite book in his first Typhonian trilogy.

[Jim Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly excellent.