Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) “A Memory” by Jan Fries

Kenneth Grant (1924 – 2011)

A Memory

© Jan Fries 2011 (www.kalikaula.co.uk)

 

Winter 1981 a young magician wrote a brief letter to Kenneth Grant. He enclosed a collection of photocopied pictures (mostly automatic drawings) and a series of poems, many of them composed during a single day of near total obsession. The whole wild opus was bound in purple cardboard and entitled A Book of Movements. Kenneth Grant was not the only recipient of such a letter. However, of all the distinguished magicians who were approached, he was the only one decent enough to respond. The reply arrived early in March, its mood friendly, encouraging and interested in further information.

 

“…you may be interested in the Cult of LAM, which I have written about in my latest book (‘Outside the Circles of Time’) and which seems to be of profound appeal to artists (especially in the United States) who are establishing contact with this Entity  which is releasing in them a great surge of creative energy.” (3 Mar 81 ev).

 

It sounded very tempting. Most readers of Kenneth Grant will be well aware of Lam. Lam is, or seems, for convenience’s sake, to be an extraterrestrial sentience which old Crowley portrayed. The drawing appeared in the Blue Equinox as an illustration to Madame Blavatsky’s The Voice of Silence. It also appears in Grant’s The Magical Revival.  When Crowley was old and ailing, Grant had received the portrait of Lam as a present. Crowley may have channelled the image, but that’s as far as the contact went. He does not seem to have had much use of Lam. Kenneth Grant amplified the contact. It turned out that Lam can be a key to the silent and wordless realms of consciousness that appear when conceptual thought has faded. When you look at the picture you will immediately notice the tightly closed mouth and the complete lack of ears. Such a being is not much of a talker nor very interested in listening. Nowadays Lam is something of an archetype. The same sort of figure, sporting a huge, bulbous head on top of a tiny body, appears in other works of Crowley which do not necessarily relate to the entity. More so, Lam proved to be an enormously popular image for the intellectual type of alien. Variations of Lam abound in movies and cartoons. Today, the figure seems almost self evidently extra terrestrial, but when Crowley channelled the image it wasn’t so. It was after Crowley’s death that the UFO craze began. We might call his drawing the dawn of an artistic fashion.

 

The young magician, yes, this crazed and confused creature was me, immediately painted a portrait of Lam in acrylics and devoted several months to daily meditations and invocations. It was a great opportunity for experiment, as Lam kept me waiting and didn’t say anything. I used all the methods which were available to me at that time. I had more than a decade of almost daily experience with hypnotic trances and meditation at the time, but was rather inexperienced in ceremonial and shamanic approaches. For Lam, I used ritual invocation, astral projection, lucid dreaming, sigils, sexual magick, music, hours of hyperventilation, dancing to exhaustion plus several nights on a mountain in the Taunus, staring at the painting in the light of a candle from sunset to sunrise, charging it with all the emotions I could raise.

 

Tough cookies, as Ra Hoor Khuit says, that very little happened.

 

In a few more or less lucid dreams I chanced upon Lam, but this didn’t get me anywhere. The invocation of Lam became a challenge (I had read too much Castañeda) and turned into sheer frustration. Just what had gone wrong? For one thing, I was trying far too hard. A magickal contact you requires the co-operation of all ‘participants’. It’s not enough to make a real effort as long as the other party isn’t interested. However, the rituals were not without effect. In magick, energy is never lost. The whole extreme charge of frustrated ambition became thoroughly counterproductive. When you are stubborn (like me) and try to force a result, the natural effect is cramp. Sooner or later so much magical pressure builds up that something comes apart. With a bit of luck it’s your personality. During these months I became increasingly obsessive and result-oriented. Simultaneously, thick-headed, stupid determination fused with a steady increase of self-doubt. It was quite a useful process, as doubt is unequalled in dissolving the rigid confines of the ego. Mr. Grant, who appeared to be well acquainted with such crisis states, showed much understanding. He probably expected me to blow my lid before long. During a Beltane ritual on the dark-night mountain I became temporarily blind. It was a shattering experience. First, the surroundings dimmed, then the torches lost their colour and everything became black and white. A moment later, vision faded. I touched my face and found that my eyes were wide open. Inner vision set in. I saw a red circle which became a vortex that was sucking me into its central, spinning emptiness. For an instant I wondered how I could ever continue drawing with my eyesight gone and almost panicked. Then I recalled Austin Spare’s magnificent mantra ‘Does not matter – need not be’. I relaxed my cramped muscles, calmed my breathing and stopped struggling. Shortly afterwards my eyesight returned. I felt completely drained and wasted and had a difficult night of sleep on the forest floor. The experience had been a much deserved warning. I swore a magical oath not to perform any sort of magic, ritual, divination or meditation for three months. And I wrote about the experience to Kenneth, who was delighted by the episode, as he was just finishing writing Hecate’s Fountain, a book which celebrates a series of magical rituals that ended in accidents. Three months without daily magick was simply an ordeal. At that time, I was habitually practicing several hours a day. I immediately felt exposed, insecure, out of sync and beside myself. Anyone who really loves to alter consciousness will understand that the sudden stop of even the most elementary practices leads to withdrawal symptoms and another highly entertaining crisis. For one thing, I was haunted by a series of intense nightmares. For another, I developed paranoia. I was acquainted with a pair of respectable traditional magicians who were the leaders of an old fashioned order. One boasted to my friends that she going to influence me in the astral. In her opinion, I had been obsessed by a faun (!) in the forest, and should be freed of such an unwholesome influence. I was amazed to hear the news, as my obsessions were definitely not of fauns. However, I was oath-bound to use no banishing or magical defences. One night I dreamed of a zombie-like Aryan giant coming after me and fought him off (using no magick, only common household Gong Fu).  A few days later, I chanced to meet her. She bitterly complained that I had assaulted her!

 

It was a thoroughly weird period, which found an end when I was on Corfu for a week of holidays. I swam in the sea, slept between the gnarled olives and found myself in contact with Medusa, who used to share a temple with Artemis on the island. The Medusa frieze, kept in the archaeological museum, 17 metres long and 2, 6 metres high, is one of the most mind blowing works of spiritual art. Unlike other renderings of the Gorgo, this image celebrates the goddess instead of her slaying. It was one of my favourite pictures when I was a small child, spending hours over books on Greek sculpture instead of picture books, but seeing it for real made me stagger. The contact was overwhelming and scary. I wasn’t at all sure if a banishment might be needed, but then, I was under oath not to do anything of that sort, and didn’t.  That very day I found my dreams escalating into Nightside dimensions. Medusa came uninvited, and she prompted the very fit of creativity that Kenneth had hoped I would receive from Lam. For many months, I kept my attention to Medusa, who sucked me into spiralling tunnels of alternate realities. Kenneth enjoyed reading of my experiences and helpfully suggested that Medusa (numerical value 116) has a similar numerical value as another name of hers, Satalia, provided we misspell it a little: “’Satalie’ (116) is a profoundly interesting concept which connects with the Deep Ones. As a whirlpool of demonic ferocity that sucks in every conceivable entity it suggests a watery version of the Black Hole.” (18 Nov 81 ev).

 

Nevertheless, he soon tried to set me back on the trail of Lam. Alas, it was not to be.  Apparently I am more comfortable with chaotic trans-dimensional serpent goddesses than with egg headed intellectual aliens. Sorry about this. For no matter what form or personality triggers ṡaktipāta (a discharge of energy and sentience), it is simply One Consciousness that manifests, everywhere and always.

 

The futile Lam rituals turned out to be quite wholesome for my magical development. It’s enlightening to get things wrong, if only for laughs. Let me add that the ‘blindness’ I experienced had been a side effect of the ritual trance. As I learned a few years later when I was enjoying a night-time walk through the snow, and had more leisure to explore the phenomenon, my eyes had simply screwed themselves upwards with such force that vision first lost colour and then disappeared entirely. But I’m sure you guessed this anyway, it’s so obvious from the way the retina works.

 

Medusa opened the gates to Maat. Once again, Kenneth was involved. When I realised that contacting Lam just didn’t want to happen (or happened want to didn’t) he recommended a text entitled Official Statement on Lam, and informed me, that it was scheduled for publication in The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magic. I wrote a friendly letter to the editor and enclosed a picture book entitled Visions of Medusa. I received two replies. The first was a very brief note from the editor, who wondered what he should do with the pictures and added that the Lam Statement wasn’t going to appear; if I wanted to read it I should contact Kenneth Grant Esq., who had composed it. The other was from Nema, who visited the office on the day my letter arrived, saw the pictures and felt the urge to respond at length. Now frankly, things could have been simpler. Kenneth could have sent a photocopy of the statement. It wouldn’t have been of much use, however. I read it when visiting a friend in Britain in 1982 and was a little disappointed. However, by being difficult and making things complicated, Kenneth put me in touch with Nema, for which I am very grateful.

 

The Lam story was not over yet. From time to time I caught a glimpse of Lam in my dreams, and one night I dreamed that Kenneth was writing a book entitled Les Fleurs du Lam. I told him, and he replied, quite amused, that Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal had been his bedside book for several years.

 

Today I learned that Kenneth has died. It is late at night, the winter sky is dark and overcast, the cold comes creeping, and silently, small crystalline flakes of snow are swirling from the height. Kenneth would have approved of the darkness and the silence, not so of the temperature. On and off, we were in written contact for almost thirty years. Our interaction changed a lot over the years. The letters I received during the eighties were usually short, concise, encouraging, and friendly; frequently they put me in touch with magicians and publishers, or got me involved in the Nightside Tarot Project; on request I airbrushed portraits of Dagdagiel, Zamradiel and Saksaksalim. Sadly, this tarot never saw the light of day. Over the years Kenneth’s replies became shorter and less meaningful, until I wondered why we were corresponding at all. We had a pause for a few years. In the early 1990s, when Visual Magick appeared, I sent a copy, which revived our communication on a much more personal level. There were still loads of qabalistic calculations involved, but in between the names and numbers a more relaxed and playful Kenneth Grant was beginning to share the secrets that lay behind his books, and the way he composed them. After Living Midnight appeared, he joked that he had “always imagined you as a fierce weapon-brandishing Viking slashing a way through impenetrable forests, the haunts of ferocious beasts. The fact that you are a scholar to boot creates a forbidding image, quite outside the range of terrestrial experience.” (Plenilune, 23 Mar 97 e.v.). Next thing I knew I was called a “Chinese sage”. Nevertheless, our interaction had its difficulties. No matter how much he joked, Kenneth insisted on formalities. I found it amusing that it took him more than two decades before he began to address me by my first name. From time to time, our opinions diverged considerably. Kenneth usually showed his disapproval by ignoring the topic in question. More frequently, his letters were personal, friendly, humorous and supportive.

It was only during the eighties, when he was facing numerous troubles, that the mood occasionally became difficult. During this period, his health was not too well and the publishing of his books became a strain. From what I heard, his publisher had a change of mind and decided that books on cooking were a better investment than occult gnosis. The manuscript of Hecate’s Fountain, completed in 1982, ended up on a shelf and Nightside of Eden was trashed at railway station-bookshops for a nominal sum. Likewise, Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare turned out to be a commercial failure. Kenneth began to look for a new publisher, but had problems in retrieving the rights for Hecate, as, from what I heard, the advance needed to be repaid. For many years, Hecate remained in limbo. Kenneth occasionally made highly cynical remarks on the topic. In spite of such setbacks he continued to write. After all, with or without a publisher, magick needs to be earthed. People who fail to put their spiritual experience into some form tend to get magical constipation. On the other hand, earthing the magick is the easiest way to receive fresh inspiration. Hence, Laozi observed: “The saint does not hoard. Having regarded everything as belonging to others, he has greater abundance himself.” (Translation Duyvendak, London 1954). Writing was one of Kenneth’s favourite occupations, publishing wasn’t. On many occasions he complained bitterly about publishers, editors and printers.

Hecate’s Fountain was eventually released under the auspices of a new publisher. The publication, after so many years of frustration, affected Kenneth very little. He was busy on other books and hardly realised that he was upsetting other people. Hecate is a highly controversial work. Half of it is dedicated to the amazing rituals of Nu-Isis Lodge, a former branch of the OTO, which generally tended to end when people were devoured, dissolved, or otherwise disappeared. Anyone who took it seriously might have wondered just how the lodge was recruiting fresh members, given such an impressive mortality rare. That Kenneth was describing real events as surrealistic parables, and that ‘death’ and ‘dissolution’ stood for release from bondage to the ego and its limitations, escaped the attention of many. Where other magicians boast of their successes, Kenneth devoted himself to a series of terrifying magical accidents and highly entertaining failures. Hecate is one of the most humorous occult works ever written. However, you have to know about ego-death from experience to be able to share the laugh. Those who took Kenneth as a dead-serious occult master were considerably upset. Likewise, his commentaries on Liber Al, which neatly remove much of the book from the human sphere of activity, did not meet with general approval. In short, there were senior occult masters who felt much upset that Grant might give Thelema a bad name. In the process a lawsuit ensued, which Grant lost. Details of the case appear in Starfire vol. 1, 1994, in It’s an ill wind that bloweth’. Much of the excitement seemed to resolve around the highly irrelevant question whether Grant was entitled to use the term ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’ for his organisation, or call himself the head of his branch, as he had since the fifties.  It might be asked if a secular court is the proper authority to settle questions on occult legitimisation. To this day the whole boring issue is much debated in the internet and I have no intention of heating up the discussion again. Perforce, Hecate had to be sold with a disclaimer stating that the book had little or no similarity to the work of Crowley. In a way, this statement is quite true. As an occult pioneer, Crowley had done much to transform the Ordo Templi Orientis, or rather the branch of which he was the Outer Head (until he was or was not expelled by his superior, Theodor Reuss). Crowley was a pioneer, but he certainly had his limits. Instead of subscribing to Crowley fundamentalism, Grant creatively transformed the structure, teachings, field of interest and methods of his organisation. The result went much further than Crowley would have ever dared to go.

 

When, in the early sixties, Franz Germer, the treasurer of the OTO, attempted to expel Grant from the order, he only strengthened Grant’s resolution to develop his own methods. Thelema is often like that. Some people learn best in a rigid order; others need a less restrictive organisation; some stay forever or graduate by quitting/getting kicked out. Many don’t join anything and make a point of developing their magick independently. Grant built on the foundations of Crowley’s work when he attempted to put oriental magic on a more reliable foundation. Crowley himself had been pioneering enough to dabble into yoga for a few short weeks in Ceylon (before hurrying off to climb mountains) and he was certainly enchanted by the Daodejing of Laozi, which he paraphrased and republished in a version that would have amazed most Daoists. Now one of the crucial secrets of the OTO consisted of the notorious sexual magic which the wealthy industrialist Karl Kellner apparently learned while travelling in the Near East and India. It wasn’t much, considering the amount of knowledge available nowadays, but for his period it was a remarkable breakthrough and Crowley was much impressed by it. Many years later, old Crowley was much surprised when young Kenneth Grant gained access to a mysterious tantric commentary courtesy of David Curwen. The commentary purported to having been composed by a priest in Ceylon in the 1930s. Allegedly, this text changed Crowley’s opinion about Tantra a great deal. However, the Great Beast was soon to die and the new material did not affect his writing. Now the commentary which Curwen produced and which Grant occasionally quotes in his books is not a typically Indian piece of scripture. It lacks the formal style of tantric texts or their commentaries, nor does it include the massive amounts of refined Sanskrit terminology that are generally required to obtain the rhetorical and logical clarity favoured by Indian scholars. From what I have seen of this text, its author was well informed and highly competent. I am simply not sure that he really was an Indian. The source of the commentary remains a tantalising enigma. Kenneth wrote to me that he was sworn to keep most of it to himself, and felt honour bound to keep his word. The commentary is not representative for the overwhelmingly huge field of Tantric developments, but deals specifically with highly physical aspects of the cult of Ṡrī Vidyā before the movement was reformed in the sixteenth century. Nowadays, Ṡrī Vidyā is the most popular surviving tantric system, as it strictly follows conservative Hinduistic and Vedāntic regulations, attracts members of the Brahmin class and specifically prohibits all sexual rituals or activities that involve a measure of fun. Kenneth was not aware of this situation, and tended to portray Ṡrī Vidyā rituals as typically Left-Hand-Path activities, which they haven’t been for several centuries. Nevertheless, the commentary inspired further research. Where Crowley had ignored all translations of genuine Tantras, Grant was soon to master the extensive jargon and to put the theory into practice. Anyone familiar with indological literature will soon notice that Grant was widely read, experienced and quite familiar with the most enigmatic scriptures of the east. He was the first occult practitioner to emphasise the importance, if not superiority, of women in tantric worship and ritual, and to show that sexual magick, as explored by Crowley, was far too focussed on ‘solar-phallic’ mysteries. Reforming his order, Grant discarded a major body of hierarchic Masonic elements and replaced them with a more functional and organic system of organisation. He introduced anthropological studies on magic and spirituality from many times and cultures, so that we encounter a large amount of international mythology in his works, plus a lot of encouragement for all who dare, do and progress independently. You encounter Spare’s Zos Kia Cultus, Haitian Voodoo, qlippothic obsession, Egyptian rituals, Nema’s Maat Magick  and even, as valid pieces of modern mythology, Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones in his writings. Behind the colourful array, Kenneth delighted in the Daoism of Laozi, the teachings of Mādhyamaka, Chan (Zen) Buddhism and especially Advaita Vedānta. More important, he published, published and published. It allowed anarchic enthusiasts like me to experiment on their own. Kenneth was encouraging towards independent practitioners. Talking about Lam he stated:

 

“I have discussed in my books many methods of establishing contact with astral and other entities. If you use any one of these methods consistently you will not fail to achieve contact. You should take a basic formula and develop your own technique. There is no other way.” (11. May 81 e.v.)

 

Where it comes to his occult organisation, I was much delighted to hear that it is a totally non-profit oriented phenomenon where members alternate periods of formal training with similar periods devoted to wholly individual projects. Better still, contact between members was only permitted when strictly necessary. This form of organisation, while seeming to be somewhat anti-social, is a lot more effective than the many magical and pagan groups where people join to meet a peer group or to coexist in an extended family structure. Sure, group journeys may be fun, but when you have to face the divine and demonic within yourself you are absolutely on your own.  Fancy grades, diplomas, fellow travellers and illuminated masters don’t help one bit. Kenneth’s approach was not intended to make money or win large numbers of members. His organisation was always a small and dedicated group of people who could get along on their own. It certainly raised the quality of each individual quest and reduced the time- and attention-wasting pitfalls of gossiping, intrigues, quarrelling and hierarchic status games. But this is an outsider’s view.  I have never attempted to become a member, and he never asked me to, as we both knew that I’m not much of a joiner. As I was at a healthy distance from his organisation, he was quite capable of making jokes about it.  I would guess that one of the purposes of his order was to create a mystique. A ‘secret society of talented adepts’ is a fascinating glamour. No matter whether it really exists it certainly constitutes a challenge to all who develop outside of it.

 

Grant’s books are not entirely easy to understand. One of the most essential keys to them is the insight that there are many hidden meanings behind the metaphors, wild qabala and weird stories. Many of the anecdotes that grace Grant’s work are not supposed to describe a historical reality (which few magicians believe in anyway) but internal processes of alchemic transformation, the dramatic visions that arise from intense trances and stimulating parables that suggest more than they define. It helps when you understand that Kenneth did not consider himself an occult historian but as a magickal artist, who delighted to play with symbols, allusions and vague hints, and whose trilogies constitute a scintillating web of sparkling world weaving. Whether a given anecdote was entirely ‘true’, whatever that may mean, was not always his concern. More important was the effect the anecdote had on the readers, and how it stimulated their creation of a unique and inspired magical reality. One element that has been frequently misunderstood is gematria, the qabalistic art of calculating the numerical value of a word, to determine its relation to other words of the same number. Many readers saw Grant’s qabalistic analysis as a weak attempt to link entirely separate ideas on the basis of their numerical value, ands to make up ‘proof’ for connections and relations that seem coincidental or arbitrary. Few realised that Kenneth was not interested in proving anything: the complicated webs of numbers and words were entirely irrational means of conveying suggestions to the Deep Mind of the readers, and especially to those who delved into qabala themselves. Once I told him about Milton H. Erickson’s use of storytelling for hypnosis and therapy and compared it with his use of gematria. He replied:

 

“The numbers, as you suspect, are devices for insinuating psyche-transforming information. The shakti is in the number, which thereafter acts as an index to that region of the psyche into which the information is sunk. Thus, gematria is a creative tool, not a mere lexico-lîla (“only a story”) as many people seem to imagine. Your expression “dream-seed” sums up succinctly its true nature and purpose. What it has over ‘stories’ is that a mere mention of the number can set the story alive and replaying, without the need of re-telling.” (7 Apr 95 e.v.)

 

Grant was one of the first European magickians who readily informed his readers about his sources. By offering a wealth of practical information he successfully subverted the dreaded vows of secrecy which had hitherto characterised organised occultism. It upset a lot of spiritual leaders. In the mid-eighties, the leader of one such organisation told me angrily that Grant would receive heavy karmic punishment for his revelations. I wonder whether the terrible secrecy of the past centuries has any relevance in our day and age. When I began studying ethnology, I was amazed that some of the most secret methods of magic and sorcery were widely known and appreciated by numerous prehistoric or so-called primitive cultures. Pretty much everything can be found in a good university library. Today, you can plunge into any culture, spiritual tradition and magical reality worldwide, that has ever been documented. The only spiritual discipline that is direly needed to enjoy this treasure trove of secret wisdom is tarka, the ability to discriminate between what is spiritually relevant for you, for others and what is entirely misleading. It’s a skill that has not been especially valued by traditional organisations. For independently minded practical magicians, our era offers more freedom and possibilities than have ever been available. It raises the question what relevance traditional orders have nowadays. During the years of our correspondence, Kenneth became increasingly aware of this:

 

“The publication of OKBISH brought me such a welter of mail that I was able to detect an amazing phenomenon, which is, that  an underworld of women are declaring their aptitude – and showing it occasionally – for assuming the role of Pythoness! It has become increasingly evident that the days of the Patriarchal orders is phasing out and future candidates for Magical Activities have swung precisely into the lap of the GODDESS.” He appreciated this transformation but was slightly worried that the current might “founder on the shores of a vague intellectual-cum-wicca morass.” (21 Jul ‘03 e.v.)

 

To appreciate Kenneth’s living genius you have to understand some of the context. In the 1950s, Steffi and Kenneth Grant were much delighted by Surrealism. In our correspondence, Kenneth frequently referred to surreal art and to Dalí’s methods of changing consciousness:

 

“…his lucidity was absolute, and through the lens of his genius, allied to faultless aesthetic artistry, he shared with us a unique vision of an universe where all seems determinedly real in its ultimate indeterminateness – as do our own unrealities which we mistakenly suppose to be ‘real’. ..

I think only a Sage lives and dies “happily”. I would not describe Dali as such, but he was a mighty magician and no mistake” (21. Sept 00 e.v.)

 

Where Dalí used his ‘paranoid critical method’ for a systematic derangement of the senses to produce visual insight, Kenneth freely admitted to using other means. “I have applied Dali’s method to Number (gematria) in the Comments to OKBISH (Book of the Spider)...” (6 Jun 98 e.v.).

 

It says a lot about Kenneth’s methods that he repeatedly (!), voluntarily (!) and with much enjoyment (!) read Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, a book which he referred to as “a superb nightside text” (6th of June 1998 e.v.). In our correspondence he even quoted from it. Kenneth was a bibliophile who read and collected unusual books. Sometimes he surprised me. In one letter he even mentioned that he had read Timothy Leary’s autobiography Flashbacks and greatly enjoyed it.

 

But we are not simply discussing Surrealism in the arts here. The living heart of Surrealism lies in magical thinking. Surrealism happens when entirely different things are united in an irrational context by a mind that makes up meaning as it goes along. “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an autopsy table” wrote the Comte de Lautréamont. When things seem to be in relation, the observer is immediately prompted to make up a story. That’s the way the human brain works: all of us are magical beings who move in a stream of stories, myths, beliefs and phantasms. The ‘real magick’ consists in shaping this current, in transforming the ‘illusion’ into a work of art and value, in merging the inner and outer world under will to be-live a life worth living. The early surrealists explored consciousness itself, and cultivated an almost religious attitude. In 1924, André Breton, the self-elected leader of the Surrealist Movement declared: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may speak so.” Some surrealists had an open mind for the occult, as evidenced by the first post-war surrealist exhibition in Paris (1947) when Breton and others decorated the 21 steps leading to the Galerie Maeght with the Tarot trumps. The visitor passed through a ‘Room of Superstition’ and encountered, under a scaffold by Tanguy, a labyrinth featuring altars dedicated to idols of the surrealists. On other occasions, exhibitions hinted at topics such as the Black Mass and rites of symbolic cannibalism. But what the surrealists only envisioned, magicians and sorcerers turn into practice. You just have to look at the items commonly found on Voodoo altars, in talisman bags, fetish bundles or anywhere in my flat to observe that surrealism is the inevitable outcome of magic. And that a good piece of surrealist art is also magical. Helena Blavatsky created a magnificent piece of surrealism when she composed The Secret Doctrine, a book that can hardly be classed as serious research, but was magical enough to stimulate the evolution of spirituality in the Western World for several generations. The same applies to Grant’s Typhonian Trilogies, with the major difference that Grant’s work is much better researched, includes gorgeous illustrations (many of them by Steffi Grant) and emphasises practical experience. They also show his humour. Kenneth seriously studied his favourite topics and was well at home with academic research; but he also delighted in quoting crazy authors simply for the fun of it. Not as he took their work seriously, but simply as the outcome was a good piece of art.

 

When serious readers encounter Grant’s work they often show a range of typical reactions as they progress from volume to volume. Usually, they take him very seriously at first, and believe that he is a sinister occult authority revealing terrible mysteries. In the next phase, the terrible mysteries take on a life of their own. Bedazzled by a phantasmagoria of real and imaginary (you tell the difference!) deities, spirits, demons, qliphoth, Ancient Ones and a mind blowing cavalcade of international occult symbolism, they find all sorts of odd perceptions, urges, instincts and obsessions appearing in their lives. I have met people who felt haunted by numbers or who hid Kenneth’s books, wrapped in aluminium foil, under lock and key, to prevent the spirits from coming out. One couple quarrelled so bitterly about the dangers of the qliphoth that he began to read Nightside of Eden secretly on the toilet. Such tremors indicate that the magickal universe (or Cthulhu itself) wakes. Often enough, this phase involved nightmares, paranoid delusions and a complete derangement of personality and lifestyle. With a bit of luck, the enthusiastic readers progress beyond this stage and learn to handle the forces of the dark. Here, as ever, daily practise is essential. Kenneth had little sympathy with talkers and dabblers, and to those who devote themselves to gabbing on Internet platforms. Indeed he was quite upset when I mentioned that there is an Internet out there:

“I am appalled by your comments on the Internet and other contemporary contraptions, especially those in the hands of U.S. officialdom. All this sort of thing can but deaden the finer forces, in man, of natural telepathy and the rest of the siddhis developed by the higher types of vertebrates.” (7 Sept 02 e.v.).

 

In his opinion, directly after World War II the population were a lot more caring, compassionate and less materialistic than the people of our age. Kenneth angrily referred to the present period as the “Aeon of Frankenstein”:

“…I stick to New Isis and will assuredly fall by the wayside to suffer the well earned contempt of this budding race of technocrackpots. It has got so bad that everyone I pass on the street is making nonsensical remarks into a gadget held to one ear.” (13 Jun 97 e.v.)

 

Kenneth’s magick celebrates all sorts of darksome entities. Some of them, like the qliphoth and Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones, have received a lot of bad press from occultists who prefer to leave their deepest fears, desires and instincts suppressed, instead of embracing and transcending them. True enough, such entities can easily take the ego, and all you consider to be yourself, apart. The process, technically called The Ordeal of the Abyss, was first introduced by Crowley (who hurried through it as fast as he could), and turned into a complex art form by Kenneth Grant, who much enjoyed exploring the Nightside of Reality. “I personally believe that the so-called objective universe, including all concepts whatever –egos, gods, devils, etc. – are parts of the phantasmagoria thrown off by mentation-consciousness, which, when the latter is claimed to be the property of an individualized unit (such as the ego) appears to be objective, whether in ‘ancient’ or in ‘modern’ guise. It is a matter of belief (or otherwise) in an objectively existing universe. I believe there is not.” (Plenilune, November 11. 00 e.v.)

 

It is not easy for me to write much about Kenneth Grant as a person. He rarely mentioned anything about his private life nor was he very interested in mine. Much of his magic was aimed at keeping himself at a distance. Personality cults, like that cultivated by Crowley, were much against his nature. If I recall this right, there were c. fifteen people in the 1980’s who loudly declared that they were Crowley reborn, and had little to prove this point, apart from an uncanny ability to imitate the Great Beasts’ bad habits. Likewise, there was and is a whole range of reborn Austin Spares, few of whom are any good at drawing. One of them, so I was told, demanded that Kenneth ought to hand over the original Austin Spare materials.

 

Several unpleasant experiences with members of magical organisations and unbalanced individuals influenced Grant’s decision to avoid public appearance and personal contacts to occultists, and to keep his private life and family in the background. For all those years of our correspondence, his home address remained a well guarded secret. I kept writing via his publishers, even though an amazing number of people told me where his real address was. You wouldn’t call it much of a secret, but then, everybody respected his privacy and none of us would have dreamed of turning up on his doorstep for a cup of tea.

 

Grant’s works, though abounding with a colourful array of terrifying, alluring and otherwise bedazzling entities, became, over the years, increasingly centred along the lines of Advaita Vedānta. Kenneth loved to flipperghost his audience, a common confusion-tactic in advanced hypnosis, and to slip exceedingly lucid passages on pure consciousness and the nature of reality between the smokescreens and the fireworks. In his approach, a deity, demon or person could be real, illusionary and entirely symbolic simultaneously. Everyday people on the street could be representatives of eldritch forces, archetypes, incarnate deities, girlie-vamps or the walking dead. The older he grew the less was he interested in the technical aspects of sorceries or what he despised as ‘results magic’. In his worldview, based on experiences which shaped Indian philosophy for more than 2500 years, Absolute Reality is without form, shape, name, definition or time. Advaita Vedānta proposes that everything which has form, shape or energy is an illusion: to experience Reality one has to let go of all forms and appearances, including one’s own personality and existence to embrace a Universal Consciousness which is eternally present by being precisely No-Thing. The void is the essence of true being. Leaving the world of appearances and dissolving into formless nothingness is the true bliss of self-experience:

 

“The only way to get there is by meditation. It’s the formula of the Bo tree, or we go on not seeing the wood for trees, becoming bogged down deeper and deeper in Baals and Balls & even in Beaux and Belles…You may have detected a tendency in my later books to question more and more the validity of an objective approach. I hope you won’t imagine that this is evidence of the final stages of senescence, but I have reached the conclusion that the value of magic(k) (when seriously performed) lies only in its power to reveal things as illusionary, even the notion of the magician. This does not infer that we should refrain from doing what we have always done, but we shall henceforth perform without ascribing any agency to the act – as a tree sheds its blossoms, as a poet his poems, as an oracle its omens.” (12 Jan 96 e.v.)

 

At this point our opinions diverged a little. Personally, my approach is closer to Krama Tantra and Kashmir Ṡaivism. These movements accept the dissociation tactics of Advaita as the first half of the process. Advaita is based on giving it all up, on finding release by withdrawing from illusion, i.e. from everything. Unlike Advaita, the Krama, Trika and Spanda teachings propose that there is no such thing as illusion, and that everything, no matter how delusive, is real. Here, the basic sādhana is a cyclic pulsation between form and emptiness. As voidness ‘you’ experience the bliss of absolute freedom. Sometime somewhen ‘you’ (or really the All-Self in its shape as ‘you’) return into the world of form to experience the joy of being. The trance of dissolution alternates with the trance of identification. ‘You’ may be a person, or a concept, a biosphere, a deity, the planet or the solar system. And then ‘you’ drop out again and return to the limitless joy of unconfined, formless, universal consciousness. The key to this pulsation (Spanda) is continuity (Krama), for between voidness, individual existence and all-being there something/nothing/a mystery which continues. Hence, in the tantric traditions of Kashmir, all forms of experience and spiritual practice have their value.  Whether you worship or experience life as a monist, dualist or nihilist is entirely up to you, as each of these approaches is a valid experience in its own specific way, an offering to and from the All-Self, exploring and enjoying all possibilities of awareness. There is no essential difference between spirit and matter; between consciousness and its object: there is only a rhythmic expansion and introversion (Kramamudrā: the bliss of continuity) of One Consciousness delighting in itself. Kenneth occasionally verged on this experience. However, he was also somewhat bitter about humanity in general and the occult movement in particular. To dissociate all ‘illusions’ and to pass beyond incarnate existence became a major topic of his letters. No doubt it was a little irritating for him that I did not share his faith that dissolution is the ultimate panacea. As he grew older, and health problems intensified, he increasingly praised internalisation:

 

“ Yes, I have neighbours – that is why I write – to get away from them; to get away from them, to banish everything that interposes itself between me and externals, replacing them (the externals) with a terrain of my own desires, ever shifting, changing, melting the one into two, into three, into four…I can escape to far meadows, to far-flung constellations – without the need of a bicycle or even a space-ship. And if I feel like thumping Voodoo drums, I do it, without a sound; ravish the most gorgeous darlings – without outcry; sail to the stars or sink to the depths – without anyone knowing or caring. My games are unknown to most; that’s what I like about them. I can walk with murder at midnight and people pass by with a courteous smile and tell me what a lovely day it is!” (29 Sept 01 e.v.).

 

It might be called daydreaming or escapism. However, when a trained mind daydreams, the result is more than a flight of fancy. Such trances have been a vital part of Tantra and Daoism for many centuries. They are not supposed to replace a boring reality with a more exciting dream world. The main thing is to recognise reality as a plastic medium, and to transform subjective experience by imbuing or exchanging it with a more valid vision. When you realise that one ‘illusion’ (or reality) can be transformed into another, you may turn around and discover the consciousness that works the spell. Kenneth played with forms to transcend them. That I kept dancing from absence to presence and one deity to the next (each of them a key factor in writing a new book) perplexed him:

 

“…you seem to externalise your ‘magical’ history in various godforms, whilst to my mind the latter merely appear as crystallized episodic consciousness-movements. I believe everything is made of consciousness, and if it, or they, happen to coincide with various aspects of your own past you recognize them – otherwise, perhaps, they remain invisible, haunting presences just beyond range of ‘knowing’… I do really believe that it is time now to go beyond, or rather, within these ‘forms’, whether of gods or individual human/animal entities, and recognize their substance as consciousness only. Every living being and even inanimate objects are fundamentally consciousness only. Thus everything in the subjective and objective universe is truly equal. The next step is to abolish these forms by the realisation that prior to consciousness none of these phenomena exist. The world-stage is set now for a gigantic liquidation of these illusions.” (21 Apr ’02 e.v.)

 

Kenneth considered all beings and things as illusionary expressions of One Consciousness. Again and again he praised dissolution of everything into the One, Empty and Unlimited Being. Once I mentioned that I had accidentally woken the Celtic goddess Nemetona during a forest walk, got obsessed and was so overwhelmed by her awareness that it took us hours to return to civilisation, simply as she was so upset by cars, motorways, condominiums and lots of strange people. Kenneth agreed that deities do have very distinct personalities:

 

“The gods do, of course, have an ego – that of the person who gives them flesh, or activates their potential. But I think it is a mistake to regard ego as entity when it is merely the mistaken identification of the body-mind complex with the self, which in itself is NOT…Gods, demons, angels, men, women, and on and on, are figments engendered by the image making faculty – the IMAGINATION – the only true god there IS! We live upon a stage where Imagination is the sole script-writer, player and spectator – all of them glamours of the restless mind.” (22 Feb 01 e.v.).

 

The Way does not come to an end but travellers transform and disappear, only to assume new shape elsewhere, especially those who journey Beyond the Circles of Time, through the Ninth Arch and past the Outer Gateways. Kenneth Grant went through a lot. His adolescence during World War II, close contact and friendship with Crowley and Spare, dramatic group rituals with Nu-Isis lodge, family life, years of maintaining the order and finally the life of a recluse. He was one of the most original and creative magicians of the 20th Century. Around the late 1990s his health had much deteriorated, and he thought frequently about his own demise. He did not refer to holidays any more, nor was it easy for him to leave London, a city full of “zombie inhabitants”, which he grew to loathe the longer he lived in it. His sole nature contacts remained the small garden behind the house and occasional visits to close parks:

 

“When I walk down most streets I grit my teeth and mutter AL. II. 25. This gives me fresh hope and fortifies my will no end. I have, nearer home, “some restful green places”. Among them a heath and woodland at Hampstead and, best of all, a rose-garden in Regents Park, a short ride away, where, on a blazing day in June or July one may seek and find refreshing shade and the scent of roses in full bloom. They fill the still air with a fragrance almost out of this world. The enclosure is circular, and when there are no clouds the inverted blue basin of a luminous sky is a veritable dream. Such mornings remain virgin only in early summer – that is to say before the ‘annual break’ – when some intrusion on the magick circle is inevitable.” (23 Aug 1999 e.v.)

 

By 2004 he found it hard to keep up our correspondence. We still sent each other books, but his letters grew increasingly shorter, and by 2005 his vitality had been reduced to a point that he could hardly scrawl notes or type short messages, informing me that he would soon reply at length when less busy and exhausted.

Residing safely behind a formidable manual typewriter that had been new when King Shulgi ruled Sumeria and thickly book-padded walls, Kenneth faced his future without sentimentality. He was well aware that every book results in another being written, and knew that his life work would never be complete. His interest in the world reduced itself entirely to those aspects that interested him. His memories became a leitmotif for his experience. He frequently referred to incidents that evoked vital images from his past: childhood visits to the coast of Wales, holidays at derelict church ruins or bizarre visions evoked during Nu-Isis Lodge rituals. Such glimpses created a magical nostalgia and a continuity which imbued his present with the symbols, obsessions, energies and fetishes of the past. He developed this approach into a valid magical formula, and had much admiration for the way Proust applied it.

 

Late in 2010 I received a final note from him. He briefly thanked me for sending the freshly published Kālī Kaula. It’s a great relief that he received his copy before his departure. Many years earlier, his frequent recommendations of the Karpūrādi Stotra (the Hymn to Kālī) prompted me to write Kālī Kaula, which is essentially a commentary to the hymn that, according to Kenneth “says it all”.

 

Let us give him the final word and wish him a good journey:

 

“The ego, the illusion of an individual self, is not removed by the mere act of dying, because, being itself the tendency to identify with a body of some sort, the ego automatically seizes upon another one on the expiry of the last, UNLESS the dier is able to die whilst consciously surrendering the ego – a willed act, difficult of achievement unless a path to Enlightenment has been pursued during the past lifetime. In which case there is a chance, at death, of absorption in true being. Ask the Awakened!”(22 Feb 01 e.v.)

 

(c) Jan Fries 2011, All Rights Reserved.

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