Kenneth Grant

Grant knew Crowley, he worked briefly as his secretary in 1945, at the very end of Crowley's life, and he knew Spare well, and his own work is largely an attempt to fuse the two and push the result somewhere neither had gone.

The Typhonian trilogies, nine volumes from The Magical Revival (1972) onward, develop a magic of the nocturnal, lunar and reverse side of the Thelemic cosmos, drawing on tantra, on Spare's sigils, on the Tunnels of Set, and, distinctively, on the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, which Grant treated as unconscious contact with real extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional intelligences rather than as invention.

It should be clear what kind of writing this is. Grant's books present etymologies, cross-cultural identifications and historical derivations that do not survive checking, and his method is associative rather than evidential; scholars who have examined the corpus treat it as visionary literature that uses the grammar of scholarship. Readers who take his historical claims at face value will acquire a great deal of false information about Egyptology, Sanskrit and the history of religions. Read as what it is, a sustained imaginative construction, and an influential one, it is a different and more interesting proposition.

His authority claims were also disputed in his lifetime: he was expelled from the Ordo Templi Orientis by Karl Germer in 1955 after issuing a manifesto of his own, and continued regardless, running his own Typhonian order for the next half-century.

The most contested move in Grant's work is methodological: he treated imaginative fiction as evidence. In the Typhonian trilogies, H. P. Lovecraft's invented mythos appears alongside Crowley's received texts and Spare's automatic drawings as testimony to the same submerged reality, on the argument that the deep imagination does not invent but receives, and that a horror writer's dreams may be soundings of the same nightside the magician enters deliberately. Lovecraft the materialist would have been appalled, as Grant knew and rather relished.

The doctrine has a machinery: Nightside of Eden maps the tunnels of Set, the reverse of the kabbalistic Tree, assigning to each dark pathway its entities and sigils, and proposing that genuine initiation must traverse and integrate these averse states rather than pretend the Tree has only a daylight face. His New Isis Lodge, operating in London from 1955 to 1962, worked rites built on these premises, incorporating Spare's sigil methods and trance work.

Critics inside and outside the Thelemic world have called the system unfalsifiable, the scholarship loose and the prose oracular, and Grant's claimed authority over the OTO was disputed for decades. The influence is not disputed: chaos magic's free use of fictional pantheons, and the whole later conversation about belief as a tool rather than a conclusion, begin in Grant's deadpan refusal to distinguish the imagined from the encountered.