Kenneth Grant
(Deceased)
Kenneth Grant (23 May 1924 – 15 January 2011) was an English ceremonial magician and prominent advocate of the Thelemite religion. A poet, novelist, and writer, he founded his own Thelemite organisation, the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis later renamed the Typhonian Order with his wife Steffi Grant.
Born in Ilford, Essex, Grant developed an interest in occultism and Asian religion during his teenage years. After several months serving in India with the British Army amid the Second World War, he returned to Britain and became the personal secretary of Aleister Crowley, the ceremonial magician who had founded Thelema in 1904. Crowley instructed Grant in his esoteric practices, initiating him into his own occult order, the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). When Crowley died in 1947, Grant was seen as his heir apparent in Britain, and was appointed as such by the American head of the O.T.O., Karl Germer. Founding the London based New Isis Lodge in 1954, Grant added to many of Crowley's Thelemite teachings, bringing in extraterrestrial themes and influences from the work of H.P. Lovecraft. This was anathema to Germer, who expelled Grant from the O.T.O. in 1955, although the latter continued to operate his Lodge regardless until 1962.
In 1949, Grant befriended the occult artist Austin Osman Spare, and in ensuing years helped to publicise Spare's artwork through a series of publications. During the 1950s he also came to be increasingly interested in Hinduism, exploring the teachings of the Hindu guru Ramana Maharshi and publishing a range of articles on the topic. He was particularly interested in the Hindu tantra, incorporating ideas from it into the Thelemic practices of sex magic. On Germer's death in 1969, Grant proclaimed himself Outer Head of the O.T.O.; this title was disputed by the American Grady McMurtry, who took control of the O.T.O. Grant's Order became known as the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis, operating from his Golders Green home. In 1959 he began publishing on the subject of occultism, and proceeded to author the Typhonian Trilogies, as well as a number of novels, books of poetry, and publications devoted to propagating the work of Crowley and Spare
Publications
This is the long-awaited volume of collected poems by Kenneth Grant. Included here are two collections previously published as Black to Black and other poems (1963) and The Gull’s Beak and other poems (1970). Also included is a third collection, previously unpublished Convolvulus: Poems of Love and the Other Darkness.
Kenneth Grant began writing the novel in the mid 1980s. He developed it in order to explore, in a fictional setting, many of the themes of 'The Book of the Spider'.
This is the second volume in the series of novellas by Kenneth Grant. This volume consists of two stories, both of them concerning the voodoo Bultu, or Cult of the Spectral Hyanae.
The first, Gamaliel: The Diary of a Vampire, presents the history of a woman, Vilma, who attempts to invoke unseen Intelligences but takes a wrong turn. She loses her way in the Gamaliel, the Qliphoth of Yesod, and eventually succumbs to vampiric possession. The story unfolds as extracts from her Magical Diary, the editor of which makes a horrifying discovery as the Diary closes.
The first novella, The Other Child, is a tale of two brothers, one a Child of Light, the other of Darkness, and the struggle for a cataclysmic magical power which they each partially embody. A scholar of Ancient Egyptian studies is unwittingly drawn into the struggle, eventually assuming a priestly destiny as events unfold.
This is the rich and gripping first novel by Kenneth Grant. Written in late 1952 and early 1953, the typescript was thought lost for many years.
Collected for the first time as one volume, these penetrating essays on contemporary figures in Eastern Mysticism were written by Kenneth Grant from the early 1950s onwards.
Dedicated to the memory of David Curwen, this is Kenneth Grant’s memoir of his relations with Crowley, drawing on letters and diary entries. Grant first made contact with Crowley in 1944, first visiting him at the Bell Inn, Aston Clinton.
The Ninth Arch is the final volume of the Typhonian Trilogies. It comprises an extended analysis of and commentary upon “Liber OKBISh, The Book of the Spider”, a transmitted text which was received in the course of the Workings of New Isis Lodge in the 1950s.
Oblique to the paths that give on to other dimensions, and beyond them, there lies a region which the author has termed “the Mauve Zone”. Mystics, magicians, sorcerers, artists of many kinds have - over the centuries - skirted it, stumbled upon it, and fled from it.
The Typhonian Tradition discussed in this book matured and declined before even the monumental phase of the earliest civilizations. This is witnessed by fragments of magical and mystical lore once current in Egypt and the Far East. The Tradition lingered on and became corrupt with passing epochs and the gradual attrition of an ages-old lineage of Initiates.
Hecate’s Fountain is a highly original approach to contemporary Hermetic thought and experimental occultism. During the rituals of New Isis Lodge (1955-1962) it was noted that not all of them achieved the object for which they were performed.
Outside the Circles of Time explores a complex of such ideas, from Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, Crowley’s The Book of the Law, Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and Frater Achad’s researches. It also explores the work of Soror Andahadna, a contemporary Priestess of Maat whose work has parallels with that of Frater Achad some decades previously when he announced the inauguration of the Aeon of Maat in April 1948.
There exists a map of consciousness, with its light and dark byways, in the form of a qabalistic glyph known as the Tree of Life. It has its roots in the primal earth of Eden, but its branches extend into extra-terrestrial dimensions.
Cults of the Shadow explores obscure aspects of occultism that have been frequently, and mistakenly, associated with the negative and sensational phenomena of so-called “black magic”
Aleister Crowley vowed to free man from bondage by showing him how to invoke his latent genius; the Hidden God. It is characteristic of Crowley that to this end he utilised the mysterious energies of sex: the most potent, most obsessive of man’s illusions which, if used unintelligently, strengthens the false sense of individual existence that divorces him from the fullness of cosmic consciousness.
It provides a detailed analysis of certain occult traditions which existed long before the Christian epoch, survived its persecutions and anathemas, and reappeared in recent times with renewed vigour.
Drawn from their pioneering documentary work in the late 1940s, the original Carfax Monographs were an ambitious crossroads of art and occultism from the early magical career of Steffi and Kenneth Grant. Privately published as a series of occult essays with hand-drawn images by Steffi between 1959-1963, the original monographs were produced in very small numbers. Few survive.
When writing the original synopsis of this work in the early 1960s, the authors made clear that the purpose of The Carfax Monographs was to reconstruct and elucidate the hidden lore of the West according to the canons preserved in various modern esoteric orders and movements.
Borough Satyr: The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare is the long awaited full colour introduction to the work of this astonishing London artist.
With a substantial Introduction by Henrik Bogdan surveying the development of Grant’s published work, a Preface by Steffi Grant and a Foreword by Martin P. Starr, this book is sure to become the standard volume of reference for details of Grant’s work.
Servants of the Star & the Snake is a collection of eighteen essays by fourteen different writers on the work of Kenneth and Steffi Grant.
During the course of his creative life Spare produced more than 2000 drawings, watercolours and pastels. His exhibitions ranged from the fashionable West End of Edwardian London, to the earthy characterful taverns of post-War Southwark. This volume gathers together his very rare exhibition catalogues.
In his late creative life, Spare was sought out by artists and writers eager to receive insights of experience from the ‘Walworth Road Surrealist.’ And yet, there were very few indeed who became good friends. Vera Wainwright was one such friend.
Without doubt one of the most important works on Spare ever published, this ground-breaking book has deservedly won an enviable reputation in modern occult studies.
Over fifty years ago, Kenneth and Steffi Grant met the artist Austin Osman Spare. A mutual passion for weird art brought them together at a time when Spare, in the final decade of his life, had turned again to writing about his other passion – the occult.