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Liber XXXII · Thelema

Liber XXXII · Thelema · Chapter IV: Thelemic Doctrine

Kenneth Grant (1924–2011): Life, Books and Typhonian Thelema

Kenneth Grant's life and work: Crowley's last secretary, champion of Austin Osman Spare, founder of the Typhonian Order and author of the Typhonian Trilogies.

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Kenneth Grant (1924–2011) was an English occultist and writer who served as Aleister Crowley's secretary in the last years of Crowley's life and went on to found the Typhonian Order, the most distinctive offshoot of Thelema. Through nine books known as the Typhonian Trilogies, published between 1972 and 2002, he fused Crowley's teaching with the art of Austin Osman Spare, Hindu Tantra, Egyptian myth and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. He died in England on 15 January 2011, leaving a body of work that remains among the most influential, and most disputed, in modern magic.

Early Life and the Road to Crowley§

Kenneth Grant was born on 23 May 1924 in Ilford, Essex, on the eastern edge of London. Little is documented about his childhood beyond what he later chose to tell. By his own account he developed an early interest in Eastern religion and in the occult, and as a teenager discovered Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice. By his own account he served briefly in the army during the Second World War before being discharged on health grounds.

In 1944 Grant made contact with Crowley, then living in London in reduced circumstances. Crowley, nearly seventy and in poor health, was looking for younger students who might carry Thelema forward. In 1945 Grant spent some months as his secretary and companion, for part of that time at Netherwood, the boarding house in Hastings where Crowley spent his final years, receiving magical instruction in return for his work. The arrangement did not last; Crowley's diaries record both hope and irritation, and Grant returned to London. Crowley nevertheless kept in touch with him and named him in correspondence as a promising student. Grant's own late memoir, Remembering Aleister Crowley (1991), presents these months as the foundation of his life's work.

Secretary, Editor and Interpreter of Crowley§

After Crowley's death in December 1947 Grant became one of a small circle of British Thelemites who preserved his papers and memory. His most important contribution to Crowley scholarship was editorial. With John Symonds, Crowley's literary executor and biographer, he edited The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1969), The Magical Record of the Beast 666 (1972) and the collected Magick (1973), which brought Crowley's main works back into print just as the counterculture discovered him. These editions have since been criticised and superseded in places, but for a generation they were how most readers met Aleister Crowley.

Grant's interpretation of Crowley was always his own. He took seriously Crowley's late interest in extraterrestrial or "praeterhuman" intelligences, his drawing of the being called Lam, and the sexual magic of the OTO's higher degrees, and he read the Book of the Law as an opening onto older and stranger currents than Crowley himself had acknowledged.

Austin Osman Spare and the Zos Kia Cultus§

In 1949 Grant and his wife, the artist Steffi Grant, came to know Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), a once-celebrated draughtsman then living in poverty in south London. Spare had briefly belonged to Crowley's A∴A∴ around 1909–10 and had developed a personal magical system based on sigils, the "death posture" and the instinctive, pre-rational layers of the self, set out in The Book of Pleasure (1913). The Grants became his close friends, published his writings in their small magazines and helped arrange exhibitions.

Grant named Spare's system the Zos Kia Cultus, after Spare's terms for the body-mind (Zos) and the free, unconditioned self (Kia). After Spare's death in 1956 Grant championed his art and ideas in Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare (1975) and other books. It was largely through Grant's writings that Spare's sigil method reached the founders of chaos magick in the 1970s and became one of the most widely practised techniques in contemporary magic.

New Isis Lodge and the Break with the OTO§

Grant's career as a leader began with New Isis Lodge, which he opened in London in 1955. Its manifesto announced the influence of a newly discerned current linked to a supposed planet beyond Pluto named Isis, and the lodge's work drew on Spare, Tantra and the more esoteric degrees of the OTO. Karl Germer, Crowley's successor as head of the order, is said to have given Grant limited authority to work the order's degrees in Britain, but he regarded the manifesto as heretical and expelled Grant the same year.

Grant ignored the expulsion. New Isis Lodge worked until about 1962, and after Germer's death that year Grant came to style himself Outer Head of the Order, leading what became known as the Typhonian OTO and later the Typhonian Order. Its history and doctrines are traced in our article on Typhonian Thelema and New Isis Lodge; other claimants to Crowley's succession, notably the OTO rebuilt by Grady McMurtry from 1969, never recognised Grant's authority, as described in our guide to Thelemic orders.

The Typhonian Trilogies§

Grant's reputation rests on nine books, issued by a succession of London publishers and small presses and grouped into three trilogies:

  • First trilogy: The Magical Revival (1972), Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God (1973) and Cults of the Shadow (1975).
  • Second trilogy: Nightside of Eden (1977), Outside the Circles of Time (1980) and Hecate's Fountain (1992).
  • Third trilogy: Outer Gateways (1994), Beyond the Mauve Zone (1999) and The Ninth Arch (2002).

The Magical Revival surveys the modern occult revival from Blavatsky and the Golden Dawn to Crowley and Spare and introduces Grant's central claim: that behind solar religion lies an older "Typhonian" or Draconian tradition centred on the stellar goddess, on Set and on the star Sirius. Cults of the Shadow extends the argument to African religion, Tantra and the Voudon Gnosticism of Michael Bertiaux. Nightside of Eden is the most influential of all, mapping the Qliphoth, the "shells" or averse powers of Kabbalah, as a set of tunnels behind the paths of the Tree of Life and attaching to each a sigil drawn from Crowley's Liber 231. The later volumes turn increasingly to dreams, received texts and Lovecraftian imagery.

The style of the trilogies is allusive, associative and heavy with gematria and footnotes. Admirers read them as initiated writing that works on the reader; critics, including many Thelemites, regard much of the historical argument as unfounded, especially Grant's reliance on the Victorian writer Gerald Massey for his picture of ancient Egypt. Grant also wrote fiction, including the novella Against the Light (1997), in which similar themes appear in narrative form.

Final Years, Death and Legacy§

Grant lived quietly for most of his later life, avoiding publicity and publishing through small presses. Steffi Grant illustrated several of his books and collaborated with him on Zos Speaks! (1998), an edition of Spare's writings and their recollections of him. Kenneth Grant died on 15 January 2011, aged 86. The Typhonian Order he had led has continued under new leadership and maintains a deliberately low profile.

His influence is wider than his order. The revival of Spare, the treatment of the Qliphoth as a field of magical work, the use of Lovecraft's fiction as a magical mythology and the idea of a dark or "nightside" current within Thelema all owe much to him, and pass through chaos magick, Swedish Dragon Rouge and much occult art, music and literature. Historians of esotericism such as Dave Evans and Henrik Bogdan treat him as a key figure in British magic after Crowley, one who turned Thelema from a single prophet's revelation into an open-ended, eclectic current. For context see also Jack Parsons and the Babalon Working, an episode Grant reinterpreted in his own terms.

Frequently asked questions§

Did Kenneth Grant really know Aleister Crowley?§

Yes. Grant met Crowley in 1944 and worked as his secretary and student for some months in 1945. The relationship is documented in Crowley's diaries and letters as well as in Grant's memoir Remembering Aleister Crowley (1991).

What are the Typhonian Trilogies?§

They are nine books by Grant published between 1972 and 2002, beginning with The Magical Revival and ending with The Ninth Arch. Together they set out his interpretation of Thelema as part of an ancient stellar or Draconian tradition and explore the Qliphoth, Tantra, Spare's magic and Lovecraftian themes.

Why was Kenneth Grant expelled from the OTO?§

In 1955 Karl Germer, then head of the OTO, objected to the manifesto of Grant's New Isis Lodge, which announced doctrines Germer regarded as unauthorised, and expelled him. Grant continued to work independently and later claimed leadership of his own branch, which became the Typhonian Order.

When did Kenneth Grant die?§

He died in England on 15 January 2011, at the age of 86. His order continued after him, and his books have since been reissued and widely discussed.

Sources and further reading§