Jake Stratton-Kent

[N0T 2]

I look forward to the Testament of St Cyprian The Mage, newly released by Scarlet Imprint.

In belatedly enjoying this interview with the author, as I flicked this present tab open and aimed it at this forum with it playing in the background, the interviewer started (unexpectedly) speaking about Kenneth Grant (around 45.00), so I figured I'd air it here as it raised three things for me which seem to recur when People Are Being Wrong About Aossic On the Internets.

The first is the subjective synchronicity involved for me, personally, in that I hadn't expected Grant to be discussed in this interview and he did just as I opened this forum. 

The second thing is how the critic's misunderstanding becomes the basis for the critique, in that the mistake that Jake Statton-Kent makes in his description of what Kenneth Grant calls "The Mauve Zone" (corrected, for the historical record, below, although my definition is not a quote from Grant, it's my understanding of it) becomes the substance of his criticism of it (and this after a remark that "he'd read the Typhonian Trilogy in the 70s  - although the Mauve Zone as a term only appeared in Grant's later Trilogies).

The third is the fact that this mistake is then used as a basis for his criticism of Grant's "dodgy history", with the sadly typical Typhonphobic dismissive comment "Let's just retreat into the Mauve Zone and our fantasy there is magick... well I don't just want to flee the world into the Mauve Zone, fantasy isn't magick, it's part of magick...but there is history...instead of just inventing a whole load of gothic bullshit!".

...before recommending Paul Huson's Mastering Witchcraft as the best practical starting point for New Learners (which it well may be, but it, too, is just Gothic Bullshit for some people).

What is interesting is that the segment follows immediately upon a discussion of how cool the colours red and black are, particularly when together, and how the sort of archaeological research involved in occultism even at its most academically rigorous is "basically a fuzzy area which doesn't bother me, I think if people want concrete answers they're in the wrong field" (Interviewer), and how despite what Grant and Crowley think the Bornless Ritual "isn't" Sumerian, it's Graeco-Egyptian (missing Grant's point that it's really Typhonian!).

The interview then finishes with Mr. Stratton-Kent explaining the two most important things for aspiring magicians are 1. a magical record and 2. being sure to study parts of magic you naturally dislike (as he did with Chaos Magic...but why stop there...go to the source ?)

I applaud the desire for authentic historical research and look forward to this beautiful-looking and resonant new publication on Goetic history by Mr Stratton-Kent, whose work I deeply respect and enjoy for its scholarship and its authentic personal provenance, but in the interests of historical accuracy, I thought I'd point out to him here that Kenneth Grant does not equate fantasy or imagination with "The Mauve Zone" nor does he propose either as a place of retreat from reality, historical or otherwise, in any work I have found to date.

The Mauve Zone is a symbol which Grant towards the later part of his work used to designate an experiential state or mode (not fantasy - nothwithstanding the experiential reality of fantasy, he's not talking about fantasy when he speaks about the Mauve Zone, but is instead speaking about the thing he intends by that symbol - which is a Point Of View, or a hidden dimension within consciousness/The World, an element or aspect of it which touches particularly upon New Aeon consciousness and the evolution of mind), the vantage-point between individuated consciousness and cosmic consciousness, or perhaps the vantage-point of individuated consciousness rooted/enthroned in cosmic consciousness.  Sometimes it is towards the direction of an appreciation of this reality that his work, carefully absorbed by the prepared mind, can triangulate the mind of the reader (voluntarily or otherwise, as sometimes occurs, as it did in my case).

The thing about archaeologists going back to prehistory and finding great inspiration there is the simple fact that very, very ancient magical practitioners would have probably thought modern academic objectivism a most absurd way to research the actual practise of magic.  Easy for them to say, you might think! They didn't need it. At least not for the same reasons that we, or some, do.

Gratefully,

Yours in non-mobile becoming,
N0T 2

[Jake]

if I may respond to some of these points.

Firstly, I read the *first* Typhonian trilogy in the 70s, and went on to read his later books - which I consider inferior to the first three. There is no 'mistake' here, other than expecting a tabulated and dated listing of Grant's works to appear in the interview! In Mauve Zone Grant explicitly asserts his pessimistic gnostic rejection of the world. Redefining magic as an unworldly mysticism is neither necessary nor semantically justified. My rejection represents - among other things - a major difference in philosophical outlook, not uninformed prejudice.

Secondly, Grant did explicitly identify the Headless Rite as Sumerian, and that is plainly wrong. His interpretation of Typhonian is also divergent from its meaning and context in the Magical Papyri. His erroneous usage is unhelpful in establishing that meaning and context. There was a 'Typhonian Tradition' and it involved magic, not pessimistic mysticism. Its principal deity was of course Typhon-Set.

My criticisms of Grant are neither off the cuff nor unconsidered, where relevant I can defend aspects of his work; although some of his positive contributions have been subsequently superseded. An important instance is his correcting the phallocentric emphasis in Crowleyanity - and by extension magic of that era. As Thelema of any stripe is more or less dead outside of historical re-enactment and dated consumer occulture, this was less relevant to the specific discussion. Incidentally the interview ends with *THREE* things of use to magicians, with *DO YOUR RESEARCH* completing the trio.

[Frater Shaddad]

Mar 16, 2014 11:23:54 GMT Jake said:

 As Thelema of any stripe is more or less dead outside of historical re-enactment and dated consumer occulture, this was less relevant to the specific discussion. 

Jake,

You state that as if it's a fact, while it is only your opinion.  Thelema is not "dead".  It is a vibrant, dynamic, living current.  You'd know this if you Work with the current instead of those REALLY dated grimoires.  Your books would have been relevant a couple hundred years ago....talk about "dated consumer occulture".    That's my opinion.

[Ad Finem]

Jake, I agree with some of your remarks about Grant's focus on Eastern mysticism which perhaps to some people, including myself, do seem somewhat pessimistic, and I don't agree with Grant in this respect because in AL there are many verses which contradict this view, "...existence is pure joy", for example and even further with certain "hidden" words secreted in AL. However, I disagree with you when it comes to Grant's later works because what Grant did in these later works (among many other things) was to map out the "Mauve Zone" which when used with the correct keys, gives the Magician the means of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence's. Personally I do not like to identify "The Book of the Law" with any kind of religion or Aeon. To me, defining AL as a new religion or any such following becomes just another to add to a ever growing pile. However, the formulas, and secrets contained in the book are certainly not dead, and certainly not in the liberal sense of the word, (although I would agree with Grant in it's connection with "The Necronomicon") and is evident to anyone who is in possession of the correct keys to AL, and who has researched the material within the current framework of knowledge. The headless formula is a key to AL, in fact it is "the Whole of the Law". It really makes no difference where in space / time you place it's origin and magical kalas, what matters is the formula or process involved.

91

[N0T 2]

Mar 16, 2014 11:23:54 GMT Jake said:

if I may respond to some of these points.

Firstly, I read the *first* Typhonian trilogy in the 70s, and went on to read his later books - which I consider inferior to the first three. There is no 'mistake' here, other than expecting a tabulated and dated listing of Grant's works to appear in the interview! In Mauve Zone Grant explicitly asserts his pessimistic gnostic rejection of the world. Redefining magic as an unworldly mysticism is neither necessary nor semantically justified. My rejection represents - among other things - a major difference in philosophical outlook, not uninformed prejudice.

Dear Jake,

Thank you for your reply (and for your excellent books on Goetia, which I am thoroughly enjoying, and highly recommend to readers here).

Your mistake, as I point out, is in your misunderstanding of Grant's term "The Mauve Zone", which you seem to confuse with fantasy. I have no idea where you get this notion from: as much as Grant (along with many other magicians) might extol the powers of imagination as the "transmitting/receiving apparatus" of mankind, useful as a plasmic medium of intercourse with cosmic intelligences and vehicle for transmission of Their influence, or alternately as a limb wherewith to assist in giving form to unmanifest realities, this is not the same as pointless gratuitous "fantasy", nor is it a sign of comprehension or understanding on your part to naively equate this with his coining of the term Magick of The Mauve Zone, which, as I pointed out in my initial criticism of your misinformed remarks in the interview, is a symbol which Grant uses to denote a field or mode of consciousness (which he only referred to in his later works, rather than the first trilogy which you mention in your interview).

You seem to belong to that group of people, and there are a few, who "like" his first Trilogy because it resembles in some ways a compendium of historical information, appealing to rationalistically biased people who like to think of history as a linear narrative in a single phenomenal dimension, that can be stuck in a book, upon which act it becomes formally true, but dislike his later Trilogies (because they actually creatively embody and are examples of contemporary exposition of the Current whose antecedents are previously outlined historically in his earlier works, themselves designed not to impart information but to produce direct effects upon the consciousness of the Ripe Reader - i.e., one who actively engages with the same energies, under whatever guise).

To me this view is problematic. Grant made no attempt to satisfy merely academic criteria at any time. His work was conceived from the outset as an act of Magic designed to impart a Gnosis of which he felt he was a custodian. They are examples of Art, folklore perhaps, but not scholarship of the merely academic variety. The fact they nonetheless are of immense historical and scholarly significance is due to the fact that he himself is, rather than because of the (mere) historical facts they may or may not contain. Kenneth Grant is not a scholar, and never pretended to be. He is a Magus, like Crowley.



Now, for your second point.

Secondly, Grant did explicitly identify the Headless Rite as Sumerian,
and that is plainly wrong.

No, Grant doesn't do this, Jack Parsons does (see Hecate's Fountain, p.23 Skoob edition).

In The Magical Revival (page 105), Grant states "The most important rite that Crowley restored is the Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia, a medieval rite stemming from much earlier phases of Magick...", going on to point out its provenance via C.W. Goodwin under the title Invocation of The Headless One, going on further still to explicitly identify it as EGYPTIAN on that same page. He describes Liber Samekh (not the Headless Invocation) as a reconstitution of A Sumerian Rite (designed to put the aspirant in contact with his "Disc" or Angel or Daemone - his noumenal counterpart) in the glossary in that book. This is quite distinct from the historical origins of the Bornless (or Headless) Invocation, although the latter is included as part of Samekh, they're not identical. Obviously.

Crowley believed that his work in "restoring" or creating this rite (Liber Samekh) was a continuation of Sumerian tradition, and that Aiwass was simultaneously the God of the Yezidi, Shaitan, a form of Set, and his own HGA, not based on academic scholarship but upon his inner resonances as a poet and magician. Make of that what you will, Grant was simply continuing this tradition, echoed by Parsons as referenced above. What an ancient Egyptian or Sumerian magician would have made of this we do not know, nor is it particularly relevant. Grant (and Crowley) are using what they have for their own purposes, which is precisely what magicians (as opposed to their Rain Man cousins, mere academic pedants) do.

This is different from what you claim, that:

... Grant did explicitly identify the Headless Rite as Sumerian, and that is plainly wrong.

What is plain to me is the wrongness of suggesting he ever did any such thing, when the only place he ever states provenance of this rite is in the context of it being Egyptian, on page 105 of The Magical Revival (Starfire edition).

Also, for my tuppence ha'penny worth - it actually might be Sumerian in origin anyway. The form (and language) in which historical data come down to us is often not the form in which they first emerged or appeared, as you of all people should know. Who is to say the Invocation did not appear first in Sumer and was later transmitted to Egyptians, who committed it to writing, surviving thence through the medieval traditions to present day? But that's simply my speculation...not that that is a crime...



Going on:
 

His interpretation of Typhonian is also divergent from its meaning and context in the Magical Papyri. His erroneous usage is unhelpful in establishing that meaning and context. There was a 'Typhonian Tradition' and it involved magic, not pessimistic mysticism. Its principal deity was of course Typhon-Set.

I'm pretty confident you won't be able to produce an instance of Grant suggesting in print that Historical Egyptian practitioners of the Typhonian tradition were pessimistic mystics.

In fact, I don't understand your reference to "pessimistic mysticism" at all in the context of Grant's writings. Pessimism and optimism are peurile ideologies based on fantasies and relative values of the incomplete knowledge contained within ego. Magick and mysticism are fields of activity that relate to liberating consciousness from the chains of ego and establishing the Self in right relation to the cosmos which appears within it. Non-Duality by its very definition excludes anything like pessimism from possibility. The fact that this necessarily involves at one point or another a process of dis-identification, various formulas exemplified by advaita and Madhyamaka, is hardly Kenneth Grant's fault. Don't shoot the messenger.

My criticisms of Grant are neither off the cuff nor unconsidered,

I am sure you have the best intentions (genuinely). I, too, found Grant's works merely "fun, but irritating and unreliable" at one time, and oddly, it was after getting one for pure entertainment value whilst abroad (after an earlier reading years before) that the penny dropped. Each to their own - and I have no intention forcing anything down anyone's throats, nothing could be less appropriate.  However, for the little it's worth, the value that his writings have since brought to my life in both the operative and contemplative modes, surpasses that of any other author from any period. He lacks the romantic wit of Crowley, but possesses a perspective that to my mind is essentially a capstone upon operative theosophy, truly producing the union of Thelema with Eastern wisdoms that was beyond Crowley's ken.

where relevant I can defend aspects of his work; although some of his positive contributions have been subsequently superseded. An important instance is his correcting the phallocentric emphasis in Crowleyanity - and by extension magic of that era.

Agreed, apart from the unnecessary and puzzling idea they have been "superceded" (by whom/what? do tell!).

As Thelema of any stripe is more or less dead outside of historical re-enactment and dated consumer occulture, this was less relevant to the specific discussion.

This is of course simply a confession of ignorance, by which you insult good people who work the current independently and privately using their individual understanding of the works of these men and others as their starting point in the same way they themselves did their own predecessors. The current of Thelema has precisely nothing to do with "dated consumer occulture" (you must be thinking of the Caliphate, the historical re-enactment society Crowley would have been appalled by) although of course any thing can be abused to this end. Reducing a vastly nuanced field of poetically-driven spiritual endeavour (in the highest sense) to such a trite definition simply suggests that you want to confine it to a box and thus dismiss it. Your reasons for doing so are a mystery to me, but I am sure you are coming from a good place (the desire to liberate magick from empty historical re-enactment is a passion dear to myself as well...).

Incidentally the interview ends with *THREE* things of use to magicians, with *DO YOUR RESEARCH* completing the trio.

A fine sentiment - to which I'd like to add "Do whatever the hell you like", especially if it involves the Work required to appreciate the various states of Self modulated by Grant in his superior, later works.

Yours in Non-Mobile Becoming,
N0t 2

[phos]

Is anyone here familiar with the excellent works of Henry Corbin? They can be a bit, hard going but worth the effort. The reason I mention this is that he goes deeply into the matter of the difference between fantasy, and 'true' imagination. After a number of years searching for a correct expression to define the difference between mere fantasy and the Imaginal, he ended up coining the term Mundus Imaginalis. He has a very good paper of this same title, explaining all this. It is the realm of the "meeting of the two seas", where there is autonomous spiritual form. The realm where spirit takes form and matter is spirit.

Here is a link to this paper in case anyone is curious: imagomundi.com.br/espiritualidade/mundus_imaginalis.pdf

[N0T 2]

Mar 26, 2014 7:13:40 GMT phos said:

Is anyone here familiar with the excellent works of Henry Corbin? They can be a bit, hard going but worth the effort. The reason I mention this is that he goes deeply into the matter of the difference between fantasy, and 'true' imagination. After a number of years searching for a correct expression to define the difference between mere fantasy and the Imaginal, he ended up coining the term Mundus Imaginalis. He has a very good paper of this same title, explaining all this. It is the realm of the "meeting of the two seas", where there is autonomous spiritual form. The realm where spirit takes form and matter is spirit.

Here is a link to this paper in case anyone is curious: imagomundi.com.br/espiritualidade/mundus_imaginalis.pdf

Phos, thanks for this - but the link does not appear to work for me.

[Aleph]

In Outer Gateways 72-3 Grant identifies a pessimism that can result from encounters with eastern mysticism, which I suspect was conceivably a quandary for him as it had been for others - e.g. why magic when all is an illusion and there is no self?

Grant discusses some misunderstandings that he believes others have made on the philosophical implications of Advaita/Buddhism. Here's Lovecraft:

"Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings - that one no longer has a self - that is the nameless summit of agony and dread."

Would have to agree with Grant here, since Lovecraft seems to be defining a type of senility, but I'm unaware if this was actually his take on Advaita/Buddhism?

Grant also raises a sweeping opinion of Kafka's as being the same (i.e. the pessimism resulting from a misunderstanding):

"Indian religious writings attract and repel me at the same time. Like poison, there is something both seductive and horrible in them. All these Yogis and sorcerers rule over the life of nature not because of their burning love of freedom but because of a concealed and icy hatred of life. The source of Indian religious devotions is a bottomless pessimism."

In OG, the point which Grant thinks escaped Crowley, Lovecraft & Kafka, is that the space where objects appear, the space where the apparent duality is generated thereby, is itself a thought or consciousness.

[Ad Finem]

This topic is both a very interesting and a very difficult one. A few years ago I spent a week in a Kadampa Buddhist centre in the UK. I was made very welcome there and the people there were both friendly and hospitable to me, however, the one thing that struck me most about these people was - and the only way I can aptly express is - was coldness / remoteness, as if nothing really moved them. There was for me a sense that they were living out their life for no other reason than they had to. One or two of the monks in fact had confided in me that they had suffered with problems with depression and similar issues. Unfortunately for me I went away with quite a negative and unhappy feeling of my experience there.

In my opinion the Book of the Law is at odds with not just Christianity but also Buddhism and such like. AL is focused far more on the experience, whether illusory or not which is exampled in lines such as, "Remember all ye that existence is pure joy", and, "the consciousness of the continuity of existence", and "thrill with the joy of life and death". It is also essentially a magical text, not a mystical one, dealing as it does with what A. E. Waite termed, "The Secret Tradition". The problem as I see it, is not such much as in what is, or is not Self or illusory, but in the illusory nature of what we pursue, which is bound up in the ego. As I see it the greatest goal is for life to experienced by the true Self / Will, which is what we really are, and this is a rejection of materialism and what we perhaps now seem to accept as the modern world and in which the ego bathes and delights. I think here, I agree completely with KG, in that we in, what is essentially an early stage of our development but heading inextricably in the wrong direction. Human kind has lost touch with it's cosmic nature and this puts ever more faith in so called technology which is nothing more than a further destruction of the psychic, sensitive, and creative modes of our being.

The path as I see is as described in AL is not the annihilation as offered by the Buddhist, nor the blind faith as offered by religion, nor the complete absorption into materialism as offered by the West, but a pathway between these extremes which sees Man/Woman embracing the splendour of existence in it's true form and in all aspects. I believe that both Crowley and Grant maintained that the only way for mankind to evolve as a whole was for individuals to establish contact with those intelligence's other than human which is what is essentially the Great Work.

99

[squareye]

The question of 'annihilation' of self is compounded by translations of 'anatta' and 'sunyata' into terms like 'void' or 'nothingness' which does not really give the flavour of what those terms point to.

They do not point to some black hole rather to the illusory nature of separate entities. No-self is not a dissolution of ego, in Buddhist terms, as there has never been an ego to dissolve or get rid-of. Rather it describes in negative terms the positive (at least to my mind) assertion that the universe is entirely inter-connected and cosmic in scope.

The Mahayana sutras in their visionary language go to considerable lengths to illustrate this point having the Buddha inducing visions to his gatherings of billion-world galaxies each with their own Buddhas, each with their own life-cycles mirroring each other. These displays are to give a sense of incalculable vastness and multiplicity in contrast to the sense of hub-and-centre of the individual ego. It's the same sense that can be gleaned standing under a vast night sky contemplating the sheer magnitude of it all.

[Gregory Peters]

Apr 22, 2014 19:19:34 GMT squareye said:

These displays are to give a sense of incalculable vastness and multiplicity in contrast to the sense of hub-and-centre of the individual ego. It's the same sense that can be gleaned standing under a vast night sky contemplating the sheer magnitude of it all.

Indeed, Squareeye. I often use the night sky as my visualizing liftoff point, or even the contemplation of black holes and an exploding singularity creating a new universe in my contemplations of the the radiant "void" of sunyata. These are not unlike the contemplation of the white and red essence melting together in the bliss of union in certain tantrik sadhanas to create universes anew, after the dissolution.

[Deleted]

The existence of a Headless Rite in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica suggests that it has a universality unconstrained by the geographical, historical, and cultural limits indicated in some of the posts above.


Codex Laud, Folio 24.

Notes: Codex Laud is one of the very few surviving codices of the Aztec Late Classic Period (1300 - 1500) before the Hispanic invasion. The business of this painted manuscript is divination within the context of astronomical events. The narrative moves from right to left.

Its exact place of origin is unclear, but it seems likely that it was produced in the region of Teotillan in northern Oaxaca, under an Aztec client state.

The substrate is made from deer skin coated with plaster to make a paintable white ground, as with the gesso grosso and gesso fino of Renaissance panel painting. The pigments are of both mineral and plant origin.

This is not the only example of an Aztec headless rite in the codices, but one by which my point can most quickly be established.