kaos

Review articles
Beyond our Ken
Against the Light: A Nightside Narrative by Kenneth Grant
(London: Starfire Publishing, 1997)
reviewed by Alan Moore
“This is a terrible defect in your outlook on life; you cannot be content with the simplicity of
reality and fact; you have to go off into a pipe-dream.”
Aleister Crowley, writing to Kenneth Grant, February 15, 1945.
As fascinating and as ultimately mystifying as a giant squid in a cocktail dress, what
shall we make of Kenneth Grant? I know few occultists without at least a passing
interest in his work, and I know fewer still who would profess to have the first idea
what he is on about. What he is on. To open any Grant text following his relatively
lucid Magical Revival is to plunge into an information soup, an overwhelming and
hallucinatory bouillon of arcane fact, mystic speculation and apparent outright fantasy,
as appetising (and as structured) as a dish of Gumbo. The delicious esoteric fragments
tumble past in an incessant boil of prose, each morsel having the authentic taste of
magic, each entirely disconnected from the morsel which preceded it. Sometimes it
seems as if inferior ingredients have been included, from an unreliable source: the occult
data and the correspondences that simply fail to check out when investigated, knowledge
that appears to have been channelled rather than researched. Doubtful transmissions
from the Mauve Zone.
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