kaos

Spicing this delirious broth, characteristically we come across bewildering yet urgent
outbursts in which Grant repeatedly protests that the eleventh degree ritual of the oto
involves no homosexual practices, or jaw-dropping accounts of magic workings that
defy all credibility, with live baboons dragged screeching into nothingness by extrahuman
forces, this delivered casually, almost as after-dinner anecdote. The onslaught
of compulsive weirdness in Grant’s work is unrelenting, filled with jumpy fast-cuts that
remind one less of text than television: H P Lovecraft’s House Party. Each chapter an
emetic gush of curdling chthonic biles and juices served up steaming, a hot shrapnel of
ideas, intense and indiscriminate. A shotgun full of snails and amethysts discharged
point blank into the reader’s face.
The difficulty in assessing Kenneth Grant as writer is compounded by his stance as
magus which, quite properly, insists upon the personal and the subjective, making it
impossible to view his writings without reference to Grant himself, the atmosphere of
his peculiar mind hung in a churning fogbank over every page. A mere fifteen, Grant
blundered into the fluorescent vortex of Aleister Crowley via a copy of Magick in Theory
and Practice discovered in a Charing Cross Road bookshop. Three years later, aged
eighteen, Grant joined the army “with the expectation of being sent to India, where I
had hopes of finding a guru”. Given that Grant’s enlistment took place at the height of
World War II, this statement would seem to suggest a grasp upon conventional worldly
reality that was at best precarious. Eighteen months after setting out on his unusual
khaki path towards enlightenment, Grant suffered an unspecified “health breakdown”
and was discharged from the forces. During convalescence, he wrote to the Jermyn
Street address listed in Crowley’s Book of Thoth, and subsequently entered into first a
correspondence and then, later, full apprenticeship with the Great Beast.
Grant, at the time, was barely twenty, while the Master Therion was in his early
seventies, a magus down to his last chants and just about to settle into premises at
Netherwood in Hastings, Crowley’s terminal address. The details of the correspondence
and relationship are to be found in Grant’s Remembering Aleister Crowley, an entrancing
blend of fannish scrapbook and The Screwtape Letters, published by Skoob Books in
1991. The frequently exasperated tone of Crowley’s letters to his younger acolyte suggests
a Thelemic Laurel and Hardy routine: Stan fails to magickally identify a channelled
drawing of the entity called lam. In retaliation, Olly knocks Stan’s bowler hat off and
then treads on it. Stan scratches his head and weeps.
In spite of such one-sided spats between the hapless Grant and his impossibly
demanding tutor, Crowley penned a memo during 1946 to the following effect: “Value
of Grant: if I die or go to USA, there must be a trained man to take care of the English
oto.” This memo is one of the building blocks supporting Grant’s succession to the
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