kaos

leadership of what is now called the Typhonian oto, a wilfully chthonic enterprise that
seems devoted to exploring Magic’s darker countenance; its subterranean underbelly.
Clearly, these psychic cave-diving expeditions have done much to generate the slightly
creepy, claustrophobic aura that perfumes the reputation of both Grant and his
organisation. It’s not so much that the Typhonian oto has “something of the night”
about it, more that it gargles with the stuff, splashes it underneath both arms and down
its underpants, a schoolboy gone berserk on brimstone aftershave.
Hardly surprising, then, that this relentlessly infernal posture should elicit comment,
much of it adverse. As an example, occult writer Gerald Suster has described Grant and
his circle as “wallowing in Qlipothic slime”, and while this might sound like a perfectly
good Saturday night out to you or I, it seems to be intended as a criticism. Grant, it
must be said, does not bend over backwards to contradict this impression. Each new
published work contains a further mapping of his inner, magic landscape that exposes
more of its bizarre nocturnal landmarks, its unutterable flora and fauna: mauve zones,
ninth arches and tunnels of Set; leapers and Outer Gods and elementals in the form of
monstrous aquatic owls. The ingress of alien information through the knowledge-gate
of the eleventh Sephiroth. Mind parasites. Neural invaders. Great Cthulhu. An
apparently deliberate blurring of the line between describing Separate Reality and writing
Magic Fiction, if there ever really was a line to blur.
This brings us to Against the Light, ostensibly a novel rather than a book of writings
about magic, issued in a limited hardback edition of a thousand by Starfire Publishing
Ltd. From the word go the novel, if novel it be, adopts an unapologetically ambiguous
position. Nowhere on its jacket or within do we find any notice that Against the Light is
meant to be received as fiction. The only description of its content that we find is in the
volume’s cryptic subtitle: A Nightside Narrative.
The text itself, of course, only confounds the matter further. From the opening
dedication to Grant’s great-uncle, one Phineas Marsh Black, we are immersed within
the question that has surely haunted every reader of Grant’s earlier writings: just how
much of this is supposed to be… you know… real? The prologue talks of “Uncle Phin”
and Grant’s great-cousin Gregor, seemingly also a relative of Crowley’s and an actual
person, his existence at least vouched for elsewhere in Grant’s oeuvre of avowed nonfiction.
From here we trip lightly through a brief discussion of Clan Grant and an
unusual family heirloom in the form of a forbidden book known as Grant’s Grimoire,
this being a record of the quaint, longstanding family tradition of “traffic with entities
not of this world”. The author helpfully informs us that “there exists to this day in the
library of a Florentine family an Italian version, Il Grimoire Grantiano.”
Scarcely have we had time to absorb this stylish continental touch than we are
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