kaos

world of Magic. From his advocacy of the works of Spare and Lovecraft to this latest
offering, it’s difficult not to perceive a man deeply in love with what Sax Rohmer
christened the Romance of Sorcery. This is not to label Grant a fantasist in the pejorative
sense: there’s a good case to be made for the position that fiction, romance and fantasy
have always been the cornerstone of Magic theory. From the first cave-wall surrealism
of Palaeolithic shamans, through the visionary poetry of Blake and the vastly important,
almost-free-associational synthesis of occult ideas constructed by Eliphas Levi, on to
Crowley and Blavatsky, to the Lovecraft/Moorcock tropes of the Chaos magicians,
what we see acknowledged is the staggering supernatural power of creative imagination.
Might not the entire of Magic be described as traffic between That Which Is and
That Which Is Not; between fact and fiction? If we are to speak of Magic as “The Art”,
should we not also speak of Art as Magic? Even Crowley tellingly and rather poignantly
describes great artists as superior to great magicians. Crowley also points out the
connection that exists between a grimoire and a grammar, between casting spells and
spelling; goes so far as to admit, at one point, that the greater part of magical activity
lies in simply writing about it. Clearly there is a reason why Hermes and Thoth, the
Gods of Magic, should be simultaneously the Gods of Writing.
The magician conjures angels or else demons, out of nothingness into manifestation,
while the novelist does likewise with her ideas and her characters. Again we have a
commerce between the existent and the non-existent, something out of nothingness,
the rabbit from an empty hat that is perhaps the very crux of magical endeavour.
The intensely beautiful and elegant schema described by the Qabala, which rests at
the fulcrum of Western Occult Tradition, speaks of the ninth, lunar sphere of Yesod as
the gate through which all energies from higher stations on the Tree of Life pour down
into material form and manifest existence. Yesod, as the sphere of the unconscious
mind, is thus the well from which both the magician and the artist draw. Though
situated “higher” than the earthly and material sphere of Malkuth on the Qabalistic
diagram, Yesod at the same time represents the underworld of our subconscious and
oneiric faculties, the eerie and chthonic realm of Hecate upon which Grant and his
Typhonian oto lavish their magical attention. These are the bone-strewn caves that
rest beneath the deepest cellars of Jung’s mansion of the human soul, the dark pits
where all dreams and magics spawn. All fictions and insanities born in the queer light
of a buried moon: this is the Nightside.
We may read this as the metaphor upon which the subtitle of Against the Light
depends. The Dayside can perhaps be seen as the consensual outer world of Apollonian
thought, empiric reason and the waking mind; the sharp-edged sunlit world of Fact.
The Nightside, judged by the same token, then becomes a personal and inner realm of
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