kaos

Dionysiac non-sense, fantasy and dream; the shifting moonlit realm of Fiction. In
between these two states lies a twilight, intermediary domain: a mauve zone, if you will.
This is William Hope Hodgson’s borderland, a troubling grey area in our contract with
Reality, the kingdom of the Half-Real, of the swine-things and the shoggoths and the
leapers. A blurred spot between the actual and the imaginary. Sometimes things come
through. Sometimes, things trade position with their own reflection. Real works of
Magic are exposed as fictions. Works of fiction are revealed as Magic. Yelda Paterson
winks knowingly at Helen Vaughn and Anna Sprengel. If a witch or sorcerer be of
sufficient magnitude and power, the fact that he or she be also fictional should not prove
any great impediment.
Viewed in this crepuscular light, the ambiguities that haunt Grant’s book can be
resolved. This is not a work of fiction, nor is it authentic Magic documentary. Instead,
it is both of those things, shaped by an understanding that the territory of the fantastic
is of singular importance to the magus. The subterranean landscape of the Unreal yields
a lush, fertile environment, pregnant with possibility, that will sustain both occultist
and artist. New life forms erupting from corrosive and impossible conditions, clustering
around the boiling mouths of deep sub-oceanic vents or fissures.
It need not be said that this terrain is also highly dangerous: always the risk of being
swallowed by one’s own conjured illusions. In Pellucidar, the flora and the fauna can be
snappish; unpredictable. Tunnels of Set collapse and leave the rescue party, if there is
one, listening for voices from the rubble. Or they’ll find you dangling from the Ninth
Arch, twisting slowly in the astral breeze, strangled by shadows. Dreamshot. Yellow
Brick Road-kill.
Then again, it might be argued that no true, authentic magic insight is achievable
without considerable risk. Kenneth Grant’s books, despite or possibly because of their
forays into dementia, have more genuine occult power than works produced by more
conventionally coherent authors, and are certainly a more engrossing read. The lack of
any safety-rail about Grant’s prose is one of its most captivating features. Purple passages
that sometimes shift into the ultra-violet. Trains of speculation in spectacular head-on
collision. Thousands dead.
Semantic theory breaks down all communication into two components, noise and
signal. Thoth the language god and his pet ape, the gibbering Cynocephalus, the monkey
with the typewriter. Order and chaos. Paradoxically, the noise is capable of holding
much more information than the signal: a page of Janet and John is more or less entirely
signal and contains a minimum of information, while a page of Joyce’s Ulysses is almost
wholly noise and therefore holds a massive quantity of coded data. So with Kenneth
Grant, the constant flood of ideas that elude the reader’s comprehension and yet are
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