kaos

Joel—There is little doubt that Yelg (Ye Elder) Paterson is an evolving mythological
creation of Kenneth Grant, designed to suit his cosmogony. In his years of work, we
watch her evolve from a lowly fortune-teller to the leader of an ancient witch cult,
trafficking with the Great Old Ones. While it can still be argued that a real thing
emerges through such artists as Spare and Lovecraft, there is little doubt that Mr Grant
has spun things around to his own ends. The ends of a master builder of cosmogony.
Few realized that Grant was such an expert chaos magician!
There is also little doubt that Austin Spare has been subjected to some of the same
treatment. At the very least, most people’s ideas of Spare have been colored by Grant’s
interpretation of him. Anyone looking at Spare’s automatic art and early writings can
sense a true connection with the “outer” but the concretization of his vague myth into a
firm portrait seems to owe much to Grant’s fertile imagination.
But just how well did Grant know Spare and his work? Did Spare actually sit down
and “explain” his work to Grant, or has Grant interpreted it? To answer these questions
we have no choice but to turn to Grant’s diaries, published in Zos Speaks, which chronicle
his activities with the “later” Spare from March 16, 1949, until Spare’s death on May
15, 1956. It is pretty clear that their relationship was never as deep as Grant had always
led us to believe. Often it was a matter of Spare begging for supplies and trying to get
exhibitions, while Grant would egg him on about working on magick. He seemed
content to be poor and have a lot of cats. Toward the end Spare started to become a bit
of a burden on the Grants and they drifted apart until shortly before his death. You, of
course, came to the same basic conclusion as I, man ⇒ myth ⇒ magick.
DAVID
The Illuminates of Thanateros
Hey Joel—I’m curious, what is your criticism of the iot? I’m not interested in gossip or
personality conflicts with people, I’d like to know what criticism you have of the texts
they use or the structure of the group, stuff like that. I only ask because your opinions
have been referred to by you and others in various texts, but I’ve never been clear on
what those opinions actually are. And it may give me a better understanding of what
you mean when you talk about chaos magick.
MIKA
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