The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic - Peter Levenda 2013
The Dark Lord
... when the world was destroyed by fire on 21st March, 1904, one's attention was inevitably called to the similarity of this card to the Stele of Revealing. ... This being the beginning of the New Aeon ...
—Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
My father died in 1904, but without any message to leave to me, or to my only child ... it was this boy who reversed the order of family information ...
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Rats in the Walls”
But why do we think that love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another, due to a certain affinity of natures ...
—Marcilio Ficino, De Amore, VI, 10
IN ORDER TO PROGRESS BEYOND a certain point in the Golden Dawn, one had to demonstrate one's ability to conjure a spirit to visible appearance. This had to be witnessed by other initiates in order to pass the test.
Contact with non-human entities is one of the inescapable requirements of magic. There is no magic without this type of supramundane communication. And the most intense form of this contact is sexual.
Those who have been inadvertently or unwillingly involved in this type of encounter speak of it in sexual terms. The UFO abductee experience seems to include various types of (often uncomfortable) sexual encounter with alien beings. In the Middle Ages average men and women complained about incubi and succubi. The Witches' Sabbat is portrayed as a kind of orgy. Lovecraft's aversion to sexuality may be a reflection of this unconscious understanding that, somehow, sexuality and contact with alien forces are linked.
This is the basis for what we have learned of the Typhonian Tradition.
In a Typhonian Order newsletter published in Miami, Florida in the 1990s we find the bold statement:
The central concern of Magick is communion with discarnate or extraterrestrial Intelligences.194
This is characterized by Grant as the “occult policy of the OTO”195 and it more or less throws down the gauntlet. There is no insistence on lofty spiritual goals or an Asian-inspired quest for non-duality or nirvana. While these are certainly present in Grant's works they are there almost as after-thoughts. After all we have read—and it has been only a drop in the Typhonian bucket—we know that this “policy” of communion with discarnate and extraterrestrial Intelligences involves some form of sexual magic or Tantra.
Why is this specifically Typhonian, then? After all, Crowley's Thelema also involves sexual techniques and is not characterized as Typhonian. Grant is clear on the difference between the two approaches. Grant's magic is stellar-based, while the mainstream of Thelema is solar-based. His emphasis is not so much on Horus as it is on Set, and he is willing to accept input from sources as diverse as Jack Parsons, Frater Achad, and even H. P. Lovecraft. He is reaching for a greater scope for Thelema and believes that this is achievable through the operations of ceremonial magic with sexual or Tantric enhancements conducted as a series of experiments to gather more, and deeper, information about the nature of our universe. This universe is not perceived as the visible solar system and the star systems outside of it alone, but as that universe plus other dimensions, other realities beyond the ones we see or measure with our conscious minds.
Tantra deals with enormous lengths of time, elaborate cosmological systems, and an intense intellectual component—but viewed from within a worldview that states the cosmos was created by means of a sexual act between the gods, and that therefore the entire created universe reflects that sexual polarity. The power that fuels the universe has its analogue in sexual energy. Our bodies contain the source of this energy, the Fire Snake—dead but dreaming—at the base of our spines; and as individual as this seems it is also universal. The Kundalini coiled at the base of my spine is identical to that at the base of yours, and they are both identical to that at the base of the spine of the Universe (the body of the Mother Goddess), which is identical to that at the base of the spines of the gods themselves. It is a machine, a technology, that bridges the gap between science and religion, between mind and body, between reality and the Other.
Sexuality is an ancient metaphor for this power. It crosses cultural, racial and religious lines. Sexual spirituality can be seen in the occult practices of China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Europe. Fertility rites have been observed among pre-literate societies the world over, and painted on cave walls dating back thousands of years. This is the “apostolic succession” of the Typhonian Tradition.
Using sources as diverse as de Santillana and von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill, as well as the more fanciful projects of Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Danniken, we can see that a stellar—rather than a solar—tradition is the oldest form of occult theory and practice. Reference to the famous Dogon tribe of Mali, in Africa, reveals to us a sacred tradition that is based on stellar, and not solar, considerations and computations that take place in the wilderness. The venerable astrological system of India—Vedic or Jyotish astrology—is sidereal-based and not solar-based. There is a definite Current that involves this tradition, and with it we can begin to re-evaluate some of the history we think we know about such groups as the cult of Mithra—which this author insists was an astral and not a solar cult.
Truly, it is written that “Every man and every woman is a star,” not a sun or even a moon. Much of what Crowley wrote is intelligble from a stellar or astral perspective as opposed to a purely “solar-phallic” one. Some of Grant's criticisms of Crowley's approach to magic are legitimate; that does not mean that Crowley's Thelema has been somehow devalued in the process. It can only benefit from constructive ideas and the expansion of its theory and practice into new, uncharted territories. Yet, any criticism of Crowley is considered anathema in some quarters, and those with lesser initiations feel unequal to the task of questioning either Crowley himself or his (appointed or unappointed) heirs.
So what is needed is the Dark Lord.
Set is the Opponent, the Adversary (like his Christian avatar, Satan). It is the role of Set to set himself up in opposition to the status quo, to the consensus viewpoint, to traditional beliefs and practices. He is the Other, and as such represents alien concepts and methods. Just as the Elixir Vitae is formed of both the male and female elements, and just as the Aeon of Horus is the Aeon of the Magical Child—the offspring of those elements—so too Set is the polarity required by Horus to balance the new religion and bring it into greater recognition.... And to contribute to the birth of new—non-human—offspring.
In the Catholic Church, there is the role of the Devil's Advocate. This individual is there to question every aspect of the life of a person being considered for canonization as a Saint. While he works for the Church, his job is to try as hard as he can to challenge and defeat those who would support the canonization. Set's role is similar, but much more far-reaching.
Set is the avatar of all such Devil's Advocates. He is, in fact, the Devil himself according to some traditions. He is the Dark Lord, the “dark” at the end of the Tunnels of Set. He represents all that humanity has suppressed, repressed, and oppressed since time immemorial. There is no Aeon of Set, for Set is not relegated to a solar period, an equinoctial precession, or any kind of calendar. He cannot be contained that way. Set's position in the heavens is as the Pole Star or, at least, as the circumpolar asterism we know as the Big Dipper, but which the ancient Egyptians recognized as the Thigh of Set: the all-important device made of magnetic iron—Lovecraft's “Tutulu metal”—that “opened the mouth” of the mummy, of the corpse, of the re-animated God.
Set is polymorphously perverse. He'll have sex with anything. He'd do his mother if he could. He is the symbol of unbridled lust, which is characterized as evil, vulgar, rapacious, etc. by his parents. Sexuality is the first thing societies control and legislate. It is the one power that, if unchecked, can topple governments, impeach presidents, destroy careers. Sex must be tied, like Set, to the prow of the Ship of State or the Ship of Saint Peter ... or just the Ship of Fools.
Set and Shiva hang out. Both are wild men, living in the wilderness. Shiva is the Lord of Destruction, with Brahma (Lord of Creation) and Vishnu (Lord of Preservation) forming a holy Sanskrit Trinity. Set spilled his seed, and so did Shiva.
Set comes from the stars. He is not from around here. Even his token Egyptian animal is unidentifiable. He is an Alien, in every sense of that word. And that means his natural consort is the alien woman, the Strange Woman of the Bible: the Scarlet Woman, the Red-Headed Goddess of the Red Lotus throne.
Set is the Beast. He is Therion. Set is that supernova that exploded on April 30, 1006, when his asterism “hung from its tail in the sky” and destroyed a civilization, and buried one of the largest temples in the world under a mountain of volcanic ash not to be seen again for more than eight hundred years.
Set is the reptilian brain. The serpent brain. That ancient legacy from the Great Old Ones, from five hundred million years ago. Fight or flight, it's all the same to Set, but my money's on fight.
Set is the Lord of the Underworld. He is cthonic. He is Kutu-lu. Cthulhu. High Priest of the Great Old Ones. In his underground, underworld, undersea James Bond villain-villa. They feared him in Egypt. They were terrified of him in Sumer. They searched everywhere for him among the Cathars, the Albigensians, the Templars, the Witches ... and finally found him in the mirrored plates of their own armor.
Set is the key to understanding human existence. He is the key because he is the one Lord we fear the most, and don't know why. He is the Ghost in the Machine, the Father of Lies, the King of Demons, the Lord of the Flies. He pub-crawled with Job. He wrestled with Jacob. He hit on Eve while she was naked and Adam wasn't home, the Dog.
He walked up to Jesus and offered him the world.
Like he cared.
Set is the Master of Deception and Dissimulation, but not of Classification. Set does not work for governments and has no desire to serve and protect. Governments have never been very kind to Set, so besides being the Master of Deception he is also the Lord of Leaks.
Set is the Force of Retroversion. He reverses the flow of energy in the universe, the onward march of time, the linear measurement of space. He's the up of the down, the down of the up. The backwards glance. The lateral pass. He's tricky that way.
Most importantly, however, Set has his throne in the deepest, darkest recesses of the human unconscious. And the human unconscious is the gateway to all the other zones of reality that comprise the magician's neighborhood. He's in deep, but that's because we've put him there. If human beings are social animals, and need society to feel safe and comfortable and to sleep their way through existence, then Set needs to be suppressed. And when Set is suppressed, then everything connected to Set is suppressed. And that's how most of us live.
It's not a very magical approach to life.
But it's safe.
Let's look at the 24th Tunnel of Set, that known as Niantiel.
Kenneth Grant describes what was seen on a tour of this Tunnel, this scary back alley on the Tree of Life. And it's not pretty.
It's about a Death Cult whose members “became addicted to necrophilia.” The ritual involves sex with a “ritually slain woman dedicated to the deity with whom contact was sought.” As we have learned, the occult policy of Grant's Typhonian Order is contact with discarnate Intelligences, and in this case, both the Intelligence and the Vehicle are discarnate. According to Grant, virgins were kept especially “sequestered” for these rituals. Once slain, sex with the corpse was almost immediate as the astral form of the slain woman was sent to a realm between earthly and “post-mortem consciousness.” All of this was to enable the magicians to use the freshly-liberated spirit of the victim to travel to the desired realm and communicate what she saw back to the cult.196
This is a form of necromancy, and versions of it exist in many cultures. Contact with the dead is tabu in many religions and sexual congress with a corpse is especially heinous.197 However, the Tantric rites that take place in cremation grounds in India come pretty close to this example. Sexual congress—maithuna—can take place in the presence of a corpse, and not necessarily one that has died recently. To a true Tantrika there would be nothing inherently objectionable about having sex with a corpse as nothing is hideous to the truly enlightened. There are many Tantric ikons that depict Kali, for instance, dripping in blood and skulls, standing on the corpse of Shiva. Foul substances are no longer foul in the realm of the Dark Lord:
The mediaeval Alchemist perhaps came nearest to the pure doctrine with his analysis of substances popularly considered unclean. He knew that dross was the outer form of the Hidden God...198
And
That which repels, that which disgusts, must thou assimilate in this Way of Wholeness.199
Even Austin Osman Spare, the visionary artist and natural magician, weighed in on the subject:
Perversion is used merely to overcome moral prejudice or conformity. By persistence, the mind and desire become amoral, focused, and made entirely acceptive, so the life-force of the Id is free of inhibitions prior to final control.200
In the rituals of the Kalachakra Tantra—the form of Vajrayana Buddhism practiced in Tibet by the Dalai Lama into which he has initiated thousands of people all around the world—there are instructions for the preservation of urine and faeces in special jars at various points of the Mandala, as well as those for blood and semen. (I have already discussed this in Tantric Temples.) The motivation is probably the same: to demonstrate that there are no “bad” substances, no “ugliness” in the world, but that all is a manifestation of the Goddess, and there is no purpose in prefering one substance over any other.
After all, even the Bible tells us that “the Stone the builders rejected was the cornerstone.” (Psalm 118:22; Acts 4:11)
This ugly substance, this forbidden act, this rejected Stone ... all can be understood as relics of the Dark Lord.
The problem with the scene depicted as having taken place in the Tunnel of Set known as Niantiel is that a woman was slain for the purpose of contacting the Old Ones. Everything else would be permissible to a Tantric Adept, in our world, except murder and human sacrifice.
Except ... except ... it has been known to occur. Human sacrifice was not unknown to the various Tantric sects of India, Tibet, and even Southeast Asia. Tantra is about power, about shakti, and there have been Tantric kings who coveted the power represented by the Goddess Kundali and who applied that arcane knowledge to the world of politics and government. Kings have never been squeamish about killing people; add a religious or occult justification and it just makes it easier.
The kapala—the human skulls used as sacrificial vessels in the more shamanistic of the Tibetan Buddhist rituals—were sometimes selected from appropriate victims while they were still alive and using them. The requirements for these skulls are complex and specific; there was no way one came across an appropriate skull by accident. It had to be by design. The same for the skulls to be used for the damaru, the ritual drums. And the care and preservation of these skulls was also a matter of some concern. The best way to keep the skulls from drying out was to rub them with fat; the best fat was that obtained from the cremation grounds.201
We know that human sacrifice, sometimes on a large scale, did exist in various parts of the world. The Aztecs were famous for massive sacrificial events. While we consider ourselves too advanced and civilized today to engage in this type of barbaric behavior, the possibility still exists.
We are entranced by tales of serial killers and we have romanticized them to the point that we have made of them the new Dracula: urbane, intelligent, sophisticated, like Hannibal Lecter. But the reality of serial killers is quite different, just as the original vampires were believed to be little more than animated corpses.
Don't be seduced by the Dark Lord. His power rests in the things we have hidden from ourselves; and, yes, sexuality is one path that brings us before his throne in the sunken city. But he must be approached with care, and with caution.
Otherwise the Dark Lord will fuck you up.
The Typhonian Tradition is ancient, according to Grant. This is not so unbelievable as it appears. As Ioan Couliano tells us:
... witchcraft was still practiced in certain zones of eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century as a direct derivative of shamanism. Beliefs recorded in Paleosiberian caves around 1000 BCE were still valid less than a hundred years ago. How can we explain such amazing continuity? ... a simple set of rules would generate similar results in the minds of human beings for a virtually infinite period of time.202
This perfectly accords with the writings of Grant who does not insist that his discoveries came from a long line of initiates stretching unbroken back to the Stone Age or beyond. What he does say is that the Typhonian Tradition itself is ancient, and that there have been bodies of adepts at various times in various places who have either kept the Tradition alive, or who have rediscovered it and breathed new life into it. The “simple set of rules” is what counts, and those of the Typhonian Tradition are straightforward and reflect a preoccupation with darkness, danger, and the systematic and deliberate transgression of social and religious tabus.
But that is a psychological and anthropological perspective on the Tradition, which may satisfy some but which does not tell the whole story. Eventually, psychological and anthropological ideas go out of fashion and change with the times. New ideologies, new trends in intellectual pursuits mean that we keep looking at the same material from the point of view of where we are standing at the time.
The serious pursuit of magic—as of shamanism, of Tantra—requires that your point of view shift to that of the source of the knowledge. It requires that you abandon your safe place. Otherwise you are only standing at the edge of the Abyss and taking quick glances over the side. There is no information in that pose, no initiation possible in a state of suspended animation. You must enter a place where all the cool academic theories no longer obtain, where the comforting “it's all in your head” platitudes and attitudes have no meaning—because your head, your body, your soul and spirit are all fully engaged in ways they never have been before, and it is not what you expected when you bought the ticket.
The above is true about magic in general, but in the case of the Typhonian Tradition it is especially important to understand these challenges. Because it is not a solar tradition but a stellar one that reaches back into the very origins of the human race, the Typhonian magician is working without a net. As in the case with the Necronomicon, normal modes of protection may not obtain. The entities one meets in the Tunnels of Set—as per Grant's trilogies—are not those that were bound by the Seal of Solomon; they are older than Solomon, older than dynastic Egypt, older than Babylon. The only reasonable description we have of the realm and its denizens is what we come across in Lovecraft.
The Typhonian Order focuses on the Lovecraftian entities, especially those of the Cthulhu Mythos. The standard demons and evil spirits of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are unequal to the task of representing the deeper archetypes that are encountered in this high-intensity approach to the magic.
More than that, however, is the stated goal of the Order which is to make contact with discarnate and extraterrestrial Intelligences. This is perfectly in accord with the Lovecraftian tales which are concerned almost exclusively with this type of contact. In fact, by using terms like “discarnate” and “extraterrestrial” the Order is changing the parameters within which traditional ceremonial magic functions.
Magic's nineteenth and twentieth century European and American manifestations were still concerned with the medieval grimoires and their lists of demons and angels. It was a purely sectarian approach that was based on a Judaeo-Christian worldview. Groups like the Golden Dawn reinforced that approach but added Egyptian and other traditions to the mix, thus expanding their reach somewhat.
But the Typhonian Order grew up in the post-World War II era, in the age of atomic weapons, the Cold War, the space race, and UFO sightings. The idea of contact with entities other than human took on different meanings and implications. Magic was no longer limited to a traditional religious environment, but in the mid-late twentieth century took on more contemporary dress. There has been more technological development in the seventy years since the end of World War II than there has been in the previous thousand years, and this has affected the awareness of occultists in the West. What had seemed magical a hundred years ago—communication over vast distances in an instant, machines that can talk and answer questions, images transmitted through space without the use of wires, flying through space across the entire world, etc.—are now commonplace. The siddhis—the magic powers that are the result, or the side effect, of Tantric and magical practice—were now within the reach of everyone on the planet. Magic, then, had to reach further and farther to identify the source of its power and its utility, leading some to ask: Is magic useful? What does it contribute?
The art and science of psychology began to encroach on some aspects of the initiatory process. Add to that the use of hallucinogenic drugs and another secret chamber of esotericism had been breached by technicians and tinkerers and government grants.
Why do magic, then, when you can drop acid? Or undergo a few years of depth analysis? Or go into a trance watching television or listening to your iPod?
There was only one thing left and it was the hallmark of ceremonial magic.
Communication with the Unseen. Traffic with extraterrestrial beings. Dinner dates with the discarnate. As early as the 1950s, Kenneth Grant and his circle realized that the only thing separating magic from science was the ultimate ambition: contact with the Otherworldly. Rather than sitting passively on a couch and recounting one's dreams, Grant said let us become active participants in our dreams. Let us study and employ dream control. Let us revert the normal processes of mind and body until we pass through the Gate into another mode of being entirely.
Let us take back our souls before the scientists and the shrinks wash, rinse, and spin-dry our brains. Let us boldly go where no man, woman, computer nerd, or intelligence officer has gone before. The people running our massive, space-based telescopes are probing the universe in ways never before thought possible; they are looking at the beginning of the universe in the seconds after the Big Bang, and taking snapshots of it to show their kids.
The only alternative left to the magician is to (a) posit the existence of a universe invisible to human eyes (aided or unaided) and (b) go there.
It may be true that one day science will be so advanced that it will be indistinguishable from magic, but that's not the point of orders like the Typhonian which put the human being back in the center of the cosmos. The world has become so enamored of its toys that it sits and waits patiently for the next new development, the next smartphone, the next flat screen TV. The toys have become the center of the universe; the tools are replacing the mind, and as they do they replace the spirit. Technology is replacing pure science.
But magic can be done on the cheap. All it takes is determination, discipline, and practice. It is not for the couch potato or anyone looking for a quick fix. And that is why it is safe from the sweaty palms of the technocrats. For now.
Grant's thesis is the same as Lovecraft's to a certain extent. They both concentrate on contact with extraterrestrial, supermundane creatures. Lovecraft fantasized about it; Grant tried to figure out how it could be done. But Lovecraft was a scientist and an atheist. The concept of sex with aliens frightened and disgusted him. Grant was a magician, and the possibilities of sex with aliens was like something out of Star Trek: weird, maybe, but not necessarily a bad thing. Orgiastic rites in the jungles to summon Cthulhu? “I got that,” says Grant.
But this is all much more important than that, more important than the author's glib references. It comes down to more than how far magic or science can take the human race. It is about who owns the process.
One of the author's favorite thinkers is Michel Foucault. Now Foucault was a wild man himself. Check out his photographs. Read his books. He was French, but don't hold that against him. Foucault knew that a central focus of the State was control of the human body. Humans are viewed as expendable assets by the State (and, as we know, by the corporations as well). Human beings are to be controlled, manipulated, exploited, but never respected or elevated. Humans are force-fed bad food, bad religion, bad politics, bad economics. They are sent by the millions to fight and die in inexplicable conflicts. They are told what to eat, what to wear, how to behave.
And for the most part, humans do behave. They are desensitized by media, threatened by governments, kept on subsistence diets, and generally lied to by everyone.
But Set, the Dark Lord, is not about behaving.
Thelema was brought to the earth as a means of spiritual liberation, as an announcement that big changes were taking place. It claims to empower the individual, to introduce that individual to his or her true potential to become kings and queens in their own kingdoms. But to some, the solar aspect of the New Aeon looked a little too much like more of the same: hierarchies handing down encyclicals, governing the Minervals, deciding what is and is not kosher. Kissing up to the Ninth Degrees. Nodding sagely when outrageous claims of advanced spiritual attainments were made. The same old song and dance, to some. Not what they signed on for.
Crowley became nervous when disciples started to take his message of spiritual independence seriously and acted on it. Goodbye, Frater Achad. Goodbye, Jack Parsons.
Control of the apparatus became more important as each decade went by. That is the way of all groups, all religious movements. It's what happened to Christianity, which today bears little or no resemblance to the original. Two entire branches of the Church—the Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox—split over a single word in the Creed and have remained separate for the last thousand years. Oh, sure, there was politics involved, too. What's your point?
What Grant envisioned was a far-flung network of Thelemic cells—power-zones as he calls them—each investigating their own aspects of the Mauve Zone on their own but getting whatever help or support the home office can provide. As an international businessman in the last decades of the twentieth century, the author had a far-flung network of power-zones himself: they were called representative offices and they were established in countries around the world. They were largely autonomous, but had to report to me on a regular basis so I could help them to achieve their goals. It's a system that works, rather than having all the sales and marketing people sitting on their collective muladhara chakras in the home office, using the phone and trying to look busy. You need people in the field.
Grant knew this, and he put people in the field. It's just that the field in Grant's case was the Tunnels of Set.
The information these cells came back with was unintelligible for the most part, as one might expect. While in the Tunnels, everything seemed consistent and the experiences were genuine, and the synchronicties multiplied. Out of the Tunnels and trying to make sense of the experiences, the data often was baffling and the import uncertain. It would take years of attention to the minutiae of the experiences to render them at all useful to others involved in the same project. That is where Grant's feverish, extreme form of Kabbalistic analysis came to play.
The words, phrases, numbers, and associations jumble, struggle, leap, and slither from Grant's mind like the rantings of a schizophrenic on the subway. One wonders at times if the pages of the Typhonian Trilogies were written in crayon on the backs of flea market flyers. But Grant was sane. He was a lucid, functioning, and dedicated individual trying desperately to tell us something and realizing—as do all mystics—that normal human language is not equal to the task. So, sure, a lot of his gematria is suspect but then he knew that going in:
There can be no association of ideas, no correspondences of any kind, between numbers or the ideas which they represent, except in the consciousness of their subject, because no thing exists as an objective reality, ... Numbers can mean to the qabalist precisely what he wishes them to mean within the framework of his magical universe. ... This is the basis of the science of numbers, and the rationale of numerology as a creative art distinct from a merely interpretative gauge of phenomenal probabilities.203
Grant calls this “creative gematria.” It's the point at which this author has the hardest time with his works, for it implies a breezy lack of concern with any kind of consistency, and is thus relatively useless for demonstrating connections and associations to others. While his philosophical reasoning may be sound from the point of view of advaita or non-dualist thinking in which every number is the same as any other number, it is not useful for paying the bills. It may work well on a subjective level as the magician makes his way through unfamiliar psychic territory and uses these number games as a way of leaving breadcrumbs along the trail so he can find his way back, but when it comes time to try to convince the rest of us that these connections exist, then we are back to the crayons and the schizophrenic in the subway car. Reading Grant is often an exercise in stripping away the gematria—the pages and pages of it—in order to get to the straight prose, for it is in the straight prose that he makes his most astonishing claims, his most ambitious statements. The creative gematria adds little to the experience and, in fact, can be quite distracting.
There can be no Typhonian Tradition without Lovecraft, and I will tell you why. The stories of H. P. Lovecraft provide the narrative for this form of Thelema. The protagonists and antagonists one finds in his stories can be identified among the initiates of the Orders and their bewildering experiences in the Tunnels of Set. Lovecraft is all about Darkness, and so is the Typhonian Tradition.
But even more to the point, the very name “Typhonian” in Grant's usage implies an ancient Tradition, one that goes back to before “monumental Egypt” as he calls it, before the days of the pyramids and the Sphinx—when Egypt was still really an African country with the combination of African religion and magic that would be distilled in later centuries into the Egyptian forms we know today. Grant's project is to go back to the pre-literate, pre-historic times because there is where the money is buried. He wants to take us back to the ancient civilizations that he opines once existed on the earth, like Atlantis and Lemuria. And he wants us, at the same time, to go to the stars.
And that is Lovecraft's project, as well. Lovecraft wrote about nothing else save this Tradition. The Great Old Ones, the entombed High Priest Cthulhu, and all the other creatures that populate his stories with horror and gore, are all atavisms of those times, and they share one thing in common: they came from the great Vastness of deep space and deep time. None of this penny-ante fooling around with the planetary spirits for Lovecraft (or Grant). Oh, no. That's for the tyros. “Planets?” you can hear Grant saying. “We don't need your stinking planets! We've got the stars, baby!”
This was the original magic, the Ur-magic, the magic that was reserved for the initiates. Any fool can watch the sun and the moon and come up with a ritual form based on the year, the seasons, the rising of the Nile. But it takes time, patience, dedication and an uncommon intelligence to watch the stars at night, every night, for years and years, and build star charts, maps, tables of declination and right ascension, and to measure the distances between these vastly-distant points of light in tiny incremental fractions of numbers. And then to realize that something important is going on up there, something “monumental,” and it has a direct effect on what goes on here, on the earth, on the place They visited countless Aeons ago. And to which They might one day return.
The Typhonians.
The very word we use in the modern age for referring to otherworldly ideas, planes, levels is “astral,” which means “starry.” It is the Starry Wisdom cult of Lovecraft's story “The Haunter of the Dark.” We hear talk of the “astral plane” and the “astral body” and rarely stop to consider what that means. It is the astral self that is indestructible, that is capable of doing the kind of time and space traveling that both Grant and Lovecraft describe. And entire cults were built around its cultivation and use.
One of Grant's power-zones, the K'rla Cell, was designed with just that idea in mind. He describes it in Beyond the Mauve Zone, and tells of the intention of its members to contact Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, both Lovecraftian entities, and to use “psychosexual dynamics concealed in the Necronomicon.”204 This group eventually identified the star Betelgeuse as the home of the Elder Gods, and a black hole somewhere in the constellation Sagittarius as the home of the Great Old Ones.
It is this kind of magical practice that allows Grant to write seemingly outrageous statements (for a serious occultist) as the following:
Yog-Sothoth is the zenith of which Tutulu is the nadir, As solstitial points they are balanced by their equinoctial counterparts East and West, represented in the Necronomicon cycle by Hastur and Shub Niggurath. The full complex formulates the Great Cross which typifies the crossing over from matter to spirit. This is represented on the Tree of Life by Daäth, and by Death in the Voodoo imagery of Baron Samedhi.205
Well, you wanted us to take seriously stories about talking snakes, burning bushes, and Sodom and Gomorrah as the basis for a religious current that has lasted more than five thousand years; why not replace all of that with the Great Old Ones and Shub Niggurath, the “Goat with a Thousand Young”? Grant is saying we need a new narrative, because the old one is not working. The old one is not up to the challenges we will soon face as resources become limited, fanatics get the Bomb, and governments go all Emperor Nero on our ass. At least, with the Necronomicon Gnosis, we look the danger straight in the Eye. We grapple with the unpleasantness, the threats, the tension and stress of knowing that there is some spectacularly ugly catastrophe lurking at the edges of our consciousness as the alien forces of which Grant writes so eloquently mass at the rent in the veil, waiting for the Gate to open ... or are already pouring in.
The Book of Revelation, of Apocalypse, where we first encountered the Scarlet Woman and the Beast was written at a time when it seemed civilization was coming to an end, much like the present age. Empires were at stake. Nations were being swallowed whole. The Jewish revolt had failed, and that failure would have consequences for the next two thousand years. And in 33 CE, “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.”
Well, guess what? It's two thousand years later, and God has changed his mind.
The End
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathesomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
The force is completely blind, depending upon the men and women in whom it manifests and who guide it. Obviously, its guidance now tends towards catastrophy.
—Jack Parsons, The Book of Babalon, 1946
Grant does not want us to worship Cthulhu or any of the Great Old Ones. That's not the point. But we have to be aware of the forces that these names and ideas represent because they are real forces, real ideas. Much of Grant's work involved identifying these forces, trying to understand them, to place them somewhere within a context with which we are already familiar—but not in reducing them to a simple equation of Cthulhu = Set. He knew there was much more to it than that. Yet, such shorthand coding is useful in the beginning for it sets the parameters of the problem in a creative way. When we start with Cthulhu = Set we will eventually wonder in which ways are they the same, and in which ways are they different. What can Set tell us about Cthulhu, and vice versa? Why is Set “real” and Cthulhu is not? And is that statement true?
The Typhonian Tradition works at that very point where human imagination and creativity have provided the world with its great religions and its great art. They are all, in a sense, works of imagination. They all come from the same place. The direct experience of the Divine can be horrifying and potentially deadly; the Bible is full of such stories. So is Lovecraft. So is Grant.
Magicians don't try to build ethical structures around their experiences and try to tell other people how to live their lives. Well ... they shouldn't, anyway. Crowley's dictum, quoted towards the beginning of this study, may very well be wrong. The aim of magic should not be religion, at least not as we understand it. Magic is an artform, and you don't create religions based on a painting or a pop song. You just create more magic.
Magic is the “science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will” according to Crowley. That doesn't sound much like religion. When magicians stop doing magic, they create religions. The context of magical systems that arose out of the Judaeo-Christian tradition was linear: there was a beginning, the Creation, and an end, the Apocalypse. Everyone's eye was on the finish line. Thus there was a beginning and an end to magic, as well.
But the Typhonian Tradition says that there was no beginning—just ancient days—and no end, because the universe is eternal and the yugas and the kalpas repeat themselves endlessly. Time is not linear. What goes around ... well, you know.
The magic of the Typhonian Tradition, therefore, is an ongoing project with no end in sight, which basically means no religion in the foreseable future. And that's probably a good thing. The Dark Lord represents chaos, not stability, not established institutions like churches and states. As humans, we crave stability but we need to get our heads around the chaos first. Because chaos is what's happening. We need to come to terms with the Dark Lord.
In the Necronomicon, the initiatory program is important. The rising on the seven levels of initiation is a requirement before one goes sailing off into deep space. One must be psychologically prepared for what will follow. These seven stages have their analogues in Chinese alchemy and in European alchemy. They are phases of purification and reification (and here purification is meant in a purely technical sense and not in a moral one). In India, one rises one chakra at a time, and it can take years to accomplish the entire program.
But once that is done, it's open season on trafficking with discarnate entities. The Necronomicon Gnosis is perfectly consistent with both the Egyptian and the Thelemic currents, as Grant insists. The literature of each helps to explain the other; the practices of each amplify and extend the other. The psycho-sexual techniques of Tantra can be employed in rituals of the Necronomicon as well as within the Egyptian context, breathing new life into each. Just imagine for a moment equating Cthulhu with Kundalini, which is precisely what Grant suggested. Or equating both with the Egyptian deity Set. That was Grant's intention and it is obvious from his work that he (and his followers) was dedicated to just that.
The Dark Lord, like Kundalini and Cthulhu, lies dead but dreaming. In psycho-sexual terms, at the base of the spine waiting to be “evoked” through the “orgiastic rites” of the followers of Cthulhu. In magical terms, simultaneously deep within the bowels of the earth and at some unimaginable distance in deep space.
Thank God for quantum theory and non-locality.
We have seen that Crowley wrote a series of texts in 1907 that he called the Holy Books, and that these were “received” texts, much like the Book of the Law itself. These writings are the most clearly Lovecraftian of all the pre-Grant Thelemic material, with the possible exception of Jack Parsons and his Book of the Antichrist, written in 1948 and a year after the Roswell incident and the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting ... and a year after the death of Crowley himself.
I believe it is fair to say that Crowley did not understand completely the import of the Holy Books. (It has been demonstrated that it took Theodor Reuss to alert him to the fact that one of his rituals, Liber XXXVI or the Star Sapphire ritual, was an encoded form of the IXth degree ritual of the OTO.) The Holy Books in general are rather dark, and the language is pure Gothic horror. These are, the author contends, works that more properly belong to the Necronomicon Gnosis aspect of Thelema. Read in that light, their meanings become clearer.
The same can be said of the work of Jack Parsons. He was intent on incarnating the Red Goddess, and equally intent on incarnating the Anti-Christ. He was focused on bringing about the End of Days so that the New Aeon could dawn. Yet, there is something faintly disturbing about the Book of Antichrist that recalls some of the accounts we have of alien abductions. In this brief text, he writes of being called by Babalon to continue the work he began with Hubbard in 1946, two years earlier. He then proceeds to describe a strange scene in which he approaches “cyclopean ruins” and a tower of Black Basalt. A robed figure shows him four of his previous lives, one as Simon Magus, then as Gilles de Raiz, Earl Bothwell, and Cagliostro. Then, in a line that almost prefigures what abductees would say, he writes:
And thereafter I was taken within and saluted the Prince of that place, and thereafter things were done to me of which I may not write ...
The brief account of his “Black Pilgrimmage” ends with him taking the Oath of the Abyss, filled with terror and foreboding, after being told, “It is not certain that you will survive ...” It is then that he assumes the identity of the Antichrist.
He would die in an explosion less than four years later. He was 38 years old. His mother committed suicide a few hours later upon learning of the death of her son.
This is a Lovecraftian scenario, straight out of “The Dunwich Horror” or any number of his other stories: the magician who is also a scientist, summoning spirits, trafficking with discarnate entities, taking mysterious oaths in fear and trembling, proclaiming himself the Anti-Christ, and then dying in a spectacular ball of fire.
And at some point we have to accept that this is what is happening: that the bizarre themes we find in the purple prose of Gothic fiction have become the operating principle of our world.
Lovecraft wrote that the artists and the sensitives are the first to notice the incoming forces of the Great Old Ones. He could have added magicians to that list and, indeed, there were occultists among those who, in “The Call of Cthulhu,” responded to the Call. What he failed to realize—as an atheist—is that the occultists can push back.
Those who “push back” in his stories are not occultists, but academics, scholars, intelligent third parties who find the unholy books, figure out the forbidden formulae, and then send the Old Ones back to where they came by closing and sealing the Gate. The Typhonian Tradition, however, is composed of the very type of people Lovecraft's stories demonize: the magicians themselves. They have the unholy books, they know the forbidden formulae. And it is true, they do open the Gate.
That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take the great Cthulhu from His tomb and revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
194 Kenneth Grant, Beyond the Mauve Zone, p. 274.
195 Ibid., p. 274.
196 Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden, p. 223.
197 Oddly, however, in the United States necrophilia is not an important criminal act and is treated as a misdemeanor in seven states, including New York.
198 Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, p. 89.
199 Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph, chapter 23.
200 A. O. Spare, The Zoetic Grimoire of Zos.
201 For more detailed information and sources, please see the author's Tantric Temples: Eros and Magic in Java, 2011.
202 Ioan Couliano, Out of This World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein, Boston, 1991, pp. 8-9.
203 Kenneth Grant, Outer Gateways, p.158-159.
204 Kenneth Grant. Beyond the Mauve Zone, p. 115.
205 Kenneth Grant. Outer Gateways, p. 12.