The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic

The Dark Lord is Peter Levenda's exegesis of Kenneth Grant's Typhonian Trilogies ( The Magical Revival , etc.) by way of the Simon  Necronomicon , with historical/magical notes regarding Aleister Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. He doesn't do a terrible job of it - certainly Levenda presents a more coherent and consistent system and cosmology than Grant managed in his later books - but there are some serious flaws in this book, and I'm not just talking about the complete lack of both an index and bibliography.The main problem is there's not a lot new here, and quite a lot of borrowing. The Schlangekraft Necronomicon of '77 claimed tenuous connections between Lovecraft and Crowley that were obviously based on Grant's 'The Magical Revival', and Kenneth Grant returned the favor by referring to the Simon Necronomicon (and the George Hay edited  The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names ) a few time in his Typhonian Trilogies. Now, some thirty years or so later Levenda returns to the well by trying to tie the Typhonian and Simonian systems together again - and it doesn't quite work. It is a very competent exegesis of Grant, but it doesn't really develop much in the way of original material, and in truth the Simon Necronomicon does not look very much like Grant's rather complicated Lovecraftian occult system. Considering the costs of copies of Grant's long out of print books this might make a fairly good introduction to Grant's system, but if you already own Grant and Simon's books, then 'The Dark Lord' is little more than an accessory.In general, Levenda also fails to really address any Lovecraftian occult material outside the Simon/Grant axis. No mentions of Phil Hine ( The Pseudonomicon ), Stephen Sennit ( The Infernal Texts: NOX & Liber Koth ), Donald Tyson ( The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon: A Workbook of Magic (Necronomicon Series) ), Messiah-el Bey/Warlock Asylum ( The Atlantean Necronomicon: Veils Of Negative Existence ), or Asenath Mason ( Necronomicon Gnosis ) just to name a few. In part, this is understandable I suppose - they are Levenda's direct competition on the magickal side of things. On the factual side of things, it's rather unfortunate Levenda didn't make better use of resources like Dave Evans'  The History of British Magic After Crowley , which might have added a bit of perspective on Grant. Kudos where they are deserved however: Levenda's explanation of the sexual magick aspect of Grant's system is rather more developed than in most of the other authors managed.And, with the aid of Jim Wasserman ( In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966-1989 ), at least he kept in character, maintaining the Simon facade and making this a true sequel to the Simon Necronomicon series. No one expects Levenda to cite The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind The Legend in one of his books unless he gets really desperate for money, in which case I fully expect him to come out with "I Am Simon: The TRUE History of the Necronomicon."

I must first state I am far from an authority on the occult, though I have read a smattering of books about occultism and esotericism in its many flavors for several decades. I am an enormous fan of H. P. Lovecraft and his mythos, however, and I learned long ago about Kenneth Grant's incorporation of Lovecraftian entities and themes into his interpretation of Crowley's Thelema. But I hadn't known of the fascinating, synchronistic links between Lovecraft's enormously influential fiction and Crowley's real-life occult writings and experiments. Levenda's book suggests that Crowley and Lovecraft were tapping into to the same source, and whether or not it's "true" does not take away from the intriguing correspondences. Kenneth Grant formed his own Typhonian O.T.O. based upon an incorporation of Lovecraftian elements, and the book is largely an examination of this enlarged version of Thelema, its source material, and its potential implications.This is a dense book that may be too perplexing to those without a basic grounding in ritual magic, Kabbalah, initiatory systems, Thelema, and other occult concepts. But to those with an active interest in such things, it is packed with facts and anecdotes from occult history and philosophy. As a writer who has used pseudo-Lovecraftian and ritual magic elements in my fiction, this book lends an eerie sheen of reality to the stuff I've only explored in my imagination, leading me to wonder: when we use our active imagination to explore the darker regions of the vast, incomprehensible cosmos, are we simply creating stories out of our subconscious effluvia and books and films that we've ingested, or are we tapping into something atavistic, primordial, and in some sense very real?

It's about time a study of this type has been undertaken, an investigation into one of the most neglected theses in the history of modern occultism, as the obligatory blurb on the back cover informs us. As far as this reviewer is concerned that's an accurate statement, and Peter Levenda sure has the smarts that give him the broad perspective that informs this brilliant book. Speculating that Crowley and Lovecraft had achieved resonance with the same cosmic current and vibration - and filtered through their respective personalities, that Grant's Typhonian Tradition and the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon continue this connection, joining the dots that, lets face it, are there to be joined, especially between some of the Thelemic Holy Books and Lovecrafts' Cthulu mythos, are bound to get Thelemic tongues a-wagging. There's so much here that shows the authors' penetrating intellect on display, suggesting further avenues of research. Setting all this in a Thelemic context, discussing the Aeons of Crowley, of Frater Achad and of Jack Parsons, and best of all - deciphering the oft-times baffling writings of Kenneth Grant in an educational Typhonian Tradition-for-Dummies, this reviewer truly appreciates, familiar as he is with Grant's musings on transplutonic entities seeping through the Mauve Zone. The authors' knowledge of Tantric traditions and practices gives an informed perspective on how these and other elements come together in the attempt to induce the appropriate states of consciousness, to evoke the sinister forces. There are some truly deep and dark concepts brought out and given a hearing.This is a fascinating book. Some of what he has to say about Crowley I found particularly insightful. And best of all for this Aussie, Roie's "The Master" graces the front cover. Highly recommended, especially to inflame hard-core Thelemites.

Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) was a poet, novelist, and writer who met the poet and magician Aleister Crowley in 1944 and served as his personal secretary for three months in 1945. Despite their short liason, Grant impressed Crowley, who saw him as a candidate to lead his occult order, the O.T.O., in England after his death. However, Grant had a falling out with Karl Germer, Crowley’s spiritual heir, who revoked Grant’s charter to operate the O.T.O. in England. Nevertheless, after Germer’s death in 1969 Grant declared himself Outer Head of the Order (O.H.O.), much as Crowley had with respect to Theodor Reuss, and was supported in this by John Symonds, Crowley’s infamous literary executor, biographer, and one time assistant treasurer of the O.T.O. Together they published several important Crowley works, notably The Confessions of Aleister Crowley and Magick, both published by Routledge and Kegan Paul.Grant also published nine of his own works on esoteric philosophy, including The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, in which he developed an original theory, based in part on Crowley’s Law of Thelema, that all human spirituality derives from a primordial Ur-cult which Grant associated with the Greek god Typhon, a monstrous serpentine giant who is the offspring of Gaia, the earth, the ancestral mother of all life, and Tartarus, the god of the underworld, and the unbounded first-existing entity from which light and the cosmos are born. Grant sees Crowley’s Thelemic cult as a contemporary manifestation of the Typhonian tradition, as well as the fictional writings of H.P. Lovecraft, the art of A.O. Spare (who Crowley rejected as a “black brother”), and the eccentric writings of Charles Stansfeld Jones, one-time “magical son” of Aleister Crowley, who ended up rejecting the Law of Thelema and converting to Roman Catholicism, among others. Peter Levenda is an occult historian whose works include studies in Nazi occultism, H.P. Lovecraft, “American political witchcraft,” Maoism, Chinese alchemy, Qabalah, Freemasonry, Tantra, and UFOlogy. The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic is, much like the works of Kenneth Grant himself, a highly speculative, protean attempt to systematize Grant’s view of Typhonian traditionalism in relation to the work of Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft principally. As such, it is a useful introduction to Grant’s oeuvre for those who do not have the time or the inclination to wade through all nine volumes of Grant’s work (the reviewer has read four of these, The Magical Revival, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Hecate’s Fountain, and Cults of the Shadow; Nightside of Eden and Outside the Circles of Time await his perusal).Levenda is an excellent expositor, much better than Grant, with a penchant for historical research and detail, sometimes excessively so in relation to Crowley, albeit highly speculative. For example, Levenda seems to be enormously impressed by Lovecraft’s short story, “The Beast in the Cave" (1905), which (he surmises) alludes to Crowley’s experience of March and April 1904 during which he received the dictation of the Book of the Law, which Grant/Levenda equate to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. If, they quite reasonably argue, Crowley could derive meaning from automatic writings and visions, why could Lovecraft also not have intuited the zeitgeist of the New Aeon through the medium of dreams, filtered through his personality just as Crowley’s filtered his, or Muhammad his for that matter? Thus, Lovecraft’s story, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), which inaugurated the whole Cthulhu mythos, was set on November 1, 1907, the very day that Crowley wrote chapter 3 of his inspired holy book, Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (“The Book of the Heart Girt About by a Serpent”), wherein we read, “Thou art Sebek the crocodile against Asar; thou art Mati, the Slayer in the Deep. Thou art Typhon, the Wrath of the Elements, O Thou who transcendest the Forces in their Concourse and Cohesion, in their Death and their Disruption. Thou art Python, the terrible serpent about the end of all things!” Similarly, we find the following passage in “The Call of Cthulhu”:“On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.”Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (“The Book of Those that Wear the Serpent’s Heart”) is just the second Holy Book to be penned by Crowley, the first, Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli (“The Book of the Children or the Lazuli Stone”), having been written just days before on October 30, 1907 – the day before Halloween, interestingly. Nor is their surmise entirely without basis in the writings of Aleister Crowley himself. Crowley did, after all, identify himself with the Beast of the Earth, and in the Book of the Law we read, “Also the mantras and spells; the obeah and the wanga; the work of the wand and the work of the sword; these he shall learn and teach.” Obeah (or obi), from Twi 'ebayifo' ("witch, wizard, sorcerer”) and wanga (or ouanga), refers to voodoo sorcery, esp. a voodoo charm or spell. Clearly, a reference to Afro-Caribbean magic is implied.Also in the final chapter of the said book, written on November 3, we read: “Accept the worship of the foolish people, whom thou hatest. The Fire is not defiled by the altars of the Ghebers [Zoroastrians], nor is the Moon contaminated by the incense of them that adore the Queen of Night,” although the reference to “the foolish people…whom thou hatest” might give us pause. But most telling of all is the significance of Set, the negative or “wrathful” counterpart of Horus. Crowley writes: “This child Horus is a twin, two in one. Horus and Harpocrates are one, and they are also one with Set or Apophis, the destroyer of Osiris. It is by the destruction of the principle of death that they are born.” Similarly, Lovecraft would write in “The Nameless City” (1921):“Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet: 'That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die,'”referring to the return of Cthulhu, the chthonic god of primordial time, represented as a dragon or octopus, in a future aeon. Like Set, the evil brother of Osiris, Cthulhu is the half-brother of Hastur the Unspeakable.Interestingly, Boleskine House, described in the Book of the Law as “thy house 418,” “my secret house” (Horus is speaking), and the Kaaba and the Kiblah, referring to "the Cube" which is "the vector" of attention in the New Aeon. Aiwaz/Horus predicts that “your holy place shall be untouched throughout the centuries: though with fire and sword it be burnt down & shattered, yet an invisible house there standeth, and shall stand until the fall of the Great Equinox.” Boleskine is the place where Crowley undertook the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage, and houses the temple where Crowley was instructed to establish the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-khonsu. Boleskine was in fact "burnt down and shattered" twice, in 2015 and 2019, and is now being rebuilt as a spiritual and ecological centre. 418 is the number of Abrahadabra, “cosmic consciousness.”Interestingly, Boleskine is on the shore of Loch Ness. Loch Ness takes its name from an old Celtic word meaning “roaring one,” and seems to be associated with an ancient Druidic sacred spring. Loch Ness has a long history as a spiritual or occult “power place.” Reports of the famous Loch ness monster go back 1,500 years. Local Buddhist monastics believe that “Nessie,” as she is called, is a naga, a serpentine deity in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain tradition, credited with guarding sacred treasures and esoteric wisdom.In the Book of the Law, its author, Aiwaz, whom Crowley describes as a preterhuman intelligence, is declared to be the “minister of Hoor-paar-kraat,” Aiwaz itself being a Pakistani name, Turkish for “substitute.” Hoor-paar-kraat (more properly, Har-pa-khered in Egyptian) is the Greek god Harpokrates, identified with the Egyptian child god Horus, the god of silence and secrets, but, more importantly in this context, the newborn sun, identified with Typhon and Chaos. Based on the advice of Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs, e.e. cummings’s typesetter, Crowley further identified Aiwaz with Set or Saturn. Set, Sutekh, or Seth, represented as a beast, is the Egyptian god of deserts, storms, disorder, and violence.Originally Set had a positive role, and accompanies Ra (the Sun) on his barque to repel Apep, the serpent of Chaos. He was Lord of the Red Land, balancing Horus’ role as Lord of the Black Land. Sometimes he is represented with a falcon’s head, like Horus. Set was also associated with the planet Mercury. But most importantly in this context, Set is a predynastic deity (3790-3500 BCE).Crowley identifies Aiwaz/Set with the god of Sumer, the oldest human civilization (5500 BCE). The Sumerians were probably a non-Semitic, non-Indo European West Asian people. They traded with the Indus Valley civilization, but were older. Sumerian society was divided into free people and slaves. They had a highly relaxed attitude to sex, and practised masturbation and anal intercourse. Paradoxically, perhaps, ritual cleanliness was of great importance.The Sumerians regarded themselves as the literal children of the gods, the Anunnaki, who came from the sky, but who were humanoid; the similarity of Sumerian drawings to the classic depiction of extraterrestrials has been noted by UFOlogists, including by Jacques Vallée. The Anunnaki are credited with creating humans to replace the Igigi who the Anunnaki used to perform forced labour. Thus, the arts, sciences, industry, manners, and law came from the Anunnaki, chiefly Enki, who is associated specifically with the constellation called the Square of Pegasus and depicted as a Serpent. 40 is his sacred number, also referenced in the Book of the Law. He is also identified with the planet Mercury, like Set.Sumer was governed by its priests. These details are strikingly similar to the Book of the Law, especially the notorious Third Chapter, leading to the suggestion that the Age of Aquarius, ruled by Saturn = Set, represents a revival of the original human civilization, Aquarius itself being represented as a human. Set, as Satan, also figures prominently in the Hebrew bible, based on Sumerian precedents. According to the Sethian gnostics, he is said to guard the divine wisdom which confers immortality in the garden of Eden and to have shared it with Eve and Adam in order to liberate them from the thraldom of Yah, the demonic deity of the Old Testament.The snake or serpent also figures prominently in the Book of the Law, where he is represented as the corollary of Nuit, “the Star,” who “giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir[s] the hearts of men with drunkenness.” He is “the winged snake of light,” Hadit, the latter referring to Behedite, Heru-Behdeti or Horus of Bedhet, represented as a winged solar disk. As the serpent he burns upon the brows or ajna-chakra as the “serpent flame”: “I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy.” These passages clearly refer to the Kundalini (lit. “coiled snake”), the famous “serpent power” that lies dormant at the base of the spine but, once “activated,” ascends the spine to the brain, where it activates the ajna and sahasrara chakras and induces illumination. This is, moreover, the location of the “reptilian complex” of the "triune brain," associated with power and sex.Just as “Set” is the original god of man, so is the basal ganglia of the reptilian complex the root of human consciousness, and its assimilation and transformation the key to enlightenment itself. This has been confirmed by psychedelic research. For example, in Jung and in Stanislav Grof's model of individuation, the Freudian "personal unconscious" or, in Jungian terms, "the Shadow," or the "birth trauma," must first be penetrated and assimilated in order to hypostatise the collective unconscious that lies "behind," as it were, rather than "above." "The Khabs is in the Khu." This is the doctrine of the "real self" or subconscious that Aleister Crowley explained to Frank Bennett at the Abbey of Thelema in 1921, and that caused Crowley to reject the doctrine of the "higher self" as a "damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion" in Magick Without Tears. This is of course a highly secret, occult doctrine, because of its potential for abuse.Historically the problem of the reptilian brain has been addressed through the patriarchal formula of repression, identified by Crowley with the formula of the Dying God of the Aeon of Osiris, which dates back to the Egyptian First Dynasty (3100 BCE) or even earlier. Thus, human beings covered their nakedness with clothes, concealing their sexuality behind closed doors (the origin of territoriality, according to Buddhism), channelled into socially approved avenues, and established repressive authorities to enact laws and regulations to control, limit, and restrict their behaviour, the compensation for which appears in the tendency to psychosis (Arthur Koestler, Glynda-Lee Hoffmann, etc.) that manifests intermittently in ever more destructive wars, culminating in the Second World War (1939-1945), the most destructive war in human history, the very decade of which was predicted by Aiwaz/Set in the Book of the Law. According to the Book of the Law, this will be followed by civilizational collapse, in the course of which the accumulated karma of human history will be expiated, followed by reconstruction based on the formula of the New Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, characterized by the arising of "a new species of man" (Yeats), the “kingly man,” who has attained the knowledge and conversation of the "Holy Guardian Angel,” or “Real Self,” also known as Congressus cum Daemone (see Liber 800), "absolute individuals" entirely self-realized and autonomous (the so-called "True Will"). Thus, the New Aeon is nothing other than the process of making the unconscious conscious. This New Aeon is equated with the astrological Age of Aquarius, which Levenda says will commence in 2600 CE, although the consensus date seems to be closer to 2400, just about 500 years following Crowley’s “Cairo Working” in 1904. Interestingly, one Neptune-Pluto cycle lasts 495 years. According to Palden-Jenkins (“Astrological Cycles in History”), “they characterise an underlying driving-force behind history, an undertow of reality which marries the inevitable ram-force of Pluto with the imaginal, ideational power of Neptune. This combined force helps us define our underlying historical reality on a collective-unconscious level - this world-view being a combination of actualities and perceptions.”Interestingly, the Age of Aquarius, the Human, called The Star in the Tarot, will be followed by the Age of Capricorn, the Goat, called The Devil in the Tarot, about 4560 CE. Capricorn is also the constellation of Enki. Both Aquarius and Capricorn are ruled by Saturn (Set = Satan). Thus, we are on the verge of a 4,320 year reign of Saturn, the only occurrence of a planetary “double age” in the astrological cycle. This will be followed by the advent of the Aeon of Ma’at about 11,040 CE, characterized by the universal attainment of cosmic consciousness and supreme, perfect, and absolute enlightenment (anuttarasamyaksambodhi).

Gerald Massey would have been proud ... that at least 1 man with his kinda radical passion (Kenneth Grant) was homaged as he is herein; by someone with as much interest in Lovecraft & Crowley. If Necronomicons, The Mauve Zone, and similar æonics of Amentà 'get your goat' (by the best bits!) this is for you! Gerald Massey, Kenneth Grant, Lovecraft & The Beast 666 dominate the best shelves in my library. Whether or not they do yours, dear reader, this book should.

Not my favourite Levenda, but he knows his stuff and helps clarify some of Mr Grant's more complicated agenda!

It's a mindblower: Crowley and Lovecraft simultaneously unleashing dark forces from other dimensions. I read it as science fiction and magick anthropology and didn't weigh in on the "is it real" or is Peter Levenda really Simon (writer of the Necromonicon) question. The book is well written and his knowledge is impressive. How many other magick writers quote Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari? None that I've ever read, but these connections make sense and show that Levenda's thinking outside the typical new age/magic framework. Some of his earlier books aren't as polished as this.Kenneth Grant and Steffi Grant (her art is pretty impressive) both deserve their own biographies, but this is a great start for those interested in modern magick theory.

I find Mr Levenda to be very readable, and this subject matter is very interesting. I essentially devoured the book.