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

The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic
Peter Levenda
Ibis Press – 2013

Imagine your kid’s birthday is coming up. You go to the dollar store and buy one of those premade piñatas. You take it home and spend several days drawing intricate occult symbols all over it. The big day comes. Your kid can’t wait to smash the shit out of his piñata to get some sweeties. He notices the crap you’ve drawn on the outside, but he doesn’t really give a shit. He gives it a few good whacks and the piñata breaks open. Nothing falls out. You didn’t bother to fill it with sweets.

You are Peter Levenda, the piñata is this book, and I am the son who will never forgive you for this. The Dark Lord is 340 pages of meandering, pointless twoddle.

The book’s full title is The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic. I thought this was going to be an in depth look at how the eldritch entities of Lovecraft’s mythos have infiltrated modern occultism, not a fucking treatise on magical pussy juice. Admittedly, Levenda does address Lovecraft’s influence on Kenneth Grant, but despite the title, this book is far more concerned with Grant’s work than it is with Lovecraft’s. Although I had read one of Grant’s books before this one, I was not aware that he was so interested in vaginal discharge.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s lay out some facts before I discuss the contents of this book further.

Howard Philips Lovecraft wrote a whole bunch of horror stories.
Aleister Crowley wrote a whole bunch of bullshit.
Lovecraft and Crowley never corresponded with each other. There’s an oft quoted reference to an English magician in one of Lovecraft’s stories, but no definitive proof that either man was aware of the other.
Kenneth Grant noticed that if you compare the vast amounts of writing these two guys left behind, you will find phrases and words that could be addressing the same events, ideas and entities. Grant wrote a series of books that argued that this is not coincidental.
Grant’s writing is notoriously difficult to read. Levenda himself compares it to the rambling of a person suffering from schizophrenia, so Levenda wrote a book trying to distill the parts pertinent to the motifs used in Lovecraft’s horror fiction from the kabbalistic, numerological fiddle faddle that takes up so much of Grant’s writing.
It’s not really fair to say that The Dark Lord is a book about Lovecraft’s influence on Grant. It’s more a book about similarities in their ideologies. Both were fascinated by the idea of a dark, chaotic gods that will drastically alter the course of human history. Lovecraft put these in his stories. Grant tried to devise ways to communicate with them.
The book goes into detail on different forms of magic and how these forms of magic are focused on the darker aspects of human nature. According to Grant, the ultimate goal of all forms of magic is to communicate with alien entities.
The best way to communicate with these entities apparently requires gallons of magical vaginal discharge. It turns out that there’s 16 different types of gee juice, each one having its own purpose in magical rituals. If you want to get the Dark Lord to assist you in your mystical endeavors, you’re going to need your wife or girlfriend to allow you to collect samples of her vaginal moisture every evening for a fortnight.

I’ve tried to be fair with this list. In the context of this blog, I don’t think any of the above statements are unfair or misleading.

I think I’d be a lot more polite when reviewing occult books if their authors didn’t have their heads stuffed so far up their own arses. At several points Levenda mentions how Grant references the “Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon“. Just in case you didn’t know, the book being referenced is an infamous hoax, and Levenda is widely believed to be the person who cobbled it together. Think about that for a moment. Levenda knows better than anyone in the world that one of Grant’s sources is bollocks because he himself made it up, yet he still writes a book about Grant’s teachings. Whenever I think of Levenda from now on, I’ll imagine him hunkered over on himself with his head between his knees trying to inhale his own farts.

The weirdest thing about this book was that I kinda enjoyed it. It’s been a long time since I had to power my way through a book with big sections on chakras and Kabballah. Knowing that I’d get to express the resultant frustrations on here made these parts tolerable. I’ll probably never read occult books at the rate I was getting through them three years ago, but I’m already planning on a few more in the near future.

One other thing before I go: There’s a part in this book that mentions a form of yoga that teaches men how to suck sperm back into their dicks after it has been ejaculated. It’s called Vajroli Mudra. I couldn’t find any proof that this is possible, but I truly hope it is. I want to transform my willy into a little elephant’s trunk.
slurp slurp slurp

Secret Magic Spells of the Romany Gypsies and Fascination – A Feast of Finbarr

I was pretty lazy with reading this week, so here’s a post on two more awful magical pamphlets from Finbarr Publications, publisher of the worst magical texts ever printed.

Secret Magic Spells of the Romany Gypsies – C. McGiolla Cathain & M. McGrath
Finbarr -1993

Secret Magic Spells of the Romany Gypsies purports to be a collection of authentic gypsy spells for love, money and revenge. It’s a load of shit. All of the spells in here look something like this:

For this spell, all you need is a green candle and a picture of your true love. First, thoroughly rub the tip of the candle against your anus. Then Light the candle and let some of the wax drip on the photograph while uttering the following incantation;

“Tweedly diddly fiddly dum,
Fiddeldy diddeldy widdeldy wee,
Boomboom bumbum bambam bum
So mote it be”

You will marry your true love within a month.

The spells take up roughly half of the text. The rest is made up of anecdotes of these spells being used succesfully. I’ve noticed a similar approach in quite a few other books from Finbarr publications, but the stories in here are particularly unconvincing. One of the characters is referred to only as “B.S.”. I can’t shake the feeling that this was the authors cryptically confessing to feeding their audience complete and utter bullshit.

Fascination – Master Count de Leon
Finbarr – 2015

Fascination is the shortest pamphlet I’ve read from Finbarr, and it’s probably the most absurd. The actual text is barely 7 pages long. The first 5 of these pages are spent praising Adolph Hitler, and the last 2 describe a ritual that you can use to become more like Adolph. The ritual consists of wagging your dick at your reflection in a mirror while muttering your own name exactly 99 times. Seriously. I’m not even joking. That’s all this book contains. It suggests that Hitler himself performed this ritual.

This is obviously a noteworthy magical offering, but I don’t feel much need to comment any further on it. If you think I’ve exaggerated about its contents, read it for yourself – the text is easy to find online.

Kenneth Grant’s Magical Revival

kenneth grant magical revival crowley lovecraft
The Magical Revival – Kenneth Grant
Skoob – 1991 (Originally published in 1972)

Fuck. Here we go again.

Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley‘s protégé, wrote a set of 9 books called the Typhonian Trilogies. This is the first in the collection, and it serves to lay out the key players, ideas and history of modern magic. It’s infamous for its attempts to link the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft with the magickal ideas of Aleister Crowley. The introduction to the Simon Necronomicon, published 5 years later, attempts to do something similar, but we all know how ridiculous that book is. I wanted to read this one to see if it was more convincing. (Incidentally, Simon, in his Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon, claims that Grant was to use the Necronomicon as a source for some of the later works in the Typhonian series.)

I first tried to purchase this book several years ago, but it’s hard to find an affordable copy. Plus, a quick google search for it will lead you to a .pdf of the text. At one point I had decided to just read it online, but on seeing it show up in Alan Moore’s Neonomicon, I became convinced that I needed a physical copy for my library.

magical revival in alan moore's neonomicon If a comic book character has read it, I have to read it too.

Most of this book is spent expounding the magickal theories of Aleister Crowley. There’s other chapters on Austin Ozman Spare and Dion Fortune. The part on Lovecraft is only a few pages, and it doesn’t delve very deeply into Lovecraftian lore at all.

I reckon Grant had a decent understanding of all the different occulty things he is talking about, but he doesn’t always make that easy to believe. Don’t get me wrong, there are entire pages of the book that are lucid and interesting, but the writing frequently spins out of control and becomes terribly muddled. It becomes impossible to distinguish between when Grant is making brilliant connections, when he is making less convincing connections, and when he is talking absolute bollocks. My job, believe it or not, involves teaching people how to write. I am a fairly lenient marker, but I am strict with my students on a few things: clarity, cohesion and referencing. If little Kenny handed this in to me, I would tell him it’s rubbish and make him rewrite it. I get that occult writers all like to fill their books with tricks, traps and only a little truth, but this is just taking the piss.

magical revival kenneth grant student comments The Magical Revival vs. My Grade 11 marking scheme.

There are some cool things about this book. Kenneth Grant did actually know several of the people that he is writing about, he shit-talks L. Ron Hubbard, and the system of magic he is propounding is unabashedly left hand path. That being said, the whole book is a load of bollocks, and I walked away from it having learned very little. Apparently, this is the most straightforward entry in the Typhonian series too, but hopefully I won’t be reading the rest. I don’t think I’ll have the stomach for any more of this kind of nonsense for a while anyways; I guess I’m just not cut out for the Hogwarts lifestyle.

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin The Mage: the 100th post on Nocturnal Revelries

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage – Abraham of Würzburg (Translated by S.L. MacGregor Mathers)
Dover – 1975

Wow, 100 posts! I don’t think I realized how much work I was going to put into reviewing dumb books when I started. This blog now contains more words than most of the books that have appeared on it. To celebrate this momentous achievement, I’m going to briefly review the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, a curious grimoire of angelic magic. I first heard of it in the BBC documentary about Aleister Crowley’s house by Loch Ness, and I remember soon thereafter watching a video of Robert Anton Wilson discussing how he had attempted to perform part of the Abramelin ritual while tripping on acid, but it wasn’t until I heard the name of the text being mentioned in Ghoulies, one of the finest motion pictures ever made, that I knew that I needed a copy for my library. This book of spells purports to have been written in 1458, but the oldest surviving copies date from 1608. Many grimoires claim to be far older than they really are as that makes them seem more mysterious, but if this text was written in 1608, you’d imagine that the author would have set it back more than 150 years. Regardless of its authenticity, this is a rather interesting read.

I don’t want to spend too much time going into the plot details as there are plenty of summaries of this book to be found online, but the idea here is that in 1458, an old man named Abraham wanted to give his younger son, Lamech, a present. He had already let his eldest son in on his knowledge of Kaballah, so he decided to initiate Lamech into the secrets of Sacred Magic instead. He himself had come across these secrets from a hermit named Abramelin. We never find out much about Abramelin, but his magical secrets had supposedly made their way to him from the lads in the Old Testament.

There are three books within this book. The first of which gives Abraham’s account of how he came by this magic, and the second book gives the instructions for a 6 or 18 month ritual that one must go through in order to use the spells that make up Book 3. The lengthy ritual puts the magician into contact with his guardian angel. (I use the masculine pronoun purposefully here; women aren’t really supposed to practice this magic.) The guardian angel then grants the magician the power to control demons. This makes for a weird form of whitened-black magic. The practitioner is commanding legions of evil spirits to do his bidding, but he is doing so under the guidance of a good spirit. The standard how-to-turn-invisible/tell-the-future/get-money spells are all here, but it is presumed that the magus will only utilize these abilities for the good of all humanity. Abraham strongly advises that this system of magic never be used for evil purposes, but he nevertheless includes instructions on how to cast spells upon Men, to bewitch beasts, to cast spells upon the liver, heart, head and other parts of the body, to demolish buildings, to ruin possessions, to excite emnity in general, to excite quarrels and fights, and to cause a general war.

Each spell comes in the form of a magical square. These look a bit like wordsearches, and each one must be used in a certain way. You generally have to make a copy of the square, rub it on your bum or keep it in your hat for a few days and then plant it close to the thing you want to bewitch.

spell square abramelin
The Spell Square to “make work done in inaccessible places”

It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone being in the position to give up 6 months of their life to perform the ritual as described in Book 2. The ritual must also be performed in a very specific type of building, so unless you’re a millionaire, you’re probably not going to have the opportunity to get this done. Aleister Crowley tried in 1901, but he didn’t get to finish it. The fact that he didn’t finish the ritual meant that the demons he evoked were never banished and were left free to haunt the house where he had evoked them. (Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page bought the house in 1970, but it has since burned down.) The book is fairly clear that its instructions must be followed very carefully, and I doubt many people have had both the determination and the means to actually go through with it. A few of those who have claimed to complete the ritual have published the diaries that they kept throughout. I would imagine these accounts are very boring indeed.

The Mathers version of the Book of Abramelin, the text that I read, was translated from an incomplete, already translated version of the original text. The manuscript that Mathers translated is of a later date than the copies that have since been discovered, and it only contained 3 books while the earlier German versions contain 4. The missing book is about the Kaballah though, so I’m actually pretty relieved that I didn’t have to waste my time reading it. The other big differences between the texts are that Mathers got some of the ingredients for one of the potions wrong, his version of the ritual is 6 rather than 18 months long, and his versions of the magic squares are missing some letters.

Unlike many grimoires, the Book of Abramelin is actually a fairly entertaining read. The narrative of the first book reads like a novella, and the unique bad-angels-working-for-good-angels-working-for-the-magician-working-for-God concept makes the magical instruction fairly interesting too. George Dehn and Steven Guth put out a translation of one of the older manuscripts, but unless you were seriously considering performing the ritual herein described, I wouldn’t bother shelling out the extra money. The Mathers translation may not the most authentic version of this book of spells, but it still includes all of the bits I’d be interested in. That being said, if I ever come across a cheap copy of the newer translation, I’d probably take a look.

If you want a far more in depth look at Abramelin’s magic, check out this blog.

Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head?

I’ve written about Aleister Crowley’s books before, but of the texts I reviewed, one was a novel and the other a translation. I thought it high time to look at some of Crowley’s mystical texts, the ones in which he propounds his deepest insights into magick, humanity and existence. To start, I decided to look at what is perhaps his best known work, the Book of the Law.

Just to get this out in the open right away: I’m not an expert on Crowley, and this is mostly an opinion piece. If you are a dedicated Thelemite and you feel frustrated/offended by anything in this post, please leave a comment and explain to me where I have erred. I would genuinely be interested in your insight.

The text of the Book of the Law or Liber AL vel Legis (hereafter to be referred to as AL) was supposedly revealed to Aleister Crowley by a guardian angel styled spirit named Aiwass in 1904. The work is rather short (about 20 pages), but it provides the foundation for the religion of Thelema. Much of Aleister Crowley’s subsequent literary output either references this text or serves as a commentary on it. While not an expert by any means, I’ve been mildly interested in Aleister Crowley for a few years, and I’ve had an idea of the importance of this book to his followers ever since I read about it after buying my first Fields of the Nephilim cd. I decided to buy a copy of AL a few years ago, but then I found out that the text was included in its entirety in Crowley’s Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick, a much larger and more expensive book that, for some reason I have since forgotten, I was determined to own. I thus decided that I would wait until I owned a copy of Book 4 before reading the Book of the Law. In the meantime, I found myself in possession of a book called Portable Darkness. This is a collection of assorted writings by Crowley that also includes the text of the Book of Law, but it doesn’t contain the infamous Comment section. I hate abridgments and so decided not to read AL until I owned the complete text. Eventually I found an affordable copy of Book 4, but when I opened it up and realized that it was largely about yoga, I felt desperately ashamed of myself and put it on the shelf to collect dust for few years.

I decided to read AL a few months ago, but I wanted to do a bit of research on it beforehand to ensure a decent level of understanding. I read essays about it in Portable Darkness and DisInformation’s Book of Lies and on countless websites. I listened to youtube clips of Robert Anton Wilson’s ramblings on Crowley, and I even read the wikipedia pages of the Egyptian deities that I knew were going to be alluded to in the Book of the Law. I felt fairly prepared by the time I opened the book.

Jesus Christ lads, what a pile of muck.

Honestly, I don’t even know where to start with this garbage. I’ve long understood that Aleister Crowley was both full of shit and had his head up his arse, and I wasn’t really surprised that he had the audacity to present this hogwash as divine revelation, but I was a little taken aback by extent to which he has gotten away with it. I could break the text down and analyze it piece by piece, but it doesn’t merit doing that. With the amount of time and effort it would take to squeeze any form of meaningful interpretation out of this barrel of masturbatory vomit, a person could doubtlessly resolve several of their real life problems. Thelemites, I have deduced, are just religious hipsters. Their religion is far more obscure than yours; I mean, you’ve probably never even heard of it, and you almost definitely wouldn’t get it if you did. Other tortuous religious texts have the excuse that they were written thousands of years ago by individuals living in societies that were vastly different our own. The Book of the Law, on the other hand, was written by a smackhead British toff that wanted to make himself sound mysterious and smart so that he could get girls (and a few fellas) to sleep with him. If you’ve been thinking about reading this piece of trash, take my advice: spend that time updating your CV and applying for a new job instead.

Now, if you are ever lucky enough to be in my apartment, you might notice the above sign. Why would a person who has such disdain for Crowley’s masterpiece place its credo above his front door? Well, the phrase ‘Do what thou wilt’ and the word ‘Thelema’ actually come from one of my favourite books, the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. In this long and lurid tale, the Abbey of Thélème is basically a monastery, led by the licentious Friar John (pictured above), where the only rule that the brothers must follow is ‘Do what thou wilt’. This phrase was later adopted as a motto for the Hellfire Clubs. Interestingly enough, it’s also word-for-word the advice given by Mephistopheles to Faustus after he has turned the good Doctor invisible inside the chambers of the pope in the 7th scene of Marlowe’s tragedy (A-text).

crowley book of lies
I also read The Book of Lies. This book is probably slightly more self indulgent than the Book of the Law, but it’s made a little more palatable by the fact that it comes across as being more aware of its own absurdity. (I’m not saying that Crowley wasn’t aware of how obnoxious the Book of the Law seems; he might well have written it just to wind people up.) The Book of Lies, or to give it its full title, The Book of Lies,Which is also Falsely Called BREAKS. The Wanderings or Falsifications of the One Thought of Frater Perdurabo, which Thought is itself Untrue. Liber CCCXXXIII [Book 333], is broken up into 91 little passages that can be read as poems, jokes, philosophical aphorisms, nuggets of advice, magickal instructions and/or riddles. Each passage comes with a commentary from Aleister that’s supposed to explain it. Most of this book is absolute rubbish, but there were a few bits that made me think.

The 80th passage starts off:

“The price of existence is eternal warfare.
Speaking as an Irishman, I prefer to say: The price
of eternal warfare is existence.
And melancholy as existence is, the price is well
worth paying.
Is there is a Government? then I’m agin it! To Hell
with the bloody English!”

A self-professed Irishman? Wasn’t he born and raised in England? Crowley’s attitude towards Ireland was a little strange. He once wrote a rather curious poem to Saint Patrick, requesting that the saint come back to again rid the country of snakes (an apt metaphor for the brits). Within the O.T.O. Crowley obtained the title of Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona and all the Britains within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis, and two years later, in 1914, he went to New York and tried to convince people that he was there to raise support for Irish independence. His attempts to do so included writing a declaration of independence for the Irish Republic. As with much of what he did, it is very hard to tell how sincere he was being, but he definitely seems to have been on the right side of the argument. The above chapter is a little cringey, but I like the idea of existence being the downside of chaos.
aleister crowley IRA
There’s another interesting bit in the commentary for chapter 46 where Aleister says,

“The lesson of the chapter is thus always to rise
hungry from a meal, always to violate one’s own nature.
Keep on acquiring a taste for what is naturally
repugnant; this is an unfailing source of pleasure”

There’s something wonderfully Sadean about this notion, and although seemingly paradoxical, it’s remarkably accurate. Humans get bored very easily, and we love doing what we shouldn’t. Hardcore pornography, death metal, super spicy food and ultraviolent films might seem rather unpleasant the first time they are encountered, but they all have the potential to become ‘unfailing sources of pleasure’. However, while I think that Crowley’s observation on the insatiability of human nature is interesting, I’m not sure that I agree with his advice. While our tendency may be to intensify our pleasures, I think it might be dangerous to make the intensification the goal. I’m not preaching humility here; I just reckon that there comes a point in most human endeavors where enough is enough.

There were a few other bits and pieces in here that made me think, but it probably wasn’t really worth reading the whole thing to find them. The most rewarding part of the book was probably when I finally got the Psalm 69 joke that Ministry used on their ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ album. I’ve listened to that record a thousand times, and I have often wondered what the ‘the way to succeed and the way to suck eggs’ line meant. After reading the commentary here, I felt a bit silly for not getting it sooner. I guess I just never thought that Al Jourgensen would be smart enough to use puns. Chapter 88 (Gold Bricks) is pretty funny too. I’ll leave you to find it for yourself.

There you have it. Aleister Crowley led a very interesting life, but his books are shit. His magical writings serve as little more than ‘how to be Harry Potter’ instruction manuals for grown-ups who want to play make-believe (or is it believe-make?) In fairness to Crowley, I don’t think either the Book of the Law or the Book of Lies are aimed at beginners, but if understanding these works is what reading his other books will allow me to do, I’ll probably not be bothering.

Disinformation’s Book of Lies

Book of Lies – Richard Metzger (Editor)
Disinformation – 2003
I can’t quite remember what put this book on my radar, but it was on my goodreads to-read list for a few years before I picked up a copy. Unabashedly taking its name from one of Aleister Crowley‘s books, this is a collection essays on Magick and the Occult, all written by modern authors. (Actually, I recently found a copy of Crowley’s Book of Lies at a library booksale for a cool 75 cents, so you can expect a review of that at some stage in the future.) The format (and choice of contributors) of this book reminded me a bit of the super edgy Apocalypse Culture series (although, in fairness, this book contains less paedophilia). I’ve been making my way through it since December, and although I have not read every single essay herein, I doubt I will get much further.

The book is divided into 8 sections, each dealing with a different aspect of occultism:

Section 1 is about the actual practice of Magick. Even though I had heard it during his infamous speech at DisinfoCon, I enjoyed Grant Morrison’s explanation of sigil charging through masturbation, I struggled through Mark Pesce’s piece, and I gave up about two paragraphs into Genesis P Orridge’s pile of rubbishy nonsense. Joe Coleman, the artist who did the covers for the Apocalypse Culture books, wrote a fairly cringeworthy prose poem on the magickalness of his own art. I barely even looked at the other essays in this section. All together, this part really sucked. The kind of magick being discussed here isn’t completely loopy stuff; it’s really just other forms of self motivation. If this kind of thing works for you, and I totally understand that it could, that’s awesome, but it isn’t for me.

Section 2 is about “Chemognosis”. I’m not a drug user, and I have no interest in ‘getting high’, so I skipped this section completely.

Section 3 is about magickal icons. There are several essays on Austin Osman Spare, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. I once heard a poem by Brion Gysin that was so irritating that I decided to skip the essays about him. I don’t really care for Spare either, but I may come back to the essays on him if he ever catches my interest. I read Burroughs’ first 3 novels in my early twenties, and I used to think he was really cool because he had collaborated with Kurt Cobain, U2 and Ministry. (Coincidentally, I only recently realized that Ministry’s Psalm 69 song and album were allusions to Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies.) That being said, William Burroughs was definitely full of shit, and I don’t really care about his forays into magick. There was another essay in here on Lovecraft’s influence on occultism, but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already. This section ends with excerpts from two books. I don’t like excerpts, so I skipped them.

Section 4 is mostly about Aleister Crowley. The essays focusing on him were extremely boring. Donald Tyson’s essay on John Dee and the Enochian apocalypse was entertaining enough, but I can’t really remember what it was about and I’m only after reading it last week. Richard Metzger’s essay on Jack Parsons wasn’t horrible, but Jack’s wikipedia page is currently more informative.

Section 5 is titled Scarlet Women. There are three essays here, one on Marjorie Cameron, one on Ida Craddock, and one on Rosaleen Norton. They were ok. In a book that is 350 pages long, only 22 pages are about women. Out of the 40 essays in this book, one was written by a woman and three were written by Genesis P Orridge. I have seen this book being criticized for its very white guy perspective on occultism and magick, and while I certainly don’t want to read about sacred femininity and that kind of nonsense, I’d have to say this is a fair criticism.

Section 6, the section on secret societies, was probably my favourite. Twyman’s article on Hitler and the occult put me on the trail of a few interesting books, and P.R. Koenig’s accusations that the Ordo Templis Orientalis are a gang on spermchuggers was rather amusing. It pains me to admit it, but Boyd Rice’s very silly essay connecting Enoch’s Watchers, the Holy Grail, Dagon, Jesus Christ and Ea, Lord of the Depths is probably the best part of the entire book. The last essay in this section is rather long and it explains why wicca might not be as legitimate as some people think. I have never taken wicca seriously, so I didn’t care to finish that one.

Section 7 is quite short and not particularly interesting. It includes an interview with an aged Anton LaVey and an introductory essay about rock music’s links to the occult.

The final section is awful. There’s a big, boring, section on Julius Evola, the esoteric fascist. There are also 3 essays by Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey. Wilson/Bey, for those of you who don’t know, is a rotten paedophile. He freely admits to and writes about wanting to have sex with children. I didn’t read what he had to say, and I really wish that he hadn’t been included in here. I am very glad that I bought a second hand copy of this book and thus avoided giving the publishers any money. Fuck that. Put that paedo in the oven. This section ends with a super cringy essay on “The Secret of the Gothic God of Darkness“. We’re dealing with seriously edgy stuff here.

Overall, Book of Lies was a bit disappointing. Some of the essays are on very interesting ideas, but in most cases, they barely scratch the surface. Then again, I bought my copy cheap, and it gave me the names of a few books that I will be checking out in the future. If you see a copy for less than a tenner and you want a nice book to leave beside the toilet, you could do worse than this.

The Trials and Tribulations of (reading about) Paracelsus

Paracelsus Magic into Science – Henry M. Pachter
Collier Books – 1951

I was looking for a new book to start at the end of November when I picked up a most peculiar volume off my shelf. 100,000 Years of Man’s Unknown History had come as part of a set of cooky ancient-alien books that I bought years ago, and as I skimmed through it, I saw mention of the mysterious Count Von Küffstein and his homunculi. (If you’re not familiar with the Count Von K, you might want to check out my post about Aleister Crowley’s strange creations.) I was intrigued, but I was about to spend half the day on a bus and I wanted a smaller book that would fit in my pocket. I was buzzing off the idea of homunculis though, and so I picked up the biography of Paracelsus that I had found on a ‘free books’ table when I was in university.

Paracelsus was a travelling doctor/healer in the 16th century. He disdained the traditional academic approach to medicine and tried to figure out better ways to heal people. Most of his methods would sound very silly to us today, but his approach, which was based on reasoning and experiment, has contributed to the development of the modern scientific method. He was a pretty cool guy too. He traveled around Europe, healing people, writing books, getting drunk and starting arguments with local professors and doctors.

theophrastus
The man’s life was interesting, but in truth, this book is actually quite boring. However, when it comes to books on Paracelsus, I reckon the boring ones are probably the most trustworthy. Pachter’s focus is on how Paracelsus influenced science, and while he never denies Paracelsus’s fascination with the occult, he doesn’t give it as quite as much attention as I maybe would have liked. There’s only a few very brief mentions of Homunculi in here. (Paracelsus claimed it was possible to create miniature human life by placing glass bottles of sperm into steaming piles of horseshit.)

Pachter acknowledges that other writers have gone completely overboard with their interpretations of the more mystical aspects of Paracelsus’s writings, and even though I was fairly bored with Paracelsus when I finished this one, I went straight on to a silly book on Paracelsus that I had been meaning to read for the past year.

paracelsus-by-hartmann The Life and Doctrines of Paracelsus – Franz Hartmann
1886?

The only attraction of this book is the fact that it seems to have been the text that brought the story of Count Von Küffstein to the attention of the occult community towards the end of the 19th century. In the 8th chapter there’s a chapter on Homunculi that contains an extremely lengthy footnote telling the story of Count Von K. As far as I can tell, this book was originally written in German and later translated into English. If it was originally published in German, we can presume that the footnote on the Count was a paraphrase of the account given in Die Sphinx. (Again, read my post on Crowley if you’re not following this.) This would mean that nobody has ever actually translated Die Sphinx directly. I have been toying with the idea of translating and publishing it myself, but I don’t want to waste my time if it was already been done. If anyone has any information on this, please let me know.

Aside from a single footnote, this book was un-fucking-bearable. The first chapter gives an account of Paracelsus’s life, and the rest explores his beliefs. This is basically the exact opposite of Pachter’s book. While Pachter gives perfunctory mention to the more nonsensical ideas of Paracelsus, Hartmann wallows in them. I read the first two chapters and then skimmed till I got to the homunculus bit. I simply wasn’t prepared to give these dated and stupid concepts the attention that would be required to make sense of them. This book was utter shit.

paracelsusthegreat From The Book of Alchemy

Paracelsus was actually cooler than I expected, but these books were a real chore to read. I’m reading two other dry ones at the moment, and I don’t think I’ll move straight on to 100,000 Years of Man’s Unknown History as I reckon I ought to treat myself to something a bit more enjoyable first. The story of Paracelsus played a part in shaping the Faustian Legend, and I am now considering a reread of Marlowe and Goethe’s versions of that tale for a future post on the same.

paracelsus-ulysses Paracelsus was Swiss born, but James Joyce thought so highly of him that he included him in a list of Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity in Ulysses.

Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual – Eliphas Levi

2015-07-06 20.53.53
Senate – 1995

This book is a load of bollocks. I’ve seen it mentioned in other books, and I thought that I should check it out. In fairness, I was probably underwhelmed because I have come across these ideas in so many other books (Although they were bollocks in those books too.) There is a story that the secrets disclosed herein were once the private knowledge of a secret society to which Levi belonged*, but I think it would be unfair to blame anyone other than Levi for this stinking garbage heap of nonsense. Levi links the usual ancient traditions together and adds a bunch of his own bullshit into the mix to create a completely incoherent mess of esoteric diarrhea.

This is actually two books in one. The first is a book on the dogma of magic, the second is a book on the rituals. The chapters in each book correspond to each other, and if I were to read it again, I would read the corresponding chapters in pairs. I am almost definitely not going to read this book again though. The first ten chapters in each text are on numbers. For example, the second chapter is on the number two. For this chapter, Levi thinks of all the things that exist in pairs, and occults them. Cain and Abel represent the Yin and the Yang. Yin is the Angel Lucifer, but Yang is the Angel Michael. Yin depends on Yang, so death (Lucifer) depends on life (Michael). Death is a penis, but it is also life, therefore a penis is actually a vagina. Now this is of course corroborated by the two pillars of the temple of Solomon: they enclose the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, duhh! It’s all so obvious!

So each book starts off with ten chapters of that kind of crap. It’s only after the number chapters that Levi gets into necromancy and witchcraft. Those chapters are alright. There are some fucked up rituals described in detail. My favourite is the ritual that requires the necromancer to somehow put themselves in a position whereby they are assisting a priest in the celebration of mass on Christmas Eve. They must help the priest until the host is consecrated and then interrupt the ceremony by yelling ‘LET THE DEAD RISE FROM THEIR TOMBS!” After this they run from the church to the graveyard, continually screaming. Wouldn’t it be amazing to see that happening? Levi also gives detailed instructions on the steps you need to take to become master of the Gnomes of the earth. Yep, this is all fairly pragmatic stuff…

The translator, A.E. Waite, provides lots of footnotes, most of which criticize Levi’s nonsense in a manner so harsh that one would wonder why he bothered with it at all. Waite, who wasn’t exactly the most rational man in the world, describes Levi’s ideas as ‘fantastic’, ‘without authority’, ‘idle nonsense’, ‘incredibly bad’ and ‘made up out of his own head’. I also own his translation of Levi’s History of Magic, a book that I now doubt I will ever read.

The illustrations are cool though. The Sabbatic goat on the cover is quite deadly, and there’s a fair few images in here that I’ve seen elsewhere. That’s the thing about this book; it has been used as a source for lots of other books that explain its contents far more clearly than it does itself (I would recommend Cavendish’s The Black Arts to anyone who’s interested.)

I was also delighted to find a brief reference to the tarte Bourbonnaise of Panurge. The Borbonesa tart is a dessert mentioned in Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is a “filthy and slovenly compound, made of store of garlic, of assafoetida, of castoreum, of dogs’ turds very warm, which he steeped, tempered, and liquefied in the corrupt matter of pocky boils and pestiferous botches” This is Rabelais’ description, not Levi’s. Levi only mentions the tart in comparison to the smell that might emerge from one of the potions described in the chapter on charms and philtres.

If you want to read a mess of mystical bullshit about the astral plane and tarot cards, then this is the book for you. Otherwise, skip to the chapters on necromancy, witchcraft and the Sabbath, and leave it at that.

*My source for that information was Wade Baskin’s Dictionary of Satanism, so it’s almost definitely untrue.

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The Occult A History – Colin Wilson

Random House – 1971

The title, ‘The Occult A History’, is a little misleading. A more accurate name might be ‘A ridiculous theory based on an unquestioning and incredibly naive consideration of the History of the Occult’. Colin Wilson comes across as frustratingly credulous. The following might be a typical paragraph in this book:

Tom was able to communicate with the leader of the great race of flying ape-dogs on the planet Durthyanus. Tom was a patient in mental hospital who was spoon-fed mush by a nurse and needed his nap-nap changed twice a day, but there is no reason not to believe that he had strong powers of interplanetary telepathy; most people who possess such gifts are actually completely untrustworthy.

That’s barely even an exaggeration! I understand that people who write books on the occult are often going to be more ‘open-minded’ than the average individual, but Colin Wilson comes across as a chump. The book is definitely well researched though. Wilson uses lots of interesting sources and I got loads of ideas for other books to read from this one. This book is actually quite an enjoyable read if you don’t waste too much time getting upset over the author’s ridiculous methods of reasoning. I really liked the chapters on Cagliostro and werewolves, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish the final chapter in which the author discusses ‘Faculty x’ in detail. ‘Faculty x’ is basically a 6th sense type thing that Wilson believed human beings were about to discover/develop. Well, this book was written more than 40 years ago and from what I can tell, we’re yet to x.

Sometimes I feel that I put too much faith in the authors of books on the occult. I’m not sure that people intelligent enough to make their living as writers could possibly believe the wacky crap that ends up getting published. I reckon that authors are spewing out this silly garbage just to increase their sales. It makes sense that a writer like Wilson would inject a little craziness into an otherwise reasonable historical account; books on the fantastic just aren’t as enjoyable when they’re logical. I mean it’s not likely that anybody would ever pay money for a book that sets out to disprove the validity of moleomancy.

(Wise words from Gurdjeff on the back cover.) This book is dumb but mostly fun. Read it, but don’t bother with the last chapter. 6.5/10