Key to the Mysteries

Kenneth Grant’s Against the Light as Roman à Clef, Occult Allegory, and Play

Howard, Jeff ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9077-1025 (2024) Key to the Mysteries. The Enquiring Eye of the Witchcraft Research Centre, Spring 2025. ISSN N/A (In Press)

Text (A forthcoming article for The Enquiring Eye: The Journal of Magic and Witchcraft) KennethGrantPaperv27pdf.pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 7 February 2026. Available under License All Rights Reserved. Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Abstract / Summary

Kenneth Grant chose to write the tenth, unofficial volume of his Typhonian trilogies as a novel called Against the Light: a roman à clef in the classic mode, with figures from his occult milieu fictionalized as thinly veiled characters. At the same time, Against the Light is a “clef” or “key” in more than one sense, in that it is both a grimoire in fictional form and a key to the dense mysteries of Grant’s system. Against the Light is thus occult fiction in the original etymological sense, containing hidden truths of occult practice that are simultaneously concealed and revealed through fictional allegory. Moreover, this novel slots into Grant’s larger ideas about the role of fiction in the occult, i.e. that works of fiction (like dreams, to which they are analogous) can communicate occult truths of the Left Hand Path. Specifically, Grant argues that works of fiction can operate as portals through which “negatively existent” entities from the Nightside of the Tree of Life can enter the mundane waking world. Moreover, fiction allows Grant to encode occult practices that he would otherwise be forbidden to communicate by his occult injunctions to keep silence. Grant thus consciously aligns himself with a tradition of fictionally allegorized occult practice that stretches backwards to Apuleius’ Golden Ass and forwards to the hypersigils of Grant Morrison. Investigating the interrelationship between Grant’s Against the Light and the nine-volume Typhonian trilogies of which it is the fictional précis reveals an unusually comprehensive and cogent example of the interrelationship between occult history, fiction, and practice. This relationship offers lessons for current occult practice and occulture, including the media influenced by Kenneth Grant, with emphasis on games such as Invisible Sun, which operate as generative ludic frameworks in which the currents summoned by Grant can be experienced as play.

Item Type:	Article
ISSN:	N/A
Subjects:	Literature Philosophy & Psychology
Courses by Department:	The Games Academy
Depositing User:	Jeff Howard
Date Deposited:	19 Mar 2025 15:38
Last Modified:	19 Mar 2025 15:38
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/5922

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