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There is no book quite like this. Even GoodReads appears to have failed to recognise the latest attractive if expensive (£30) new hardback edition from Starfire Publishing that has just been published in London (2010).But what exactly is it? In some ways it is a conventional narrative of the new Magical experiment that was introduced by the revelation of Aiwass to Aleister Crowley in 1904. Grant takes us through to the Zos Kia Cultus of Austin Osman Spare who died in 1956. But this general narrative is overshadowed by the books true purpose which is to do for Magic as a religious narrative what the Early Church Fathers did for Christianity - to express both its cogency and its mystery and so its high and serious purpose as a spiritual tradition, if not necessarily a religion in the formal sense.Nor can the corpus of work be wholly judged on this one work. Grant was dedicated to his task. This is merely a part of a cycle of nine books which, in themselves, must require equal dedication from the reader and so either elicit a deep interest in what this religion means or some participation in it.Let me start with where I am coming from personally because I have given it five stars as an imaginative tour de force but this does not mean that I am wholly persuaded by it. And this is not because it is a work of high irrationalism. I have no objection to the irrational in its appropriate place and its appropriate place includes the spiritual, the daemonic and the artistic.My interest and concern with Grants Typhonian Tradition is that it confuses two great magical processes - one retrogresive and one progressive. The book is important in helping the reader understand what he is dealing with before detaching the one from the other for his or her own purposes. Let us deal with the retrogressive. Crowleys Thelema and its Typhonian derivative represent not the first steps in a new march towards human transformation but the last gasps of post-Socratic attempts to ideologise the human condition and place it under essentialist laws and processes.Nearly all religions do this. Christianity, Judaism and Islam certainly do. The secular religions of the Enlightenment, including Marxism-Leninism and Constitutional Liberalism, do this. The Mormons, Theosophy, Thelema and Wicca, amongst other new ways of challenging old ways, have been no different. Even environmentalism is at it nowadays. All have their false histories and absurd eschatologies.In the Typhonian case, what we have is a myth of ancient diffusionism as untenable as that belief in an ur-matriarchy and a surviving ancient nature religion that infected the early thinking of Wicca and of Starhawks followers on the American West Coast. Fortunately, modern neo-pagans have courageously managed to throw the bathwater of false history out, without losing the baby of a very attractive nature religion filled with personal and community meaning.The Typhonian mythology is a romantic and poetic tale in which the chthonic worship of Set or Shaitan was displaced by Judaeo-Christianity and the old gods transformed into demons and into the evil figure of Satan. There is some truth in the myth perhaps but the matter is myth nonetheless. It forces the believer into a faith that requires priests in a way that is not only not liberatory but works directly against the liberatory aspects of not only Thelema but of the whole progressive revolt against established religions and rigid ideologies.Having said this, the chapters that recount this myth are entrancing to anyone who has become depressed in their soul by the dessicated rationalism of the West. They are in a tradition from Blavatsky through to modern alternative histories where both the frustrated educated and the half-educated are given the opportunity to rewrite reality according to their own inner drives. The process is liberatory at this negative level of NOT being what was dumped on the believer by his history but it does not deal with the most enslaving matter of all - the absurd need to believe in any system at all, whether rational or irrational.However, beneath this late nineteenth century pseudo-science and late symbolist nonsense, a progressive force is burning to get out. You can see this in the move from the quasi-traditionalism and dressing up games of the pre-war period to an interest in psychology and direct experience that emerges in the interwar period. We go from a priestly class of magical obscurantists to individualism in around half a century. Since Magic has no problem with internal contradictions - indeed, it thrives on them - the co-existence of Setian myth with individualist shamanic excess is not something we should worry about too much except to note that one looks backwards and one looks forward Janus-like. Two figures, in this context, stand out.The first figure might be dismissed as a batty old dear but she was far from this, even if the woman has little importance outside of her particular time and place - this is Dion Fortune. Fortune had two insights - the psychotherapeutic role of Magic as a true pathway to the exploration of the unconscious with all its risks and dangers and the biochemical physicality of these pathways. Her link of the chakras to the endocrine system permits a renewed respect for the possibility that the Tantrik tradition and (less often acknowledged) those East Asian spiritual traditions that deal with the person elliptically, as in Taoist spiritual alchemy or the philosophy of Zen, might have some scientific validity hidden within them.Others have moved on from there to investigate the physicality of sexual secretions and magical, and so spiritual, meaning (of which more below) but where the genius of this lies is in its filling a fascinating gap between the description of matter (the biology that underpins mind) and the actual experience of mind. Although it is reasonable to state that we humans might be behaviourally predictable, all things considered, and that our minds are moulded into shape by our culture and relationships, a mystery remains that minds can consider matters to be other than might be dictated by society or inheritance (imagination). On top of this, minds contain with themselves a will to power and self-development that can work against norms. They seek to transform a person and their surroundings regardless of these norms. This thing that cannot easily be explained is certainly not fully explained by God at one extreme or by science at the other. Between the two is a state, best described philosophically by the pragmatists, the phenomenologists and the existentialists in the areas, respectively, of doing, experiencing and being, that is fluid and volatile. In this state, the True Will (the really seriously important innovation of Crowley even if Nietzsche understood it better) competes with the necessities not so much of physics but of a constructed social reality that can be oppressive and is a cause, often, of deep misery and non-fulfilment. It is this territory in which magic works as an alternative to other forms of spiritual engagement and to various psychotherapies - indeed, it might best be understood as a form of psychotherapy in which certain methods are used rather than others. Of course, believers really do believe in demons and maifestations and tulpas. We retain an open mind but the rareness of accredited examples of these phenomena means that, given that life is short and we cannot all live at the intense level of Spare, it might be better if we passed over this and concentrated just on the techniques of self development.The second significant figure is Austin Osman Spare, the artist, who might best be described as having discovered for himself the shamanic instincts of non-civilised cultures in the post-civilised culture of a strained and crumbling West. This book is valuable in itself for explaining Spares quite remarkable thought processes and giving us some excellent illustrations that help us understand the link between Spares intense artistic engagement and the magical liberation of the self that was intensely necessary for him. Throughout the book, Grant makes clear that he knew those of whom he writes and this adds something special to his accounts of his subjects.There was a flow of endeavour that started with the OTO, in which dissatisfied middle class nobodies (for that is what they were, regardless of the involvement of luminaries like WB Yeats) performed strange rites to free the spirit from the shackles of convention. Crowleys individualistic revelation of personal transgression and Fortunes harnessing of magical thought for psychotherapeutic transformation lead thence to Spares final abandonment of priests, gurus and therapists for a dangerous mix of excess, transgression and deliberate self-exhaustion. This is a trajectory that mirrors the crumbling of English imperial confidence into post-war individualistic rebellion against a dull bureaucratic society. But these are very much marginal figures in society. The individualistic rebellion only moved from the margins to the centre of society in the 1960s (much as drug culture moved from the high born experimentation of Aldous Huxley to the global tuning out of Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna). By the last quarter of the twentieth century, few actually needed rather than wanted transgressional Setian rituals and increasingly fewer took psychotherapy seriously. A combination of the ability to speak out about distress, a loss of faith in all authority and the realisation (whether from NLP or CBT or determined use of mental breakdown, drugs or divorce to effect change) that things can change has since made these figures (Crowley, Fortune, Spare and others) less useful but they are still pioneers of new thinking and this thinking is interpreted as spiritual because it deals with things that can have no externally imposed meaning except through faith. For some, they are truly magical figures because, as in the placebo effect, magic is simpy a way of describing techniques that appear to WORK.Which brings us to the most positive aspect of the book. It appears to ramble through its narrative (the book is, however, well written and a pleasure to read) but there are some key themes and one of these themes is sexuality and another is transgression. In 1904, Crowley was already well experienced not just in sexual experimentation but in finding a meaning to it that extended beyond hedonism. This had arisen originally from a rather doubtful interpretation of the Tantrik Tradition by the OTO in Germany which had important corresponding links with the UK.The personalities types attracted to the OTO were often unstable, anarchistic, solipsistic and unreliable but they were also aware that social mores dod not permit them to reach their full potential or express their true natures. Instead of seeing that potential fulfilled in social obligation or duty or repressing it into bourgeois respectability or conventional art or into industry as an end in itself, they looked inward to their primal urges in that interesting period between Nietzsches critique of the herd and Freuds identification of the sexual component in the sub-conscious.Nietzsche did not give primacy to sexuality while Freudianism had its own powerful liberatory sexual heretic in Wilhelm Reich (whom Grant mentions) but, at this crucial period, the normal state for a sexually aware male or female in the West was to accept a culture based on a repression of instincts in public discourse but sexual exploitation in secret. This is a culture that still exists (based on recent scandals) inside parts of the Catholic Church and it is interesting to note that the abuse scandals within the Catholic Church are one of the few issues that can cause a bitter anger to emerge in magical circles, as if there remains a recognition that their real origin as a religious sub-culture lies in an age of intolerable hypocrisy and sexual repression. It is hard to realise just how extensive this culture of sexual repression during the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries was and how those who were highly sexualised were forced into states of shame and guilt or effective psychopathy or misery by the general refusal to consider sexual energy as of value.Eastern values, dismissed within the prevailing ethic in very negative racial terms, arrived in certain circles with explosive force. The progressive, liberatory and most valuable part of Grants book is his exposition of how this understanding of Tantra and sexual alchemy combined with various transgressive myths and currents to become something both new and very old - Sex Magic or Sex Magick as Crowley preferred to call it.In essence, and in its early stage, Sex Magic was, bluntly, exploitative of women (as the Eastern versions often but not invariably were). Women were used as vehicles for what amounts to a manipulation of the endocrine system and the chemicals in the body to reach altered states of consciousness that precisely mimicked, indeed were identical with, states of consciousness experienced in high spiritual states of mysticism. This was beyond good and evil - powerful transformations that could change lives but with the proviso that a late nineteenth or early twentieth century European was forced to conduct themselves in secret or else face social obloquy or worse.Everything in Grants book presupposes secrecy and being outside society. This expresses a reality of a world where homosexual acts were illegal (we remember the fate of Oscar Wilde), where the sexual life of women was regarded as something that must not be discussed or encouraged, where masturbation was not a pleasure but a wrong and where free discussion of the link between sexual ecstasy and spiritual transformation could not be openly debated.Grant wrote this book originally in 1972 and, though subsequently revised, it is courageous in that context. He pulls no punches in his account of transgression and some readers will be disgusted - at one or two points, I was. Its deliberate transgressive tone made it an underground text. There would be no Penguin edition or serialisation in the Sunday Times. This was, of course, being written less than a decade after reform of laws governing homosexuality in England. Women were still being treated as second class citizens (an attitude that has created the baby boomer harridans of today). Sex education in schools was avoided except at the functional level and there was no significant research into the positive aspects of sexuality. Jenny Wades highly influential Transcendent Sex was only published in 2004 and the literature of sex-positive feminism and polyamory, much of it to the consternation of feminist reactionaries, has turned from a trickle to a flood only within the last decade. From this perspective, Grants book expresses a pivotal point in history where all the transgressional revolt of a repressed element within humanity (not necessarily the majority of humanity but a significant portion) had piled up into an over-engineered, possibly defensive, demand for the recognition of sexual transgression as a spiritual tool of equal value to (at that time) drugs and psychotherapy.What this book does is not just state what might now be said in a very different way with another thirty years of liberatory struggle under the belt, it lays out the findings of all those thwarted people in their explorations (in secret) of the truths lying behind the link between sexuality and spirituality that they had derived from the traditions of the East. This is also a book that is in the tradition of seeing magic as a science - a concept alien to any positivist who happens to pick it up and start reading.The point is that the scientists can still only tell part of the story. The psychologists are demonstrating the health relationships involved in sexual satisfaction. Wade has identified the convergence of spiritual and sexual technologies and outcomes. Psychotherapists are increasingly moving from being priests seeking to make people normal into arbitrators between persons and a world in which changing the world in conformity with will has become part of the equation for many people. Cognitive scientists are discovering the biochemical pathways that link orgasmic experience and the sense of the numinous - and are even postulating God genes and spirit molecules. But, in terms of the actual experience of a person getting spiritually from A to B and finding meaning in existence, science still has nothing to say. The only religions that in any way prepared the ground for this brave new and exciting world are the religions of the East and, in the West, the neo-pagan alternatives to the religions of the book. In this context, as the Western tradition that best developed a working technology of transcendence based on sexual energy, transgression, shamanistic excess and exhaustion and adaptation of meditative technique (where Spare had interesting things to say on the not wanting that permits success in desires that you no longer consciously have), the Magical Revival documented by Kenneth Grant is of critical importance.For this reason, this book is almost a must-read for anyone interested in self development and in the link between spirituality and sexuality even if, like me, you tend to reject its retrograde ethos, its pre-scientific basis and its excesses as all counter-productive to a sane and rounded life, ecstasy included. It remains my view that true liberatory sexual spirituality is held back, not enhanced, by belief systems like the ones in this book. They are now distractions from developing a much more clinical and disciplined approach, perhaps truly scientific, that takes the core of what the East and the Western mystery traditions have developed into systems, strips away their essentialist presuppositions and treats the whole thing as existentialist technique - i.e. the management of a surge of energy (which may or may not be sexual depending on personality) able to change brain structure at will based on altered states of consciousness that deliberately trigger the spirit molecules. There is no need for gods or demons except as tools and metaphors. Personally, I understand the short cut of drugs but, having achieved a form of gnosis myself in both of two states (which we might describe as tantric and zen), it is my personal challenge to find gnosis on terms that integrate me with the world and which are non-exploitative to the partner. This is definitely not Oshos Neo-Tantra which (in my opinion) misses the point that the aim is not integration and tranquillity but periodic disintegration and struggle in order to rebuild and restructure the self for new conditions. In that sense the transgressional aspects of Grants Typhonian system are worthwhile and should be respected - there is dangerous but life-enhancing meat in his book that should not be ignored because it is surrounded by nineteenth century accretions and the eccentricities of social outsiders.If you are interested in Neo-Tantra, by all means take that option but I remain convinced that, in the long run of life, the issues of transgression raised in the sex magic tradition that developed out of the OTO and which were brought into the relative open by Crowley and Spare, need to be faced head-on - death too needs to be faced and the Typhonian tradition does this as well. There is no better guide to this path and to its history than Kenneth Grant.
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