Skoob Books Publishing Ltd, 11a-17 Sicilian Avenue, Southampton Row, London WC1A 2QH, 1992 E.V., Hardbound, $39.95 U.S.
From the Forward:
"... Between the years 1955 - 1962, I was involved with an occult Order known as New Isis Lodge. It functioned as a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), with headquarters in London. I founded the Lodge to channel transmissions from transplutonic sources,* and during the seven years of its activities it transformed the O.T.O. into the highly specialised vehicle of magical energy which Aleister Crowley had envisaged for it as long ago as 1945.
"... certain forms of tangential tantra sparked off by particular rites have been extracted from the Annals of the Lodge and edited, where necessary, to preserve textual continuity.
"... the book endeavours to follow the workings of these phenomena in dimensions that scientists are only just beginning to explore. These dimensions, which may be considered as existing outside or between the two states of dreaming and waking, I have called the Mauve Zone. It includes and excludes both states simultaneously. The designation comports occult overtones needing no explanation to those acquainted with the function of Daäth as the Gate of Ingress and of Egress to the other side of the Tree of Life.* To those not so acquainted, the Mauve Zone may be said to have a mythical analogue in the symbol of the Crimson Desert of the Arabs, which, according to Lovecraft, was the ancient equivalent of the Roba el Khaliyeh, a zone reputedly haunted by evil spirits and monsters of death.
"... Crowley's Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis)* - which I have here interpreted with reference, not to its mundane implications, but to its extraterrestrial provenance. As it is the first time this has been attempted, the reader is requested to exercise patience as the skeleton is gradually stripped of its deceptively human appearance. ...
"... AL Azif (The Necronomicon), which latter, according to Lovecraft, was entirely a product of fantasy. ... The idea was taken up by various editors and compilers of grimoires and no less than four versions of the Necronomicon have since been published! ..."
As you can see from the Forward, Grant is still taking H. P. Lovecraft's fictional Necronomicon and the entire mythos he created seriously, despite the fact that Lovecraft himself on numerous occasions insisted that it was all nothing but horror fantasy. However, Grant claims that Lovecraft unconsciously tapped into a kind of "primal grimoire" and he proceeds to identify the Secret Chiefs or Hidden Masters with Lovecraft's fictional Old Ones, primeval extradimensional monsters of a most inhuman and hideous nature whose sole reason for seeking entry or reentry into our dimension was to destroy humanity and everything we hold dear to gratify their apparently equally monsterous egos. Great stuff for fiction, but Lovecraft's fictional creations are pretty much the antithesis of the Secret Chiefs! What Grant has been trying to do all these years with Thelema is practically the same thing satanists have been doing to Christianity [and other religions and esoteric philosophies] - turning it upside down and inside out to serve his own petty personal ego and the qliphothic forces that master him. His insanity is not what Crowley had "envisaged" for the O.T.O. or Thelema. It is the reverse of that, the perversion of Thelema. And nothing that Grant has done in decades has been sanctioned by either Crowley, Karl Germer or the (now defunct) Ordo Templi Orientis.
The so-called Mauve Zone is naught but Daäth, the false sephira of the Tree of Life, to which there is no "other side" as the Tree is only a symbolic representation of the multidimensional aspects of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Plunging into Daäth, so to speak, does not lead anywhere but to the qliphothic realms wherein the ego is torn, shredded, tortured, made one with the empty shells and used by them. He who plunges into Knowledge, forsaking Understanding and Wisdom, becomes an empty thing, sterile and perverse. He becomes a brother of the Left Hand Path, a Black Brother, as it is called in the Western Tradition, and employing the meanings of "Left Hand Path" as used in the Eastern Tradtion as Grant does to rationalize his fall from grace, in no way changes the facts of that fall.
"... how can a man go so far wrong after he has, as an Adeptus Minor, attained the 'Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel'?
"Recall the passage in the 14th Aethyr, 'See where thine Angel hath led Thee,' and so on. Perhaps the Black Brother deserts his Angel when he realises the Programme.
"Perhaps his error was so deeply rooted, from the very beginning, that it was his Evil Genius that he evoked.
"In such cases the man's policy is of course to break off all relations with the Supernal Triad, and to replace it by inventing a false crown, Daath. To them Knowledge will be everything and what is Knowledge but the very soul of Illusion?
"Refusing thus the true nourishment of all his faculties, they lose their structual unity, and must be fortified by continuous doses of dope in anguished self-preservation. Thus all its chemical equations become endothermic."
Hecate's Fountain, like all of Grant's books, is practically unreadable, inane and one might suspect that he is employed by the makers of headache relieving medications as wasting ones time trying to get through and understand his ravings will surely keep them in business. Making things worse, his books are filled with a plethora of footnotes [in quoting Grant I will indicate each footnote with a simple asterisk rather than the one or two digit number in the original] and it seems to me that these numerous footnotes serve only one real purpose, which Grant himself may not even be aware of, wooden-headed puppet of the qliphothic forces that he is, and that is to distract the reader and break his or her concentration and perhaps even shortcircuit reason so that if the book is not given up on by the reader, that reader will start accepting what is written without giving serious thought to it. The text alone is often confusing enough, composed of a massive hodgepodge of concepts, terms and whatnot from almost every conceivable source, including fiction as well as fact, that are nothing more than tattered and soiled rags torn from the robes of legitimate religions, philosophies, myths and fables, crudely stitched together with ill-chosen words, but when you add to this an incredible number of footnotes as Grant has it becomes doubly confusing. And remember that confusion is the primary weapon in the arsenal of the satanist. Kenneth Grant is simply "satanizing" Thelema in an attempt to destroy it, although he himself may not consciously recognize this fact.
Page 2:
"... the officiating priestess was an accomplished ritualist. Mira herself was a natural sensitive and had several times demonstrated her peculiar powers."
Page 3:
"There were transplutonic elements in the vision and they seem to have revealed, in literal fasion, regions from which Lovecraft had received the Fungi from Yuggoth.* ..."
Page 4:
"One acolyte claimed, after the séance, that she had been physically levitated several inches above the floor."
Pages 7 and 8:
"Her occult affinity with water made Clanda an unfortunate choice, as the evening's proceedings were to prove. She lost consciousness at the climax of the rite, fell against the carved metal dais whereon LÎ was enthroned, and struck her head against the bas-reliefs, fantastic monsters of the deep more appropriate to Cthulhu's Cult than to Hastur's. ... A trickle of blood from her earlobe - lacerated by the protruding tail of a sea monster ..."
Page 9:
"... all hell broke lose. Judging from the general tone of letters I receive from omniscient occultists the world over, I imagine I shall be informed that this is easily explicable. ... Clanda, as has been recorded elsewhere,* died at sea, claimed perhaps by the Deep Ones. Some months after the episode here described, LÎ fell from the air when a plane carrying her over central Asia crashed against mountains. Was she also claimed by the elemental minions? ... This incident too originated as a side-kick or tangential tantrum of routine ritual."
Page 10:
"Clanda, with her hypersex-centred personality ..."
Pages 11 and 12:
"... Clanda appeared as a squameous teratoma swimming in an arid sea of blood-streaked etheric substances pullulating with the unwholesome currents of the qliphoth. ... Clanda had unconsciously harboured in her aura the remnants of rapport with questionable entities engendered by her past association with a Witch Cult.* The connection was now reactivated and it caused a sudden violent conflict in her psyche. I felt the shock of it but I was totally unprepared for the eruption of black energy that accompanied its awakening. ... Clanda shrieked, rushed raving about the premises and grabbed a dagger ... the weapon in question happened to be the magical weapon used by Aleister Crowley in his evocation, years earlier, of Choronzon, whom Crowley once described as 'the first and deadliest of all the powers of evil'.* ... I made to seize the weapon, noticing as I did so that the Alchemist was clutching his breast and writhing on the slab as if suffering the pangs of an excruciating immolation. Clanda tripped and fell as the dagger - now unsheathed - clattered on the slab. The Alchemist later told me that he had at that moment seen a hooded shape hovering over him, about to inject into his heart the venom that flowed from its eyes in a jet of mauve."
I am, of course, condensing portions of several operations he described the results of, blurring everything together almost as badly as Grant has, simply to present a lump sum of only a few examples. He continued on page 12:
"This was my first introduction to the Necromancies in Mauve that were to recur persistently throughout the history of New Isis Lodge. Mauve is one of the colours ascribed to the 'false' sephira Daäth. Its outpouring as a kala, in a rite having overtones of necrophily, was to prove significant for it enabled me, at a later period, to penetrate the Lovecraftian Gnosis with special reference to the Mysteries of the 'abominable Plateau of Lêng'."
Pages 18 and 19:
"LÎ was sunk in deep trance. ... At the climax of the rite LÎ shed her robe and, like a white shadow, incredibly reptilian, slithered over the rim of the tank. As her form clove the waters eight phallic feelers reached up and seized her. They engaged her in multiple maithuna in which each tentacle participated in turn. ... Violent paroxysms displaced the black hoods, revealing bald shining heads and the protuberant eyes of the batrachian minions of Cthulhu. This transaction occurred only in the depths of the mauve zone, for on the dais LÎ's figure, still hooded, sat slumped in a heap like a pool of oil on the point of oozing down the legs of the throne."
Page 106:
"Unable to withstand the current that suddenly seized both of them, Rodi valiantly struggled for control. But the door had opened. A heavy, obese, repellant figure dominated the lodgeroom. As Rodi dropped the censer that an acolyte had thrust into his hand, he saw the tulpa that Nerik had seen; a white slug-like entity pointing with a mottled claw at the image glowing blackly beneath Nerik's fingers. Then its body seemed to boil, as it absorbed the dark light emanating from the altar. It swelled with shadow until it filled the doorway with menacing intensity, and strange excrescences - like mandibles - sprouted from its head. This episode had startling tangential results. Shortly afterwards, Nerik experienced a constantly recurring nightmare in which she was the recipient of an alien transmission. ... Parallel with her obsession by the burrower, grew the conviction within her that Aleister Crowley was the prophet of a futuristic epoch, and that the Aeon of Horus was a preparation for the total destruction of humanity. This would result, or so she thought, in releasing from inner earth a swarm of burrowers, and other 'creeping things', which would swiftly achieve mastery of the planet. ... it was a denizen of this realm that transmitted to Nerik the fragments that finally drove her to madness."
Page 143:
"... It was quite an ordinary box, just like a boot-box, yet at that moment it housed forces that had blasted both Zoyle and the priest. ... Zoyle and the priest were stripped overnight of their magical powers. ... Two individuals hostile to the Lodge - a witch and her lover - died that night.*"
Page 188:
"A powerful current of magical energy had been consecrated by Oola, and the lodgeroom was alive with vibrations. One of these seized upon an acolyte who received the full impact of the current like a lightning-conductor. She was struck to the floor as the Force zigzagged from Oola on its devastating flight; a perfect example, physically speaking, of a tangential tantrum. ... The acolyte barely survived, but there manifested that night in full force the tulpa of a Great Old One whose name also added to 131, which is that of Samael,* commonly known as the Devil!"
Pages 217 - 219:
"Its result, however unfortunate, caused the tangential tantrum which eventually gained for it a foremost place in the lodge annals. The member in question was of a low grade in the lodge ... She [Serenye] had nurtured a hatred for a rival, in connection with some sordid sexual affair, ... There was in fact about her personality a quality strongly suggestive of the felidae. ... It was too late to recall the grey shadow; it broke loose from the talisman despite desperate banishings on Xedo's part. It floated like a grey cloud above the throne and devoured the form of Serenye, as the cat leaped from the dais and vanished."
And on and on it goes, no descriptions of how Grant and company proceeded, the purposes for the various operations vague at best, so that obviously the most important thing about all of this were the "side-kicks" or "tangential tantrums". Now remember that Kenneth Grant presents himself as a Master, a great adept, the O.H.O. of the O.T.O. [from which he has been expelled decades ago], and yet his enthusiasm over these "tangential tantrums" is that of a cowan or neophyte. His so-called "tangential tantrums" are nothing more than the result of bad magic, just as the thrill of electricity coursing through the body, a fabulous display of sparks and fire are the result of uninsulated or poorly insulated electrical wiring short circuiting after the switch has been thrown. Now of course we do not know how much of what Grant writes is true and how much is merely a product of the "Mauve Zone", i.e. dreams or hallucinations, perhaps shared in some cases, experienced in the hypnagogic state, real in some sense upon the lowest astral levels of consciousness, but "real" or not, what an awful microcosm to be so filled with hideous monsters, madness and death. This is not at all the evolutionary goal of Magick and Thelema. It is, at best, devolution - a kind of undoing without the hope of resolution and reformation.
His assistants seem to be for the most part poorly trained [if disciplined at all!] hysterical spiritualists and nymphomaniacs, and it is no wonder some died or were driven to further, more obvious, madness as they were adding their own mental and emotional illnesses to his, each playing against and strengthening the madness of the other.
And the individuals Kenneth Grant speaks highly of, misbegotten anti-saints in his anti-thelemic perverse personal universe: Michael Bertiaux [see TNN II.3, July 1979 E.V.] and Soror Andahadna, aka Maggie Cook, Maggie Ingles, Maggie Crosby, Nema, etc., etc., who, when I corresponded with her, was hiding out on a farm with a person called Shadow, hiding from her ex-husband who was trying to gain custody of their children, while also waiting for the end of the world and communicating with the Sirian Comity and crystalline extraterrestrials affixed to asteroids. Also Jane Wolfe who horrified Crowley with her penchant for crass spiritualism of the worst type, Charles Stansfeld Jones who tried to fly before he could crawl, fell and went mad, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism, and Jack Parsons, perhaps once a genius but one who had obviously gone quite mad before blowing himself up either in an accident or committing suicide.
Grant also seems to revere Austin Osman Spare as a saint, and no doubt the man was a talented artist, but even a glance at his later work shows how both his mind and talent became perverse.
In the bibliography and elsewhere Grant mentions Linda Falorio, relying some upon her fortunately unpublished work which she calls The English Qabalah (Liber CXV). Linda I know personally. She and her live-in-lover lurk about in my neck o' the woods. I will present only one pertinent anecodte here, amusing though these anecdotes are, primarily because she is not worth any real consideration.
Quite a long time ago, around 1979 E.V., Linda came to my home with a gift. I had known her and her mate, Fred, for some time, but I had never spent a lot of time with them nor did I desire to get close to them. It was painfully obvious from the first that they were both ... well ... how can I put this sweetly? I suppose I can't. Idiots. This particular time Linda presented me with a copy of a thick manuscript, simply but adequately bound, and she struggled over what she should write in the inscription to me, finally settling upon "Do what thou wilt". Not very imaginative, but typical. It reminded me of the Winter Solstice party she and Fred once held - everyone sitting around bullshitting and the only reason I attended is that I was literally all dressed up with nowhere to go, having had to take a date home early - and through the evening Fred, sitting in the centre of the circle of guests as if he were some great teacher, continually squawked "Do what thou wilt! Do what thou wilt!" and it was obvious that he did not in the least even understand that simple Thelemic statement, the Law of Thelema. Anyway, Linda made a fatal mistake when she gave me a copy of The English Qabalah. After confessing that her ego is very wrapped up in the work, she asked me for my honest opinion of it once I had read it. Foolish girl. I would have been happy to simply accept the gift graciously and keep my opinions to myself so long as it was not a published work, but, well, she asked for it!
The MS began with a justification for the numerical and symbolic attributes she gave to the letters of the English Alphabet, the basics of which, by the way, she found in a book, and it amused me to see that she made up rules but then either broke those rules or changed them whenever it suited her to justify this or that attribution. The bulk of the MS was nothing more than words, names, phrases, and whole verses from The Book of the Law, their numerations calculated. The most amusing part about this is that not only was no effort expended in trying to show what any of it meant, but at least 50% of her calculations were incorrect. Like her hero, Kenneth Grant, Linda Falorio proved to be incapable of simple addition and either could not fathom the workings of an adding machine or calculator or simply never bothered to employ such a device. [Reminds me of the story told to me by a reliable astrologer about Linda and how she sat in the midst of the Pittsburgh Astrological Association with several books on her lap, one of which was an ephemeris, supposedly a great astrologer, but when someone asked her to check the ephemeris in her lap for the postion of the moon, I believe it was, or some planet, she was completely incapable of doing so. But I digress.]
In a very polite letter I gave Linda the opinion of her work that she asked for, detailing the above errors and more in as positive and helpful a manner as possible. Shortly after that, having not heard from her, I dropped into the local occult book store and there she and Fred were. I, however, was invisible. Or so it seemed! She and Fred looked past me, or through me, as if I were not there. How horrid of me to give Linda the honest opinion of her work that she asked me to give! The nerve of me! Cad! I almost doubled over with laughter, but held it in, maintained my polite decorum, and I believe that was the last time we ever set eyes on one another. I have been informed since then that the dyspeptic duo are running about claiming that I have threatened to murder them, I suppose unaware of the fact that defamation of character could get them sued. Even this digression is more attention than Linda and Fred deserve, and certainly neither deserve the kind of attention that murder would require. Besides, how does one kill things already dead?
Kenneth Grant also values highly the infamous Marjorie Cameron, of whom he writes on pages 28 and 29:
"Cameron claimed that she had been through one of the 'strangest and wildest voyages into the unknown that has ever been told'. Because of it she was considered insane and shunned by all but a 'peculiar few'. She claimed that the Babalon Work which Parsons had begun in 1946 'set in motion the second part of a great force which was divided into three. A(leister) C(rowley) began the first, three years before I was born. I never knew the man, yet his desire gave me birth. His paternity sings in my veins'.
"... Crowley was undergoing his supreme ordeal on the way to attaining the Grade of Ipsissimus, 10°=1° A.·.A.·.,* i.e. in 1924. This happened to be also the birthtime of the present author, who later became Aossic-Aiwass 718 and Crowley's successor as Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis.'
"Cameron believed that the war-engine referred to in AL.III.7, was the Flying Saucer, and that through her intermission, and by means of these war-engines, her 'peculiar few' would be transported to Mars, 'which I believe, is somehow my home. Earth will explode in a collision of the two Star Islands which are reported now moving towards each other in the heavens. And resulting therefrom, my star, the great Seven-pointed Star of Babalon, shall be born in the heavens.'
"The Star was not born at the Summer Solstice, 1953, nor at any other known time; but in 1955, the Eleven-pointed Star of Set, beyond Yuggoth - the Star known as Nu-Isis - began transmitting the vibrations that were received by New Isis Lodge at that time. These transmissions lasted seven years and their results are embodied in my double trilogy, and in a certain secret grimoire known as The Book of the Spider, which will remain unpublished until a predestined throne has been ascended."
It is worth noting that Grant also quoted Cameron on page 33 as having said or written "'I carry within me something black and dreadful - it writhes in my womb like a monster of Hell'." Indeed this was true and that monster was her own mad ego, a madness that Grant has also obviously succumb to.
The Book of the Spider sounds to me like a lure, but the world can do without another book by Kenneth Grant, and especially if its publication will announce the ascension to that "predestined throne" for surely then Mr. Grant will be announcing that he has become God Of This World and the planet currently has enough to deal with, thank you very much.
It distresses me that Grant seems to be in possession of some artifacts that, like the title O.H.O. of the O.T.O., he has no real right to. According to statements on page 5 he has "the chandelier lustre that was used as a blasting-rod by Allan Bennett ... the magical dagger used by Crowley in his evocation of Choronzon ... [and] an original portrait of Lam, an extra-terrestrial entity, which I selected - at Crowley's invitation - from one of his portfolios." Of course advertising this fact can also act as a lure to try to suck in devotees.
He continually refers to Lam and Aiwass [aka Aiwaz] as "extra-terrestrial" entities, he wrote on page 162 that "For Crowley, the Great Work involved precisely the establishment of contact with non-human intelligences", and he continues with the same old theme that all of his books are based on, making such statements as that on page 247 of the glossary:
"A.·.A.·. (Argenteum Astrum): The initials of the Order of the Silver Star. The Star is Sirius, or Sothis, the Star of Set."
Grant is constantly mis-directing students and aspirants away from the True Path of Thelema for it is not Outer Space to which we should look and the physical entities that may be alive on other planets, at least not in this context, but rather it is the Inner Space we should as magicians explore and conquer. There is where we will find entities like Lam and Aiwass. There and there only is where we will contact the True Self, our Daemon, Genius, our Holy Guardian Angel. Grant often refers readers to "One Star in Sight", an instructive poem to be found in Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice, but he doesn't seem to get it. The importance of the last two lines seems to escape him.
Choronzon masters Kenneth Grant, and in mastering him perverts his perception of the facts, twisting the conclusions he draws from those perverted facts. With some degree of accuracy he defines the demon of the Abyss thusly:
"The principle of disintegration (of the Ego) that must be brought into play in order to effect the ultimate reintegration of phenomena with their noumenal source. As Choronzon dissolves the Ego, it is regarded - by the Ego - as the essence of evil. The concept of Choronzon plays a vitally important rôle in the magick of the Mauve Zone. It is particularly dangerous because it can assume any form whatever in which to delude the magician rash enough to invoke it without first having established communion with his Angel."
And this may show precisely where Kenneth Grant, as an aspiring magician, stumbled worst and fell.
Grant has told us in his book that Crowley described Choronzon as "the first and deadliest of all the powers of evil" and this is true for Choronzon is not regarded by Ego as the essence of evil as Grant claims. Choronzon is the ego and thus the essence and source of evil. However, Grant is correct when he says that Choronzon "can assume any form whatever in which to delude the magician", and this Evil Genius, this false self, has assumed for Grant the form of the True Self, and accepting his own ego as his god, donning the false crown of Daäth, Kenneth Grant, fixated, obsessed, haunted by the monsters of his own mind, a flayed, tormented creature utterly lost in the qliphothic realms, spends his every waking moment in the effort to mislead others and drag them down with him. What little merit there was to the man was lost long years ago. Only as an example of an utter failure at magick, an example of what is not a Thelemite, is he now of worth to the world. He is like the totalled automobile some officials leave alongside a busy highway, all twisted, misshapen, wrecked beyond repair, to remind the travellers on that road why they should slow down and be careful, obeying the laws.
There is so much nonsense and insanity in Hecate's Fountain that a volume ten times the size of this 288-page book would be needed to deal with it all. For instance, as the Rev. Montague Summers saw the Devil everywhere, so too does Kenneth Grant see Cthulhu hidden in numerous names and words that he comes across, as in the Greek word stélé for "stone", [written in Greek capitals, using the old version of Sigma which resembles an English C, the e's being Etas and looking like an uppercase H], he tells us on page 34.
He fills his book with dubious bouts of gematria. For example, on page 34 he also has: "The number of this 'unspeakable name' is 333,*" and in the footnote explains: "IXAXAAR = 10 + 60 + 1 + 60 + 1 + 1 + 200 = 333", 333 being the numeration of Choronzon, but to accomplish this he is attributing Hebrew numerations to the English letters and transliterating X as Samekh, normally transliterated as S.
Perhaps most damning of all in this book so far as I am concerned are two passages in particular that prove he is not a Thelemite and thus then how could he be the head of a Thelemic order? Page 86:
"After an eruption of typically Crowleian bibliophobia, and anti-Buddhist sentiment, appears the statement [in The Book of the Law - ED] ' ... the Kings of the earth shall be Kings forever: the slaves shall serve'. Apart from the evident fact that AL condones slavery and requires it, we are left in no doubt that royalty will return."
And on page 189: "The acceptance of AL automatically comports also the acceptance of the idea of slavery. It had naturally provided a great stumbling block to initiates and non-initiates alike. Intentionally, or not, Bertiaux offers a way out by interpreting the term 'slave' in much the same way as a Hindu would interpret the term das, which is often translated 'slave', 'servant', 'devotee', 'votary'. The slaves of Aiwaz may therefore be viewed in this light. 'The slaves shall serve', simply because service is their nature, and in a mystical sense, there is no higher sadhana than service to the chosen Deity and/or Guru."
Pardon my French, but this is nothing but the typical elitist bullshit that is common among those individuals in our society who feel stupid and impotent and only make themselves so by refusing to recognize their failings, admit to and deal with them, and set about to perfect themselves, raise the level of their intellect and learn how to function in the world. Instead of reaching for their True Self, trying to achieve their highest potential, they embrace their ego and lose themselves in a fantasy world of their own making where they are superior to everyone around them ... at least in their own imagination.
Here it is. I can make it no more simple than this. It is a stumbling block for some, and obviously Grant made "a great fall". And there is no need for a whacko like Michael Bertiaux to offer one "a way out" of the moral dilemma one may find oneself in.
"Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve."
This portion of Verse 58 from Chapter II of The Book of the Law [Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX] refers to two basic types of individuals. (1) The kings of the earth: essentially this refers to Thelemites but it is applicable to any man or woman who has become master of his or her earthly nature, who strives for ever greater control of body, mind and emotions for the sake of not only personal evolution, but also for the evolution of all. (2) The slaves that serve does not refer to individuals destined to serve Thelemites, Kenneth Grant or any other genuine or false king of the earth. These individuals are those who make of themselves slaves to alcohol or drugs, slave gods and the religions built around them, willing victims to the bully, the criminal, the charlatan and the dictator. The slaves that serve are those who serve their own fears, their own petty often self-destructive desires, and though in most cases it may seem hopeless, because "Compassion is the vice of kings" [CCXX II.21], it is the duty of everyone who has found his or her Way to assist others in that great task, to help them along the evolutionary Path of the Wise so that they too may discover their kingly nature and be masters of themselves. There will always be those who master their earthly nature, realize themselves as a king, ay, even god of their personal universe, and there will always be the slaves who serve. However, the effort to evolve and assist others to evolve must never cease. False prophets like Kenneth Grant make this especially necessary for they exist only to drag others down with them, to pull them away from the True Path and down into the depths of their lowest, most unevolved nature.
Not only is Hecate's Fountain another awful, headache producing book full of the same old ravings from Kenneth Grant, but it is a continued effort to pervert Thelema, misrepresent Aleister Crowley and his work, and mislead sincere aspirants so that they may never find their Way on the Path. It is worth less than the paper it is printed on [thank the gods a friend sent me a photocopy of a borrowed book to make this review possible!] and it is worse than inaccurate and misleading.
Unfortunately, Hecate's Fountain is not the last book to be written by Kenneth Grant.