Tag Archives: golders green

Kenneth Grant dilated upon Mathers’ and Gardner’s dicks

Posted on February 7, 2011 | 17 comments

I cannot break my oath to Kenneth Grant’s OTO, and I won’t. Here he is pictured in 1974. We used to drink in a pub just round the corner from where he lived, and did so much that my girlfriend and I renamed it the KG.

As we lived in Golders Green too, I sometimes took a trip there on my tod. One night, I fell into a conversation with two Hindu guys – a Brahmin from Gujarat and a Brahmin from Bengal.

Should they have been drinking at all? The tapestry unfolded.  The Gujarati Brahmin was appalled at the fact another member of his gotra on the other side of India ate fish. The Bengali guy was appalled that the rigorous diet on the west coast was quite so vegetarian.

A Jain joined us. He said that day was a religious day in Jain tantrik culture. On one day a year, a faithful Jain could drink and do all sorts of things that they couldn’t do  on any other day in the year.

Kenneth Grant was a thelemite but as the Kaula Upanishad said, you must respect other people’s notions of what the heck any of it meant. He was very taken with David Hall’s notion that Beelzebub (Gurdjieff) and the Beast (Crowley) were two of a kind.

As for the Nu Isis Lodge. As I was inducted in the first degree of Kenneth’s order, I never got to meet these people in 1973.  Ithell Colquhoun was very nice to the SOTHiS people in her book about Mathers, but we’re still not sure where in  her book, Sword of Wisdom – the Mathers picture, is. She left it to the Tate but now, apparently, it is nowhere found.

Kenneth was witty about the witch Graham Gardner and about the s0-called Scot McGregor Mathers. To me he described the BT tower as Gardner’s dick, and Centre Point as Mathers’ dick. Which one was the bigger dick?

Or was it the other way round? He was a very witty man. ♦

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Kenneth Grant: Aossic Aiwass, memories are made of this

Posted on February 6, 2011 | 7 comments

I have very fond memories of Kenneth Grant – very fond memories indeed. Unlike quite a few of my friends, I never got expelled from his Typhonian OTO, I resigned and he was gracious enough to allow me to exit, gracefully. I was a member of his Sovereign Sanctuary.

It all came about because of this. I wasn’t interested in Indian traditions at all, until 1974 or so, when a vivid dream woke me up to stuff.  Kenneth, actually, was very knowledgeable about tha tantrik traditions. Apart from spending a great deal of time in India in the 1950s, he also contributed many articles about Hinduism to Man, Myth and Magic.

He was very sympathetic to me when in 1978  threw up a good job to visit Mahendranath (Dadaji) in Old Mehmadabad. I had corresponded with Dadaji for well over a year – I sought tantrik initiation.

In a very sympathetic conversation I had with Aossic Aiwass,  the then OHO of the Typhonian OTO, I had spelled out my vivid dream to him, and I asked him for tantrik initiation. He said he had never had tantrik initiation. Shortly after this, I got a letter from Dadaji – he had had articles published in John Spiers’ magazine Values, and John Spiers and I had exchanged adverts with each other – me in my first magazine Azoth. Dadaji asked me to send him copies of Azoth and latterly SOTHiS magazine – Jan Bailey,  David Hall and myself had just started this organ.

I felt I had to go to India and seek initiation into a tradition that suddenly appeared to be in my mind and in my heart and in my body.  Kenneth conferred a VII degree honorary initiation on Mahendranath, never to my knowledge rescinded.

I continue to have the utmost regard for Kenneth Grant – his knowledge was deep, practical and full of wisdom. He knew Dylan Thomas in the early 1950s – his books of poetry show that Sarasvati sat on his tongue. He told me, when he was writing his first Typhonian Trilogy, that these books were also informed by poetry. He said that it was important, after you had digested wisdom, that you published it and made it available. He said that when you died, and began to get back to the Light, you would read stuff in books and it would remind you who you were before.

Digestion, he said, involved excretion too, and these were books. If you failed to write what you had learned, or felt, it was the equivalent of mental constipation.

He was devoted to the goddess in all of her guises.


This picture is of Kenneth and me in 1978 in our flat in Golders Green, just round the corner from where he lived. I am missing him. He was a master of wisdom.  I venerate his memory.♣

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Kenneth Grant is dead, great

Posted on February 1, 2011 | 12 comments

I am reliably informed that Kenneth Grant – born in 1924 –died two weeks back.

I have many memories of Kenneth, and will tell them, one by one, and over and over again. I have many letters from him, and will scan them in. Kenneth was a polymath, and said over and over again the power of words was the greatest thing on the planet. He tried to get me to give his letters back to him, but I was a bit of a refusenik about that – it was he who told me that when letters were sent they were the property of the receptor. What a man!

Kenneth lived in a Typhonian Tower,and a bit like the Lady of Shallott, was always looking out for strangers living in Golders Green, he lived there for a long time, with strange creatures outside the suburban semi he, Steffi and Gregori lived.

Grant was a genius in many ways, and an idiot in other ways. In his loft was a vast collection of Austin Osman Spare paintings but once he asked me to get rid of a vast collection of 1950s pornographic paintings.

My then girlfriend, Jan Bailey, a co-editor of Sothis magazine, helped me to dump Kenneth’s 1950s porn – it took five weeks – there was  so much of it. It all went in several bins.

Kenneth was eloquent about sex – his books are full of it. Once, he said, he shagged a Chinese woman on a graveyard in Soho – he said her tits were so small but her thighs so big that he came all over her face, almost immediately.

He was far less forthcoming about the Ordo Templi Orientis. This was Mr Grant’s Ivory Tower. He became a refusinek if you asked him anything about it at all – I’m kind of thinking he didn’t want to think about it himself.

In short, Kenneth Grant was a very nice person and I am totalled that he is dead. I loved him.

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