The Ninth Arch by Kenneth Grant

‘a rush of mephitic air from the unsealed depths’

Kenneth Grant, The Ninth Arch (Starfire Publishing 02) £30
available from www.mandrake.uk.net

‘Can you in good conscience recommend "The Ninth Arch" to someone who is only familiar with some of the early work of Grant? That is, is the new book comprehensible to a neophyte of Grant's work or should I resume investigation elsewhere in his canon, in the improbable event that copies can be found? I've read "AC and the Hidden God" and part of "The Magical Revival".’

Umm good question. I regard myself as a child of the first trilogy, Cults of the Shadow, Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God. I never really expected the second trilogy to even appear – Nightside of Eden, Outside the Circles of Time and Hecate’s Fountain; and I never even looked at the third trilogy, Outer Gateways, The Mauve Zone and now the Ninth Arch. So perhaps I am a bit of a guinea pig and give it a go. I was surprised how intriguing the Ninth Arch can be. I found it, to use KG’s own words ‘a rush of mephitic air from the unsealed depths’, a ‘Kamsin blast.’ truly something different in a word of publishing mediocrity.

‘The Ninth Arch is an ancient Masonic concept relating to the legend of the three Grand Masters engaged upon the erection of King Solomon’s Temples. After it was completed, the three deposited therein those things which were important to the craft, such as the arc of the covenant, a pot of manna, the rod of Aaron, the book of the law etc.’ Inscribed about it was the lost or unutterable Word.’ The purpose of Grant’s book is to explain this mystery and reveal the word.

The heart of Grant’s book is a 924 verse Book of the Spider, a mystical text channelled to Grants New-Isis Lodge in the 1950s. Around this sutra, Grant weaves almost six hundred pages of comment, mainly in the form of mini essays. It sounds an unpromising structure but it really works and is well suited to the lucid dreamers or to use Grant’s parlance, the inhabitants of the mauve zone to whom this books is addressed. Having no acquaintance with Grant’s earlier work might actually make this book even more evocative. There were some very obscure sections that would only really make sense if I totally entered into Grant’s system, but there were many comments that seemed to throw light on almost any style of magick.

After all it is the books central thesis that something out there is trying to tell us something using a whole variety of mediums and modes of communication. Crowley, he tells us, ‘with prophetic acumen [ ] presaged the massive interest in alien phenomena which erupted soon after his death and which was caused by Kenneth Arnold’s ‘flying saucer’ sighting [in 1947]. Whatever one’s attitude to such phenomena – positive, negative or indifferent – there is no just denial of the fact that the wave initiated an era of psychomythology unparalleled since man conceived the idea of the ‘gods’…. unless, therefore, we are to write off the entire ‘myth’ as an unprecedented mass delusion, we have to accept the fact that something approaching a seemingly new and inexplicable nature began slowly and insidiously to disturb the world in the year 1947.’. (p xix)

Acting on the assumptions that ‘Many a true word spoken in jest’; ‘the ‘ritualists of the New Isis Lodge utilized certain novels and stories as other magicians might use paintings or musical compositions to effect perichoresis and astral encounters’ xxxvi. Apart from the usually occult litany, H P Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood et al Grant primary source is Richard Marsh’s novel The Beetle which contains the only published account known [to Grant] of the Children of Isis who emerge in the channelled text in rather startling form.

I haven’t read Marsh’s novel but guess that Grant’s reworking of it is likely to be far more evocative. Really Grant’s books are a new artform what I have in the past called ‘auto-romance’. I picked it up near the end of the day, not expecting a factual hit, although there are some fascinating facts here somewhere – but more as a collective grimoire. I take a little snort and am then primed to enter the mauve zone. Here’s a little taster.

The oracle
31-2 below the tunnels of the spider hanging athwart the network of alleys choked in the mud, the sand of the Mokkatam hills …

The comment
The spider is here symbolic of the web of alleys that existed at the time Crowley received from Aiwass “The threefold book of the Law”, not far distant from the Mokkatam hills. This verse sets the scene for a series of events concerning the Children of Isis, of whose activities a fragmentary account was given in fictional form by Richard March writing in the 1890s. It is assumed that he was oblivious of the actuality of the events he described. It may not be so easy to assume that he was not an indirect descendant of that Obed Marsh of who Lovecraft writes in The Shadow over Innsmouth. It is also not impossible that he was related to Dr. Phineas March Black, a great uncle of the present commentator. Details of Dr. Black’s mysterious life are given in Against the Light, which contains much information relevant to this Book OKBISh. Note that the present verse constitutes verse Thirty-One of the Books as a whole.’

Kenneth Grant’s numerology may be suspect, his historical sources unreliable, but his poetical intuition is strangely prescient. I may not want to be part of the only true order but I can’t help admiring his eclecticism, his culture, his generosity towards other artists and writers. So this book is not be quite the triumphal arch many were hoping for to top out the edifice of previous books, but it is a final act from a highly creative magician and writer who has done more than any other living adept to explicate Crowley’s magical universe and to initiate us all into some very sinister mysteries.