RIP Kenneth Grant (1924-2011).

The last living student of Aleister Crowley has died at the age of 86.

Kenneth Grant served as Crowley’s secretary during the last years of the master’s life, fetching him heroin while Crowley scribbled insults in his diary. Grant also famously befriended Austin Osman Spare, another great 20th-century occult genius, who drew the portrait of Grant reproduced above.

Grant went on to write over twenty books, including biographies of Crowley and Spare, but he will be best remembered for his later collection of nine visionary and startlingly original occult tomes, known collectively as the Typhonian Trilogies. These strange and often unintentionally silly books are not traditional grimoires, but dark and wildly speculative explorations into Lovecraftian entities and the reverse side of the Tree of Life, known as “the Tunnels of Set.”

Due to a caustic split with the OTO, Grant never received the attention from modern magicians and Thelemites that he probably deserved. Now that he’s passed, it’s likely that his work will be re-examined and finally integrated into the occult mainstream.

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