The
Ninth Arch is woven around a transmission received over the course of New Isis Lodge workings, ‘The
Book of the Spider’ or ‘Liber OKBISh’. This
transmission first started during a magical working of the 29th Tunnel of Set,
Qulielfi, around 1952. The principal medium for the transmissions was a
priestess known as Soror Arim. She appears in Grant’s novel Against the Light as Margaret Leesing. She
was not the only medium for the transmissions, but she played the larger role
and co-ordinated the work of several priestesses of the Lodge.
The
Book of the Spider is essentially a collection of cryptic oracles which
were received over a number of years, and were in retrospect arranged into 29
chapters, each of 29 verses. Some of the verses were not heard, or have been
lost, but this is the basic pattern. A couple of years after the original
transmission was received, the Current once again became active, and a second
transmission was received. This was a smaller number of verses, and again was
arranged retrospectively into 3 additional chapters, again of 29 verses each.
The
transmissions were sometimes audible, but sometimes apprehended visually also.
Thus there are sigils amongst the verses.
With
all this talk of transmissions, I think that we had better stop and remind
ourselves of what Grant had to say in relation to the transmission of the Wisdom of S’lba:
The series of verses entitled collectively the Wisdom of S’lba ... were not
written down at any particular time or place, although the state of
consciousness in which they were received was invariably the same. The process
was initiated as early as the year 1939 when the Vision of Aossic first manifested
in the manner described in Outside the
Circles of Time (chapter 8). The vision unfolded sporadically throughout
the time of Aossic’s association with Aleister Crowley and Austin
Osman Spare. But the dynamic aspect of the Working, that is to say the
integration of the Vision into a coherent whole, occurred during the period of New Isis Lodge’s existence.
Transmissions
are not a matter of establishing some sort of radio contact with a discarnate
entity and transcribing what it has to say. A transmission can be via any of
the senses. Often it will be intuited or subtly apprehended, with the
imagination as catalyst. Imagination is not whim or fancy, though this is the
baggage that the word has accumulated in modern times. Rather, imagination is
the space in which things occur. It is cosmic, though there are individual
areas of awareness of imagination, and it is those areas around the individual
of which he or she is more immediately aware, that we regard as "our"
imagination. The truth is, though, that it is not "ours", but a
common or cosmic area, the local reaches of which we are more immediately
aware.
Transmission
takes many forms. It is an inspirational flow into the more personal areas of
imagination, and will often become garbed in forms drawn from the personal
subconscious. We see this in Lovecraft’s work for instance, much of
the inspiration occurring through dream, and expressed through imagery drawn
from the extensive reading and day-dreaming of Lovecraft’s childhood.
This is not to be wondered at. Much as light is refracted and transformed by
its passage through a prism or a piece of coloured glass, or as the setting sun
through atmospheric matter produces a pageant of glorious and stirring colours,
so the transmission of a Current will be coloured by the personal areas of
imagination. This is absolutely inevitable. The wind, for instance, only
becomes manifest in the stirring leaves of the tree through which it moves, the
perfumes which it agitates, the skin against which it brushes, the shapes into
which it swirls the desert sand.
At
the time of the New Isis Lodge
workings which attracted and then incubated this informing Current, the main
Priestess, Margaret Leesing, and many of her colleagues, were extremely caught
up in occult fiction, and in two books in particular – Dope by Sax Rohmer, and The
Beetle by Richard Marsh. At this time, New
Isis Lodge had evolved a magical ritual technique which involved the
dramatization of fiction. As Kenneth Grant describes it in The Ninth Arch:
As already mentioned in the General Introduction to this
book, the ritualists of New Isis Lodge
utilized certain novels and stories as other magicians might use paintings or
musical compositions to affect perichoresis
and astral encounters. They entered into a tale as they might enter into a
given picture, a scene, a desert, a crowded drawing-room, or other venue.
Applied to the novel, the process develops dramatically as a vividly kinetic
experience that becomes startlingly oracular. We used, principally, Richard
Marsh’s novel The Beetle,
and Sax Rohmer’s ‘A Tale of Chinatown’ or Dope, for no other reason than because
the chief Skryer had recently read these writings, and because other Lodge
members also were acquainted with them. Marsh’s tale, in particular,
was chosen because it contained the only published account known to the present
author of the Children of Isis, and
therefore seemed en rapport with the Wisdom of S’lba and with the
oracles of OKBISh.
These
are the circumstances, the prism, the coloured glass, though which the verses
of the Book of the Spider is
expressed. There is reference, for instance, to such characters as Shša, the
Evil Woman; to Sin Sin Wa, the Chinese villain and sage; to Tling-a-Ling, his
pet raven and familiar; to Sam Tžk, his revered Ancestor; all these characters
are drawn from Sax Rohmer ’s Dope.
There are also references to other characters drawn from fiction, such as Helen
Vaughan and Mrs Beaumont from Arthur Machen’s story The Great God Pan. These are masks,
clothing, and are not intended to point to profundities of meaning inherent in
the stories in which these characters occur. There are references to scenes in
novels, such as The Brood of the Witch
Queen by Sax Rohmer; or characters from Lovecraft’s stories, such
as Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward. Take the verses of chapter 6, for example:
Oily waters, murky, lapping, licking the rotten timbers
of the wharf encrusted with Limehouse slime.
Perhaps it was a Chandu dive where first I met her, Shša,
the Evil Woman.
No telling where a roamer might end up and find himself
face to face with the bird of Sin Sin Wa.
There were in those days
Sails on the misty Yellow River
Chinese dreams, junks on the poppy trails. Nothing
relevant to an aeon of
remorse except the faint green spirals of incense curling
about the ecstatic features of a barbaric goddess ...
Shša!
Shša! Shša!
How the silent river fled and hid the white frills of its
troubled surf between the dark flanks of the Witch‑Queen, below Festat!
Only one plumbed the depths of that river and found
nothing there
but the bones of innumerable crocodiles ‑ bound for Fayžm, beneath the sacred lake.
And these bones assembled themselves
and made an immaculate Goddess in alabaster wrought,
or plaster bought of an image‑caster in London’s
Chancery Lane.
Again the chinless abnormality with the lantern eyes and
meldrum snout no yellow veil may hide.
Darkening to a silhouette against the pure pale azure sky ... sixteen
teeth and the sharpness of death washed by a surging vermilion foam.
Nightmare in the eyes. They increase, they wax, growing
enormous they eclipse the whole accursŽd face.
Floating in their abysmal skies the junk rides the gentle
ripple as it laps the wharf.
A single lantern showers its beams on deserted streets
licked by the encroaching tide
as it eats tiny holes in the decomposing planks. They
overlap the water ‑ calm now, swaying gently like the lantern.
They see ‑ these eyes ‑ where the steep
staircase cleaves a deep furrow in the outer waves, and plunges.
All nautical now, reeking of fish and decaying hunks ...
It is possible at this point to swing oneself onto the
staircase by means of the hawser‑web the Spider spun but yesterday when
strolling down Chancery Lane in brilliant sunshine.
I collided head on with that indescribable monstrosity.
Much of this imagery
is drawn from Sax Rohmer’s novel Dope.
The references to Limehouse, to Ho-Nan, to Chandu, to Shša, to the Yellow
River, to the poppy trails, for instance. There is the languor of dream, of
reverie; the images seem to drift, to shift, to coalesce – to emerge, to
flicker, to fall back.
There
is another element. Several years ago we published a short story by Kenneth
Grant entitled Against the Light,
subtitled ‘A Nightside Narrative’. This was written as a
dramatization of some of the elements of The
Book of the Spider, written as an introduction to it in fact. This was
supposed to have been published between Beyond
the Mauve Zone and The Ninth Arch,
but this programme was disrupted by Skoob suspending publication of Grant’s
works. In the event it was published before Beyond
the Mauve Zone. It stands very well as a novel in its own right, but it is
very interwoven with The Book of the
Spider and hence The Ninth Arch.
Anyone acquainted with Against the Light
will recognise the echoes in the verses just quoted - the oily waters, the
rotting timbers of the wharf, the crocodiles, Chancery Lane in brilliant
sunshine ...
There
is much in the verses of The Book of the
Spider which bears on the life of Kenneth Grant, and it seems at times as
if the informing Current is principally directed at him. We should not be
surprised at this. We are all of us expressing an informing Current of magical
energy. None of us can express an absolute truth, but convey truth as we see
it. The work of an adept is always in a sense intrinsic to him or her. The light
is one but the lamps are many, and each lamp transmits that light in its own
way.
Non-fictional
characters are also woven into this Spider Web. These are the verses that are
gathered into chapter 11:
It needed but one to reveal it. But the spider knew.
[From the destruction of mind that gives birth to Chaos
a zone of mauve is created, a desert of sand above the
Tunnels of Set. The winds
hurry through them,
a sinister piping bearing the Beetle on its wings.]
It had in its mandibles millions of years; spanned
infinite oceans.
No gulf too wide, no chasm too deep, that its fathomless
wisdom does not embrace.
Flung into the heights the Shadows of the Outer Ones
play upon the walls of the Empty Place
above the secret cell where in the lidless cask the
echoes of aeons reverberate
bringing down fresh fever
and a Word ...
spoken by another prophet when One arises and One
descends, invoking the Beast.
Lam’s legions through the eyes
burnings of Isis bring fresh fever
from the skies
Another woman shall awake
and slake the hunger of the Snake!
Yes ‑ the Shadow falls: Shša, the Evil Woman; Lilu,
too, Hekt and the she‑Goat OZ, and that Great Spirit that cannot be
invoked because
It sleepeth. The Fire of the Earth and of Lam.
When She joins with the fever from the skies, Truth will
prevail.
There is She.
(He that heeds these shadows of S’lba
goes in danger of destruction by the Children of Isis.)
A silent sampan glides upstream.
Wharf ... lanterns ... mist descending ...
Riverboats, their foghorns muffled in the dark of a
Limehouse winter.
The jewelled tray, mother‑of‑pearl, the
serene boatman. Dancing scintillations ... the cosy household fire ... the domestic
hearth ... childhood. Flickering shadows on the walls, the napery, tea is
served ...
Black man ... Black Eagle
Stone ... crumbling ... the still weir ...
In
the course of The Book of the Spider,
we become aware of a doctrine of avatars, whereby several persons living at the
same time can each be embodiments of an entity. As anyone who has read Against the Light will know, it concerns
a witch called Awryd, an ancestor of Grant’s who was executed for
witchcraft in the Sixteenth Century. Awryd returns, in the guise of Margaret
Leesing, Soror Arim, the chief seer, and before her, Yelda Paterson, Spare’s
witch-mentor. However, the situation becomes more complex when several people
living at the same time are each avatars of Awryd – for instance, Margaret
Leesing and Clanda Fane, both contemporaries of Grant in New Isis Lodge. Some of the avatars are characters drawn from
fiction, such as Helen Vaughan from Machen’s The Great God Pan, or Besza Loriel from Grant’s novel The Stellar Lode. There are references
to David Curwen, another contemporary of Grant’s in New Isis Lodge who had a strong interest
in alchemy, being an avatar of Joseph Curwen, the alchemist whose dark presence
looms large in one of Lovecraft’s best stories, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Before going further, let us hear
chapter 22:
Write these
Spells - they are woven by Awryd;
picked up by the first alchemist
passed on to the second after centuries had passed.
These are things Earth should know ... that when Joseph
became David, Awryd’s formula was made complete. Zos had it from a
page of Grant’s Grimoire, even in Yelda’s time.
Explain, but darkly, how Awryd and Vaughan are one, that
she became Yelda and Loriel and Fane. Machen knew the secret, but the Master
did not.
When Aossic showed him S’lba, the Master knew
that the nest had been found.
and that the nest is
S’lba -
Ixaxaar Lam-Aiwass Ilyarun-bel-Aossic.
What a lugubrious game!
But Earth should know this:
that out of lost time
the Qliphoth of DaŠth will descend
below Malkuth and void themselves through the Tunnels of
Set.
A man named Black will open the Gate.
Those will fall through whom Black Eagle lets pass.
You will recover the Stone - you who hold the Sword of
Zin and understand the knowing wink of Zos, and the unwavering glance of Sin
Sin Wa whose Eye is single; and the Word
that arose. Set all this forth in a special Book so that
those that read will quote the words of the Master’s Angel: "Why
hast thou whispered so ambiguous things?"
And if they reply: "Be precise!", ask them
where they are from and where their destination.
They can not reply.
Or ask of them their Name as the Yellow One asked of me.
Only those of Khem – they know their Name – which was
Their Word.
It took flesh of itself and in Festat manifested.
They can tell you why the coffer was void in the Pyramid
without a Name.
It is without a Name because born of the Aeon without a
Word outside the circles of time ...
and of the Tangled Light, Qrixkuor -
Awryd’s Elemental of the Black Wings
--- the Tripod and the Stone
... and the Raven of Ho-Nan.
The reference to
" ... explain, but darkly ... " is because there is something here
which cannot be well articulated, but I shall try. It concerns the imagination,
which as discussed earlier is cosmic. We misuse the term
"imagination" when we use it to mean whim, fancy, something not
rooted in fact. On the contrary, we are adrift in imagination. Images created
in the imagination can take on a form perceptible to others. There are areas of
the occult which are concerned with the creation of thought-forms. The fulcrum
of group ritual magic is the creation of common images – images which all
members of the group can draw upon. Imagination is the fulcrum of all this because
it is the image-making faculty.
Helen
Vaughan was not created by Machen. Rather, Helen Vaughan became perceptible to
Machen. Essentially, she intruded into the localisation of imagination around
Machen.
The
Ninth Arch consists not only of The Book of
the Spider, but of a verse by verse commentary. The fulcrum of commentary
is the number of the verse running in serial order, whereby verse 1 of chapter
2 becomes 30, and so on. The verse is then commented upon taking into account
gematrical correspondences for that number. Kenneth Grant has accumulated a
vast amount of gematria over the years, and has drawn upon it exhaustively for
this commentary. Having said that, there is a great deal of material in the
commentary other than gematria.
The
Ninth Arch is the diadem of the Typhonian Trilogies. I have the impression that
although the work done in New Isis Lodge
was Grant’s formative work, the foundation of everything which he has
done since, by the same token it is the work done over the years since New Isis Lodge which has enabled Grant
to understand fully the work of those earlier years, and to take it to another
level. Kenneth Grant’s initiation continues apace.
To
close this brief account, here are the final collection of verses, chapter 32:
From the stairhead she descended
bearing the battered volume 67964
an innocent tale for children
who became the Children of Isis.
A page of it is enough to send you beyond sleep.
A torn page of it covered in childhood scribbles and
scrawls - if held against the light
reveals ...
I followed the critter’s advice.
That is why I know the contents of Grant’s
Grimoire and the secret of the Ninth Arch.
Why not follow the Spider’s web?
Hop from strand to strand of its glittering tracery ...
Meet the awesome insect
Like a vast beetle emerging from the vulva of Isis!
Why not? To do so signals the end of this world-web, and
as one dangles over narrow voids above Dunsanian gulfs ...
even a Sime would hesitate.
Let us then close the grimoire.
Let us not dive into the arms of Her, whose brow bears
the telltale mark of an alien qliphoth.
Phineas Black; deep mysterious Phineas Black took back to
the Stars the secret of an awful spawn.
Tarry awhile, ’though your feet slip upon the
crazy pathway ...
’though the arches fly past in your abysmal fall
like the cavernous eye-sockets in a skull from which Baphomet even would recoil
...
The shadow of Anubis
like Mr. Meldrum
walks unbidden in a human walker
stalker of nightmares in the aftermath of holy days ...
Hunted the hunter hunts
no bright survivor
and an aeon of darkness; the Darkness that is undying
wherein the nosferatu eat the shades.
On the table-cloth with knife-crisp folds is spread the
feast ...
Fall to!