‘IO Typhon’ by Harper Feist
Review: Harper Feist, IO TYPHON, s.l.: Grayle Press, 2024, limited hardcover edition, forthcoming
“For I, being a woman, lust ever to mate myself with some beast. And this is the salvation of the world, that always I am deceived by some god, and that my child is the guardian of the labyrinth that hath two-and-seventy paths.” (Aleister Crowley, The Cry of the 16th Aethyr, Which is Called LEA, in: The Vision and the Voice, Dallas: Sangreal Foundation, 1972)
IO TYPHON is an exemplary literary and theurgical text; a striking and original expression of contemporary esoteric thought and praxis that unfolds in eight distinctive movements. Its combination of subject (the draconian current) and context (that of ritual invocation) provides compelling subject matter; whilst our progress through the text is sustained by diction that, necessarily employing the discursive idioms traditionally encountered with liturgical invocation nevertheless retains a lightness of touch and a freshness of expression that ensures that the text remains accessible whilst drawing the reader ever closer towards the object of the rites – possession by the draconian entity.
The Grotesque Idiom & the Antinomian Path
The ease of access afforded by the text in no way mitigates the essentially grotesque and antinomian nature of both its visual and verbal imagery,
“Oh Lord, your teeth are vast, your breath putrid.
Your scales gash my flesh. Your foetid wings of translucent skin
Unfurl and beat the desert air with a fearful rustling clam” (p. 35)
The employment of a grotesque literary and visual idiom in initiatory contexts can be readily traced back to the grotesqueries, metamorphoses and hybridities that are constitutive of the essential nature of the gods in general; but in this context more specifically to the originary draconian deity as it emerges from the Orphic egg,
“According to Orpheus everything had its origin in water; from water mud was formed, and from mud an animal, a dragon bearing the head of a lion; and between the two heads there was the face of a god, named Herakles and Kronos. This god generated an egg of enormous size, which burst into two, the top part became the heavens, the lower part the earth.” (Athenagoras of Athens, πρεσβεία XVIII)
The danger of literary exposition is that it tends to distract from the performative context that makes such writing doubly significant. A case in point being the relation between the Orphic cosmogony just cited and the imagery of the, alas now lost, Orphic bowl that rendered these lines into a three-dimensional ritual diorama. The present writing is, in any case and despite its ancestry, replete with its own grotesqueries,
“Your thick reptilian ejaculate
Rapacious and unstoppable
Superheated
Scalding
You will cover me” (p. 74/75)
The rationale for expressing essentially spiritual states and articulating ritual practices through the lens of the grotesque – and of the antinomian path more generally – is, firstly, to challenge encultured religious, cultural and aesthetic inhibitions; forces that hold the theurgist in the grip of a socialised reality and thereby act as an inhibitor to more expansive states of being.
A second advantage afforded by such language is that it helps to maintain a state of immanence – of being-present-now; and thereby avoids the tendency towards indulging in, and thereby confusing, transcendental flights of the imagination with stabilised states of psycho-energetic realisation. We can add, thirdly, that such language prompts the reader to seek out their own fetish-keys to the unlocking of the transformational force of Eros.
Of the Erotic
“[…] Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.” (Hesiod, Theogony, 120)
Divinity travels upon the tide of the Erotic; the daemon Eros is the force or energy intermediating between humanity and the divine; and as such, is the proximate cause of that ecstasy whereby the socialised self is bypassed. The force of Eros dissolves boundaries, restrictions and limitations; and re-connects us with ancestral lineages that are also our own desiring bodies in times long past; thought of as lost, they nevertheless remain, perpetually present echoes subtly inflecting the trajectory of desire.
When, ultimately, the tide of eroticised intensities finally ebbs – as it always does since embodiment demands the assimilation of experience – our awareness can self-evolve to encompass greater dimensions of being. Needless to say, when properly executed, such rites leave, in their aftermath, nothing of old certainties or stabilities; for no one, and no thing, is any longer situated where they once were.
Of the Literary Tradition
The literary affiliations of this text should come as no surprise. Contemporary recensions of the Typhonian current remain rooted in the tradition associated with Gerald Massey and its performative re-awakening in the works of Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant. IO TYPHON has been designed to invoke the most potent, disruptive forces of change and transformation known to the Western esoteric tradition but without their accompanying hangover: the splitting headache of Gnostic ethical dualism. Derived from the syncretic system known as the Papyri Greco Magicae – the rituals of Egypt’s hieratic temple culture miniaturized, preserved and filtered through the multiplying lenses of Hellenism, Gnostic Christianity and esoteric Judaism – the work is constituted of seven hymnal incantations and two sections formatted to provide the principal invocations in the form of ‘call and response’.
Of the Invocations
The first of the two invocations is framed by, and arises in response to, section seven of Crowley’s Liber Ararita, one of the Thelemic Holy Books that is itself keyed to the rich visionary material of Crowley’s The Vision and the Voice (Liber 418); a record of the visions arising from his successive performances of John Dee’s Enochian calls in the Algerian desert in 1909.
Liber Ararita’s final section (section seven) incites Qadosh – the Holy Fire that is beyond all space, matter and time – to consume all that we are; a call to self-annihilation that – to the embodied self – provokes a visceral response and, hence, an eminently embraceable terror. In this experience of the via negativa, the aspirant’s abjection, self-abnegation, self-abandonment and subjugation parallels the progressive dissolution of the subtle bodies, from the grosser to the finer, one by one, that also marks the process of dying,
“As your reptile body melds with my primate one,
The two flash into zero.” (p. 43)
The second of the invocatory sections – Hymnus Inordinatio: A Lament in Two Voices – is based on the Book of Job (King James Version, Job 41:25-34) that describes the emergence of the monster Leviathan, the Judaic Typhon, the Orphic Kronos. Harper Feist’s response celebrates the possession of the theurgist by the deity in verse that conveys its existential import – the progressive dissolution of the boundaries of the self,
“The coming finality is white like pale moonlight, a path
Of complete destruction from Hell to Heaven,
And back again to Hell.” (p. 121)
The outcome of these processes, the invocation, the setting of this havoc upon the facile contours of the human persona, its systematic whittling away to reveal a brighter essence finds its expression in the final Hymn to Ignition wherein the theurgist assimilates their most essential self, the subtle continuity of their ever-being, within the entourage of the god for all time:
“Claim me as child of the Dragon
One who sings your songs
Who ignites your fires
Devotes acts to you” (p. 129)
The work concludes with a set of notes that effectively recapitulate the mythos of its principal actor – Set-Typhon – his origins, qualities, appearance and associations; but more importantly, his significance as an avatar, a totem in this age of continuous upheaval, change and transformation. The text has been vividly illustrated by Rowan E. Cassidy, illustrations that contribute significantly to the talismanic nature and tone of the admirable work.