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Kenneth Grant and "bestial etymology"

  
 
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02:41 / 23.12.02
I was perusing Digital Ink recently and GM mentioned the works of Kenneth Grant and how his books had occult mindbombs hidden within a reasonstorm of bestial etymology (or something to that effect). For some reasons I find the word bestial etymology interesting. I'm not familiar with Grant's work, can anyone who is tell me what this means? I know etymology has something to do with a history of linguistic forms, right?
 
 
illmatic
13:40 / 23.12.02
Sure someone on here can answer this better than I can but I think etymology is the study of the history of words to understand their meaning ie. "Yoga" originates from the same root as "yoke" so has the connatation of "linking together" or union. Crowley makes a lot of this in Magick Without Tears. Don't know about the phrase you mentioned in connection with KG though - he seems to operate a lot though suggestion, hints and linkages while presenting the craziest information as "factual".
 
 
penitentvandal
17:55 / 23.12.02
Is Morrison referring here to the concept of 'barbarous names' which, IIRC, Kenneth Grant introduced into the occult canon (or at least developed the theory of - there's a chapter on this in Gary Lachman's excellent Turn Off your Mind, but I can't be bothered to look it up)?

Basically, Grant's ideas about the importance of using barbarous names of evocation when dealing with god-forms in order to bypass the conscious mind fed into the ideas of groups like the IOT and TOPY at the dawn of the Chaos Magic era, and led to their development of the concept of barbaric language, i.e. meaningless, sigilized words chanted during ritual to get past the ol' 'psychic censor'. Or shevurak gzeeedeh mo'haburath...You get the idea.

Then again, it could just be GM indulging in his usual semenstorm of lexical hyperbole...Who knows?

There used to be a lot of stuff about barbaric language at the Chaos Matrix site, but that doesn't seem to exist anymore. Damn it.
 
  
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