Eulogy for a Necromancer

Gather in my friends, as a fellow magician I proclaim my lament for a dead Brother. To summon him forth to those who knew him, and to proclaim his name and deeds to those who did not. Jake Stratton-Kent, England’s greatest living necromancer, is dead.

I cannot begin at the beginning with his rising sign, or tell you about his working class childhood. Though I can attest to his blistering intelligence which always remained keen, I can only conjecture how that trangressive, combative intellect, along with his bisexuality, put him between worlds from a very young age. He was by birth, necessity and temperament a warrior. Jake was slight, but strong from working on building sites, and summers fighting with swords on pagan soil. You would choose to have him at your side in the shield wall, or in the street at your back. In Celtic culture, these things matter. The man active in body, mind and spirit; to that I bear witness.

I cannot tell you who he stabbed, or of Stonehenge festivals, the Wallys, living in communes, nor about the collapse of that dream with the rise of a yuppified Tory England enforced by bone-headed coppers and state-sanctioned murder. I do know that many of his friends died too – too fucking young – from drugs, alcohol, suicide and broken hearts. From what I understand, and I was not present at those battles or feasts, Jake was a survivor, but only because he was so damned tough. A revolution does not fail if one spark escapes, and Jake was one of the sparks that leapt from that balefire.

Neither is it my place to talk to you that peculiar heresy which is English Thelema and the ciphers contained therein. All that is before my time but molded the Jake that I knew. His character was one of rebellion, but forged with discipline. The liturgy that ran through his work was always ‘Do what thou wilt.’ He was a true Thelemite, a term which many pretend to but few embody. He was never going to be a company man. Like Jesus, he preferred the rougher sorts in the tavern. To friends, spirits and strangers he was always generous. He stood up for the downtrodden. For his enemies he carried a knife, a brick in a handbag, an eight ball in a sock whilst dressing like a dandy pirate.

What I do know is what he carried out of that world: a devotion to the work of that peculiar little grimoire, named with veracity and a certain swagger, The True Grimoire. It was a book that no-one cared for, in the dismissive language of the time it was ‘Old Aeon.’ Here Jake had the last laugh; it was in fact these tatty disreputable blue grimoires that were the ignition for the latest occult revival, and not the moribund orders. Worse, his chosen book was a broken engine maligned by most and made of parts mismatched across Italian and French versions. Jake patiently and lovingly restored it to life and in the process of a footnote found himself amongst the archaic goês. In his approach, the entire western tradition could be reconnected to that source; a journey that spans his defining five book, three volume Encyclopaedia Goetica.

My Jake, or ours, if I can speak for Alkistis, comes surging out of the crowd at us in the claustrophobic low ceilinged room of the Oxford Working Men’s Club. We are all at the resolutely non-sectarian Thelemic Symposium, jolted back to life. Most are drinking, as befits a symposium, and a significant minority are attending to the other selfish angel, cocaine. Jake is blitzed on amphetamines and talks a mile a minute. He has no teeth, making his face even more skullish. But he is incandescently bright, enthused, delighted that we had invoked Babalon; doing the thing, not just talking about it. The insistence on practice and contact drove him against the tide of psychologising, or talking instead of doing. The guard was changing, and Jake was still amongst the young upstarts. The previous generation have not always been good at passing on tradition and authority, but Jake was always for the young, and those young at heart. His generosity with his knowledge and time is well attested, but he did not suffer fools.

He sent us the manuscript of The True Grimoire soon after that meeting, and as had been clear from our conversation, this autodidact displayed a blistering intelligence and a concise manner of expression. No fat on the bones. The arguments he advanced were cyclopean blocks that you could not fit a razorblade between. He assumes his readers will get on with it, ‘it’ being the practice of spirit-centred magic. We have been allies ever since, and will see that his legacy continues. The work stands and while it does, the man is not gone.

The True Grimoire served as a critical juncture in the modern occult revival, in which he played an important role, which history will remember. Of course, the academy has yet to catch up; but that is not where he sought validation. In the acknowledgments to the book he wrote, ‘to Peter and Alkistis for not starting the revolution without me’ and that was the deal. Like Jake, we were upstart punks and he trusted us with his precious book to hone our skills on. We worked on it, holed up in the French Alps with no heating, ice-water off the mountain to shower in, and only the company of those fiery salamanders to keep us warm. When the hardback book was designed it was in bloodstone colours, emblazoned with one of his beloved skulls. Those in the know would recognise the skull without teeth as a portrait of the author.

Begrudgingly he accepted the fancy books we made, but his heart was always with the paperbacks, preferably bent out of shape and scrawled through with working notes. Like us, he wanted the work to get to those with the desire to know, not just those with deep enough pockets. We shared a democratic vision of the occult, and Jake’s True Grimoire was fittingly the first of our Bibliothèque rouge editions.

He already had undergone at least one resurrection, and was coming back from the underworld with work to be done. We acknowledge the importance of his then-partner Misha Newitt in believing in him, as well as pushing him to publish The True Grimoire. We spent late nights at her Bristol flat, near the allotment where they grew the herbs necessary for Verum practice, and Jake would slip away at midnight and without ostentation perform Liber Resh and his other magical obligations.

Some may consider him a ‘great’ in the modern occult, but the opposition he faced was considerable. Some of that was character; he was too much for some people, too confrontational. He came spitting fire and challenged those on ‘the scene’ to do what they endlessly prated about. That suited us, as we too had to fight to get our voices heard, our books known. Jake was with us on the barricades and backrooms where we congregated and made the magical revival happen. When he spoke to his people, at the Glastonbury occult conferences, our Summer of Love, the book launches in London at the Atlantis Bookshop, they adored him. He was happiest taking questions rather than lecturing, or sitting outside the venue with endless coffin nail cigarettes and ignited with his stimulant of choice, talking practical sorcery.

Jake developed emphysema and became visibly frail, which at least gave him the chance to sport about with a stick. His personal energy remained undiminished, but we worried for him. We saw him less as he made the move from Shepton Mallet to Wales and found love with Karel. We caught up via skype with the world locked down and planned with him to reissue his books in hardback editions for the next generation. A stroke knocked him down, and like everyone else who knew him, we prayed he would make a recovery. We got the new edition of The True Grimoire into his hands, so he could feel what he had accomplished. Eventually he lost the fight. We all become ancestors, however long our roads, get to be the skull smiling through the skin, both anonymous and distinct. He had a lot of love for the dead, and now he is amongst them.

I will not do the disservice of trying to make Jake respectable. He was a persistent thorn in the (back)side of orthodoxy through the simple fact of his ceaseless pursuit of the truth, of his Will. He always described himself as a Greaser, but that subculture is little known, I will describe him in language you will understand, as a truly punk motherfucker.

Jake changed things with his little book and the spirits therein. His name will forever be inseparable from the Grimorium Verum. He wrote of his ‘near perfect identification with Scirlin’; that work has been perfected in death. It is proven.

Jake Stratton-Kent is dead, and it was a cold clear morning speared with frost and snow bursts. Here in the west we woke early and knew it had come. The hexagonal gold daffodils open on the verges, pushed out of their bulb skulls and screaming at the skies. For the last time I will proclaim it, Jake Stratton-Kent is dead. Yet he prevails.

Before the great God, the dread Lord of the West!
Speak fair words for Jake Stratton-Kent. May he flourish
In the place of the weighing of hearts
By the marsh of the dead, where the crocodiles nourish
Their lives on the lost, where the Serpent upstarts.
For though I be joined to the Earth,
In the Innermost Shrine of Heaven am I.
I was Master of Thebes from my birth;
Shall I die like a dog? Thou shalt not let me die,
But my Khu that the teeth of the crocodiles sever
Shall be mighty in heaven for ever & ever!

Peter Grey