Given the occult tenor of my week - and the fact that this is the 93rd posting of this series - today I return to the work of Kenneth Grant with Hecate's Fountain. This is probably my favourite of the Typhonian Trilogies; it is also one of Grant's more autobiographical entries into the series, documenting as it does the various Cthulhuvian-inflected ritual activities of the Nu-Isis Lodge during the 1950s and 60s. Inevitably, many of these rituals precipitate all kinds of Lovecraftian bizarrerie, including the manifestation of weird entities, strange disappearances, and mysterious deaths - to the degree that Hecate's Fountain reads almost as it were a novel of the Cthulhu Mythos. In this so regard the volume certainly embodies Grant's notion of 'creative occultism', such that the rapidly derationalizing blending of fact and fiction within the author's own unique writing style threatens to produce a dizzying derangement of the senses. As a consequence Hecate's Fountain - much like Ligotti's occult tome Vastarian - operates less as a means of signification than as the signified itself (and thanks to Phil Hine for pointing me in the direction of this idea during a recent discussion).
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