Kenneth Grant (Typhonian Order), "Vinum Sabbati" (1961)

This chapter highlights Kenneth Grant’s “Vinum Sabbati” (1961). Grant became an influential figure in the British Thelemic movement, and to some extent British occultism in general, after Aleister Crowley’s death in 1947. “Vinum Sabbati” is a short essay on the Witches’ Sabbath, and two principal lines of reasoning are intertwined in the text. To some extent, Grant argues that the witches’ Sabbath had roots in pre-Christian magical ceremony; the main part of the text, however, is an attempt to explain the logic and magical motive behind the rite of the Sabbath. What Grant here calls “the medieval Sabbath” is perceived by him to be a corrupted remnant of an ancient Egyptian religious ceremony dedicated to the god Set. Moreover, the Devil, presiding over the Sabbath, is described by Grant as a reinterpretation of older pagan deities such as Pan or Set, he is the sun and the life force—but he is also that source of creation in which the performers of the Sabbath are trying to reabsorb themselves. Even though “Vinum Sabbati” is one of Grant’s earliest texts, it expounds basic elements of an understanding of the Devil that is never really revised.