THE NINTH ARCH: ANDREW COLLINS, THE SEVENTH SWORD AND MEONIA NAME CHECKED IN KENNETH GRANT'S NEW BOOK

Report by Andrew Collins

 

Since the early 1970s occultist and writer Kenneth Grant has produced a series of absorbing tomes expounding the astral philosophies, beliefs and practices of modern groups and individuals utilising ancient magical systems. Particular emphasis has been placed on the Egyptian cults of Set and Sobek, the Tantra and Sufi sexual magic of the Indo-Persian world, the Voodoo tradition of Haiti and the fictional Cthulhu mythos of H P Lovecraft. Kenneth Grant books, which have titles such as THE MAGICAL REVIVAL (1972), CULTS OF THE SHADOW (1975) and OUTSIDE THE CIRCLES OF TIME (1980), are by far the greatest insight into the mechanics associated with the magical processes of the human mind and its contact with perceived external intelligences of a non-terrestrial nature. In all there are nine books spanning a period from 1972 through to his latest work THE NINTH ARCH, published by Starfire Publishing Ltd in December 2002.

I recall buying my first Grant book, NIGHTSIDE OF EDEN (1977), at a market stall in Wickford, Essex, in 1979, and subsequently purchasing CULTS OF THE SHADOW from a second-hand bookshop in Wolverhampton later that same year. Since then I have collected his various works, some of which are worth hundreds of pounds second-hand. I was therefore pleased when I learnt that THE NINTH ARCH, Grant's latest book (Starfire Publishing, 2004), makes references to myself and Graham Phillips in connection with the Seventh Sword saga and the search for the Meonia Stone, as presented in our books THE SEVENTH SWORD (1991) and THE GREEN STONE (1984). This is the first time that either have made it into the pages of a Grant book, which might be seen by some as quite an accolade. For instance, on page 80 it compares the name MEONIA with the concept of Manio/Ma-Ion, a magical formula of occult invocation devised by mystic 'Frater Achad', actually Charles Stansfeld Jones, and achieved by means of symbols such as the pentagram, a stone and a double egg. It also offers the numerological value of the word MEONIA as 176, the same as BLOOD ‘also TzVP, “overflow”, from the Kamite Sefa, “to purge, purify”. The concepts suggested by these correspondences are: cutting by a sword.’(1) A seventeenth-century Rosicrucian allegorical drawing of the alchemist wielding the sword that slices the egg of creation, symbolising the philosopher’s stone, was used as the cover image of the 1991 reprint of my book THE SWORD AND THE STONE, which, of course, features the hunt to find the Green Stone, which supposedly bore the name MEONIA, which is an anagram of 'I AM ONE'.

Grant goes on to say:

Frater Achad made it clear that the 'Daughter-aeon of Mâ' is the Mâ-Ion (the two ends of the keyword, Manifestation), and that Mâ should be pronounced as may or mé, as in MEONIA, in order to distinguish it from the Mother-Mâ, or Maat.(2)

Afterwards, Grant makes reference again to the Seven Swords saga:

Subtracting from the word manifestation the six letters of meonia leaves seven letters. Seven is the number of Zain, 'a sword', as of the seventh sword. 'Seven' is the meaning of Sebek, or Sevekh, the name of the Queen [i.e. the female pharaoh Sobek-nofru] who revived in Egypt the indefinitely ancient Typhonian mysteries of the Goddess of the Seven Stars.(3)

Sobek-nofru, or Sobek-ka-re, as many readers of THE SEVENTH SWORD will know, played a dramatic role in early questing history, and I have written about her again in one of the appendixes of TUTANKHAMUN: THE EXODUS CONSPIRACY entitled ‘Pork Abstinence and the Worship of Set’, available on-line by clicking here. Page 82 of THE NINTH ARCH makes further references to MEONIA, this time in relationship to American mystic Michael Bertiaux’s concept of the Meon, or Universe B, the Anti-matter world (something that I pondered on as early as 1979).

Although these facts might not mean a lot to some readers out there, for me it is significant that an esteemed writer has deemed psychic questing important enough not only to include within his own take on magical philosophies worldwide, but also to see it as an integral formula in the processes behind modern systems being used today.

For those interested in obtaining a copy of THE NINTH ARCH by Kenneth Grant contact Starfire Publishing Ltd., at BCM Starfire, London WC 1V 3XX. The book’s cover price is £30. However, be warned - the book is a limited publication of 1000, with 500 of those going to the United States. If you want to secure a copy, I suggest you do so immediately.

Notes and References

1. Grant, THE NINTH ARCH, p. 80.
2. Ibid., p. 81.
3. Ibid.

Bibliography