The Cryptic Files Podcast - Lovecraft, Grant and Primal Grimoire with Richard Ward

In a secondhand bookshop in the early 1980s, a teenager bought two out-of-print books by the occultist Kenneth Grant: The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God. Those books mentioned H.P. Lovecraft, which sent the same teenager to read “The Call of Cthulhu” for the first time. That teenager was Richard Ward, now the author of Beyond the Primal Grimoire, a book that maps the connections between Lovecraft’s cosmic horror fiction and Grant’s esoteric system. The second edition, roughly twice the length of the 2017 original, is expected in 2025 from Starfire Publishing.

Intrusions from Outside

The central link between Lovecraft and Grant, Ward explains, is the concept of “intrusions from outside.” Both writers were fascinated by the idea that entities, forces, or energies that exist outside our physical universe can, under certain circumstances, manifest within it. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos — a term coined later by August Derleth — centers on a pantheon of gods said to exist outside space and time, capable of being invoked or called into our world. Grant, in his nine-volume Typhonian Trilogies, explored the same territory from an occult perspective, treating these intrusions as a practical magical phenomenon rather than a fictional device.