The Millennial Glow: Myth and Magic in the Marxist Ethic

In a letter to Jean’s Sihvonen dated April 19th, 1958, Grady immediately began telling her that it was his view that the Work was not being promulgated at all and Thelema had entered into a dark Saturnian phase. He added, that since Crowley’s death, or for almost eleven years, “We have all been sitting around waiting for Karl to act, and Karl has no intention of acting. Karl does not consider himself to be a teacher.” He told Jean about his “forte in political theory” and that, while working in this area, “suddenly, out of clear blue sky,’ I had what I can only describe as a ‘revelation,’ a sudden understanding that was completely revolutionary.” At this point he gave no indication what the Thelemic “revelation” was. He merely went on to comment upon his M.A. thesis, “The Millennial Glow: Myth and Magic in the Marxist Ethic” in which he “took the Marxists theories of knowledge, reality and metaphysics apart and put them back together again.” Grady felt that when he did this he “really began to get on the right track. For the first time I was able to carry out my affirmation to A.C. by making the world of scholarship recognize magic as a meaningful universe of discourse.”

He further describes his thesis a letter to Phyllis Seckler dated February 10th, 1969 by saying, “I threw everything at them. Political science, sociology, anthropology, you name it, and of course the theory of magic which I documented in terms of primitive tribalism and demonstrated, beyond all doubt, that the closed mind of the Marxist ideologist is essentially that of the tribal witch doctor. You would have to read it to understand it, and if it sounds like I’m giving magic a bad name, remember that I only used what I needed to use to prove a particular point.”