Jake Stratton-Kent and the Geosophic Turn

14 May 2026

Jake Stratton-Kent (1956–2022) was that rare thing, a working magician whose scholarship changed how scholars and practitioners alike read the grimoires. A goetic magician by self-description, active in the British occult scene from the 1970s, editor of the journal The Equinox: British Journal of Thelema and later a central voice in the grimoire revival, he spent his last two decades arguing a single large thesis with a bricklayer's patience: the despised conjuration books of early modern Europe are not degenerate Christian magic but the living descendants of ancient Mediterranean religion, above all its funerary and chthonic strata. Goetia, on this reading, is not a genre of demonology. It is the surviving Western form of the cult of the dead.

The argument, book by book

The case is made across three works published by Scarlet Imprint. The True Grimoire (2009) reconstructs the Grimorium Verum, an eighteenth-century "dark" grimoire usually dismissed as hackwork, and takes its spirit hierarchy seriously as a coherent working system, arguing that its chiefs and their families preserve older strata of spirit religion than the respectable Solomonic books. Geosophia: The Argo of Magic (2010), the historical engine of the thesis, traces goetia backward through Greek sources: the goēs as mourner and evocator, whose lament-craft became conjuration; the katabasis, the hero's descent to the dead; the nekyia of Odyssey XI; the restless dead of curse tablet and hero cult. The Testament of Cyprian the Mage (2014) carries the line forward through the Cyprianic literature into Iberian and Atlantic folk magic, where the saint-sorcerer's book is still a living genre. Running through all three is the practical corollary that made the trilogy controversial and beloved: European magicians seeking a functional spirit-cult have more to learn from living traditions such as Quimbanda than from further psychologizing of the art.

Assessment

Academic reviewers have noted, fairly, that Stratton-Kent worked outside the university, cited eclectically, and sometimes pressed continuities harder than the evidence strictly allows; Geosophia argues like an advocate, not a referee. But the direction of the argument has aged well. Scholarship on Greek necromancy (Ogden), on the goēs (Johnston), and on the grimoires' debts to the papyri has moved steadily toward the connections he insisted on, and the grimoire revival he helped lead now reads its sources with an attention to the dead that would have seemed eccentric in 1990. His death in 2022 was mourned across the occult publishing world as the loss of the tradition's great autodidact.

For the practitioner, his legacy is a reorientation summed up in his own refrain that "goetia is the working man's magic": a religion of the dead approached with offerings, service, and alliance rather than mere command, a frame that changes how one reads every catalogue entry, including Focalor and Paimon, and that connects the grimoires to the animist ground this site keeps returning to.