There’s been gossip in the broader occult community about a particular Big Name Occultist who has come to prominence over the last several years. A good two thirds of it are the sort of anecdotes with limited evidence, none of which puts anyone on the wrong side of the law. The court of public opinion is its own animal.
This is understandable. No one wants to put their trust in someone who might abuse it. No one wants to learn they’ve been grifted by someone who has used their fears to gain their confidence in order to better exploit their wallet.
It’s hardly news that occultists are capable of being shitty. Crowley sold virility potions made with his own spunk. L Ron Hubbard swindled Jack Parsons out of a boat and a girlfriend (although I believe the boat, at least, was returned). Occultists will also talk audacious shit on each other — Crowley was good for this, too, writing Moonchild mostly to dunk on people he hated.
So this latest round isn’t groundbreaking. Its significance in fifty years will be a footnote, a curiosity, much like any grimoire whose progenitor was also a public figure. Did you know John Dee and Edward Kelley wife-swapped because ‘the angels’ told them to? Tee hee!… I only bring it up because there are a handful of repercussions we, as contemporaries, ought to contend with.
The man in question is known as Jack Grayle. This is his pen name, separating his work as an occultist from his mundane life. It is with the assumption of this pen name that the accusations begin.
Samuel David, an author and occultist who worked with Grayle in person, wrote a social media callout post on March 23rd, and then a follow-up on the twenty-fourth. Before he was Jack Grayle, he was James Grey, author of a book on Arthurian magic, and David alleges he abandoned this identity to separate himself from the consequences of impregnating a nineteen year old who Grayle had “driven to obsession.”.
From a recent podcast interview, Grayle is presently fifty-four. James Grey left the internet in 2015. The math, it must be said, doesn’t look great. David also claims this obsession was a result of Grayle’s use of magical practices intended to dominate, compel, or persuade, and that he has a pattern of using it to target the vulnerable. (More on this later.)
Reader, I know not all of you follow me for occult insights. At least half of you are here because I write fiction. Even if your attitude is that magic, malevolent or otherwise, is total bunk, there is still the worrying implication of an older authority figure who is comfortable with the idea of using coercive means to con himself into believing his is a master manipulator then turning that manipulation on a teenager. “She’s legal” is a poor argument when the age difference is greater than half his own; ‘legal’ is not the same as ‘experienced.’
At the time of this writing, the then-nineteen year old is absent from the conversation. This is the valid cause to suspend judgment. On the face of it, all of this still looks very bad — but I dislike infantilizing women or declaring them victims without their presence or, quite importantly, consent. Her assessment of her experience would be valuable insight, but it has not yet been provided.
David asserts Grayle ingrains himself into occult groups and smaller communities with the aim of personal gain and self-gratification, expanding his influence. This is how they met, participating in the same local group from 2015-2020, and this is how David witnessed firsthand how Grayle used divisive tactics on the group members and capitalized on the resulting conflict, even meddling in David’s marriage while exploiting his insecurities. (David and his husband are still together, and the rest of the former group can attest to Grayle’s behavior.) To hear David describe it, Grayle is Charismatic but malignant — and he contends Grayle’s use of books such as Demons of Magick are signs he is using dark arts to dark ends.
This is where David’s message conflicts somewhat. David is (or was) a Left Hand Path practitioner; these are occultists who will work magic to further their own purposes, often working with demons or Goetic spirits. This isn’t rare; any occult writer has probably worked a success spell ahead of publication, and some of them employ anti-piracy hexes. No one is writing grimoires for the money, but they aren’t endorsing theft, either. To condemn a fellow practitioner for also using LHP practices for success or reputation seems hypocritical. He also writes of Grayle leading group rituals which required participants to use the Abrahamic names of God, which some considered anathema to their own practice; this is a personal sticking point rather than a universal one.
Here is why this assertion still matters: David says Grayle bragged about compelling these participants to act against their own beliefs and speak these names. This implies Grayle has no ethical boundary on coercing people close to him, and even takes pride in his success. Hm.
This post was, for a while, shared to r/Hecate. The comments leaned in Grayle’s favor, but a handful aligned with David. There were grim mumblings about the nature of Grayle’s day job, but nothing concrete.
Over on Facebook, where David’s post originated, Josh Gadbois (also known as Rufus Opus, author of Seven Spheres) stepped up to confirm David’s statements about Grayle taking advantage of women in vulnerable positions. Summarized: While Gadbois was in rehab for alcoholism, Grayle ‘supported’ his then-wife by entering into an email-based intimate affair. To quote Gadbois: “It’s not an allegation, I have receipts. I know more about what he likes done to his scrotum in his online domination fantasies than anyone should ever have to know.”
In case you were wondering if this was just a misunderstanding over emotionally charged messages, there you go. Gadbois says this is not isolated, and Grayle has a tendency to appear in similar anecdotes.
It is also worth observing, for the sake of noting credible evidence, that Grayle sent an unprompted gift to Gadbois’s current wife, Nicole, as well. She commented on David’s original post, not describing the item but detailing the circumstances. The gift landed poorly (it was an item she had already made for herself, and she was a little insulted he sent her another), and has now destroyed it.
So we have assertions of Grayle behaving questionably around women, particularly those who are somehow emotionally compromised, and allegations that he has no problem with behaving coercively towards fellow practitioners, and he seems needlessly interested in women attracted to Gadbois. This is not illegal, but depending on your personal standards, certainly a little disquieting (and possibly a bit weird).
About a week after David’s post, a YouTube playlist began circulating. The account name is “Azostos” — one of the epithets of Hekate, meaning “Unbound” and, in Grayle’s own book, a good one to invoke when shaking off what shackles you. The playlist is one ten and a half minute video, followed by a handful of others which are the individual clips spliced together in the first. Redditors accused the sharer of editing the videos to make it sound bad, but really, the editing appears mostly to avoid doxxing Grayle’s real name or the exact nature of his job. The longer video opens with a clip of Grayle introducing himself in a magical capacity, then cuts to him doing a promotional video encouraging people to support their local law enforcement. The rest of the video is him discussing new laws going into effect which would make it harder for police to do their jobs effectively — things like not tazing someone in the head or back, or not using chokeholds, or announcing to a crowd that you are about to use teargas before actually deploying it. He appears deeply concerned that an inexperienced rookie might intervene with a more experienced officer they have misjudged to be using excessive force — because this is not, it is implied, something which can be trained for in advance.
In his day job, it appears Jack Grayle is lawyer for LEOs.
There is no date on this video. From a little light sleuthing, his appearance matches those in podcasts from around 2021. Again: hm. This is also around the time his website went live.
The text on his site has changed very little between then and now. Hekate, popular among women with feminist leanings, is a strong presence. “Diverse Magic for a Diverse World,” it said. The Greek Magical Papyri (or PGM) is his area of special focus, and he pitches his work as multicultural magic for multicultural people. Outlaw magic for outlaws. Marginal magic for the marginalized. Available to all, regardless of your color, race, ethnicity, age, or upbringing. He describes developing a reciprocal relationship with spirits to get them to do the heavy lifting of magic on your behalf, something we do intuitively every day with the people, pets, and plants that surround us. He describes these beings as powerful, unpredictable, non-binary, self-aware, and reciprocal. “What they give with their right hand, they can take away with their left” — and if you think this sounds like transformative work, you should totally sign up for his class.
Of my small pool of readers, most of you are not centrist enough to begin splitting hairs. You can see immediately, I am sure, the contradiction of LEO advocacy in one area of life while advertising “outlaw magic for outlaws” in another.
When I finished watching Azostos’ playlist, I entered Grayle’s name into the YouTube search bar. This wasn’t even the first time; Grayle is a knowledgeable man, has appeared on several podcasts, and I enjoy listening to occultists talk about their wheelhouses. He’s had multiple appearances on Glitch Bottle, and had been on episode #172 just over a month ago. I saw this and opened the video.
When I finished, I found my notebook and started it over from the beginning.
The episode, titled at Grayle’s suggestion as “Magic Older Than The Gods & Egyptian Coffin Texts,” involves invocations Grayle has included in his new PGM course. The first is an amalgam of two works from the “Coffin Texts,” a declaration of power and authority. This is nothing new; the Bornless Rite or Liber Israfel are similar, the practitioner gradually assuming the identity of a god whose sovereignty must be obeyed. What makes Grayle’s incantation interesting is that it compels the gods to “crouch down before” him as he declares himself Heka, eldest of the Egyptian gods and also the ultimate, primordial force of Magic Itself.
This is challenging, he says, to modern practitioners in a dominantly Christian culture. This sort of thing incurs divine wrath. Older paradigms would call it hubris, which risks suffering the disfavor of the gods.
But Grayle has solved this concern. He is not declaring himself, as Jack Grayle, to be the one compelling the gods to crouch, but that the performer is embodying Heka — that one is channeling the god who speaks these words, and therefore is only a vessel for the speaking.
This Coffin Text was originally for a soul navigating the underworld. (13:47) “[…] the dead soul, upon approaching the underworld, would not be a victim, but would declare with all this magic behind him: ‘I am a god as you are.’ And that can be useful in one sense to navigate the underworld and to survive and thrive in it […]”
He continues with more recitation, wherein the practitioner describes themselves as strong enough to fight gods, conflates themselves with the Morning Star, “For I will not be harmed in sea or land or sky,” and “Tell me, spirits, would you be an enemy to one such as this? If so, begone, be banished, eat putrefaction in darkness, but for the rest—“ he would stand with the beautiful, and the good, and ask them to put Truth in his mouth.
Those of you not steeped in this sort of thing will miss it, so let me draw your attention to some significant facts:
Grayle’s biggest contribution to modern occultism is the Hekataeon — a devotional grimoire to Hekate, the Titan who chose the side of the Olympians in the Titanomachy, which bound every other primordial power. Zeus, in gratitude, left Hekate unbound, sovereign over her portion of the sea, land, and sky. She is a known psychopomp, guiding the newly deceased. One of her myriad epithets is Borborophorba, “Eater of Filth.” She is liminal, aligned to her own purposes, not particularly known for justice but no stranger to restoring natural balance.
Did you catch it?
I’ll get back to this.
About thirty-three minutes in, after acknowledging students are often uncomfortable with this, he describes encouraging them to simply practice reciting these empowering spells during quiet moments — “But do it aloud, because the speaking of these words is a sacred act, and hearing the words is a sacred act, and simply to allow oneself to say these things changes you.” To invite this kind of self empowerment is important because, as he states around the twenty minute mark, he believes we are living like ghosts, experiencing the deadening effect of media and politics and economic turmoil and political drama and the chaos of uncertainty from new tech, always watching others do rather than doing ourselves.
“[…] we find ourselves increasingly ghosts in our own life, hampered not only by larger forces such as politics, governments, police states and those things, but other things, too —“ partners, parents, our own inhibitions. His students lack confidence, and these workings reclaim it. “You aren’t just a piece of meat, or a number.” These spells will widen the channel through which magic flows.
This is the sales pitch, of course. It answers the unasked question, “Why should someone take your course?”, and Grayle presents a perfect laundry list of modern anxieties, once more tapping into the language of the oppressed, suggesting without explicitly stating that this work is meant to subvert the structures which disempowered the listener in the first place.
And isn’t it so interesting that the man who argued against laws inhibiting use of force by LEOs is now listing police states as a worthy concern?
At 36:48 he says, “We’ve been overwhelmed with the influx of corrupt politics, climate change, plague, influx of immigrants and intermixing of cultures, many of whom have different perspectives, financial collapse, corruption at the highest levels, increasingly draconian rules, unbearable taxes, and racial strife as well.” This, too, inspires a raised eyebrow at his choice of words. This is an advertising net cast as wide as it will go, phrased just vaguely enough to filter out neo-Nazis or, indeed, Thin Blue Liners. Grayle’s list of anxieties doesn’t present an opinion; he only names them, and the listener is left to contemplate which of these they claim, and how.
So much of what he says in these segments its that the world is full of problems, and his work provides an answer — and you know what? Fair. That’s the same claim a lot of popular modern occult works make: this book will change your life for the better; make you richer or more attractive; it might even act as a talisman.
After reading David’s and then the Gadbois’ perspectives, followed by Azostos’ videos, watching this interview sounded very different than it might have if I’d seen it the day it came out. Grayle is enthusiastic about his subject, and gives himself over to his Theatre Kid days with his full chest as he recites these sacred pieces. It’s the advertising bits which hit a false note, tapping into the language of the vulnerable minority and the culturally oppressed without expressly aligning himself with them. Many buzzwords, few personal attachments. Where else have I seen public figures hurling Approved Language at the audience to only imply shared purpose and inspire confidence in the speaker’s leadership?
He refers, around 38:15, to the Egyptian god names as “simply a cultural attribution.” The word “paradigm” is peppered throughout the video, which suggests a strong inclination toward compartmentalizing. This would certainly explain some things. He enters a paradigm where he is not Jack Grayle, but Heka. He enters a paradigm where he works with Egyptian gods for one working, then steps into another to work with Hekate. He references the appearances of multiple goddesses together in a spell to dedicate a lighter to Dadophoros, because in this paradigm they are syncretized. In his mundane life, he lives out the paradigm of a legal professional for local law enforcement; in his life as Jack Grayle, he paradigm shifts to teach outlaw magic to the vulnerable souls with wounded confidence, afflicted by the circumstances in their families, their marriages, their greater society.
Let me draw your attention back to the quoted words of his incantations, and the description of the Titaness Grayle built his career on. Let me now opine on it as an occultist with theurgic tendencies.
Grayle is, if not a lawyer, very adept with lawyer logic. He negotiates at the interview’s outset that to demand the gods crouch before him is channeling, and therefore not hubris. He orates what he later describes as a sacred act of speaking and hearing, of self-altering, words which declare him a primordial force, unharmed by anything in the sea, land, or sky, and banishing anything of a nature which, coincidentally, bears a strong resemblance to the goddess who made his name known. He aligned himself not with her liminal qualities but with the far end of a moral polarity, asking the gods there to put the truth in his mouth after having previously commanded them to crouch before him. He even uses convoluted logic to explain that what some might call hubris is, in fact, humility. Perhaps even he doesn’t see the way the specific language he used might have unintended consequences — because it’s just a paradigm, and therefore the streams can’t possibly cross-contaminate, just as his mundane and occult lives are utterly separate.
The moment of hubris, I think, was not assuming the identity of Heka. It was thinking he could use “paradigm shifting” to rules-lawyer his way out of consequences. But it’s the GM who gets the final say, not the player.
About a month and a few thousand YouTube views later, one of his former magical co-operators could no longer tolerate their own silence on the schism between Grayle’s public image and their private experience of him. Another chimed in. A third presented a video revealing the contradiction between Grayle’s day job and his persona in the occult community. All of these are presented in public fora where Grayle can’t control the narrative — and can’t get litigious, either. Doing so would require him to use his government name. The connection to the occult would kill his career. As I said earlier, no one’s writing grimoires for the money.
So what now?
At last check, Reddit was mostly accusations about Samuel David’s motives; she was legal, an LHPer wringing their hands over LHP magic is stupid, who hasn’t done a glamour or success spell, etc. Facebook, to hear tell, is the opposite, taking allegations as evidence, burning books and declaring Hekate warned them off of Grayle’s work ages ago. There’s not a lot of nuance in either direction, but occultists on the internet love rubbernecking on drama to punch up their week. (It’s how this popped up on my radar, after all; the reddit post landed in a group chat.)
My response is less passionate. Occultists grifting isn’t new territory. Neither is it new for occultists to be persons of dubious moral turpitude, with or without involving magical compulsion. I am also AFAB and have been inoculated via exposure to “man do bad thing,” more tired than shocked at the possibility that Grayle has ugly anecdotes following in his wake. I don’t think I will be burning my copy of The Hekataeon. The money’s spent, the research is good, and a book can’t help its parentage. I will, however, take into consideration the warnings about questionable material worked into it, and will laugh a little harder at possible examples of the author’s thinly veiled kink.
Will this have a lasting effect for Grayle? Possibly. He has not, as of yet, made a statement, though he did show up at David’s house unannounced to attempt a confrontation. (David got photos, but didn’t open the door.) His intentions were unclear, so there’s too much room for invention.
The most damning evidence is the videos. He demonstrates a hypocrisy of ideology which is much harder to justify with Truth in his mouth. The apoplectic rage from the Leftists in my sphere watching him use the language of the oppressed to sell his work, juxtaposed against his statements siding with the police state, suggests he might have some reconciliation to do.