The Hollow Throne of Lucifer: Praxis
Peter Grey’s long-awaited sequel promises revelation.
The long wait and the quick flip
For six years, the occult community has been waiting for Lucifer: Praxis—the practical counterpart to Peter Grey’s Lucifer: Princeps. When my copy finally arrived, I tore into the packaging like it might burst into flame. I’d promised myself this would be my final Scarlet Imprint purchase, bought purely out of loyalty to Princeps and curiosity about how Grey would translate that scholarship into action. If Princeps mapped the metaphysics of rebellion, then surely Praxis would show us how to live it.
...right?
At just 30 pages in, that hope had already started to flicker. Grey offers a dense weave of literary exegesis, angelic hierarchies, and musings on William Blake that leave the supposed praxis hovering somewhere between poetry and polemic. The question that echoed through my reading was simple and insistent: where is Lucifer in all this?
Does it do what it says it will?
Grey frames Praxis as a “working book,” a companion that transforms through use. Yet despite that claim, what unfolds is largely reflective rather than operational. The early sections read more like Princeps II than anything approaching evocative practice. Even when ritual language appears—“Venite Lucifer!” or instructions drawn from Le Dragon Rouge—the invocations are cited, not enlivened or innovated. Lucifer is mentioned as historical artifact, theological concept, or literary device, but not as a spirit who might actually respond.
At one point Grey reproduces an operation to summon Lucifer from The Grand Grimoire, complete with the exorcist’s address and licence to depart, before acknowledging that this is quotation, not innovation. Elsewhere, he notes that “the entire rite can be performed in the name of Babalon rather than Lucifer as the commanding authority,” effectively displacing the supposed protagonist altogether. Even the few moments that mention the “Prince of the Power of the Air” are perfunctory, as though Lucifer’s presence has been reduced to a literary echo rather than a living intelligence.
That same pattern extends to Praxis’s two major original workings—“Mons Angelorum” and “The Marriage of Gods and Women.” On paper, Mons Angelorum is a sweeping initiation that re-enacts the descent of the rebel angels: a mountain pilgrimage under Orion’s stars, an oath sworn on stone and thread, blood offered to the fallen host. It reads as the de facto initiatory rite—there’s no mention of gender, and its choreography can be performed solo or in a group.
Then comes The Marriage of Gods and Women, explicitly labeled “the female rite,” described as an erotic working “to attract the attention of the angels” and timed to a woman’s menstruation. It references Bathsheba’s ritual bath and the Song of Songs—a mingling of seduction and supplication summarized by the refrain “Am I not fair?” The gender coding is overt: the operator is instructed to undress, bathe, and “appreciate [her] beauty” as a means of summoning angelic attention.
It was at this point where I immediately recalled the words of the late Jake Stratton-Kent, that never fail to elicit a chuckle: "I don't do angels."
"I know that's right," I muttered out loud to myself — or to Jake, or maybe both.
Returning to the text: this raises more questions than it answers. Are we meant to read Marriage as the initiatory counterpart to Angelorum, or as a supplementary rite for women? The text clarifies neither. Grey even references Angelorum within Marriage, implying continuity, yet separates the two by biological determinism. Why should the gender of the operator determine which gateway to gnosis they may enter? And what of women who do not menstruate, for any number of reasons—how are they to engage with a rite whose timing is tied to a cycle not universal to all female bodies?
Even granting that the eroticism may be intended as metaphysical symbolism, it remains troubling. If Marriage is indeed positioned as the initiatory rite for women, why must that initiation be sexual? To render female gnosis accessible only through erotic encounter—however poeticized—is to risk reinscribing the very coercion a true Luciferian current liberates us from. The practitioner becomes object rather than agent; illumination is earned through availability rather than rebellion.
In that light, Praxis falters on its own promise. Its so-called practical dimension is riddled with contradiction: rites that exclude as much as they invite, initiations that romanticize submission, and a cosmology where the path of light depends on who’s permitted to climb the mountain—and who’s told to bathe and wait to be seen.
Who is this for?
Grey writes as though to a specific reader: a man of leisure, situated somewhere in the English countryside, whose life can orbit entirely around magical practice. His Lucifer is a reflection of that ideal—cultured, self-possessed, erudite, and male.
Hmmm.
The tone assumes a shared vocabulary of Western esotericism, classical education, and access to physical and temporal resources most practitioners simply don’t have. It is entirely plausible that that's the point.
And that positioning matters. When a text claims universality but centers one narrow subject position, it risks reinforcing the very hierarchies it purports to challenge. The gendered framing is particularly jarring: women, when they appear, are muses, mirrors, or sacrificial vessels—never agents of illumination in their own right. It’s the same old binary, dressed up in infernal iconography.
For readers outside that imagined circle—especially women, queer practitioners, or those navigating spirituality within marginalized bodies—Praxis can feel exclusionary. The luciferian flame here is gated by gender and geography.
Who benefits from the information being presented this way?
There’s a broader cultural question at play: who benefits when rebellion is aestheticized but not enacted? By couching his Luciferian project in literary mystique, Grey transforms insurrection into contemplation. The rhetoric of liberation becomes safe—something to admire, not to do.
In that sense, Praxis functions less as magical manual and more as ideological reinforcement. The patriarchal romanticism running through it mirrors the very ecclesiastical structures Lucifer was meant to subvert. Even the persistent focus on Blake—half of the book's 210 pages—serves to align the fallen angel with a canon of male visionary poets rather than the lived lineage of witches, heretics, and ecstatic bodies that have always carried the torch of rebellion in practice, not just in verse.
Form and focus: the Blake detour
The most bewildering structural choice is Grey’s extended literary pilgrimage through William Blake. For pages on end, Praxis reads like a devotional essay to Blake’s cosmology rather than a continuation of Princeps. The parallels between Blake’s “Satanic mills” and Lucifer’s revolt are interesting, but the emphasis is disproportionate.
Grey lingers on Blake’s theology of contraries, Swedenborgian correspondences, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, suggesting that Blake’s sexual mysticism prefigures Luciferian gnosis. He tracks Blake’s visionary practices—his prayers as “the study of art,” his communication with his dead brother Robert, and his erotic symbolism in Milton and Jerusalem. Yet, despite positioning Blake as a proto-Luciferian heretic, Grey’s portrayal of Blake’s life and labor quietly reinscribes the same hierarchy his subject fought to dissolve.
Catherine Blake appears only fleetingly, as a biographical aside: “illiterate, from another class,” a devoted wife who “could only sign their marriage license with an X” but “doted on him.” This single paragraph is the book’s sole substantial mention of her, reduced to the symbolic “emanation” of Blake’s genius rather than the co-creator she was.
Modern scholarship makes that omission glaring. Catherine Blake was not merely his muse—she hand-tinted his illuminated plates, prepared inks, proofed etchings, and maintained the home that doubled as workshop and temple. Biographers such as Kathleen Raine (Blake and Tradition) and Peter Ackroyd (Blake: A Biography) both document her technical and spiritual partnership in producing Songs of Innocence and Experience, Jerusalem, and the prophetic books. As Ackroyd notes, Catherine “worked beside him, not behind him,” and Raine described their union as “a continual marriage of vision and craft.” Contemporary accounts recall her singing alongside him as he etched, repeating lines he spoke in trance, tending the press that gave form to his revelations.
Grey’s silence on that collaboration is more than an oversight—it mirrors the broader erasure of women as active participants in visionary labor. His Blake becomes an isolated prophet rather than one half of a conjugal alchemy that literally fused art, body, and spirit. This omission feels especially pointed when we recall his framing of the “marriage of contraries” as the cornerstone of Blake’s system; the doctrine of union stripped of the actual woman who embodied it in practice.
That pattern echoes Grey’s earlier handling of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Apocalyptic Witchcraft, where Hughes was cast as the inheritor of visionary fire and Plath as the consumed flame. In both cases, the male genius survives by appropriating the feminine as material—wife, muse, emanation—rather than as equal creator. It’s a mythic inversion that flatters rebellion while maintaining patriarchal order.
By ignoring Catherine’s role, Grey replicates the very blindness his own luciferian philosophy should expose. The result is a praxis that praises illumination while keeping half its fire hidden. Blake’s “one law for the lion and ox” becomes, in Grey’s hands, a law for one gender of visionary or magician.
Gender, eros, and irony
Eros is meant to be the engine of Grey’s system—the sacred impulse that bridges heaven and hell, flesh and spirit. Yet the erotic current in Praxis feels filtered through a heterosexual male gaze that reduces desire to polarity. This is not merely a matter of political correctness. In magical terms, the reduction of eros to gender polarity collapses the wider spectrum of ecstatic experience.
That irony becomes even sharper when we step back and notice how Lucifer: Praxis distributes its attention. The index lists Lucifer appearing across roughly 57 pages, while Blake and his works occupy 114. The light-bringer yields twice as much space to a Romantic poet as to himself. The imbalance might have been defensible if Blake’s erotic cosmology had been reinterpreted through a genuinely liberatory lens—but instead, Grey reproduces the same patriarchal narrative: woman as conduit, not conjurer.
This imbalance reverberates through his treatment of Catherine Blake, whose labor and partnership vanish even as her husband’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” becomes the template for Grey’s metaphysical erotics. The result is a system that spiritualizes heterosexual desire while ignoring the realities of embodiment and power. The divine feminine is invoked symbolically but denied authorship.
In that sense, Praxis becomes a microcosm of the very “marriage” it seeks to mythologize: a union in which the masculine is transfigured and the feminine instrumentalized. The Luciferian ideal of rebellion against order collapses into an aestheticized repetition of it. Grey’s invocation of “immortal lovers whose motto can only ever be libido sciendi” gestures toward gnosis, but it never quite transcends the carnal allegory.
For a text so preoccupied with contraries, Lucifer: Praxis never quite reconciles its own: body and spirit, male and female, Lucifer and Blake. The promised illumination keeps circling the same dim center.
The hollow throne
Lucifer: Praxis is a beautifully produced book and an intellectually ambitious one. Its binding, typography, and cadence all promise revelation. But for all its thunder, what echoes through its pages is not illumination — it’s vacancy. Grey writes as though conjuring, but the invocation never quite takes; the spirit fails to appear. The reader is left before a throne that gleams but sits empty.
Grey’s scholarship is formidable, his prose often incandescent. Yet brilliance of form cannot disguise the fatigue of content. What once felt like insurgency in Apocalyptic Witchcraft and The Red Goddess now reads as repetition — the same exalted tone, the same binary eros, the same recitations of Blake and Babalon. It’s not that his vision has darkened, but that it has calcified. The words gesture toward revelation without ever risking it.
There are flashes of beauty here: in the interstices of Mons Angelorum, in the scattered lines where art almost becomes prayer. But they are moments, not movements. The rest is exegesis encased in ceremony, a praxis more concerned with posture than transformation.
Its rebellion is rhetorical, its illumination recycled, its risk cosmetic. The work can't manage to scandalize or offend, at least not me. It just simply doesn’t...move. And for an author who has built his mythology on the premise of danger and revelation, that quiet failure may be the most heretical verdict of all.
The book will no doubt find its admirers: those who equate obscurity with depth, citation with gnosis. But for the rest of us — readers who came seeking the bright, difficult grace of Lucifer himself — the light never arrives. It flickers, recedes, and leaves us in a room full of mirrors, watching the author watch himself.
If Lucifer represents illumination, rebellion, and risk, then Praxis ultimately betrays him by avoiding all three.
