Author: Grant, Kenneth.

Snakewand consists of two novellas, both concerning the Voodoo Bultu, or Cult of the Spectral Hyena. The first of these is entitled Snakewand, and it concerns a pair of Voodoo drums which lure a township to destruction.

The second story is The Darker Strain, and relates of possession by dark atavisms in the guise of the Spectral Hyena, with cataclysmic results for all affected.

Both stories were written during the years that New Isis Lodge was operational. As Kenneth Grant's account has it: Snakewand and The Darker Strain, and other tales to follow, were written in the wake of rituals performed over a period of seven years in an occult Lodge named New Isis.

Many were the magicians and mediums who passed through the Lodge, and some of them feature in these tales.

Their mundane personalities may not have appeared unusual to casual observation, but when elongated and siderealised by the unique perspectives which their magical rôles created for them they achieved an apotheosis, an epiphany.

This extraordinary phenomenon demonstrated the heights and the depths which human nature is capable of scaling, and of fathoming, in the delirious frenzy inspired by their art.

The tales are likewise orientated to the other side of a reality rarely glimpsed outside a magically charged Circle.