Liber Null and Chaos Magic: On the Work of Peter Carroll

As some of you will know, Peter J. Carroll, one of the founders of Chaos Magic and the author of Libanal, passed away in April of this year. And during the research for one of the courses I'm creating, a history of Western satiricism in preparation for an online, a cult school that I'm founding, I got to the Chaos Magic talk and realised just how important, not just Chaos Magic and the development of that whole non-system, shall we say, is along with Peter Carroll and Ray Showing, but just how important Carol's work has been in terms of the trajectory of Western satiric thought, Western cultism. And I ended up in a discussion with the owner of Fools, Journey Books, who was kind enough to actually supply me with some of the works of Carol that I didn't already own as for a bit more research for this talk, but basically what I wanted to do after having this realisation that, well, this is a really important figure who seem to have disappeared quite quietly, it's kind of acknowledged for Libanal, but I felt that a full talk was needed just to frame how important Carol's work. I think especially Libanal wars and still is just in relation to the entire history of Western satiric thought, really from Ella Fasslevy to the present day. And so I don't particularly want to do a survey of the highlights, but at a certain point in 1978, Carol sat down and wasn't packaged down with Psychonaut wrote down this book and really began the discussion that comes from, that we take for granted in a sense from Chaos Magic today of just what magic is. Because it appears to me that Carol is cited and Libanal is cited a lot, and much like a lot of Chaos Magic is often reduced to sigils or the eight pointed star or just that all belief systems are like equally valid as tools. And that reduction is in part true, I'm sort of in the paradox of belief here, but I think there's a broad scope of what Carol was doing that's more important and deserves, like try to do him justice in some sense, because it is often his work often is just contained to Libanal. So I think the thing to remember is that Carol and Chaos Magic were broadly didn't arrive from nowhere. That's like the key point is that it's not just some spontaneous mutation. I think there is a few just in doing the research for the history. There is instances of a few, let's say, more so spontaneous arrivals like nothing's disconnected from anything else, but there are figures that seem to be somewhat more detached from the Western esoteric linear trajectory from say a gripper to levy through the Golden Dawn de-unfortune Crowley onward. There's like Gurgif kinda springs off a different way. Franz Barton goes a different way. Pascal Bevely round off a little bit, a little bit earlier, but different. But the point being is that Chaos Magic seems to have this detachment, but it didn't arrive spontaneously. So that history that I mentioned by the 1970s, the dominant system at the time seems to be Thilema, Crowley's Crowley system. And it's a pretty extraordinary achievement. It's sometimes quite tough to sow together. You've got a synthesis of Golden Dawn and ceremony, yoga, inocche and magic, Kabbalah, Crowley's own sort of poetic genius and at some point it's not so much genius going into it. It has a cosmology, it has a theology, it has the capital, like all the hallmarks of not just the capital T tradition being formed, but quite literally a religion with the book of the law, even has aons and all this other stuff attached to it. I don't wanna downplay that. And then you know, this is just in doing this research, it's like this is more broadly the Golden Dawn from the Golden Dawn current, which also has these digressions from the set, like from the collapse of the Golden Dawn onwards, so the builders of the Additum and various other splinter groups, with this Kabbalah as the skeleton sort of of reality, the Kabbalah as the complete structuring document of how Western occultism or Western spirituality is understood. And then you get through to like Wicker and Gardner with its own cosmology, the Goddess and the Haunt God and the Wheel of the Year and specific ontological claims, but all of this still has some adherence to ideas of how to approach magic with respect to dogmatics the wrong word, but hemmed in bounds with respect to tradition. There's a commitment to certain forms, and then there's like scatterings of various other older currents and folk magic and the Grimwar tradition of Jake Stranghant, his project was the revival of that tradition, and then there's Osman Spear and Kenneth Grant. So there's, there's, there was a lot going on basically, the point being is that they had something in common. That provisionally to do magic from really any of these, though maybe not so much Osman Spear, like I said, there's a few, there is a few outlines, but maybe to do magic, you had to at least provisionally buy into a certain metaphysics, you had to engage with gods in a certain form, engage with angels in a certain way. And especially engage with the Sephiroth and the Kabbalah in a certain way, in this like specific ontological sense and act within a certain way within a cosmology. And I think the way I want to unbegin to unfold the importance of especially again, Libanal, because it's so key for just how we approach magic today is that a lot of people by the 70s, I think we're finding this difficult, all of that idea difficult to swallow, not the least because of like the counter current and the beat generation and alternative ways of living and the dawn of the new age from like Alice Bailey onwards. And also not just because people were becoming materialists, you know, people were having magical experiences and engaging with a lot of the alternative stuff. But because like doctrinal content of existing traditions, I think began to feel arbitrary in a world that really had begun to deconstruct but not destruct. And maybe it's intellectual unsatisfying and a bit like Hamden again with the Kabbalah, why these, why these specific places, why these specific angels, even if you go through to the Lima, why new eat and had eat, right rather than the others, what, what is to do with this hamming in that I think a lot of it also has connections to the golden dawn. And the importance is that Carol, it seems, didn't walk into this situation and try reform the pre-existing form and adding like some new gods that are going to break things open or something like that. He, he asked the matter question of metaphysics, which is well, what if the metaphysical content is optional like what if the begin from the fact it works and then study how it works without any commitment to any particular story about what it actually is, right. And so Carol's project, it seems was one of complete reduction to the ultimate core of like, well, this works, like that's keep stripping away until we find what works and then we can begin from somewhere but basically, do we need all this metaphysics stuff that's been brought in since levy, okay. And so in 1978, Libanol is, is published. I believe originally as this photocopied pamphlet I think, it's a really austere book like every time I go to read it, I get feelings of like a scientific peer reviewed paper. It's, it's, to be honest, it's dry and it just, it doesn't have any fluff where what you need to know is concerned it just moves on. But I think the sparseness is playing a role in terms of the style like this stripping down again. And the book, you know, I think almost tongue in cheek now begins with what, what looks like conventional training, like magical training, okay. training. Okay, like you get the banishing. meditation, there's like focusing exercises, there's like enough, there's like take any famous magical training manual and just reduce it down and then it's kind of like not even finger wagging right, so just go do this. But what's interesting is he's like by not saying he's saying we're not going to tell you what magic is, right, we're not going to give you a cosmology, we're not really going to get, like there's techniques and they work and the techniques work regardless of your metaphysical or religious or theological commitment or cosmological commitment. So the key concept with respect to this is is no system altered states of consciousness, right, that big, that the argument is the magic requires the suspension of ordinary waking consciousness, the ego or the internal monologue, the habitual like filter that we have, and then from that it requires an ecstatic or absorbed, say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, state of nocess in order to implant some intention or image into the psyche to begin to operate, right, that's like the fundamentals of sigils too, that you, you stop the ego and in that kind of void space of, which is noces, you throw in the seed and the sigil goes out into the world. And then you avoid the lust for a result and the desiring it and all that, right? Now for anyone who knows the work of Osmond Spare and I gave a talk on Spare recently, Spare did arrive at something similar, but a bit stranger to be honest with the whole Zoskia, right? But the drawing of a desire into the unconscious. Now Carol kind of even takes someone like Spare who's quite sparse and pretty odiosyncratic and strips that of Spare's personal mythology and Spare's, you know, idiosyncratic symbolism and turns it into like just this kind of very small textbook for you to use, right? And so the, the, the Austin Osmond Spare connection bears mentioning because it's, you know, we now, it's kind of the place where we now know this is where, especially sigils came from, but even then, Spare has a sort of myth and the Zoskia cultists, we could say, behind him, which even that Carol strips out, okay? And so the separation of technique, which I think we can turn, turn into the words it works, right? The separation of the fact of something works from the metaphysics, right? And there isn't anything, it's not even the contemporary notion of psychologizing, which I'm really against, by the way, I don't like the psychologizing of magic. So the reduction of it in two, like you don't even need to know that, it's just kind of just, I guess, magical engagement because of the fact it works. The point is that the method works and the working can be observed and repeated without ever resolving to the question of ultimate mechanism, which is one of the places and Steven Skinner and his intro to Libre ABA says like, that's where Crowley went wrong because he approaches it with this Victorian scientific, like, angle, whereas we just find with, that we find with Carol that it's like completely reduced, you can't produce anymore, do this, it works, okay? So that's like the basis and under that whole do this, it works is the, it's the question of the question of metaphysics, not which metaphysics, but metaphysics generally. And this is kind of a almost a postmodern assumption that we basically take for granted now in the age of, you know, like hyperconsumption in the spiritual marketplace, we can kind of pick and choose. Now some people would be in a disagreement with this, with respect to the spirits of the land and lineage and things like that and ancestors, but we are in this like postmodern moment of you can kind of, the metaphysics quite literally don't matter, right? And then in 82, psychonaut, the sort of companion volume comes in. And so if Libre Nile is like this tool kit, which like do this, you'll get this, psychonaut is this attempt at the cosmology and they, you know, they, they, they compactaged together now, but it should be said that this cosmology is, it's a light touch, right? It's like one possible model. And Carol is, I think, drawing pretty heavily here on Timothy Leary with the eight circuit model. Oh, well, Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson's eight circuit model of consciousness, right? So the idea that the human nervous system contains a sequence of evolutionary layers from like the pure survival circuit to the most speculative, higher end circuit. Okay. Carol adapts this into a framework for understanding different magical states and different modes of working. So there's still an emphasis on working. Now that seems somewhat important, but I think more importantly, right, the central cosmic commitment of Carol is put in here, which is the idea of chaos. So normal word chaos, spelled deliberately with a capital C, by the way, but it's not disorder, it's not randomness, but a primal substrate. So the chaos capital C as a ground of all being like this pre-differentiated source from which all matter and consciousness emerge. So, you know, that that is obvious, I think, gestures to the Tao or Jakob Bum is ingrowned, but Carol does arrive from a different direction and then push in a different direction. So the eight pointed star, which I'm not sure if any of the books that I currently have right here have on it. No, the famous eight pointed star, I'll use it for the thumbnail, that becomes chaos magic symbol, the star of chaos, gives this new cosmological philosophy, kind of this weight in terms of representing the infinite potentiality of chaos, all paths, all possibilities equally open before the collapse into any like particular pre-disharm in state. Kind of a little ties in, I think, to the equivalent of what most people know about quantum science, but then every time I go look at quantum science, I have to re-learn it every time, because I just forget it, which I think is probably quantum in itself. But we begin that sort of infinite potentiality of this capital C chaos as the foundation, tie that back into what works. Okay, so it's like extremely optimistic, right? Now, from that, you then have, it doesn't, you know, it needs mentioning, you have the illuminates of Thanateros, death and sex, the IOT, right, founded by Carol and show in 78, said Thanatos and eros, death and desire, death and sex, two fundamental magical principles, really the two fundamentals of life, right? And the, the organizational logic of that obviously bears influence from everything I've said thus far, no hierarchy, no dogma, commitment to like discard using and discarding in terms of like paradigm shifts in terms of what, what works, right? Like magical practice in itself. Okay, so I think not only did this become attractive because, you know, you don't have to be a thalamine, you don't have to attend a wick and coven or you don't have to work through, you have to work all the paths up the tree, you can take whatever symbol, like it does hark back to this form of magical creativity that we see in Austin, Osman, spare, right? Magikas, a toolbox, not as a religion, which so many of them become, and some of them literally became, okay? But from that, there is a new kind of problem, okay? That, I mean, it's probably obvious to most people listening. But let's, like, I want to stay with this liberation for good or ill before we get to that, which is kind of like late 70s, 80s. You know, anyone who knows the history of, especially Britain in 70s and 80s, we've got punk and then post punk hippie counterculture, as I mentioned. Basically, so much of this, like failure, I think, of utopian ambitions, then recalcifies as different forms of political, idealistic orthodoxy of all stripes. So, you know, the punk's end up having their own basically uniform and cliche. And chaos, magic, I think, managed to refuse calcification, like it refused rigidity, and maybe it still refuses that, because it has an adversarial nature within it that doesn't want to ever conform. I mean, it's all possible paths, okay? So, the interest, once the metaphysics is out of the question and the interest is in technology and what works, there isn't really a gap for anything to solidify in that sense, okay? And this does overlap, like, directly with, you know, punk, punk, punk, punk and the counterculture, like with burrows and the cut-up method and that form of subversive literary tradition is definitely there. So, but a full exposure of the arbitrary nature of any metaphysics, including the metaphysics of the sign or meaning, right? So, the idea that you can develop your own symbol and put all meaning into it, like the symbol, the sign on. arbitrary and it's the artistic kind of will or intent that imbues the practice in terms of what it works and so that you didn't All of what is working doesn't need the system to work which is far more liberating than I think that most people even realize Okay, like if you really begin to trace it back it wasn't it wasn't But you know long before Carol that there was still cosmologies and countertheologies that were trying to uphold the reasons as to why something worked and To move through to this kind of postmodern pretty Emancipative system is is quite literally groundbreaking, okay, so that's why it's like deserving of the talk because He he creates a framework that I think the importance is that you can't transmit it there there all the red flags all the red flags and sticking points and moments of apprehension in terms of a cult practice so linear gears hierarchies grade systems All of them which are the reasons for much of the abusing occult systems and Anything of that idea of transmission Are themselves this kind of foe Authoritarian you have to go through this otherwise it won't work, okay? So this kind of deconstructive. It's nothing to do like you can't even transmit this okay is Kind of revolutionary in terms of the history of magic So the core ideas of like just a personal noses sigils belief as a tool like what you believe is arbitrary in a positive sense and like paradigm the explosion of paradigms or infinite paradigms from the 8.0 chaos symbol That's just like here's your toolkit now go create now go do magic instead of you need to be completely embroiled like within some system so that's That's like I think the early days and and I will say after this point This is why and you know again thanks to fools journey books because they like hooked me up with ironically the some of the stuff I didn't have Which so because I wanted to talk some of the stuff I didn't have to fill in the gaps of my knowledge because I was like Why and I kind of only really know p2 cowl up to leave an all and then so 92 we get liba chaos k a OS at this point And it seems at this point that Carol was no longer like satisfied with Agnosticism so there is a sort of change or progression with respect to the mechanisms of magic We've seen so at this point he's done a lot of like practice and teaching And a lot of as I understand it the IOT's like collective experiments And then he now is like okay look I do what you want to say something About what's happening, but he doesn't want to create a myth so it's not happening because you know It's not happening like in the sense that the lemus happening maybe in relation to gods or wicker in relation to the goddess and the horn God or whatever the theology might be like it's not mythology. It's not theology. It's a theory So this is where like Carol, you know man of his day turns to physics and Magic and quantum physics. I think you know I'm managing many people listening would agree with me the amount of books that I've read that have quantum in the title I could have thrown in the trash, you know, I think we're justified now in Having a sort of reaction to anything where it's like magic and quantum physics or whatever it might be or you know quantum Literature or you know like there's an enormous amount of either Protocontum like they didn't quite get there Or just pseudoscientific Wu that in ironically invokes quantum indeterminancy And the observer effect and the double split experiment as a just this like you see it justifies it like there There is no cause in effect or whatever like in a very lazy way that people think it's smart But the difference for Carol I will say is he was aware of that and he's he's actually a bit more careful So the core argument of Libre Chaos is something like this and I hope I've got this right Magic operates on probability like it doesn't violate physical law it doesn't By telepathy move objects will create matter from nothing so it's not like you cast a sigil for a classic car And then like it's so powerful that the one that you eventually get or buy is like now literally materialized right? It's not doing that. Okay? What it does for Carol is influence the probability distribution of events in ways that are Evidually consistent with physical law, but in like aggregate produce outcomes that are statistically unlikely Without magical influence, okay? so This is testable, but it's kind of impossible to test Okay, and Carol spends a lot of time in Libre Chaos on something he calls the magical link So it's like the mechanism by which the magicians Intention again like if you're casting a sigil it's all about your intention Influences that probability distribution. So he's actually not satisfied with it just works Which I think he was for a while so he wants to he does now want to know the transmission medium so his answer involves something that he calls Sine PSI Which is like an attempt to locate consciousness within a physical framework that can accommodate The influence on probability, okay? So the fact that at the quantum level probability is fundamental and not just What we know that that the observation does the observation of the event does affect the outcomes is something that Carol obviously draws on but he tries to build a bridge from there to why magic works, okay? So what he's trying to do is Make magic intellectually respectable But not by dressing it up in the language of psychology and not like you know Jungian psychology or even spiritual development but by engaging with the findings of contemporary physics which arguably kind of still can't explain themselves, right? and So that's his then his framework after like look this works and then let's try figure it out Which then introduced something called aionics which is Carol's theory of magical history which is His account as I'm trying to hold everything together here his account of the major transformations in collective consciousness across human history So like his answer to something that we see in various magical traditions But famously currently is aion of ISIS Osiris and Horus We're now like after currently entering the is the aion of Horus. We've left the aion of Osiris and then like Kenneth Grant takes that up with the aion of Mart kind of simultaneous but might actually be taking it over anyway Carol's version is kind of meta is again like is that right like do we need them? Do we need the metaphysics of all that but he does attend to like let's take a step back and just look like at the metaphysics of the cosmic cycles, okay? so every time he moves It's toward the meta and that I think has opened up a lot of ground for Magical practitioners that we you know in a way we should be thankful for right? so The whole project rests on a distinction between the technique of magic and the content of magic So the methods are the produced noses or the sigil method or the use of ritual Can be separated from the content like the deities and the cosmologies, right? Okay, so basically what Carol introduced was content is Local historical optional like it's optional right technique is universal Content is optional now. It's it's a very very modern. It's pretty much postmodern, right? It brackets kind of all truth claims under various functions I think it's far enough away from comparative religion though to to not be drawn into that debate and Some might criticize it for saying it's what like modern psychotherapy does when it thinks about like religious concepts It doesn't take them at face value But then you would get into the question of Carol on belief, which is like we can still believe these things. Okay and The you know The question then becomes one of is the system arbitrary like can belief actually be arbitrary right so that I think that's like the main Carol I mean the main Carol really is Libanol and then Libacayos is like one that I don't really hear mentioned all that much So then Then we go into the place we're going to actually the later Carol so we have the old the old tarvo where This is like speculative physics taken to a source of magical extreme. And the title is a reference to eight fundamental categories that Carol argued structured physical reality and magical working. So by that point, he developed his own form of physics, what he called three-dimensional time. And he's arguing that time itself has three dimensions and that that space-show temporal structure at the fundamental level is what magical is what makes like magic basically possible in terms of probabilities that I mentioned. Okay. So he begins to develop his own like physics at that point and that's where it really goes off into unique interesting, interesting discussions, let's say. Now, what I kind of saw from my reading and also the Apapherneon which is Chaos Magic paradigm which is like, I actually like almost would say begin here now. So is that he's working on the same problem? I don't think he leaves the problem that maybe he had an answer to which was like how do you give, what can we say about the foundation of magic and how do you give a foundation that doesn't depend on either like revealed metaphysics revelation or the mere fact that it seems to work. Okay. Because like one is well, we don't all have the same revelation in terms of theology or deities and we might be just reconstructing via whatever text. And the other would be well, it works but it's like just because it works. I mean, is that an answer to that question? Like how do you build a theory of magic that would satisfy someone who actually well, it works for them? They don't care about the, so the issue is like magic works but also like we didn't need the deity's like okay and why the hell does this work then? Okay. And that's kind of his philosophical position where he got to where he got to where it was this obscure physics which is intriguing to look at. But it's just bears, like it just bears mentioning, it's seem very important to me that that that approach which we which again like we we take for granted. I think it's kind of wrong to overlook this kind of founder of it. Now that I think the place that it's developed strangely enough as he also recently passed away would be Gordon White. So Gordon White holds two paradigms which at once which is we could call it the Anomest Parodyne or the Shamanic Spirit Parodyne and the Chaos Magic Parodyne. So I think Gordon White takes the pragmatism and technique and toolbox abilities of or approach like this works from Chaos Magic. But at the same time he is very explicit about the fact that he adhered to the understanding of spirits that these are, you know, this isn't psychology, this isn't just arbitrary symbols like these are real beings. And those two together, right, that those two could be two things that come together. And I think without Chaos Magic and without Carol's initial sort of deconstructing of that, that paradigm just I don't think would that that ability to understand paradigms in that way wouldn't have been, I don't want to say wouldn't have been possible. I mean maybe some false survival to say someone else would have come along, but he's the one who really opened up those possibilities. And so like the historical importance I think it does go beyond. There's my attempt to kind of frame Carol and Chaos Magic. And I don't want to completely ham in Chaos Magic to Carol, but it would be wrong to deny the importance of Lever Nile. So there's a certain sense of a strange form of, I don't want to say democratized magic like maybe chaosized magic, right? Like that before, before Chaos Magic serious practice in the Western tradition would have involved a lineage, would have likely involved grades and then like gurus. And this like the equivalent of grade papers, right, of the Golden Dawn. And I do think that he introduced one of the key figures, let's say of this introduction of like Chaos, let's use the word Chaosize because democratize seems silly in terms of some whatever. But like you could take Lever Nile and just construct and in a strange way took it back to a form of almost like shamanic creation, right? So it's a, it was a pretty big doorway in time. And I think the attempt to try give magic and intellectual self respect that maybe it had, it had lost for a while but also not reduced it to psychology. I think it was a good attempt, but I don't think that's ever really going to happen because he didn't shy away from the fact that magic definitely worked. And then you know, I think the the IoT is one of the most intriguing histories going. So that's kind of my talk on, that's like my talk on Carol. And it was a nod to, as I went through this course, so you know, the course that I'm creating follows Levy, like it starts with Levy, goes through Golden Dawn, goes through Deon Fortrune, Crowley, GERGF, um, Theosophy. And it was remarkable to see just how long it kind of took for there to be this postmodern moment where someone finally questioned the gods, but all questioned the pantheons and the systems, but said, look, something here is working like we need to look at that without these almost like safety nets of differing theologies because it seemed that to a degree and I don't want to question anyone's revelation, whatever metaphysics one wants to apply to say wicker or Crowley or what I've asked was or is, etc. like is their own deal. So I don't want, I certainly don't want to psychologist or anything like that. But this ongoing history of finding more and more obscure gods and deities or more like, oh, we go by the Greek thing or we go by the Egyptian thing. It's all understandable and it all develops these beautiful theologies. But Carol's step back, like he was the first to step back, I think, this, you know, my own understanding of it. So I, it's just a short talk really because I felt, felt in need of it and maybe I'll introduce people to his work. I mean, you know, the place I would obviously say is strange to say where to begin now because like, leave a null, I would maybe say that there's like, because Carol's magic has had a sort of almost like a concordance because there couldn't be such a thing. But almost like in terms of practice, I think there are better books now. But as it like a historical document, this still reads, it's still like a must read for anyone into Western occultism. And actually, like of all the ones that I read in prep, like in prep, Libre Chaos was my, was my favorite. He, he develops, he develops a style in there that, and he's actually quite easy to read in that one. And then, um, the Afrofenion is, is another fantastic read on the Chaos Magic paradigm. I'm tackling a lot of key questions in there. And so, that's my little talk on Peter Carol and a big thanks to Fools, Jenny Books, who are, they're a bookseller and with me and, me and the owner, chatted quite a bit about this talk. They were kind enough actually to give a discount code for their store. So, head on over there if you want to look at, like, specialist occult books. But other than that, that's my thoughts on piece of Carol and where Chaos, like, where Chaos Magic goes now. Um, yeah, I'm in, I'm in Treg to see. But, uh, thanks for listening and, you know, go read, uh, go read, leave a Chaos or leave a not.