By Dave Lee
Peter J. Carroll left us on Wednesday 22nd April as the result of a sudden illness.
He was a remarkable individual who created the concept of Chaos Magic, founded the Illuminates of Thanateros and wrote Liber Null & Psychonaut, Liber Kaos and other books.
His greatest insight, which gave a new, simple centre to effective magical practice, was that magic is dependent on two things: an extraordinary state of consciousness or ‘gnosis’, and a shift in the way the practitioner sees the world, usually coded as ‘belief’. First we assemble the symbolic vehicles – sigils, rituals, songs and so forth. Then we get into an extraordinary state, maybe with something as simple as gazing or gentle breathwork, or something as intense as drugs or sex. Then we are able to leave behind the inertia of our mundane worlds, shift our beliefs about what the world is, and launch ourselves into a different world where our magic succeeds. The idea of belief itself as a magical technique is the core of Chaos Magic’s technical innovation, and is one of the most important conceptions of magic of the last century.
This model was presented in 1978, in the first edition of Liber Null. Before that publication Carroll had already conceived the idea of a magical order that would reflect these ideas – the Illuminates of Thanateros. At first, this was a loose network of no more than a dozen people, but in 1980 it spawned a group in West Yorkshire, in the village Ray Sherwin was living in and in which Carroll stayed. I was one of the founder members of that group. Those were exciting times; I remember thinking that we were responding to what Robert Anton Wilson had portrayed with his cartoon which depicted two characters, a scientist in a lab coat and a stoned hippie-type, with the caption, ‘Hey Man, Are You Only Using Half Your Brain?’. I’d finally found a magical current that worked for people like myself who didn’t do religious faith and weren’t interested in doing so, acidhead science kids who wanted to live weird lives.
The group ran for two years, closed down and then another group was formed, the group that became known as the ‘Circle of Chaos’, because it was an experiment in ostensibly non-hierarchical group structure. As a result of those group experiences, Carroll went on to write Psychonaut, a manual of experimental collective magics.
In 1986-87 Carroll revised the structure of the IOT into something like the hierarchy originally promised in the first edition of Liber Null, but never previously practiced. This gave rise to better-organized collective events and thereby opened up the IOT, now the ‘Pact of the IOT’, to more participants. The tiny network was expanding into a fully-fledged international order. In 1991 he wrote Liber Kaos, which contained the idea of the ‘Eight Colours of Chaos’, a simplification of traditional Planetary magic which was very helpful for creative group work. Magic was emerging from the straitjacket of over-complexity that the Victorian Order of the Golden Dawn had clothed it in.
Peter Carroll had founded the world’s foremost experimental magical organization, the IOT, but it only really came into its own when he stepped back from his leadership role. When he resigned as 0* in 1991 for personal reasons the IOT started to become what it is today. From the start, our magic was diverging a lot from his own style. We emphasised a third principle for chaos magic: If it works, use it. Carroll on the other hand had strong personal opinions about what was good magic and what wasn’t, whether it worked or not. For instance, he rejected all exploration of ecstatic states, was distrustful of energy magic, because it didn’t fit into his theoretical framework, and would not hear of anyone using astrology. His was a classic case of Founder Syndrome, creating a great organization of which he could not be a part because of his deep distrust of everyone else’s magical styles. Even now, people still make the mistake of thinking Chaos Magic = Pete Carroll’s magic, and we are still disentangling his more limiting influences from what chaos magic has become.
Another big post-Carroll shift was the development of collective creativity. He once commented to me that his Temple in Bristol was a burden because he had to constantly create new rituals for them. I asked why he didn’t design rituals collectively with them, and he seemed to think that was a really novel and rather odd idea.
Chaos magic is still developing as a cultural influence. Its philosophy is sometimes dismissed as postmodern relativism, but a closer examination shows us that it is much more than that. It’s true that one of its philosophical origins in Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Multi-Model Agnosticism’ emphasises the idea that there are many different models, or ‘reality tunnels’ that enable us to to apprehend and make sense of any situation we find ourselves in. But this is taken not as a nihilistic flatland relativism but an active response to a world grown much more complex in its layers. Chaos magic implies a value scheme in which our mind’s capacities for higher consciousness, for gnosis, enable us to go way beyond the merely verbal levels of consciousness and tweak our worlds from those higher perspectives. This in turn points to collective experimentation in altered states and magical goals. That’s what chaos magic is becoming in the 21st Century.