By Coral Carte
I was settling down to write a small offering of gratitude to Peter J. Carroll, when word broke that Gordon White had also departed this earthly plane. I was unprepared for the wave of grief that swept across the internet — mine included — and I found my project abandoned as I tried to process this fresh loss for someone whose voice, teachings, and community had also accompanied me through so many years of my life.
In the many tributes to Gordon, countless people have said they would not be where they are today without him. For me, this is true of both Gordon and Pete. One after the other, they taught me many of the things I have since incorporated and embodied in my own life and magical practice.
I met Pete first. I was never a particularly gifted student at school, but when I moved to Milan, I found myself on my Mercury line and my hunger for knowledge expanded exponentially. Once the internet arrived, I no longer had to wander bookshops dowsing for the texts I needed and magically, mysteriously, it brought me everything I needed.
I found Lyn Buchanan’s website and flew to America to study Remote Viewing. At the time this was a huge undertaking, only made possible by my then job in advertising. Later, online schools began appearing, and I found Maybelogic Academy, where I learnt astrology with Antero Alli. There I discovered Peter J. Carroll, “Stokastikos”.
After his experience teaching at MaybeLogic he founded his own magical school, the Arcanorium, and I signed up. I spent nearly three years there, the equivalent, for me, of an undergraduate degree. Unlike my difficult years at university, where failed exams made obtaining a degree excruciating, I applied myself wholeheartedly to every course offered. The teachers were extraordinary. Pete, who had visualised a magical order at only twenty-five, had by then gathered around him some of the finest magical minds of the era.
That time left traces in me both outwardly and inwardly. Some of those traces still exist physically: the wand I made for the course and still carry today, the sigil art, the staff from the six weeks of Chaos Monasticism during the Jihad of Chaos, the Ouranos figurine I sculpted, and all the things I managed to materialise through those years of practice.
Pete taught us everything. He led us on the KKK, pushing us to accomplish in 6 weeks what would normally take a year, enchanting, evoking and invoking, divination and illumination. We crafted our own lamps for illumination work, and somewhere in the middle of those studies I began to understand my life’s mission and the direction of my deeper interests. He recorded himself doing the Vortex Ritual, and we all did it and wrote up our results. He taught us about using magic in business, he taught us about the elements, about the Noosphere. I created a servitor tasked with bringing me “the others” — a phrase I would later hear when Gordon found him for one of his first “Find the Others” Podcasts.
That servitor still works to this day.
Pete was razor sharp, brilliant, demanding, and endlessly creative. We read all of his books, and studied his essays from Chaos International. At the time he was writing The Apophenion, so he entrusted us with proof copies to read through. I still have my signed copy, hand-delivered by the maestro himself, and a signed certificate of completion of the Jihad he later sent out to all of us by post.
We documented all of our work and magical experiments on the boards, Pete would comment on it in the class notes.
Then, at International public Colours of Chaos Day in 2008, I discovered another side of Pete: in person, he was also kind. After the lectures came rituals. The then-head of the IOT was magnificently robed in a striking cloak with tiny buttons all the way down the front. Before he delivered his ritual, Temple Draig conducted a group ritual, and we were called in to participate. We were divided into smaller groups, I found myself – to my terror – placed in a group with Pete himself. My first non-solo public ritual suddenly mattered very much, but he stood beside me with warmth and generosity.
That meeting eventually led me to apply to the IOT, but as magic so often does, it also shattered open the life I thought I knew and forced me into an uncompromising confrontation with myself. My life imploded and exploded in equal measure. I had already lost my job, my mother, and later my adopted father, but after the Arcanorium, and during my novitiate, I also ended a deeply conflictual marriage and stepped into the abyss with my young son beside me.
By then, however, I had magical tools. I had skills. I had sigils everywhere — painted, mosaiced, consigned to fire and earth — and I had that servitor entrusted with bringing me connection, community, and “the others.” And survive I did.
I never finished the novitiate that time. It took another ten years before I was ready to return to that path. But Pete’s school and his direct, hands-on teaching were unconditionally seminal for me. They left marks on my psyche and practice that endure to this day. Much like The Apophenion itself — philosophical, speculative, expansive, the work of a magician in maturity — Pete’s influence carried me into a lifetime of consciousness hacking and exploration.
And then there was Gordon.
From the very first podcast all those years ago, Gordon became another kind of guide entirely. Through him came names, ideas, teachers, systems, histories, and possibilities. He had an unerring eye for brilliance and an extraordinary generosity in sharing it. Gordon created bridges: between worlds, between traditions, between people. Through his writing, and teachings, he carried Chaos Magic out into the wider world, expanding it, illuminating it, and making its possibilities visible to countless others.
I can’t write any better words for Gordon than have already been spoken by some of the best writers of our time. It is enough to say this: magically, spiritually, and personally, I would not be where I am without these two great magicians.
Pete took me into the world of magic and taught me about Chaos magic but Gordon also created a bridge that profoundly changed my own path: the bridge between Remote Viewing and magic. With his unerring eye for greatness, he too found Lyn Buchanan, my teacher and mentor and interviewed him. He realized the real magic in it and had Lyn give training directly to a group of magicians in Rune Soup.
Until then, I had remained largely incognito as a magician, preferring invisibility to vulnerability – unlike Gordon, who spoke his truth openly, unerringly, and without flinching. But the bridge Gordon built gave me permission to step forward publicly as both a magician and a remote viewer, and to recognise that Remote Viewing, despite its scientific terminology, also leaves space for magical thinking and direct experience of mystery.
The Rune Soup viewers became firm friends and excellent viewers in their own right, and to this day we still collaborate. Through Gordon, worlds that had seemed separate suddenly recognised one another. And many of us found ourselves reflected back through that meeting.
Travel safely onwards, dear magicians, and thank you for lighting the way for so many of us.