From: Tyagi@HouseOfKaos.Abyss.com
Subject: Chaos Magic - Carroll, Misc.
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 93 10:46:25 PST

There is no maxim.


Misc. Excerpts from Peter Carroll's Works [including the typos]

by Soror EXLVX
__________________________________________


It would be inappropriate for any Chaos Magic text to prescribe any
particular beliefs or dogmas.  It would be inappropriate for any
Chaos magician to slavishly adhere to the fine detail of any system.

_Liber KKK_, p. 1


[The 5 'conjurations' or classical magical acts:]

EVOCATION is work with entities which may be naturally occuring or
manufactured.  They may be regarded as independent spirits, fragments
of the magicians subconcious, or the egregores of various species of
life form, according to taste and belief structure.  In practice
Evocation is usually performed for Enchantment, in which the evoked
entities are made to create effects on behalf of the magician.  Evoked
entities also find some application in Divination, when they are used
to discover information for the magician.

DIVINATION includes all those practices in which the magician attempts
to extend his perception by magical means.

ENCHANTMENT includes all those practices in which the magician attemps
to impose his will on reality.

INVOCATION is the deliberate attunement of conciousness and the
unconcious with some archetypal or significant nexus of thought.
The classical conceptions of Pagan god forms are often used but
other principles may serve.  Invocation creates states of inspiration
or possession during which Enchantment, Divination, or occasionally
Evocation, can be performed.

ILLUMINATION is deliberate self modification by magic and may include
spells of Enchantment cast at oneself to repair weaknesses or increase
strengths, and Divination and Invocation performed for inspiration
and direction.

Thus all magical operations are based on the use of will, perception
and imagination, which is to say that they are all species of
Enchantment or Divination.  Imagination is that which occurs when will
and perception stimulate each other....


[The 5 levels of magical activity:]

SORCERY is simple magic which depends on the occult connections which
exist between physical pheneomena.  Sorcery is a mechanical art which
does not require the theory that connection exist between the mind of
the operator and the target.  Any effects arising from such a
connection can, however, be regarded as an added bonus.  Working on
the sorcery level the magician creates artifacts, tools and instruments
which interact magically with the physical world and which can be used
again in more subtle ways on the other levels.  The sorcery level work
should be performed thoroughly, for simple as it's practices seem they
are the foundation on which the higher level work rests.

SHAMANIC MAGIC works on the level of trance, vision, imagination and
dream.  It opens the magician's subconscious by negating the psychic
censor with various techniques.  The magician faces considerable danger
on this level and may have frequent recourse to sorcery techniques or
banishing ritual if it threatens to obsess or overwhelm him.

RITUAL MAGIC combines the abilities developed on the Sorcery and
Shamanic levels.  The magician brings together the use of tools from
the Sorcery level with the subconsious powers liberated on the
Shamanic levels and combines their use in a disiciplined and
controlled fashion.

ASTRAL MAGIC is performed by visualisation and altered states of
consiousness or gnosis, alone.  Physical paraphernalia is not used
although the tools and instruments from the previous levels can be
used in the form of visualised images.  At first the magician will
probably requre seclusion, silence, darkness and considerable effort
at concentration and trance to succeed with such magic, but practice
will allow it to be performed anywhere.

HIGH MAGIC is that which occurs when there is no impediment to the
direct magical effect of will, no barrier to direct clairvoyance
and prescience, and no separation between the magician and any form
of rapport or conciousness he chooses to enter into.  For most
people the portals of High Magic open at a few peak moments in a
lifetime.  As the magician progresses through his training the
momentum he acquires will force open the gates to the miraculous
more often.  No procedures are given here for the five conjurations
of High Magic.  High Magic represents the point where technique
gives way to intuitive genius and each must intuit the key to
unleashing such powers for himself.

Ibid, pp. 2-4


All the techniques of magic are really just so many ways of tricking
some indefinable parts of ourselves into performing magic.  The
universe is basically a magical structure and we are all capable of
magic.  The really useful theories of magic are those which explain
why magic tends to work so erratically and why we have such enormous
inhibitions about believing in it, making it work, and recognising
that it has worked.  It is as if the universe has cast a spell upon
us to convince us that we are not magicians.  However, this spell
is rather a playful cosmic joke.  The universe challenges us to
shatter the illusion by leaving a few cracks in it.

...The magician must rely on the momentum of his work in sorcery,
shamanism, ritual and astral magics to carry him into the domain
of high magic where he evolves his own tricks and empty handed
techniques for spontaneously liberating the chaotic creativity
within.

KAOS KERAUNOS KYBERNETOS

Ibid, p. 13


'Banishing Rituals' as they are commonly known, serve several
purposes.  At the beginning and end of longer rituals they serve
to establish or re-establish concentration, balance and control.
They may also be used for visualisation practice or for shutting
out unwanted influences.  The traditional lesser banishing ritual
of the pentagram devised by Golden Dawn adepts is becoming
progressively less useful as time advances.  Nowadays, few people
are sufficiently commited to hebraic mysticism or Kabbalistic
studies to derive much power from the god-names and angelic images.
The persistency of the increasingly inappropriate lesser banishing
ritual of the pentagram and imitative variants of it in other
traditions is evidence of a continuing requirement for a ritual of
this type.

'The Gnostic Banishing Ritual', p. 1


An invocation of the personal ego or false Holy Guardian Angel for
the purpose of casting ones entire will as an Enchantment upon
reality.  Such an operation would normally qualify as an extreme
act of Black Magic were it not prefaced by an initial invocation
of the formless Kia or real Holy Guardian Angel.  The essential
purpose of the conjuration as a whole is to increase the domination
of ones ego over the world in the hope of bringing the formless
life force of the Kia more fully into play.

'The Mass of Chaos', p. 1


Despite the theories of the sixties it now appears that the
neurophysiological basis of both mysticism and magic is actually
consciousness contraction.  Mysticism is the extreme compression
of attention into a signle point to provoke a cerebral orgasm.
Magic uses similar techniques but aims to provoke material effects
in the outside world.  Both are based on physiologial methods
which bring about an hysterical narrowing and concentration of
mental focus by ecstatic or meditative means.  The quality of
mysticism can only be measured by how much fun you get out of it
or by how much people are prepared to pay to listen to you.
Otherwise magical power provides the only objective measure of
spiritual progress in Chaoist terms.  This can appear as the
direct power of parapsychology or indirectly as the amounts of
obedience, sex, force or money (wands, cups, swords, pentacles)
that one can command.  Implicit in this view is the principle
that all acts are basically magical, and that power equals
freedom.

Direct magic is the short and dangerous path to certain
freedoms and amusements.  No path ultimately leads anywhere
for there is nowhere to go and that which thinks it is going
is an illusion anyway.  Nevertheless, in a spirit of self
sufficiency one sets out for the pleasure and the pain of the
going.  Would you really want it any other way?

>From 'The Relief of Randomity', _Chaos International_ #2, 1987; pp. 23-4.


You are the totality of what you do and can therefore change
yourself by doing otherwise.  Magic is the art of deliberately
believing and pretending very hard and finding that it works.
Highly improbable things can be done by those who are prepared
to experiment with the belief that they are not quite so
improbable.  The world is an illusion, it has played a confidence
trick on you if you let it define who you are.  However, you are
able to play confidence tricks on the universe and force it to
accept your own definition of yourself(s).  In fact, the universe,
being a humorous, obliging and magical structure, will invariably
collude in any such definitions you care to make, if you act
skillfully.  We are all charlatans, especially those persons
pretending to be normal ordinary people....

Magic is not an elusive epiphenomena as parapsychology seems
determined to prove.  This universe is an esstially magical
structure.

>From 'Principia Chaotica', _Chaos International_ #8, p. 15.


...if you want a one-line definition with which most Chaoists would
probably not disagree, then I offer the following.  Chaoists usually
accept the meta-belief that belief is a tool for achieving effects;
it is not an end in itself.

>From 'Chaoism and Chaos Magic', _Chaos International_, #10; p. 11.


...since the demise of essentially spiritual descriptions
of magic, the belief in material causality has been increasingly
used in a haphazard fashion to form various ill-conceived metaphors
such as 'magical energy' or 'magical force' which are tacitly
presumed to be something analogous to static electricity or radio
waves.  This, I think, complete bullshit.  Magic can sometimes be
induced to behave a bit like this, but it is not a very effective
description....

Quantum physics says to me that not only is magic possible in a
world that is infinitely [more?] Chaotic than we thought, but
that magic is central to the functioning of his universe.  This
is a magical universe not a clockwork one....

[For all practical purposes] Relativity, the fundamental physics
associated with it, and the causal materialist paradigm of which
they are probably close to a final refinement... confine us to
this planet forever and rule out magic from our lives.  Quantum
physics, which I believe currently to be basically an investigation
of the magical phenomena underlying the reality most people have
perceived as non-magical for the last two hundred years, shows us
a way out....

I consider that all events occur basically by magic; the apparent
causality investigated by classical science is merely the more
statistically reliable end of a spectrum whose other end is
complete Chaos....

There are for me two main aspects of magic; the parapsychological
and the psychological.  In enchantment and divination I believe
that the magician is attempting to interact with nature via non-
material causality.  He is basically exchanging information with
hs environment without using his physical faculties.  Austin Osman
Spare precisely identified the mental manoeuvres necessary to allow
this to occur.  The manoeurvres are startlingly simple and once you
have understood them you can invent an unlimited number of spells
and forms of divination.  The manoeuvres are sacred but the forms of
their expression are arbitrary; you can use anything at random.

Bohr and Spare are for me Saints of the Church of Chaos.

...when a magician interacts with those apparently sentient sources
of knowledge, inspiration and parapsychological ability that used to
be called spirits, gods, demons and elementals, he is tapping into
the extraordinary resources that each of us already contains.  When
activated they may also receive some input via non-material causality
from outside.  Yet since we all contain such a rich multitude within
our own unconscious or subconscious and can also receive congruent
information from the collective unconsciousness, as it were, then the
possibilities are practically limitless.  Given the correct techniques
one can invoke or evoke anything, even things which did not exist
before one thought of calling them.  This may sound like complete
Chaos, and I have to report that my own researches confirm that it is!

Chaos Magic for me means a handful of basic techniques which must be
adhered to strictly to get results, but beyond that it offers a
freedom of expression and intent undreamt of in all previous forms
of magic.

Ibid, pp. 12-3.

________________________________________________________ END


Liber Ate Information.

Sr. Ex LVX 963