Absurd Moment

Quem és tu, à beira de um ataque de nervos, para decidir o que fazer com a minha vida?
Estou profundamente em fúria com o egoísmo de desejares a morte e me quereres arrastar contigo.
Ninguém me conduz para lado nenhum, a não ser que eu queira ir.
Da próxima vez que fechares os olhos e me puxares contigo, vai ser a última vez que o fazes...

E o meu ódio é:
Ver as raízes das árvores crescerem para fora da terra à procura de um pingo de água
E os céus virarem-se ao contrário procurando o sol nas entranhas do cinzento
E bater com um punho fechado na terra semi-mole em negação com os factos da vida
Olhar o monge enquanto este cruza o meu caminho e violentamente agredir o chão com um ramo
O monge é lânguido e parece satisfeito com a minha incompreensão crescente.

Hoje acordei tenso e suado. A arfar de revolta. Sentia saudades do ódio, e desta força que me resseca as entranhas.
Quando estamos sozinhos somos resistentes.
A individualidade ocupa espaços por preencher, e consome sentimentos desconhecidos.
Criam-se defesas para saber lidar com o que não se quer aprender.
E o pior de tudo é ser o actor segundário no palco da minha vida.

A partir de hoje:
Seco como um salgueiro com fome
Implacável com o que me diz respeito
Certo do que me assegura
Decidido com o que me faz bem
Pensamento rectilinio; afiado
Ouvinte atento dos impulsos instintivos

... E atirei o anel (da complexidade) ao mar.
Venha o que vier!

Hello Peter! To begin our little chat tell me, & the readers, how did you first get into Magick and Occultism in general and in what ways does it change your current life?
Peter Carroll - “I had a few odd experiences in my childhood, if I wanted something really badly then it would sometimes come to me by a most improbable route, and my mother occasionally astonished me with her psychic abilities. For example she once woke in the middle of the night to announce to the family that an obscure relative had just died, sure enough a phone call the next morning confirmed this. I started to borrow books from the library on witchcraft and magic from an early age, then when I went to college and discovered just how tedious advanced chemistry could be, I spent most of my time studying magic instead. I started with Eliphas Levi, and then went on to Aliester Crowley and the Golden Dawn material. With friends at college I began to try spells and rituals and meditations. Gradually I began to try and formulate some sort of theory and organisation of ideas to make sense of it all. From the age of 18 to 38 the quest to formulate a coherent view of the theory and practise of magic dominated my intellectual and social life. I see myself as half scientist and half magician, I see no conflict between these world views, I regard magic as a phenomenon that we can investigate scientifically. Most of my friends have an involvement with magic or metaphysics of some kind, and from what I have learned about how belief and religion actually work I could never accept any religion for myself.”

When did you first meet with other people involved in Magick and why? Did it contribute to an exchange of thoughts and experiences? Do you think most Occult students are good communicators?
P.C. - “I actively sought out the magical scene in London in the early seventies, it was very vibrant in those days with a lot of well educated private school and university drop out hippies with the time and money to read and write and experiment. I have met a very broad spectrum of people in the occult, from Eton educated mathematicians who were real gentlemen and brilliantly erudite, to uneducated satanic creeps with nasty chips on their shoulders.”

Would you agree with me when saying that Occult knowledge is something that one acquires as being very personal and by that reason always works differently from person to person?
P.C. - “It depends on what you mean by occult knowledge. Each person has a unique psychological makeup and idiosyncratic motivations and obsessions, and some people use occult ideas to explore such things, however when it comes to magic (I do not like the term occult), I think that certain universal technical principles apply. If you look at what remains of Shamanism, humanities first attempt to organise magical principles and practices, you find that all over the world in widely separated cultures, shamen were using the same set of basic techniques, and only the local symbolism varied.”

Please elucidate our readers on the books you’ve written and what are the themes you explore within each one of them? Are you satisfied with what you’ve accomplished so far both as a writer and on personal ground?
P.C. - “In “Liber Null & Psychonaut” I basically wrote down the results of my first 5 or 6 years of theoretical and practical study. I tried to write the book that I would have liked to have found at the beginning of my quest. I wrote it to force myself to organise my ideas and to make them available to others. The books that I started with were generally quite confusing, Levi tried to make a theory of astral light but it didn’t really work, Crowley side-stepped theory almost completely, Austin Spare had a theory of sleight of mind but no metaphysic, the Golden Dawn material contained a crazy cacophony of assumptions culled from many eras and mixed animism, spiritism, paganism, with monotheism. I just wanted to make some sense out of it all. In my second book “Liber Kaos, the Psychonomicon”, I wrote down the fruits of my research conducted whilst forming and leading The Pact, an international magical organisation of mostly British, European and American magicians at the time (now it has gone global). In appointing myself head of this organisation I accepted the challenge of innovating a great volume of ideas and techniques as a more or less full time job. I developed the ideas in the first book to create the equations of magic, collections of rituals and training exercises, and a lot of “insider tips and tricks of the trade”. My last book, “Psybermagic” was my leaving present to the Pact. I was exhausted and I needed to devote more time to my business and my growing family and I wanted to devote my remaining spare time to developing a more general and profound model of magic based on quantum physics and 3 dimensional time. (see my website for ongoing details). Most of the people in the Pact did not want to follow me into this field of research, so I went off on my own into the wilderness as it were. I struggle continuously with this new project which has become highly mathematical, I may never complete it.”

“Knowledge is power”, and for many people I know into Occultism they are not of the opinion that one should divulge theories or empirical knowledge to the masses for they are not worthy of working with such grand Arts and secrets. Do you agree that one should expose these elder themes totally for free & for the mind of people who may not be ready to receive, and perceive this sort of experiences?
P.C. - “Many people who know very little would prefer that others know even less. So often “occultism” is used to conceal the fact that the writer knows nothing of any use at all. Magical technology is no more dangerous than religious or weapons technology.”

What do you think it is then, that it took so long for Occult knowledge to come out of secrecy and into the open?
P.C. - “I consider that we are only at the beginning of understanding magic. Remember how chemistry gradually developed out of the mire of alchemy? Well it seems to me that at the time of writing our understanding of magic has reached a stage equivalent to discovering the atomic table in chemistry. We have sorted out and classified the basic elements and eliminated the spiritual dimension, now we have to find out how to make the elements do what we want in a controlled and reliable fashion.”

Are you pro or against the use of drugs in order to enter altered states of consciousness? Even if one can do it without the use of drugs it’s always a different perspective to be under the influence of it and may contribute to the enrichment of perception or even the confidence of ones inner-strength, don’t you think so?
P.C. - “There is a long history of the use of various intoxicants and hallucinogens for divination from shamanic cultures onwards, personally I have not found them useful for this although I found hallucinogens gave me an insight into what my brain could do in unusual circumstances. However I suspect that the ancients fascination with altered states arising from narcosis, epilepsy, and fever has a lot to do with the fact that they did not regard the mind as a material phenomenon but as a spiritual one, and thus they tended to look for spiritual explanations for unusual mental activity.”

What do you think it happens to consciousness after physical death?
P.C. - “The physical body disintegrates and becomes incorporated into new physical bodies, some evidence suggests that fragments of our thoughts and ideas and desires become reincorporated into other brains, however even the Dalai Lamas rarely seem to manage to pass on more than a few fragments in a coherent way. If we try and define exactly what we mean by the word “consciousness” then it does not really seem to mean much at all, I regard the concept of self as a convenient illusion.”

Could the sexual act be considered as a vital force that spiritually needs to be utilised and experimented/experienced in order to incite a different terrestrial view?
P.C. - “I will have to guess what you may mean by that question. Sex, together with religion and politics (in the broadest possible sense of both), give most of the definition to peoples identities in every culture. Now these three things are linked in a far deeper way than most people acknowledge consciously. Sexual behaviour rarely changes unless political-economic or religio-philosophical circumstances change first. However if people deliberately change their sexual behaviour then it inevitably causes changes in the other two things as well, in this sense it can act as a revolutionary force with unpredictable outcomes.”

Where do you see this new direction in magick and thinking going, and why do we need it now?
P.C. - “Well magic seems to be going in many contradictory directions at once in this post modern eclectic age. We have sorcerer- scientists, satanic gothic neo-medievalists, and new age white Wiccan pre-teens. We need all of these things because we need to keep experimenting.”

It is suggested that when one draws sigils, or just the outlines of the various names over magical talismans, we are really drawing the literal energetic patter of the forces invoked. Does this happen only while drawing or merely in the act of focalisation? Or under both actions?
P.C. - “I do not use the animist or the spiritist paradigms much, except perhaps symbolically in ritual design. I consider that the medium of magic is information projected from or received by the magicians subconscious across space and time.”

Some people believe that there is a limit to how far one can go while incarnate. That we can’t really experience some of the higher levels of the Qabalah Tree. Is that an obsolete statement, or is it just pretty relative?
P.C. - “In Qabalah as understood by the Golden Dawn and Crowley, it seems that one builds a tree for the pleasure of climbing it, and that to gain full spiritual satisfaction one has to believe that the tree is somehow real. I have chosen to avoid this belief system.”

How do you see your childhood years and infancy to contribute to what you are today? Did you have any paranormal encounters or an unusual growing?
P.C. - “I had a modest upper working class background with a strong mother and an amiable but weak father. Apparently that’s a recipe to create offspring driven to success, my three siblings have all done well in different fields. My alternative interests were perhaps partly a reaction top my fathers lack of imagination and lack of interest in anything outside of his small world. I mentioned some of my odd experiences previously, but I think that perhaps the defining moment came as I walked home from a long tough written exam aged 12. I suddenly became fully aware of the recursive nature of awareness itself, I became aware of myselfs becoming aware of themselfs in an infinite regress, before that I had been living like a sleepwalker.”

The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some spectacular things together. What do you think created such a fusion between these the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?
P.C. - “Science and technology have always supplied the raw materials for art, in the most basic sense of providing the pigments and brushes as it were. Van Gough for example could only do what he did because someone devised portable bright liquid oil paints packaged in small skin bladders that you could use outside a studio. However we are now witnessing an appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of some of sciences creations in their own right, for example the mathematically generated Mandlebrot set. One of the criteria for any new scientific theory is its elegance, Einsteins special and general relativities look beautiful to a mathematician, the special because of its clean and sweepingly austere simplicity, and the general because of its awesome inclusivity and intricate complexity. Quantum theory though still looks a real ad hoc mess and that is one of the strongest reasons for believing it to be incomplete, it is not beautiful. However having said that, I must lament the tendency among some modern artists to eschew the technical skills and possibilities that science offers and to regress into throwing shit randomly at their canvasses in spoilt child mode.”

Imagine the world would end tomorrow, what would be the mystery or secret that you would most like to see solved or revealed?
P.C. - “We only make any progress when we work out the correct question to ask. All through history people have wasted lifetimes on the wrong questions like ‘why does god allow this to happen’ or ‘what are the names of the salamanders of fire that inhabit the realms of phosphorous’, now it may be that science is barking up the wrong tree in asking how does quantum gravity work, because we may be mistaken in the assumption that it even exists. However I would take a gamble upon my own proto-theory and ask if time really does have 3 dimensions. If the answer was yes then scientists and magicians would have just one day to congratulate me and to frantically adjust to the paradox that the world was going to end but that it couldn’t because time has three dimensions. If the answer was no then I could spend the rest of the day catching up on all the gratifications that I have denied myself in the course of a fruitless quest. I think that either way, I would burst out laughing at the answer.”

I was reading something about Chaos silliness where one wrote that humour is important in magick. Do you agree that rituals can be silly and no less effective than ones when you keep a straight face? I wonder how can one keep a certain level of concentration while being laughing or acting silly… Give me your opinion.
P.C. - “The rituals of religion are profoundly silly to unbelievers, but profoundly effective for those who do believe. In the pact we tended to use humour in two ways, frequently we burst out laughing deliberately to divert our attention after casting spells etc, and secondly we occasionally used deliberately ridiculous ideas and materials in actual magical workings but carried them through with full solemnity, for example I remember once using a child’s plastic robot toy as the visualisation basis for a servitor to retrieve a piece of information by divination, and we got excellent results for our investment of belief.”

What is your understanding of the anti-matter?
P.C. - “Anti matter seems to be simply a type of matter in which the particles carry opposite nuclear and electric charges to normal matter, however it seems to react to gravity in the same way that normal matter does. When antiparticles hit particles they both annihilate to give energy. Some antiparticles arise naturally from cosmic ray impacts and nuclear decay, and we can make a whole lot more in particle accelerators. Many theorists wonder why the universe does not contain an equal mass of matter and anti matter, and experiments are in progress to find out if antimatter differs in some other way from matter apart from the reversed charges. It is possible to model antimatter as though it consists of matter travelling backwards in time. Personally I suspect that the lack of large quantities of antimatter in the universe (we would see frequent explosions with a characteristic radiation signature if there were much) is due to the fact that the universe has taken the low energy option of splitting the strong nuclear force symmetry into red+blue+green=neutral, rather than achieve neutrality by creating a colour-anticolour symmetry break. The potential for antimatter to exist in our universe strikes me as a consequence of the underlying reality of 3 dimensional time, as does the potential for matter and antimatter to exist in three generations, two of which rarely appear in nature although we can manufacture the stuff.”

Explain me the importance of pain in a magickal exercise? As far as I’m concerned the exchange of a liquid such as blood, saliva or semen can highly increase the success of a determined ritual. It is also said that after a turbulent period silence takes over…
P.C. - “Pain can be a method of reaching a gnostic state of excitation, but it is not a method that I favour due to the possibilities of lasting damage.”

The more we try to find out what it is, the less we know. Do you remember any particular example when you felt like this? Also, could this be a correct way of describing Esoterism and the way magick works around and within us?
P.C. - “Any proper enquiry into anything should throw up as many new questions as answers. For example we now know that the universe is more stupendously vast than anybody ever suspected even 30 years ago and we have many more questions to answer about it than we had before. Similarly in magic we have a fairly good theory of the sleight of mind techniques required to occasionally make things happen, but that has opened up a whole new can of worms concerning the questions of why does it work so unpredictably and how does it get from your head out into objective reality as it were.”

Magick is full of paradoxes. Is magic a paradox?
P.C. - “A paradox merely illustrates the presence of a faulty assumption somewhere in the chain of reasoning that led to it. Personally I take the view that the whole universe runs on magic, and that science is what we call the high probability stuff where things happen more or less reliably and magic is the less reliable stuff. Quantum physics seems to lie somewhere in the middle, it works, but only with about 50% probability. This is one of the main reasons for the interest of many occult theorists in the quantum stuff.”

How can we possibly explain that most wished-for events take place when we least expect them? Is it a subconscious move or force? Please explain your thesis.
P.C. - “This is one of the most important datum’s of modern magical theory, and it was the English artist and magician, Austin Spare, who first drew attention to it. The theory basically says that a conscious desire is continually adulterated with other thoughts and desires and doubts. (Try holding any conscious desire in your mind for even a couple of minutes without thinking about ANYTHING else at all, its impossible). The theory is that only a desire planted firmly in the subconscious, where ordinary thinking cannot mess it up, is likely to have a magical effect. Thus all the analogical and symbolic representations that magicians have always used for their desires function to distract conscious thought and activate subconscious desire. For example when you stick pins in a doll you should not be thinking about the intended target at all, you should be concentrating on the doll, your subconscious will know why you made it. Spare would often make abstract sigils of his desires and put them all in a box and then after a few days take them out having forgotten consciously what they were for and then concentrate upon them, he probably often had some form of sex or other whilst concentrating on them.”

Before putting a final rest to this inquest, what advises can you give to aspiring students of the hidden arts?
P.C. - “Be highly selective in what you read and be critical of it, make notes about what seems useful and try to develop some sense of how the ideas have developed. Above all, enchant long and divine short, and do not attempt to invoke anything that should be evoked instead. Do not loose your sense of perspective, make sure that you have other interests as well.”

I sincerely thank you very much for your time & answers Peter. Are there any other items we have not yet covered and that you would like to speak about or comment?
P.C. - “Well I have said very little about the romance of sorcery, the art and charisma of magic, black robes and nudity, thick clouds of incense, weird sigils on computer monitors or drawn in flaming liquids on mountaintops. I do like these things and I do find that they get me in the mood and often lead to better results...”

from "Descending the Abyss" booklet - 26/11/01
Conducted by NM
+ info: http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/carroll.php

A inauguração da mostra é já dia 26 de Maio, no Espaço @ Juventude (Rua da Atalaia, 159) pertencente à CML, pelas 21horas. Estão todos convidados a aparecer e dar uma vista de olhos! A exposição mantém-se até dia 20 de Junho e o certame reune nomes como Antony & The Johnsons, Goldfrapp, Bernardo Sassetti, Moonspell, Mão Morta, Alice Cooper ou Rammstein. Mais info sobre o decorrer deste projecto pode ser consultado em: http://nmdesign.org/lat/

Nothing IS True | Everything IS Permitted
Uma abordagem pictórica da teoria do Caos
Instalação transdisciplinar de Imagem + Texto

"In the process of making art, the artist struggles with the seemingly opposing forces that have always existed since the beginning of time-cosmos and chaos. The general perception is that these forces are always at odds, but we need to pursue the wider understanding of how they are interdependent. From a Christian perspective, chaotic events are subsumed under the wider providence of God. Under Darwinism, the belief is that nature uses chaos constructively to provide biological systems with access to new forms. Order and chaos have always been preeminent forces that shape and define nearly every aspect of life. These omnipresent forces are present when the artist is faced with life transitions such as birth and death, with world issues of war and peace, along with the struggles faced in everyday life. Undoubtedly, our perception affects how we interpret their art as much as it affects the creative process of making art."

Concepção + Projecto + Material - becaming real according to unvoluntary Will...

- To start our interview tell the readers how did you first get into Magick and Occultism in general and in what ways does it change your current life?
I first became interested in the occult at the age of seventeen. Up until that time I thought the occult was nonsense. What first piqued my interest was a picture by the occult artist Austin Osman Spare, which I came across in a school library book. I read some Jung as part of my school sociology course, and what struck me about the Spare print was that it seemed to reflect Jung's ideas about the unconscious. So I started to look for books on the occult in the local library. In 1977 there wasn't an awful lot on offer, so I ended up reading Mme Blavastky's "The Secret Doctrine" and other such weighty tomes. I think the first book on actual magic that I read was David Conway's "Magic: An Occult Primer". I was already into meditation, but I started to try out visualisation exercises and so forth. By that time I'd also begun to experiment with psychedelics, and reading books by William S. Burroughs, etc., so I guess one thing led to another.
As for my current life, I don't have much time for formal ritual stuff. My current job is very demanding, and to be honest, I'm not interested any more in doing huge long rituals other than occasionally. At the moment I'm sufficing with a simple series of meditations which can be done anywhere.

- When did you first meet with other people involved in Magick and why?
After first getting interested in the occult, it took me five years or so before I met anyone else who was into it as 'seriously' as I felt myself to be at the time. I had just started a Degree in Behavioural Sciences and, quite fortuitously, one of the other guys on the course had an older sister who just finished that course. She was a member of a magical order - The Order of the Cubic Stone - and I was, at the time, considering doing their basic training course. She had been into magic for several years and we had many fascinating conversations, she lent me books I'd never come across and enabled me to see that there was a whole magical subculture in the UK which I'd been previously unaware of. After I finished the degree, I moved back to my home town and hooked up with a wiccan coven for a while. By the mid-1980s I had been in a number of small magical groups and had gained enough confidence to start groups of my own. I was for a few years involved in larger organisations such as TOPY, the Illuminates of Thanateros and AMOOKOS. Up until fairly recently, I'd say most of my magical explorations have been in relation to groups. I think it boils down to what a friend in a group I'm currently in said - it's about "good fellowship". That's being able to discuss ideas, experiences, feelings with other people in a space where there are no "right answers", and people are interested in you as a person, rather than playing stupid status games. Whilst working in groups, I've pushed myself to do stuff that I probably wouldn't have made time for on my own - making masks, musical instruments, incense, ritual gear, writing vast amounts of 'training papers' etc., and of course, being in a group sometimes allows you to do really cool stuff. As a member of the IOT I did a coast-to-coast tour of the USA, promoting Condensed Chaos, during which I met William S. Burroughs (a long-time hero of mine) and being a member of TOPY got me onstage in the UK with Genesis P-Orridge. Of course these are rather obvious 'highlights' and I've participated in some fantastic group ritual events, nearly fallen off a mountain in Wales, and had some amazing conversations down the years.

- Would you agree with me when saying that Occult knowledge is something that one acquires as being very personal and by that reason always works differently from person to person?
In general, yes. But it's very useful - indeed, necessary, in my opinion, that the individual magician can discuss her or his results, experiences & ideas with others who share the same interests.

- Please elucidate our readers on the books you've written and what are the themes you explore within each one of them? Are you satisfied with what you've accomplished so far both as a writer and on personal levels?
Tall order! I first started writing for occult magazines in the late 1970's, initially because I wanted to subscribe, but couldn't afford the subscription fees. By the mid-80's I was writing for a wide variety of UK & German small press occult journals, and in 1987, started (with Rodney Orpheus) "Pagan News" which ran for about five years, on and off. "Pagan News" was a news-oriented pagan 'zine, which covered a wide range of occult subjects and initially ran as a monthly publication - which meant that we were getting it out every three weeks! How we did it, on virtually no start-up capital and me being unemployed at the time, seems a bit of a mystery in retrospect. Doing Pagan News also led to a major career change for me. Up until then, my professional background was mental health (I'd also trained as an occupational therapist for three years) but as I began to get more into DTP, I decided that this was what I wanted to concentrate on. It took a while to bridge the gap, but I've spent the last ten years or so working in publishing.
I then went on to publish a series of 'chapbooks' on various aspects of magic. The first of these was the "shamanic trilogy" which was released between 1989-91 and comprised of 2 booklets looking at practical exercises and a third, which attempted to deal with some ofthe issues around using shamanic techniques in a modern, urban environment. This trilogy is out of print but is available at my website [www.phhine.ndirect.co.uk] as free pdf e-books. I then did an anthology of material from the Esoteric Order of Dagon (a network of magicians interested in exploring Lovecraftian magic). And the last two chapbooks (published in 1992 in association with Chaos International) were "Condensed Chaos" and "Chaos Servitors: A User Guide." In 1993, I released my first 'book' "Prime Chaos" as a limited edition of a 1000 copies, via Chaos International Publications. By this time, I was a member of the Illuminates of Thanateros magical order, and it was at one of their international shindigs that I met the late Bob Williams, who very generously offered to make the rounds of the US-based professional occult publishers on my behalf. In April 1994, Bob called me up and said that New Falcon publications were interested in a book from me and could I have a 60,000 word ms ready by August - which didn't give me a lot of time! So for months I wrote like a mad thing, drawing on the large number of articles I'd accumulated from my 80's writing binge, and got a manuscript together. Bob put up $2,000 towards the publication costs, and when the book was released, he and other USA IOT members arranged for me to come out to the States and do some workshops and meet William S. Burroughs, who'd kindly written some ad copy for the book, and who had been a long-time hero of mine. "Condensed" is a kind of introductory book on the Chaos approach to magic - though I feel it would be useful to anyone interested in magic. It's based on my own experiences in doing practical magic, from stuff I did years ago to things which were still crystallising in my mind at the time of writing it. I tried (how successfully I don't know) to keep the emphasis on practical technique rather than theory, since IMO a lot of what passes for magical theory is just one writer's opinion that gets treated as immutable laws. The original chapbook, by the way, has been retitled "Oven-Ready Chaos" and is available on my website as a pdf file, in English or German. "Prime Chaos" is a sort of 'companion' to "Condensed", being a rewrite of the original book, released by New Falcon in 1999. Like "Condensed" it deals with stuff which arose out of my own experiences, so the biggest section of it covers magical group dynamics, and there are also sections devoted to Lovecraftian magic and Discordian stuff. In 1994 I expanded the original Lovecraftian magic stuff from "Prime Chaos" and released it as a chapbook "The Pseudonomicon". This was later re-released in a revised edition from Dagon Productions [www.dagonproductions.com] and has just gone out of print. I am slowly putting down ideas for a third revision.
I guess I'm fairly satisfied with the stuff I've done so far. At the moment I don't really have a burning desire to embark on another major writing venture, plus I don't have as much time to write as I used to. At one time, writing & self-publishing was a major source of income to me, and since I am now paid to produce magazines & website material, that's no longer the case. I see no reason to churn out book after book and try and hold onto the fiction of being an "occult author" - appearing at conferences, etc. Been there, done that - time to move on.

- "Knowledge is power", and for many people I know that are into Occultism they are not of the opinion that one should divulgate theories or empiric knowledge to the masses for they are not worthy of working with such grand Arts and secrets. Do you agree that one should expose these elder themes totally for free & for the mind of people who may not be ready to receive, and perceive this sort of experiences?
For a start, I don't think that "knowledge is power" when it comes to magic - "Doing is power" is far more appropriate, since anyone can acquire knowledge but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can apply it practically. As for not divulging "theories or empiric knowledge to the masses for they are not worthy of working with such grand Arts and secrets" I think that's just bollocks. Anyone can purchase books on magic or find a plethora of information on the world-wide web. Whether or not they understand what they read or choose to apply it for themselves is another matter. But this whole "I'm special 'cos I'm a magician and can therefore look down on the masses” is just self-aggrandising crap. For a long time, I've been interested in releasing freely-available material. In the mid-80's, together with some friends, I released a free 'chain-book' on chaos magic. This was just some collated, unbound materials - the idea being that if you liked the idea, you added to it and passed it on. We released this under the auspices of the "Lincoln/Leeds Order Of Neuromancers" (L.O.O.N) and it's since found its way onto the web in a variety of formats. We wrote a bunch of articles under a variety of pseudonyms (Magu Magoo was one of my favourites) and soon had letters from people wanting to join the order, not realising it didn't exist. More recently, royalties from the 2 New Falcon books have enabled me to get online and post a lot more free material on my ever-expanding website. Occasionally I get emails from people saying "I've revealed secrets" but I don't take them very seriously. Writing under a pseudonym can be an interesting magical exercise. I once interviewed Pat Mills (former editor of 2000AD) who said that he consciously created characters which he more or less invoked in order to get dialogue from. I've tried this on a number of occasions, and was once informed by someone who thought that one particular pseudoynm was a 'real' person that 'he' was a much better writer than I was!

- What do you think it is then, that it took so long for Occult knowledge to come out of secrecy and into the open?
Hm, that's a complicated one. Obviously the growth of literacy and cheap publishing are factors - from what, the 16th century onwards? There do seem to be periods in history when occultism was definitely in fashion - probably from around the 17th century. A lot of popular occult literature stemmed from western travellers going to India and describing the "blasphemous rites of the Hindoos" (sic) or from victorian archeologists poking around in long barrows or pyramids and then forming theories about what they'd found. From the 19th century onwards, there's been a lot of - let's say, codification of occult literature. Mme Blavastky, the Golden Dawn, Gurdjieff, Crowley et al - were not so much 'revealing' something which was long hidden but synthesising new wholes from disparate shards and making it accessible through book publishing. Nowadays, we are mainly just continuing that trend on a bigger scale, along with what Peter Koenig has called the "McDonaldisation of Occulture" - serving "esoteric wisdom" up in bite-size chunks - easily digestible & increasingly standardised. As Pete Carroll, once quipped, it's amazing how much occult theory passes from book to book without any intervening thought. To my mind, some of the most informative books on occultism are being written not by occultists, but by anthropologists and ethnologists who are actually visiting and researching the magical cultures they are writing about, rather than just reproducing secondhand ideas. Of course, the idea remains popular that occultism is somehow 'ancient' when a great deal of it dates back to around the 17th century.
At another level though, magic still remains 'secret' in the sense that despite the fact you can go into most decent bookshops and find shelf-fulls of stuff, and the great mass of info on the world-wide web, it's still relatively harder to get into the occult subsculture itself. Obviously it's easier in some places than others, such as the major population centres as opposed to small towns. Also, many occult groups are not really interested in proselytising or making themselves easily accessible to outsiders. This is particularly true for the more esoteric genres. For example, I first became interested in tantra in 1982. I heard that there was a western-based group which drew it's ideas directly from an Indian tantric sect, but it wasn't until 1987 that I met up with someone who was not only an initiate of this group, but was willing to grant initiation into the tradition.

- Are you pro or against the use of drugs in order to enter altered states of consciousness? Even if one can do it without the use of drugs it's always a different perspective to be under the influence of it and may contribute to the enrichment of perception or even the confidence of ones inner-strength, don't you think so?
Oh I'm fairly pro-drugs, though personally I've never found them to be particularly effective personally, at least for magical actions. Most magical cultures, both historical and contemporary have recourse to conciousness-altering substances of one sort or another. I think that the injunctions against using drugs are fairly modern and restricted to a few western magical authors who tend to make absolutist statements about magic.

- What do you think it happens to consciousness after physical death?
This is not really an issue which concerns me one way or another.

- Where do you see this new direction in magick and thinking going, and why do we need it now?
If by "new direction" you mean chaos magic - I don't know where it's going and it's not something which particularly concerns me either. I would like to see more occult writing which challenges established theories and ideas, rather than just parroting them. It would be a pity, though, to my mind, if "chaos" became a seperate genre within occultism as a whole - I'd prefer to see the "C-word" get dropped off and the useful ideas of chaos magic absorbed into mainstream occultism. The problem is of course, that occultism doesn't advance in a linear fashion, in the same way that science does, for example. Old (and outdated) ideas get recycled and churned out time and time again.

- It is suggested that when one draws sigils, or just the outlines of the various names over magical talismans, we are really drawing the literal energetic patter of the forces invoked. Does this happen only while drawing or merely in the act of focalisation? Or under both actions?
Well I don't believe that "we are really drawing the literal energetic pattern of the forces" in any absolute sense. IMO, it's at best a metaphor, and the problem with metaphors is that people in western (euroamerican) culture tend to literalise them, especially those involved in occultism.

- Some people believe that there is a limit to how far one can go while incarnate. That we can't really experience some of the higher levels of the Qabalah Tree. Is that an obsolete statement, or is it just pretty relative?
I don't know. I'm not into the Qabalah, and I've never really been into that whole hierarchical structuring of experience.

- The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some spectacular things together. What do you think created such a fusion between the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?
I wasn't aware that they were 'merging' particularly - and as for science and art's fusion, I thought that it began with the Futurist movement in the 30's - but not being well up on art movements, I can't really say.

- I was reading something you wrote about Chaos silliness where you said that humour is important in magick. You've also written that rituals can be silly and no less effective than ones when you keep a straight face. I wonder how can one keep a certain level of concentration while being laughing or acting silly?
Not every ritual involves keeping "a certain level of concentration". The "Mass of Chaos 'H'" in "Prime Chaos" is an example. The aim of the ritual is to 'banish' magical pomposity (albeit momentarily) – all that 'we are an elite', 'we're better than other people' crap.

- What is your understanding of anti-matter?
Not much. I'm not very scientifically-oriented, so for me it's just something that gets mentioned on Star Trek/Voyager occasionally.

- It was also very nice to know that you like to summon the Ancient Ones from H.P. Lovecrafts' realm of fantasy. In your opinion do you think mythical figures from pantheons that were worshipped in the past have greater power than the Cthulhu Mythos creatures? To be precise, when summoning a specific mythological entity can it be stronger than a fictitious/imaginary creature or vice-versa?
This is an often-debated question. For me, what matters is the degree of affinity that one has with an entity - to what extent one has an emotional connection to it. There's also an assumption, it seems to me, that "mythical figures in the past" are somehow unchanging and fixed. That's not true. If you look into the history of deities in different pantheons, you'll find that some of them appear to change quite radically at different stages of a culture's history. Chaldean descriptions of Hecate, for example, are quite different to the potted biographies of her which appear in modern books on Witchcraft. Modern Indian descriptions of Durga as being a loving mother-goddess are notably different from medieval tantric descriptions of her as a bloodthirsty battle-goddess. Obviously, anyone doing magical work with a particular entity is going to be influenced by what they've read or heard about it, which in turn is going influence their experiences. What's interesting about the Cthulhu Mythos entities of course, is that there is little in the way of detail concerning them - for me they represent entry-points to particular liminal states of consciousness rather than being distinct entities in the way that 'deities' tend to be thought of. In the end, where does one draw the line at what's 'real' or 'imaginary'? Harry Potter is probably 'real' to millions of children.

- Are there any divinities that you have more affinity for?
Well I have close affinities with several Tantric deities - Ganesha and Kali in particular, as I've been interacting with them magically (meditation, ritual, vision, etc.) for a number of years, now - nearly twenty years, with Kali.

- Please care to explain the importance of homosexuality, particularly in the magickal context in which you inhabit?
Well, I don't know that it is 'important'. What important, for me, is that if you are gay or bisexual and into the occult, and if you've been exposed to a lot of homophobic twaddle from occult authors (two examples being Gareth Knight's "Homosexuality, like drugs, is a technique of black magic." or Kenneth Grant's stirring "Thus the blasphemy of the homosexual formula, for it denies Babalon and breeds devils in chaos.") I think it's important to read some positive articles. There's a lot of homophobia in western occultism, which IMO is just prejudice turned into 'occult laws'. There's a lot of twaddle about homosexuality and a lot of nonsense about sexuality in general - it seems that unlike the rest of society, a lot of occultists have acquired an almost victorian prudishness about sexuality. I recall Let's take "Sodomy & Sorcery" as an example, since you're publishing it along with this interview. This article caused a lot of raised eyebrows and some comment on the UK occult scene when it was first published. I think the reason it did this was that generally, sexual magic gets talked about in the third person, in a way that divorces it from direct experience. It also tends to get smothered in symbolism - VIII degree, IX degree, XI degree - roses, flowers, rods, cups - it's all so coy. And of course the whole subject of taking it up the arse upsets people too - look at how many Thelemites nervously skirt around the fact that Crowley liked it up the bum from black men. But anyway, here I am directly talking about passive anal sex and what it feels like, and how this related to my occult experience. Many years ago I took a transexual (MTF) partner to an occult soiree - now some of the people there were definitely into that "Oh I'm above the herd, I'm spiritually advanced" attitude, but they were seriously freaked, which made me question their self-proclaimed 'superiority'. I'll admit I took some small pleasure in turning up at such parties with a boy and a girl in tow and watch the confusion as people tried to sort out who was doing who. For me there's a wider issue here, which is that despite a recent rush of books on sexual magic or facile writings about 'tantra', there's been no real attempt (as far as I know) by magicians to look at descriptions of gender, which for me is a core issue, since descriptions of gender have vast effects on our lives, both privately and communally. This is an area which I'm currently researching into, and what I'm finding is that, in the main, occult 'explanations' of gender tend to be extremely deterministic, and - surprise surprise, tend to follow the bipolar models of gender differentiation which have their roots in 19th century victorian science.

- The more we try to find out what it is, the less we know. Do you remember any particular example when you felt like this? Also, could this be a correct way of describing Esoterism and the way magick works around and within us?
It's probably a way of describing everything! Certainly, in modern occultism, it seems to me that some people try and create grand theories which account for everything, much in the way that Victorian scientists did. That seems to me to be a project which is doomed to failure. One very useful approach I gained from training as an Occupational Therapist was to take a multi-disciplinary approach to problems. For example, if you have a client who's needs can be met by using psychotherapy - fine, but if the range of problems they have indicates a behaviourist approach, you switch to that instead. And I tend to approach magic in the same way - using a different range of techniques & explanatory models, depending on the situation and how I want to tackle it.

- Before finishing this inquest, what advices can you give to aspiring students of the hidden arts?
Okay. Try things out. Don't just sit there reading loads of books. Don't mistake someone's opinion for truth with a big 'T'. If you don't like one author's approach, try something else or make up your own. Have adventures and take time off occasionally. If you want to aspire to the stars you need your feet planted
firmly on the ground.

- Thank you very much for your time Phil, are there any items we have not covered that you would like to speak about?
Not unless you want to hear about the perfidy of design houses who can't get their ads in on time or people who seem to think website graphics will reproduce perfectly at 2500 dpi? Thought not.

from "Descending the Abyss" booklet - 16/11/01
Conducted by NM
+ info: http://www.philhine.org.uk/