Absurd Moment

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