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.

Liber Ate Information.

Sr. Ex LVX 963