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Peter Carroll Books?
Hey, for all you chaos magickians out there… what’s the best Peter Carroll book to start with? Liber Null? Something else? I’m particularly interested in the stuff about examining, deconstructing and manipulating belief systems towards specific (”magickal”) ends. Thanks for your help!
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August 13th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
I’ve found carroll sort of unneccisarily obtuse and complex. I’d recommend anything by phil hine, and perhaps read prometheus rising by RAW and the psychopaths bible by dr hyatt
August 13th, 2005 at 5:00 pm
My personal opinion is that Phil Hine is a great intro, but from an occult point of view it’s like reading a text for a grade 8 class. If you go with Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut is the way to go. If you do get it, however, read the second half of the book first — “Psychonaut” — as it’s two books in one and the last half is the theory. Which should usually come before the practice, imho.
And unless your an astrophysicist, don’t even bother with Carroll’s website.
August 13th, 2005 at 5:11 pm
If anyone is looking for a very no-bullshit approach, I also suggest Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus, by Julius Evola and the UR Group. For its time (World War eras), I have found Evola to be the most lucid writer on such matters, and about as pragmatic and secular as you could get for the twentieth century. (Focus on the workings, not the Traditionalistic philosophy).
Where the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn drew from a lot of Christian symbolism, the UR Group avoided all that and had more in common with the aristocracy of the Third Reich, from what I know, and tried to form a simpler approach to sorcery. Though, this was in the same era that Austim Osman Spare was developing his open system, the UR Group were definitely more interested in furthering and communicating their ideas and structured them as such.
While many writers today try to make things optimistic and friendly (with the exception of, say, Peter J. Carroll, Crowley, Frater U.·.D.·., and a few others), Evola strangled his wit in the womb and is like a really stern version of Yoda. There is no try, just do it.
August 13th, 2005 at 10:56 pm
oh boy, evola again. evola was, among other things, sort of the godfather of postwar italian “false flag” terrorism, which some say is the template for today’s “war on terror”. he was one of the premier fascist occultists, right up there with rudolf von sebottendorf and miguel serrano. a few weeks ago evola came up briefly in this thread on the RI board. from what i’ve been reading of and by evola, his famed ‘lucidity’ is simply the briskness and confidence with which he states his unjustified categorical assertions as if they were objective fact. if you’re predisposed to agree with him, it’s “no-bullshit,” if not, it’s some of the most incredible, offensive bullshit you’ll ever encounter. definitely a fascinating and polarizing figure.
August 14th, 2005 at 3:31 am
I can definitely see how this would come up. My friend and I both find his thoughts interesting, more from a historical context, but there is a huge difference between just reading his and the UR Group’s works, and sitting down and making practical use of them.
Their practicality is where his genius shines.
Unfortunately, imho, his attachment to long-dead structures and spiritual approaches (”Traditionalism”), and the peculiar and war-torn era that spawned him will ultimately (always?) taint what glistening sparks of usefulness his works embody.
August 14th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
given that evola evidentely had some powerful and dangerous friends, it’s hard to argue with the practicality of the techniques! but i think your image of evola as a ’stern yoda’ is, in biographical and historical terms, a romantic fantasy. in the full unredacted version, beyond all the pseudo-chivalric mythologizing, evola was not about ‘tough love’ or even ‘tough choices’ like arjuna. evola the man was clearly all about the hate - unbridled, unapologetic hate. there’s certainly earthly power in that, but no transcendence, and no honor. dulce et decorum est, he died a bitter, broken man.
(p.s. to tim, sorry to hijack the topic - it’s, uh, fell’s fault.)
August 14th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
I’m surrounded by both love and hate, and I think both are hogwash outside of the subjective. I’ve never taken Evola to be full of hate, and I think his pictures make him look like a grumpy old Yoda with a fat head.
Regardless, the man and his works are two different things.
I like use porn and like listening to Swollen Members, but would I want to hang out with any of them? There’s a very strong reason to believe not. I’ve heard that porn stars and I have very little in common, and that the Members are assholes irl.
Same could be said of Evola, maybe…
August 15th, 2005 at 3:48 am
well sure, not everyone who’s fond of evola is like him, but many of his works are indeed quite hateful, particularly regarding women and race, and he is fairly popular among the skinhead set. race btw is not an incidental topic for evola, he wrote four books on the subject. i could type in a few quotes regarding his views on overpopulation, but it’s late. my own personal image of the monocoled ‘magic baron,’ isolated in his wheelchair, is doctor strangelove!
one postwar devotee of evola you might find worthy of historical notice is the ‘black fascist’ mercenary stefano delle chiaie (also see here).
August 15th, 2005 at 4:52 am
btw, i agree it’s a shame that evola’s fallen through the cracks. one theory i read is that evola has been unwisely dismissed, not because he would ‘threaten the materialist worldview,’ as his followers might like to imagine, but because all the strident denunciations of evola by the angry anti-fascist left render him not worth the hassle of defending. in reaction, neo-fascist intellectuals tend to uncritically idolize him as a secret anti-hero (and let’s face it, a lot of those alienated, ennui-afflicted sons of privilege are, to borrow from a comment recently posted here, “death metal loving teenage satanists who can’t think of a more radical way of rebelling than just doing the opposite of whatever christians believe in,” which is to say, not exactly stefano delle chiaie.)
August 15th, 2005 at 10:08 am
AFAICT, the majority of Evola’s writings do not rest on his often-misinterpreted (and not well-thought-out) racial theories, but are more along the lines of Guenonian criticism of the quantitative paradigm.
The best online sources for English translations of Evola writings are European racist websites (a lot of these guys are Milosovic fans), often putting Evola right next to the most outlandish Holocaust-denying diatribes.
August 15th, 2005 at 10:29 am
alright, a little ignorant and off-topic…what exactly does the acronym AFAICT mean?
I haven’t read evola, but I probably will at some point. My impression is you can take some good, useful knowledge from practically any source regardless of how ugly or dangerous or paranoid or bile-filled those sources may be. You simply (”simply” he says as if it’s easy) have to be really awake and critical and ready to use your sword of discernment. It’s a challenge and develops your mental capacities and is well worthwhile. That’s why I’ve checked out Larouche, for example. But I can definitely understand why one would rather go to a sources that have less noise in relation to the signal…it’s more efficient, for one, and after awhile of treading through garbage on the lookout for gems it can get tiresome, draining and possibly waste a lot of time.
I’d definitely recommend the first chapter of Liber Null, if you’re looking to actually experiment with the practices. You can then read the explanatory stuff, but with the varying stuff you’ve read, I’m sure you could catch the idea of why and how this stuff might work even if you only skim the explanations. Incidentally he’s teaching a course for RAW’s Maybe Logic Academy online.
August 15th, 2005 at 12:23 pm
liber null is pretty cool. i don’t recommend anything further than that unless you’re gonna become a chaos machickian. anything after that pisses me off when i read it ’cause he’s such a dogmatic asshole. i know that makes me probably the victim of one of his crazy chaos paradigms or something, but i don’t care– he irritates me.
i’m actually far more inclined to recommend phil hine, especially ‘condensed chaos,’ which is really brilliant:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/156184117X
hine’s got an awesome approach and explains everything really well.
August 15th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
just to be clear, it’s hardly accidental or inappropriate that evola is found “right next to the most outlandish holocaust-denying diatribes.” that was his mileu while he was alive, and that’s where his cult still thrives most strongly today. except instead of a holocaust denier, i suspect that evola was actually fairly enthusiastic about the idea. his racial theories were neither incidental nor undeveloped, as i said he wrote four (count ‘em) books on the subject, all untranslated. some of his racist views were adopted by mussolini as fascist doctrine, so it was actually quite the high point in his career.
by all means pick and choose if you’re so inclined, but if you’re not aware of the real history, don’t be shocked if sombody mistakes you for a nazi. (and if that’s your thing, you’ve really hit the jackpot.) personally i find this side of evola quite fascinating, then again i don’t look to him or his works as any kind of model.
August 15th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
Odd that Evola should come up, as I’ve been reading some of his works lately. I find it interesting that while Heidegger’s image has been somewhat rehabilitated since WWII, Evola has largely been forgotten or merely tarred as a fascist intellectual, when he in fact abandoned totalitarianism long before Heidegger did! In fact, his late philosophy (as articulated in “Ride the Tiger”, circa 1960), is apolitical and anti-totalitarian; Evola sees politics as a hopeless field for anyone who strives to be more than human, especially after his disillusionment with fascism (interestingly, Evola went to Germany to visit the S.S. leaders during World War II; he became frustrated with their materialism and focus on blood and breeding- the SS merely found Evola to be a bit of an “airhead”. In any event, they weren’t communicating on the same conceptual plane.)
As for the man’s racism, it seems that by 1960 (relatively late in his life- he was 62, and would die twelve years later) he had largely abandoned it. He states a few times in “Ride the Tiger” that “spiritual aristocrats” are not products of blood, but products of spirit, and can be found in any race- nor does he imply that any race produces more of them than others. There are some bizzare paralells between Evola’s late philosophy and that articulated by Peter Carroll in his paper, “The Millenium”, in Liber Null. Both seem based on the idea of exploiting the decadent mass society of late capitalism to one’s own spiritual advantage (even though Carroll hates the term “spiritual”, it seems to be what he’s getting at).
And if you’re going to bother with Carroll, I have to respond to Fell’s comment on Psychonaut- Psychonaut is not a book of “theory” as such, but is a manual of guidelines for practitioners of the 3rd and 2nd degree of the IOT. There’s theory and practice throughout both books, and Psychonaut is pretty much intended for someone who has already worked through Liber MMM, the 4th degree syllabus of the IOT.
At heart though, I’m not overly impressed by Carroll’s “deconstruction” of magic- it seems more like a “demolition” than anything else, and presents a system only a bit more sophisticated than they typical Llwellyn publications work on Witchcraft or Sorcery. Crowley’s “Magick in Theory and Practice” deconstructed the basic ideas of occultism more effectively, if you can get through his obtuse writing (though I don’t suggest tackling Crowley at all until you’ve digested Israel Regardie’s “The Eye in the Triangle”…)
August 15th, 2005 at 8:03 pm
wrong as usual, nicq. from my perspective, evola’s disagreements with the nazis and fascists were more about factional disputes among the far right than any really significant break. evola was nostalgic for an imaginary fantasy version of the holy roman empire, the “first reich” of the ghibellines, when the aristocratic authority of the reich supposedly flowed directly from the godhead. so in that sense he was quite a bit more reactionary than the populist nazis. as for his absurd ’spiritual’ racism, i find that possibly more offensive than ordinary biological racism. ‘riding the tiger’ was published in 1961 but written around 1948, and his expressed ideal of apolitea did not merely mean withdrawl to a life of quiet contemplation, he was quite correctly interpreted by his followers to mean withdraw from politics and start tossing bombs. he was even put on trial in 1951. here is an excerpt from his autodifensa [self-defense statement]:
evola was acquitted, although the police and prosecutor suspected a much wider conspiracy. that’s pretty much how it went with the cowardly and dishonorable strategy of tension, many aspects of which have since been extensively documented. contrary to his autodifensa, evola had a long history of association with various sabotage and death squads, and apoliteia was clearly used to justify an “archipelago” or “cellular” organizational structure - which was necessary, of course, given the strong anti-fascist atmosphere that prevailed in postwar christian-democratic italy. imho, evola only backpedalled from some his earlier views because they had become politically incorrect. indeed, looking at the evolution of his life and work, i’ve noticed a remarkably hateful consistency.
by all means people, whenever possible, read the unredacted version!
August 15th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
This alone would be worth an entire thread. Not on Evola, per se, but in general.
How much can you disassociate the word from the speaker?
August 15th, 2005 at 8:48 pm
That is a great point LVX. I frankly don’t have any interest in Evola (yet), so it’s weird for me to see the tennis ball go back and forth on the issue. Especially since I originally was asking about Peter Carroll and more broadly writers on chaos magick. But as you said, this is a great topic in and of itself.
August 15th, 2005 at 11:32 pm
i’m glad you feel that way, tim, because i really did feel kinda bad about hijacking the comments again. as for “the tennis balls going back and forth”, boy that’s easy for you to say, since i seem to be the only one here on my side of the court, fielding balls from all different directions - it’s thirsty work!
and nicq, one more thing you’re wrong about is evola’s ss connections. according to evola himself, he found his ‘natural habitat’ among the old aristocracy of berlin’s herrenklub, whose members included fritz thyssen and other industrialists. after several attempts to suck up to himmler’s ss, evola was rebuffed, and despite what it says in ss communiques such as the one of 11 august 1938, i suspect the reason he was excluded probably had more to do with the politics of the time, rather than because evola and the ss “weren’t communicating on the same conceptual plane.” consider for example that there were indeed a number of people very close to the ss (wotanists, i believe) who would have found evola’s ’suprahistorical’ worldview generally agreeable. in any case it’s a moot point since as the political realities shifted during the war, evola later found his ss connection with pan-europeanist elements inside the sicherheitsdientst (sd), which was basically the intelligence division of the ss, and kind of the basis for the stereotypical image that’s developed of stormtroopers marching through the ghettos massacring innocent people.
i am all for any attempt to reassess evola, and i am fairly confident that such an inquiry would demonstrate exactly what kind of person he was. as for his work, well when i read evola’s writings, i can practically smell the hate, but i certainly don’t maintain that his ideas are all inherently evil, that would be silly.
ok i think i’ve said my piece, now back to regularly scheduled programming…
August 16th, 2005 at 7:14 pm
Hmm… withdraw from politics and start tossing bombs… sounds like a good thought.
You’re only making me like the guy more, you know…
August 17th, 2005 at 1:51 am
LIBER KAOS is pivotal. Although, Tim, why do you want to do that to yourself?
:)