The only time I ever spoke to Pete Carroll, you could hardly call it a conversation. It was thirty-mumble years ago, when I worked in a bookshop in Bristol and he rang up to place an order. When he gave his name, I asked, “Oh, did you write Psychonaut?” and he, sounding surprised, asked how I knew. I told him I’d studied the subject a couple of years back, but then I noticed my manager giving me a suspicious look – I think she’d heard the word “psychonaut” and assumed I was talking about mind-altering drugs – so I went back to boring and professional again, and that was the end of that. I was buying a lot of supplies from his shop Amphora Aromatics back then, for my experiments in making and using Hoodoo and Hoodoo-influenced incenses and condition oils. I didn’t realise at the time that it was his shop, or maybe we’d have already met.
I’ve told you before how “The Satanic Bible” was a bit of a disappointment to me as an angsty wayward young’un, but Julian Wilde’s “Grimoire of Chaos Magick” was another matter. It wasn’t so much the material, interesting though a lot of it was, but the approach. Up to that time, any books on magic (with or without a -k) I’d looked at were coming from a place of “This is a bit about how we do it, and how it must be done” – and the “we” in that sentence was definitely what a linguist would call the “exclusive first person plural”; if your name wasn’t on the list, you weren’t getting in. With the Grimoire the message was more, “This is a bit about how I do it, but how do you do it?” It didn’t so much give you permission as point out that you didn’t need permission in the first place. In Mr Wilde’s practice, elements of Wicca and Tibetan Vajrayana rubbed shoulders with entities taken from or inspired by the works of Lovecraft and Moorcock, with oral sex used in circle as a means of raising energy (“if desired”) and Hawkwind records playing in the background for atmosphere, and it was all perfectly fine if it got results. I don’t think I ever attempted any of the rituals he described, even with the adaptations any kid would have to make if he was intending to work alone in his bedroom and remain unrumbled, but what it did was get me thinking, “OK, I can see what you’re doing here, and the logic behind how you’re doing it. Now, how would I go about it…?” And that approach, in fact, has served me well ever since.
I came to Pete Carroll’s books some years later – “Psychonaut”, “Liber Null”, “Liber Kaos” and “PsyberMagick”. They weren’t as exuberant in style or range as Mr Wilde’s Grimoire, but they were easily recognisable as of a similar bloodline, with influences drawn from Crowley and Spare, and more than a tip of the fedora to Terry Pratchett. This time, though, it was like being given the grammar of a language, rather than a phrasebook. Instead of specific rituals, he gave you the underpinning of his system for understanding the magical world, and then left you to work with that in your own way, with your own knowledge and what you’d learned (and would learn) from your own studies – and, crucially, he gave the facts without the sermon. Things are very different these days, when virtually any description of magic you read comes with the writer’s political and ethical positions and neuroses welded onto it as if they were an intrinsic part of the system, or even (if the writer’s particularly arrogant) of magic itself; but back then, what characterised writing on Chaos Magic specifically was the implicit understanding that the reader was an adult and could be addressed like one, able to make his own ethical decisions about his use of magic and take responsibility for his actions and the potential results. That’s empowerment. It’s not “kiddy-safe”, but it is empowerment. Keeping everything at a “kiddy-safe” level, when you’re supposed to be writing for adults, isn’t empowering in any way – it’s infantilisation. I’ll stick with Pete’s approach, thanks.
My feeling is that Chaos Magic was to mainstream magic what punk was to mainstream music and art. Obviously I can’t speak with any personal knowledge of punk because I was only a kid when it happened, but from how I think of it I’d say there’s a definite, easily recognisable likeness. No need to give an account of yourself to the “established authorities” in the field; no need for any traditional training as such; just use your energy (“Anger is an energy!”) and get stuck in with what you’ve got, where you are. And, inevitably perhaps, it couldn’t last long, because pretty soon people decided that the way to be a punk was to copy other punks, which was missing the point.
I think Chaos Magic was rather like that. It happened, it needed to happen, and when it had happened, that was it. Keeping it going in the same form was not something it was able to lend itself to, because its spontaneity became laboured. That didn’t mean it had “failed”. It was a catalyst; it did what it needed to do and then largely disappeared from sight. It was supposed to be about stirring things up and kicking the odd sacred cow, releasing creativity by knocking down accepted barriers, and was never intended to become an establishment in its own right. The opening up of magic, freeing it up to be available again to those of us outside of orthodoxy and hidebound tradition, who have always felt the undeniable pull towards our place with it – that’s been its gift, and it’s Pete Carroll, as one of the current’s originators, that we have to thank for it.
And now he’s gone – back home to the Land under the Hill, where I like to think he’s made friends with Marianne Faithfull, and the two of them have fun together teasing Kenneth Anger. (I would.) I’m not going to be a sentimental twit and start chuntering “We shall never see his like again”, because everything’s moved on since Chaos Magic first appeared on the scene, and I’d say what we really need is someone who’ll kick over the table as it is today, with the ever-increasing wankification and ideological asset-stripping of modern magic. Perhaps that person will make his appearance soon; I certainly hope so. I can’t reasonably be expected to do everything myself.