Peter J. Carroll

Yeah, there are many, many different types of witchcraft and many practices and even religions like Wicca that, you know, are distinct.

I was a student of Peter J. Carroll, who was kind of the founding father of what's called chaos magic.

And Pete and I ended up having some disagreements in our, you know, as student and teacher do eventually at some point.

And our disagreements are basically about which interpretation of quantum physics we think is actually at play here, but also about the existence of what I would call spirits.

So this is from this picture, um, I found this just when I was creating this and I-- 'cause I wanted to use this page.

'Cause this like this is the uh page of sigil creation you could say, okay? We, we-- I will look at Austin Osman Spare in a bit, but in terms of the f- you know, the infamy of sigils as this magical technique, this is from Peter Carroll's Liber Null, you know, which really just completely popularized the sigil creation method.

And this is, uh, his draft page, okay? And him going through how you create a sigil.

And honestly, not that much has changed since then.

And what I basically want to do before we get to a bit more of the history is I want to unpack each term, each part, so you can just-- you go, "Right, now I understand what a sigil is." Okay? So let's unpack the definition.

Okay? So compressed, right? So from sentence to shape, right? From, from language, from something that we linguistically understand, like I'm talking right now, and you can understand it.

If I was talking in compressed glyphs, like let's just pop back, uh, here, these, these, um, little, uh, seeming squiggles on the right, okay, these are sigils, finished sigil right there on the right from, uh, Peter Carroll's page.

Okay? So that's a sigil.

But I think there was only one woman present.

And, uh, I was initiated by Peter Carroll.

Ian Read was the Magister Templi of the temple.

And then later joining Freemasonry and the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia and other little things here and there.

Do you really need that? I, I don't think so.

So I remember, I think it must have been very early 2000s, um, I was reading, uh, the late Peter J. Carroll's Liber Chaos, and he describes, uh, how he journeyed across India, I think it was India, um, in his youth, and had some of the most profound experiences of his life.

Um, he makes a point of it and suggests that the experience is, uh, crucial and formative to the sorcerer, and that really made a, a deep impression on me as a kid when I was, uh, you know, when I was s- first started reading about magic and, uh, specifically in this case, chaos magic.

Um, and I think it's one of the, one of the main reasons that I was really so inspired to travel when I was younger.

We don't have the same books.

We don't have libertails written by Peter Carroll.

We don't have the amount of knowledge it is available for people who speak English.

And here in Brazil, where I am right now, only 5% of population speak English and people like me, we have a heavy accent, right? Because it's not very common here.

But of course, they want to know if it's worth buying or if it's just another book.

And I told him, listen, I think the most different part of the book is adding stoicism and practice such as Prodigy Tatum Malorum to this book and also adding the journeys and the ordeals and the spells in such a way that I didn't see in English speaking world.

Now, what is Chaos Magic? Chaos Magic, with this name, started in the 70s by Peter Carroll, Ray Sherring, and all the people, and they founded the Illuminatis of Thanatos, the love and death order in the UK.

And it is about experimenting with the occult.

And then, uh, chaos magic, which is, uh, uh, occultism is kind of making a comeback, and it has these ties into quantum physics now.

And, and a lot of that was Peter Carroll, who wrote these chaos magic books in the '80s.

And one of the things that they use to, I guess, uh, energize a sigil is, is sexual energy.

So you could have sex-

It's kind of like what happened when chaos magic became popular and everybody learned about sigil magic.

The original theme of Peter Carroll was chaos magic is the end result of a lifetime of study of magic.

So now that you've studied magic for a lifetime, now you can cut corners.

Now you can do the shortcuts.

It is this iconoclastic attitude that distinguishes chaos magic from more traditional occult traditions and positions it as a path of profound self-empowerment.

The origins of chaos magic are firmly rooted in the late 20th century occultism, with its emergence marked by the publication of two seminal texts in 1978, Peter J. Carroll's Libre No and Ray Sherwin's The Book of Results.

While Carol and Sherwin are widely considered the founders, the movement owes a significant debt to the earlier work of artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare.

Spare, often called the grandfather of chaos magic, pioneered the use of sigils and the concept of gnosis as tools to empower them.

By embracing and working with the inherent unpredictability of life rather than resisting it, the magician learns to find calm within the storm and harness the energy of chaotic situations to actively sculpt their reality.

A central application of the belief-as-a-tool philosophy is the practice of magical paradigm shifting.

This technique involves deliberately adopting and inhabiting a different worldview for a set period of time, as suggested by Peter J. Carroll, who proposed using a die to randomly select a paradigm like paganism or monotheism for a week or a month.

The purpose of this demanding practice is not mere intellectual exercise, but a profound spiritual application, to thoroughly decondition the magician from the ingrained mesh of beliefs, attitudes, and fictions that constitute their ego.