Occult Book Reviews: Liber Null/Psychonaut by Peter J. Carroll

I’m very behind on my occult reading. In my defense, I’ve had other priorities. Now that I’m no longer in school, I can get back to working on the enormous pile of unread occult books, so hopefully I’ll produce more reviews in the near future. I’m still making my way through New World Witchery at a snail’s pace (it keeps spawning other research projects that I end up never finishing). I also keep jumping around between different occult fields (ceremonial, folk, alchemy) and can’t keep myself on a single track.

I scored a copy of Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J. Carroll in my local used bookstore. I decided to breeze through this one before going back to some of the other books, because it was a quick read. Chaos Magic has been relatively comfortable to me as an occultist, since I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades anyway, and I’m not fond of structure. I don’t really call myself a chaote for reasons that I’ll come back to, but Hands-On Chaos Magic by Andrieh Vitimus is still one of my all-time favorite occult books. So, I think I’d be doing a disservice to myself if I didn’t read Liber Null. This was meant to be a quick review, but oh man… I have thoughts.

Liber Null is fairly dense. It runs through a lot of material very quickly. Carroll spends paragraphs, or even sentences, on stuff that Vitimus spends entire chapters on. Carroll still provides all the necessary information, but without going very in-depth. If you’re entirely new to magic, you may come away from the early chapters without a complete understanding of the concepts and techniques presented in them. I understand them, but that’s because I’ve encountered them all before and had some experience. If you’re a beginner, you might feel a little lost. For example:

If any unnecessary or imbalanced scraps of ego become identified with the genius by mistake, then disaster awaits. The life force flows directly into these complexes and bloats them into grotesque monsters variously known as the demon Choronzon. Some magicians attempting to go too fast with this invocation have failed to banish this demon, and have gone spectacularly insane as a result.

What this really means is that you have to be careful not to project any qualities or complexes onto your personal daimon/HGA. The daimon/HGA is supposed to be the most holistic divine form of yourself. If you confuse it with any personal crap that you haven’t worked through, you risk treating aspects of your ego as if they were an infallible deity. It’s a little like believing the promises of a charismatic cult leader, but internally. The results of that are not pretty. But if you don’t know that in advance, you might look at this paragraph and think that connecting with your daimon/HGA involves the risk of accidentally summoning an actual demon who will drive you violently insane, unless you can somehow solve the riddle of what “scraps of ego” refers to. And Carroll ends the chapter with this, without elaborating! The chapter about invoking the HGA is also only about two pages long. (Later, in Psychonaut, Carroll condescendingly dismisses the concept of the Higher Self, True Will, or HGA offhand, as a holdover from monotheism. Maybe he dropped it further down the line? Weird to see in the same volume.)

It doesn’t help that the prose is very wordy and highbrow, not quite as florid as Crowley, but more like Levi. You can tell that Carroll was trying to imitate the style of older occult books. I agree with a lot of the things that Carroll says in principle, but dislike like the way he phrases them. For example, “…those who uphold limited values bind themselves to mediocrity and failure. Those who self-righteously value their own contradictions are mighty on this earth.” I understand exactly what this means: Everyone has parts of themselves that contradict their most deeply held values, and you have to be able to admit that to yourself and work with your contradictory nature, so you can reconcile it instead of trying to remove the contradictions. If you don’t, then you end up working against yourself. It’s Shadow work. It’s the core of my practice! But the way Carroll puts it, you’d think that Shadow work was some kind of Ubermensch crap.

At times, Carroll comes across as pretentious. He has strong opinions about divination: he maintains that the only “true” divination is direct precognition, and that use of symbols like tarot cards are a degraded form of it. Precognition isn’t something that everyone has, or wants. And, assuming that one can develop that skill, it would take a while. Divination is a bread-and-butter tool that you need to be able to use as soon as possible, which is why it makes more sense to recommend something like tarot cards, or scrying (which is a nearly ubiquitous method). Carroll thinks that astrology is invalid, because if it were legit, it would just be science. My only real response to this is “Okay, man.” It’s really not useful to hear that if you’re a neophyte who needs to learn a divination method. But in Psychonaut, Carroll says that he recommends astrology to people just to fuck with them!

The aim is to produce inspiration and enlightenment through disordering our belief structures. Humor, random belief, counter-information, and disinformation are its techniques.

To take an innocuous example, I usually advocate astrology persuasively to ordinary people but ridicule it to my magician friends. Humor and random belief allow the use of astrology to disorder what people think either way. Does this mean that I am: a) lying, b). mad, c) enlightened, d) aware of our ability to live almost any truth?

No, it means that you’re an asshole!

Seriously, I can’t get over how condescendingly, irritatingly pretentious that is. It also hasn’t aged well. Maybe things were different in the 80s, but in today’s social climate, disinformation is extremely dangerous. Operation Mindfuck is no longer a clever joke, because it worked a little too well, and now we live in a techno-dystopia that’s oversaturated with conspiracy theories and AI content. I suppose a chaote would just smile and go with the flow of it, and that’s admirable in a way, but actively spreading disinformation because you think it’s clever is just appalling. I guess that’s why I’m not a chaote. I do sometimes introduce controversial ideas to people just to get them to question their beliefs, but I don’t actively mislead them.

Part of the reason I don’t call myself a chaote is because I like the anachronistic D&D wizard aesthetic over the techy cyberpunk aesthetic.

For a book on Chaos Magic, it’s more… structured that I was expecting. I associate Chaos Magic with a uniform rejection of protocol, in favor of simplified methods like sigils or syncretic adoption of whatever works. But this is actually the syllabus of an initiatory system, the Illuminates of Thanateros (Thanatos + Eros. Carroll is very proud of that one). This system has the sort of protocol that you’d expect from an initiatory system, and a series of formal rituals that one must be proficient at to be ordained as a “priest of Chaos.” Early Chaos Magic was much more heavily based on Thelema than I expected, with a similar structure to the OTO and some similar concepts (like the HGA, sex magic, and acting in accordance with your True Will). It’s Thelema with a heavy dose of existentialism. It’s got some straight-up old-school ceremonial magic! To invoke a war god, you need to stand in a pentagonal chamber (Where am I supposed to get a pentagonal chamber? Should I go out to my garden and build one?) with five red lamps, and wear the pelt of a wolf or bear, and throw oak and sulphur resin into the thurible, and fucking stab your shoulder with a dagger. Carroll then says that you don’t have to use the correspondences if you’re good enough, but… I mean… if you need blood for a ritual, just prick your finger with a lancet like a normal person. I get why the correspondences are there, and what they mean, but my biggest problem with traditional rituals is that they involve things like wolf pelts. It’s always possible to adapt them, but that takes so much extra work.

And the edge. Oh my god, the edge. Chaos Magic was always a little edgy by nature, but I always thought it was less edgy than Satanism. Nope, this is full-on teenage-rebellion-level edge. There’s a whole chapter in which Carroll tells you to embrace sacrilege, heresy, iconoclasm, hedonism, etc. It’s important to question the underlying assumptions that society instills in you, explore things that you would normally reject or find revolting, and entertain ideas that you find bizarre. I don’t disagree with any of that. I think that can be healthy. But that does not mean that you should “put a brick through your television.” By all means, question the ideas you hold dear, but if you start to argue with everyone you meet just for the sake of being a contrarian, everyone will think you’re an asshole. (Maybe you don’t care what people think, but, you’ll still be an asshole.) The whole section under “Iconoclasm” basically boils down to “WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY.” Also, the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted” appears verbatim in this book, more than once. (And here I thought chaotes got it from Assassin’s Creed!) I’m surprised that Carroll hasn’t included any Nietzsche quotes. At times, he reminds me a little of Lord Henry Wotton, feeding Dorian Gray a bunch of irreverent philosophies just because they’re shocking.

And… okay. It was the ’80s. This is probably as individualistic as occult systems got back then, and this sort of stuff really was revolutionary at the time. It was pre-Internet, before everybody could see every possible scrap of society’s dirty laundry hung out for the world to see. In today’s social climate, cynicism isn’t “the magician’s privilege,” it’s both common and poisonous. And that’s the big problem I have with Chaos Magic in general: it’s too postmodern. It’s too interested in saying “fuck the rules” or “fuck society” to say anything else. Unless you give it personal meaning, it can start to feel hollow.

One of the core ideas of Chaos Magic is that beliefs are tools, and one can choose one’s beliefs on a whim. Carroll includes a dice game in which each number corresponds to a belief system. You roll the die, and then adopt that belief system for a week, a month, or a year. Carroll’s summaries of each belief system are… inconsistent. His summary of paganism isn’t too bad (though I’d personally change some things), and his summary of atheism is very straightforward. His summary of monotheism, though, is arranged like a bulleted list (though without bullets), and his description of it really only applies to Christianity (not Islam or Judaism). Carroll’s description of Chaoism, his own (?) belief system, is just a little poem consisting of various maxims, beginning with “As above, so below.” What Carroll is calling “Chaoism” seems to be the underlying philosophy of most Western esoteric systems, and it ultimately comes from Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. I’ll give him “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” but Carroll doesn’t get to claim “as above, so below” as the province of Chaos Magic. Carroll also includes nihilism and “superstition” as “degraded” forms of atheism and Chaoism, respectfully. What he’s calling “superstition” is basically just the ideas behind sympathetic magic, “like attracts like” and so forth. Can we stop looking down on folk practitioners, please?

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that Carroll doesn’t actually have much respect for belief systems besides atheism and his own “Chaoism.” Carroll himself views gods as projected thoughtforms or archetypes, and clearly doesn’t have much respect for monotheism. And… okay, fine, that’s not bad, but it sort of conflicts with the idea that one can randomly choose or switch between belief systems. In order to do that, one must not disdain any of them. So… why do it? Does switching between belief systems at will actually do anything other than prove that you have the mental discipline to do so? Seriously… does anyone actually do this?

In general, I have mixed feelings about the “switching beliefs” thing. I understand what it’s supposed to do, and I think it’s generally a good idea to see beliefs as malleable. Most of my mystically-inclined friends arrive at similar conclusions, even though our belief systems are all very different, which means that our beliefs are all somewhat incidental. I’ve seen a bunch of atheist Quorans claim that it’s impossible to choose to believe something — either you believe, or you don’t. This hasn’t been my experience. I feel like I really have chosen most of my own beliefs. I could, theoretically, change them if I wanted… but I don’t want to. My beliefs work very well for me. My friends’ beliefs work well for them, too. I’m genuinely happy that Islam works so well for my Muslim friends, but I couldn’t be Muslim if you paid me, not even for a chaote’s psychological experiment. And that’s okay! I don’t need to change my beliefs in order to be an effective mage, or to acquire wisdom, or whatnot. I just need to be able to critically examine them. I don’t need to deconstruct my personality and refuse to identify with anything, like Carroll also says I should do. I can acknowledge that my beliefs and personality are arbitrary and still like them. To put it a different way, my fashion sense is arbitrary — there’s no objectively right or wrong way to dress — but I’m not going to go out of my way to wear clothes that I hate just to prove that point.

I guess that’s what bothers me about Liber Null. It’s so extreme. I can understand why that might be helpful for someone who has not thought critically about any aspect of their personality or beliefs; if you don’t know why you believe what you believe, or why you behave the way you do, and if you haven’t done any Shadow work… then yeah, trying on a radically different belief system just to see how it affects your brain might be a good idea. Disassociating yourself from every personality trait you’ve ever had and rebuilding yourself from the ground up might be useful. But from where I stand, you don’t have to keep yourself there.

As for Psychonaut, there’s not a lot to say about it that I haven’t already said about Liber Null. I find myself saying “okay, man” rather a lot, because of those minor points of contention that get presented as if they were irrefutable. There are the rituals, like a “Mass of Chaos” that’s kind of like a Satanic-ish black mass. It includes an Enochian incantation that ends with the Zazas Zazas incantation, and it also includes an invocation of Baphomet and an osculum infame. Carroll claims that the osculum infame is “misunderstood,” and that it consists of “breathing” on the perineum (which he confuses with the peritoneum, a sheet of tissue under the skin of the abdomen). Because this awakens the Kundalini or some shit. No, I’m pretty sure the osculum infame is exactly what it sounds like! If you’re gonna do it, then fucking commit to it! (I honestly think it’s less weird to literally kiss someone’s ass than to breathe on their perineum.) Carroll also suggests that one exorcise demons (literal or figurative) by inducing trauma on purpose. Sometimes you do need to confront nasty things to do Shadow work and so on, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to “terrorize [someone] back to normality.” Carroll recounts an instance in which he successfully used this technique to help someone, so maybe it depends on the person.

The eclecticism that seems to characterize modern Chaos Magic (take what works, leave the rest) also seems to be missing. Ironically, the impression I get from much of this book is that Carroll thinks there’s only one right way to do things. For example, “Hedonism and masochism exhaust themselves uselessly into the numbed grayness of dulled faculties,” i.e. the hedonism paradox. Okay, but, what if hedonism or masochism actually work for me? The atheist stuff is even more annoying, like “Whatever the nature of the other reality, there is obviously no need — beyond the psychological — to anthropomorphize it.” Even if he’s right that gods are just psychological phenomena and don’t objectively exist, I do feel the need to anthropomorphize them! The first part of the “Magical Perspectives” chapter in Psychonaut consists almost entirely of shitting on “religion,” by which he means Christianity. I don’t mind that Carroll’s an atheist (actually, he’s more of an animist), but the derisiveness gets to me. There are so many other ideas that he presents so authoritatively, as if it were impossible to argue, that I don’t necessarily agree with (or agree with in part, but not the way it’s presented). For example, I don’t fully agree with Carroll’s division of consciousness, or definition of gnosis as overwhelming concentration on any specific thing. But what bothers me more is that he opens that chapter (in Psychonaut) by lambasting all other schemata for categorizing mental states, holding up his own version as if it’s superior. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the schema itself, but I don’t personally like it. So, it frustrates me that Carroll is presenting it as if it’s the only correct way to categorize the mind, as opposed to just another version. It’s just as arbitrary (his word, not mine) as all the other ones.

There’s a lot of that. I disagree with Carroll in minor, but annoying, ways: I don’t think we’re necessarily confined by duality. I don’t think that gods are just archetypes or projections of ourselves. As for his takes on history… oh boy. Why Baphomet (besides just being edgy)? Carroll is using this as his version of the universal principle, which he calls the “Horned God.” I was not expecting to see the Wiccan Horned God turn up in this. Carroll perceives the Horned God as the original conception of divinity from the age of shamanism (before religion took over and ruined everything). I guarantee you that he’s thinking of that “The Sorcerer” cave painting, even if he doesn’t explicitly say so. And then, of course, the Horned God was promptly demonized and turned into the Devil by the Abrahamic religions (all three of them, despite the fact that Islam and Judaism lack an equivalent of the Devil). The Horned God concept actually does resonate for me, and some of what Carroll has to say about Baphomet reminds me of things I’ve said about Dionysus, but Carroll’s interpretation is so ahistorical. He doesn’t even seem to realize that Eliphas Levi invented the modern Baphomet. He just uses Baphomet as an umbrella term for so many different gods (Pan, Cernunnos, Isis, Kali, etc.). I’ve written about the modernity of the Horned God and my feelings on the concept elsewhere, and I’ll probably go through it again when I do the Devil Project, so, for now I’ll just say that Carroll’s lionization of shamanism unsettles me. Shamanism isn’t necessarily better or worse than any other religious system, and presenting it that way risks falling into “noble savage” territory. (Again, I don’t necessarily disagree with Carroll that shamanic techniques are important underlying magical skills, it’s just the way he presents them.) Also, dividing the world into ages of religious thought (shamanism/animism, polytheism, monotheism, atheism/the Enlightenment, the Age of Aquarius) is playing right into Christian ideas about how religions worked. Christians pretended that animism and polytheism naturally evolved into Christianity, and then atheists tacked atheism on top of that, and now Carroll is tacking Chaoism on top of that. Human spirituality doesn’t evolve in a straight line! Especially not towards whatever your thing is!

Carroll seems to think that the next big era of human religious evolution will be his own Chaoism. Because of course he does. Despite the Religion Roulette dice game, Carroll is still of the opinion that his own beliefs are right. No shit. It’s another attempt to create a “universal” belief system that’s actually just the writer’s own beliefs in an idealized package. I wish that Carroll would get off his high horse and admit that! It’s hypocritical, because Carroll goes out of his way to be arbitrary at other points, like with the astrology thing, or the dice game. That arbitrariness is actually the point of Chaos Magic. Switching beliefs isn’t about eclecticism, it’s about being arbitrary on purpose. The “Chaos” part of Chaos Magic isn’t actually a lack of structure, but essentially a deification of random chance. I was not expecting that.

I realize I’m being a little harsh on this book. I’m probably criticizing it more than it deserves. This is an example of “Seinfeld is Unfunny” (or “The Lord of the Rings is cliché”). The reason why these concepts are so familiar to me is because Carroll introduced them, and the modern occult landscape would look very different if this book hadn’t been published. His postmodern, atheistic approach with its focus on practical techniques and efficacy was brand new at the time. Christianity did need to be taken down off its high horse (and it still needs that, just maybe with different talking points). Even more revolutionary was Carroll’s existentialist philosophy, in sharp contrast to the “the whole world is ordered and rational because God made it that way, and we must learn its logic” philosophy of previous generations of occultists. Chaos theory and quantum mechanics were also new at the time, and Carroll introduced it to the occult field. Carroll himself was a physicist, so — unlike many who try to use sciencey language to describe magic — he actually knew what he was talking about. (Not when it comes to history, though. Oof.) If it weren’t for Carroll and chaos magic, I’d probably struggle a lot more as an occultist. Most of my problems with Carroll are the remnants of the older system that he hadn’t moved past yet, or his open rejection of the old system that was genuine at the time but seems trite to me now. The reason why it seems trite is because it’s become so fundamental to modern occultism, and I have Carroll to thank for that.

Okay, let me talk about the stuff I liked. The actual information about magic in this book is solid. My issues with the way it’s presented probably have more to do with my personal taste. You could get all the basic magical techniques and ideas that you needed from this book. One of the things I like about Chaos Magic is how straightforward and practical it is. The upside of the atheistic approach, and the “belief is a tool” concept, is that Chaos Magic is divorced from any particular religion, and focuses directly on the techniques themselves. That makes it extremely versatile. It’s why I often recommend studying Chaos Magic first — once you get the fundamentals of magical theory down, you can apply it to almost any system. Carroll was one of the people who invented that, so again, I really have to thank him for that one. There are some things I agree with Carroll on, like that one should try to bypass the psychic censor by taking note of coincidences. (This is my “see what’s there, not what you think is there.”) I complained a lot about Carroll’s takes on history, but he does understand how paradigms shape perception, and that other cultures have radically different paradigms than the Protestant and atheistic ones that we’re familiar with. That’s a really important understanding, and it mitigate the edginess a little bit. Carroll offers paradigms that one can switch to at will, which I think is more useful and more productive than trying to switch between beliefs at will (though it is similar on the face of it). All of Carroll’s paradigms are based on theories in physics, which is clearly his wheelhouse. He basically describes the Theory of Forms, but puts it in physics terms, which is cool. I also like the anecdotes that he shares about his own experiences with magic at the end.

Another thing I really liked was the art. The artist for Liber Null is Andrew David, and his style resembles A.O. Spare’s a lot. (Probably not a coincidence; Spare’s method of creating sigils and his terminology like “Kia” appear elsewhere throughout the book.) The artist for Psychonaut is Brian Ward, who also did the cover art. His illustrations look kind of like stained-glass windows. Several of them depict Cthulhu, and some of the more abstract ones look like Rorschach inkblots. The illustrations don’t really have that much to do with the actual text, but that doesn’t really matter, because they are so cool. They set the vibe.

I’d class this as an intermediate occult book. It’s not quite accessible enough for beginners, and it’s so wordy that I think you have to have at least some basic understanding of the concepts it discusses for it to make sense. But, if you’re too familiar with those concepts, then you’re probably not going to get that much out of it, and you might end up rolling your eyes at it. (Or maybe that’s just me.) I would recommend this to people who are sick and tired of all the carbon copy beginner witch books, and want to start looking for the “advanced” books. It’s a good introduction to magical techniques and theory, even if I don’t personally vibe with all of it. If you’re relatively new to occultism, you’ll definitely get something out of this, especially if you’re just coming off of Christianity, since that seems to be what this book is designed to address.