Why I think Peter Carroll is a Shithead.
This is the first of a few essays I'm writing to clarify where I've been, what I've accomplished and where I'm going with my spiritual development, with particular reference to the Occult studies.
So I'm now rereading Phil Hine's book Condensed Chaos, after it sitting forgotten and dismissed on my bookshelf for about a decade. Next to it is Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll. I'm NOT rereading that book.
I was asked why I prefer Phil Hine over Peter Carroll and I never answered that question so I will now.
It mostly has to do with what kind of person I perceive Peter Carroll to be. First, the minor point:
Carroll said somewhere in one of his books or interviews, that anyone who gets into astrology has shit for brains. This is the kind of comment I'd expect from a particularly vitriolic atheist but...a chaos mage?...who channels Cthulu demons? How on any bloody level of Screaming Hell can I take a man like that seriously?
So that's the minor point. Now to the larger reason.
The whole tone of LN&P seems distinctly eliteist and snotty to me. Carroll has almost as much attitude as Crowley but I don't see as much work put behind it to have earned such an attitude. But before I go any further, I need to give a quick rundown of where and how I got into this whole business.
I moved from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco in late 1993. I was 23 at the time. It was precisely when I moved that I thought, "I think it's time to start keeping a diary" and so I did. Now, at this starting point, I had already had my thinking rearranged by Robert Anton Wilson's books Quantum Psychology (which I consider my Bible, I guess), and Prometheus Rising, I had read a bit of Crowley, had gotten familiar with Qabala, and had just bought my first tarot deck (the smaller version of the Thoth deck). Note on that: I will be devoting another entire essay to my works with the tarot but for now, I'm glossing over it.
I'm trying to remember...I think it was one of the bouncers at the gay nightclub I worked at (called The Endup, where I got to meet Grace Jones very briefly) who introduced me to LN&P and I immediately took interest. That bouncer, indidentally, later on became a Muslim, after having gone through Judaism, Qabala and Thelema, Zen Buddhism, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Why he settled on Islam, I cannot figure but I think he was following some Sufi aspect of it. Not entirely sure on that. That was his path and who am I to judge?
Once introduced to chaos magic, I started hunting around for others into it. I can, at this time, remember three people. The first was this VERY hot guy who I first saw at the Horseshoe Cafe (located on lower Haight street). He was tall and thin and had black, curly hair, big bulge in the jeans, and he was wearing this T shirt that said "QUEER AS FUCK!!" in enormous WHAM! style "Wake me up before you go go!" style letters. I only got to meet him briefly in person but had a few conversations with him online. See, these were the days when the Web was still young and some dude had set up a local network called "SFNet" that you could access through various coffee houses. This MIGHT have come before the Speakeasy in Seattle did their Internet cafe thing...or maybe the same time. Not sure. But...I can't remember his real name, only his online name, which was Exploding Boy. Other users called him XBoy for short.
The second, I also met on SFNet and again, I can't remember his real name but his online name was Insatiabulus.
The third was a woman, who actually introduced me to Hine's book...I think she even bought it for me. I do remember her name: Crystal. We had gotten to be pretty good friends. In fact, I slept with her. She's the only woman I've ever had sex with. And, while I discovered that I love eating pussy, the rest was rather awkward and...don't ask. Just don't. She was familiar with the IOT but had more of a personal interest in break-off group called The Autonomatrix...or AX for short.
Insatiabulus was not quite as hot as XBoy but, when we got together, he wanted to have sex and it threw me off guard because I had thought he was straight. Turned out, he was bicurious and wanted to have his first boy-on-boy experience with ME. I'm...uh...not much into that. That kind of thing gets messy and awkward. I prefer the guys who know what they want and have their shit together about their sexuality. I'd rather the curious experimenters find someone else to confirm and then come back and screw me. Nevertheless, he had a great body (took his shirt off when we got to his place...BIG hairy chest!) and I sort of wished I'd taken him up on that offer. He was the one who had told me that William Burroughs was a member of the IOT and he told me some other things, like that they had had some sort of distant relationship with the Temple of Psychic Youth. I noticed he was wearing a chaosphere ring. So I asked him outright if he was a member. That made him uncomfortable. He shifted around a bit and said, "Well, I'm sort of affiliated with some of them." and I had that feeling that he was wanting to feel me out more and find out where I was and how interested and committed before he let on anymore. He had also been doing some experimentation with the drug DMT and he told me a bit about his experiences with that.
It was my conversations with Crystal that made the most difference. She pushed Condensed Chaos at me because I was voicing more interest in the DIY aspect of chaos magick, than the demon-loving aspect. She told me something about Peter Carroll. She had gone to one of his seminars.
"What's he like?" I asked.
"Not what you'd think. He looks like a big biker. And when he was talking, he looked a bit insecure and he said 'Um' a lot in his sentences. There were a lot of places where people asked questions and he tripped up and had a hard time answering them."
I find this very interesting. Carroll comes off so arrogant in his book, and dismisses the idea of "crossing the abyss", yet in front of a public audience, he's all fidgety and says "Um" a lot. It really makes me doubt the credibility of what he's actually doing with himself and whatever wisdom he has.
Phil Hine mentions "Magusitis" as one of the pitfalls of getting into magick. He describes it as the arrogant "I'm better than all these little unenlightened bitches" attitude, which usually means he's an asshole and often pushes people away. Really seemed to me like Peter Carroll had a serious case of that.
To put it bluntly, Carroll comes off to me as a pompous buttwipe, more interested in coming up with cool sounding names like "psybermagick" and bragging about his adventures with the demons, than in actually communicating the realities of chaos magick in practice and theory to those who are new. By comparison, Hine seems much more reasonable and experienced, more thorough, and more interested in actual humanity and making a difference on the material plane. I know he's worked with Cthulu demons and probably others as well, but he just doesn't seem to have lost touch with his audience the way Carroll has.
There's something extremely important about this:
I came from a very dysfunctional family and am a rather damaged person. My father was an imbecilic control freak who uses Jesus to bully around anyone who gives him the time of day. Pentacostal preacher. My mother divorced him when I was very young but then, a few years later, married a man who was a paranoid schizophrenic. Now, I want people to know I don't throw that term around lightly. He was pretty stable during the first couple years, but after that, particularly after we had moved from Denver, Colorado to a little podunk town in Montana...I was about 11 years old then...the madness began to set in and it just got worse and worse and worse. I wrote a long journal entry about my stepfather many years ago but I think only three people on my friends list remember that. I may repost it if there's interest. But in a nutshell, I want to say that living with someone like that...it's not just about peeking around corners and thinking someone's out to get him. He grew increasingly HOSTILE, so that my home was a prison and my grades in school went from A's to F's because I was so stressed out from his constantly hollering and insulting and throwing temper tantrums and then my mother fighting back and the whole thing being absolutely savage. A couple times it even ended in fist fights. To her credit, my mother was not an abused enabler. When attacked, she took up arms and fired back. Every time. And when I was attacked, oh fuck she REALLY turned into a bear!! So this was a household full of screaming and yelling and doors slamming and things being thrown all the time. I couldn't cultivate friendships because he would humiliate me in front of them and if I tried to socialize at their house, he would monitor how long I was gone and give me Hell when I got back. Even if I was home in time, he would FIND a reason, no matter how petty, to just dump on me and dump on me and dump on me until I too was screaming and yelling in defense.
She finally divorced him when I was...15 or 16 I think. He moved back to Denver and tried to reconstruct a new life, but instead, had a breakdown and had to be institutionalized. During that time, he was clinically diagnosed as a CLASSIC case of paranoid schizophrenia...and IRRITATED by illegal drug use (self medicating). They kicked him out of the institution because his rotten family refused to pay for having him in there. His mother was a fucking bitch...the most emotionally detached reptile I've ever met. His father drank and gambled all the time. His brother, an incredible sadist with a mile long police record and lots of prison time, who had dislocated his own daughter's shoulder from beating her when she was only 2 years old. One sister was a crack whore. The other a welfare mom of five boys, all with different daddies.
My stepfather eventually committed suicide.
This was the man I had to live with for seven years of my life.
Why am I going on about this? What has this to do with Peter Carroll?
Well, to put it plainly, Carroll seems oblivious that such people like me exist. To drive the point home, I ask a simple question: What kind of people are the most likely to get into Occult?
Is it not the ones who wear black and love vampires? Is it not the Gothics?
And, while there are some Gothics out there who are balanced and fairly well developed, I found from my own experience, many of them are very damaged. Like me. They don't relate to the "normal" way of life and so naturally become interested in weird things.
It simply does not seem responsible to me for someone like Carroll to be enticing damaged people into things like calling up malevolent spirits like the ones from the Lovecraft mythos. Not that they should be guided to white light stuff but...seems like the inner, personal demons need to be made peace with before taking on a mythos of entities for which, as Hine himself says, are drawn to the emotion of terror itself like sharks to the scent of blood.
So yeah, I really think Carroll is kind of a shithead. And even if I thought the IOT could benefit me as a whole, the fact that HE founded it kind of creeps me out. For the record though, that was a decade ago and for all I know, Carroll may have learned some hard lessons since then and adopted a bit more humility and understanding of others.
Hine, on the other hand, seems extremely reasonable and understanding. He makes it clear that magick most certainly is NOT for all, as Crowley asserts, and points towards the huge number of Crowley's students who went mad from their involvement. I think this is good advice.
So...the next essay will be more of a general overview of my development with some thoughts on where I'm going from here. I can already say now that there are entire fields of magickal practice that I'm not even going to bother with. It's not my path. Not my style. Not my calling. Still not entirely sure where my calling IS...but figuring where I don't want to go will, I'm sure, help clarify that.
So I'm now rereading Phil Hine's book Condensed Chaos, after it sitting forgotten and dismissed on my bookshelf for about a decade. Next to it is Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll. I'm NOT rereading that book.
I was asked why I prefer Phil Hine over Peter Carroll and I never answered that question so I will now.
It mostly has to do with what kind of person I perceive Peter Carroll to be. First, the minor point:
Carroll said somewhere in one of his books or interviews, that anyone who gets into astrology has shit for brains. This is the kind of comment I'd expect from a particularly vitriolic atheist but...a chaos mage?...who channels Cthulu demons? How on any bloody level of Screaming Hell can I take a man like that seriously?
So that's the minor point. Now to the larger reason.
The whole tone of LN&P seems distinctly eliteist and snotty to me. Carroll has almost as much attitude as Crowley but I don't see as much work put behind it to have earned such an attitude. But before I go any further, I need to give a quick rundown of where and how I got into this whole business.
I moved from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco in late 1993. I was 23 at the time. It was precisely when I moved that I thought, "I think it's time to start keeping a diary" and so I did. Now, at this starting point, I had already had my thinking rearranged by Robert Anton Wilson's books Quantum Psychology (which I consider my Bible, I guess), and Prometheus Rising, I had read a bit of Crowley, had gotten familiar with Qabala, and had just bought my first tarot deck (the smaller version of the Thoth deck). Note on that: I will be devoting another entire essay to my works with the tarot but for now, I'm glossing over it.
I'm trying to remember...I think it was one of the bouncers at the gay nightclub I worked at (called The Endup, where I got to meet Grace Jones very briefly) who introduced me to LN&P and I immediately took interest. That bouncer, indidentally, later on became a Muslim, after having gone through Judaism, Qabala and Thelema, Zen Buddhism, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Why he settled on Islam, I cannot figure but I think he was following some Sufi aspect of it. Not entirely sure on that. That was his path and who am I to judge?
Once introduced to chaos magic, I started hunting around for others into it. I can, at this time, remember three people. The first was this VERY hot guy who I first saw at the Horseshoe Cafe (located on lower Haight street). He was tall and thin and had black, curly hair, big bulge in the jeans, and he was wearing this T shirt that said "QUEER AS FUCK!!" in enormous WHAM! style "Wake me up before you go go!" style letters. I only got to meet him briefly in person but had a few conversations with him online. See, these were the days when the Web was still young and some dude had set up a local network called "SFNet" that you could access through various coffee houses. This MIGHT have come before the Speakeasy in Seattle did their Internet cafe thing...or maybe the same time. Not sure. But...I can't remember his real name, only his online name, which was Exploding Boy. Other users called him XBoy for short.
The second, I also met on SFNet and again, I can't remember his real name but his online name was Insatiabulus.
The third was a woman, who actually introduced me to Hine's book...I think she even bought it for me. I do remember her name: Crystal. We had gotten to be pretty good friends. In fact, I slept with her. She's the only woman I've ever had sex with. And, while I discovered that I love eating pussy, the rest was rather awkward and...don't ask. Just don't. She was familiar with the IOT but had more of a personal interest in break-off group called The Autonomatrix...or AX for short.
Insatiabulus was not quite as hot as XBoy but, when we got together, he wanted to have sex and it threw me off guard because I had thought he was straight. Turned out, he was bicurious and wanted to have his first boy-on-boy experience with ME. I'm...uh...not much into that. That kind of thing gets messy and awkward. I prefer the guys who know what they want and have their shit together about their sexuality. I'd rather the curious experimenters find someone else to confirm and then come back and screw me. Nevertheless, he had a great body (took his shirt off when we got to his place...BIG hairy chest!) and I sort of wished I'd taken him up on that offer. He was the one who had told me that William Burroughs was a member of the IOT and he told me some other things, like that they had had some sort of distant relationship with the Temple of Psychic Youth. I noticed he was wearing a chaosphere ring. So I asked him outright if he was a member. That made him uncomfortable. He shifted around a bit and said, "Well, I'm sort of affiliated with some of them." and I had that feeling that he was wanting to feel me out more and find out where I was and how interested and committed before he let on anymore. He had also been doing some experimentation with the drug DMT and he told me a bit about his experiences with that.
It was my conversations with Crystal that made the most difference. She pushed Condensed Chaos at me because I was voicing more interest in the DIY aspect of chaos magick, than the demon-loving aspect. She told me something about Peter Carroll. She had gone to one of his seminars.
"What's he like?" I asked.
"Not what you'd think. He looks like a big biker. And when he was talking, he looked a bit insecure and he said 'Um' a lot in his sentences. There were a lot of places where people asked questions and he tripped up and had a hard time answering them."
I find this very interesting. Carroll comes off so arrogant in his book, and dismisses the idea of "crossing the abyss", yet in front of a public audience, he's all fidgety and says "Um" a lot. It really makes me doubt the credibility of what he's actually doing with himself and whatever wisdom he has.
Phil Hine mentions "Magusitis" as one of the pitfalls of getting into magick. He describes it as the arrogant "I'm better than all these little unenlightened bitches" attitude, which usually means he's an asshole and often pushes people away. Really seemed to me like Peter Carroll had a serious case of that.
To put it bluntly, Carroll comes off to me as a pompous buttwipe, more interested in coming up with cool sounding names like "psybermagick" and bragging about his adventures with the demons, than in actually communicating the realities of chaos magick in practice and theory to those who are new. By comparison, Hine seems much more reasonable and experienced, more thorough, and more interested in actual humanity and making a difference on the material plane. I know he's worked with Cthulu demons and probably others as well, but he just doesn't seem to have lost touch with his audience the way Carroll has.
There's something extremely important about this:
I came from a very dysfunctional family and am a rather damaged person. My father was an imbecilic control freak who uses Jesus to bully around anyone who gives him the time of day. Pentacostal preacher. My mother divorced him when I was very young but then, a few years later, married a man who was a paranoid schizophrenic. Now, I want people to know I don't throw that term around lightly. He was pretty stable during the first couple years, but after that, particularly after we had moved from Denver, Colorado to a little podunk town in Montana...I was about 11 years old then...the madness began to set in and it just got worse and worse and worse. I wrote a long journal entry about my stepfather many years ago but I think only three people on my friends list remember that. I may repost it if there's interest. But in a nutshell, I want to say that living with someone like that...it's not just about peeking around corners and thinking someone's out to get him. He grew increasingly HOSTILE, so that my home was a prison and my grades in school went from A's to F's because I was so stressed out from his constantly hollering and insulting and throwing temper tantrums and then my mother fighting back and the whole thing being absolutely savage. A couple times it even ended in fist fights. To her credit, my mother was not an abused enabler. When attacked, she took up arms and fired back. Every time. And when I was attacked, oh fuck she REALLY turned into a bear!! So this was a household full of screaming and yelling and doors slamming and things being thrown all the time. I couldn't cultivate friendships because he would humiliate me in front of them and if I tried to socialize at their house, he would monitor how long I was gone and give me Hell when I got back. Even if I was home in time, he would FIND a reason, no matter how petty, to just dump on me and dump on me and dump on me until I too was screaming and yelling in defense.
She finally divorced him when I was...15 or 16 I think. He moved back to Denver and tried to reconstruct a new life, but instead, had a breakdown and had to be institutionalized. During that time, he was clinically diagnosed as a CLASSIC case of paranoid schizophrenia...and IRRITATED by illegal drug use (self medicating). They kicked him out of the institution because his rotten family refused to pay for having him in there. His mother was a fucking bitch...the most emotionally detached reptile I've ever met. His father drank and gambled all the time. His brother, an incredible sadist with a mile long police record and lots of prison time, who had dislocated his own daughter's shoulder from beating her when she was only 2 years old. One sister was a crack whore. The other a welfare mom of five boys, all with different daddies.
My stepfather eventually committed suicide.
This was the man I had to live with for seven years of my life.
Why am I going on about this? What has this to do with Peter Carroll?
Well, to put it plainly, Carroll seems oblivious that such people like me exist. To drive the point home, I ask a simple question: What kind of people are the most likely to get into Occult?
Is it not the ones who wear black and love vampires? Is it not the Gothics?
And, while there are some Gothics out there who are balanced and fairly well developed, I found from my own experience, many of them are very damaged. Like me. They don't relate to the "normal" way of life and so naturally become interested in weird things.
It simply does not seem responsible to me for someone like Carroll to be enticing damaged people into things like calling up malevolent spirits like the ones from the Lovecraft mythos. Not that they should be guided to white light stuff but...seems like the inner, personal demons need to be made peace with before taking on a mythos of entities for which, as Hine himself says, are drawn to the emotion of terror itself like sharks to the scent of blood.
So yeah, I really think Carroll is kind of a shithead. And even if I thought the IOT could benefit me as a whole, the fact that HE founded it kind of creeps me out. For the record though, that was a decade ago and for all I know, Carroll may have learned some hard lessons since then and adopted a bit more humility and understanding of others.
Hine, on the other hand, seems extremely reasonable and understanding. He makes it clear that magick most certainly is NOT for all, as Crowley asserts, and points towards the huge number of Crowley's students who went mad from their involvement. I think this is good advice.
So...the next essay will be more of a general overview of my development with some thoughts on where I'm going from here. I can already say now that there are entire fields of magickal practice that I'm not even going to bother with. It's not my path. Not my style. Not my calling. Still not entirely sure where my calling IS...but figuring where I don't want to go will, I'm sure, help clarify that.