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‘Chaos Magic’: An Apt Metaphor for Post-Trump
Why do repeated falsehoods win in a post-truth society? Maybe it’s chaos magic.
I bought Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic years ago. These are two small companion books bound together as one. It was a used paperback, published by Samuel Weiser, Inc. in 1987, and it contained a receipt from an occult bookstore on the West Coast in 1995. I don’t remember exactly when I bought it, but I read it in 2010. I didn’t know what to make of it then.
Around 2000, at age 20, I’d found the occult aesthetic somewhat attractive and had a childlike curiosity about developing my mental powers, but ten years later, I no longer saw any promise in that or had the time for it.
Reading it again in 2022, to me as a USAmerican it seems almost like a post-Trump satire, at turns ridiculous and insightful. Carroll is British, so this political interpretation and application is my own riff.
Context Notes
Carroll, an English occultist, founded the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT). The group claims to be a descendant of “witchcraft,” “sorcery,” Aleister Crowley, Austin O. Spare, and Spare’s philosophy of “Zos Kia Cultus.” Thus “the IOT continues a tradition perhaps seven thousand years old.”
Some recently revived-or-invented occult traditions have been racist. On which I offer a context note: Carroll expelled Ralph Tegtmeier (the original publisher of Liber Null) from the IOT over Tegtmeier’s racist ideology. (Tegtmeier’s “Eismagie” or “ice magick” story held that only people with the correct European genes could use the magic.) In expelling Tegtmeier, Carroll allowed many far-right European members to depart the IOT as well.
Two Ways We Are In For a Ride
The Introduction to Liber Null says that the use of the masculine “he” is “merely in keeping with the traditional style of magical texts of this type“ and “by no means excludes women.” This kind of caveat was common in books in the 1980s when people realized they had to start using gender-neutral language but weren’t ready to do it. The book also uses weird throwback phrases like “normal congress, the genital embrace of persons…
