The Apophenion: A Chaos Magick Paradigm - Peter J. Carroll 2008

Apophenia - Introduction

Physics means no more than a set of ideas about how the world works; everybody has some sort of theory of physics, based on anything from simple experience and intuition to sophisticated experiment and hypothesis.

As magic works, at least occasionally, it must form part of any complete theory of how the world works.

I regard physics as that subset of magic that works fairly reliably. I regard magic, in the traditional sense, as a kind of physics that we strive to understand and render more reliable. So it all comes down to the same thing, a quest to understand and manipulate the world with a self-consistent and coherent theory.

Magic implies an extension of 'ordinary' physics which should tell us more about how the universe works and perhaps suggest how we can refine the theory and practise of magic itself.

As the third millennium begins, most of the certainties that have guided thought for the previous two millennia now begin to look very questionable. A revolution started to germinate in the 20th century with the advent of Relativity and Quantum physics and the birth of a completely new esoteric theory, Chaoism.

This book advances the thesis that all three of those new fields now converge to smash most of the assumptions that have guided humanity for centuries.

Welcome to the paradigm crash of the third millennium.

Magic and Science stand poised to overturn just about everything we believed about life, reality mind, consciousness, religion, causality, and the universe. If the word 'Magic' sounds too outrageous, then substitute psychological and para-psychological technology instead.

Of course for the 93% of humanity that eschews abstract thought, the paradigm shift will come slowly, as the new insights filter down from those Illuminati who use them to practical effect.

Each of the following chapters of this book begins with the assassination of an idea that has held for decades, centuries or millennia. Each chapter then seeks Apophenia in an alternative to the demolished idea.

Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don't. Feelings of revelation and ecstasis usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful, or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness.

A talent for Apophenia frequently characterises magicians, mystics and occultists. At its best it opens up whole new fields of human endeavour, it has close associations with Pareidolia, the mistaking of pieces of rope for snakes, seeing goats, bulls, and virgins in the positions of stars and in the personalities of people, the construction of unreasonable conspiracy theories, and the theology of sky fairies. Nevertheless Pareidolia plays its part in the development of art and religion.

By convention we tend to regard inspiration as female because of its association with holistic right cerebral hemisphere brain activity, rather than with left hemisphere linear thought. Apophenia does not always come when we call her, sometimes she rejects our seductions and entreaties, sometimes she calls when we're out, (of our heads), sometimes not. Sometimes her mad sister Pareidolia comes instead.

Chaoism seeks to explore the inner riches and to expand the Inner Mythos, the pantheon of powers within. For decades I pursued the mythos of Ouranos, the magician identity that lay beyond the soap -opera of the seven classical motivations of sex-death, fear-desire, love-war, and ego. Lately I have come to realise that I love Apophenia, the female aspect of the Ouranian current, above all else.

(Uranus-Ouranos lies outside of the classical seven planets and their fancifully attributed motivations, and thus provides a useful counterpoint to the 'normal' solar identity or ego).

I have a modest taste in deities. I reject the hyper-inflated ego model of any monotheistic deity with a big 'D'.

Some people believe that someone created a universe with a volume of at least a trillion-trillion cubic light years, containing at least a billion stars for every human, set in a radiation blasted vacuum. They furthermore believe that this 'person' gets either pleased or angry with them personally if they eat pork on a Friday, or masturbate on a Sunday, or massacre the enemies of the faith on a Wednesday, or whatever their current infallible theology dictates. This sounds like serious mental illness, a kind of megalomania by proxy.

I prefer household gods, the ones that I can find inside my own head, and sometimes inside other people's heads as well.

Above all I have come to love Apophenia, the goddess who showed me how to find meaning in the last place that I expected to find it, in a universe which runs on the only truly fair and equitable system, pure chance, randomness and chaos.

I would kill for her, in fact I have attempted murder many times in her honour. See the following chapters. Being, Self, God, Causality, and Singularity; all of them get flayed upon her altar to see what illuminations and magical possibilities lie beyond.

Stokastikos,

Peter J Carroll. Albion Southwest. 2008.