Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic - Peter J. Carroll 1987

Liber AOM

THE RITUALS OF the degree of the adept are secret, yet they are stated here in the most explicit form which language permits. Only by perfecting oneself in the work of the initiate can one attain the empowerment required to use the techniques of the adept. Anything less than this leads to failure, disaster, and death. The methods are given here that some sight of the eventual goal of the work might be glimpsed.

In the work of the adept the aspirant has risen above the use of all symbolic systems save reality itself. The playthings of the initiate—sigils, gods, demons and the instruments of the sorcerer—he will reabsorb into himself or retain only for teaching purposes. His need for magical weapons will be restricted to the ceremonial. His tools will be direct prescience and enchantment. In the lower grades knowledge and ecstacy were taken as a guide to progress. For the adept only the ability to work magic is used to measure the increasing strength of his spirituality. During the work of the adept, the transmutation to magical consciousness is completed and he becomes one who liveth Chaos in perpetuity. The force may take him anywhere. He might decide to project the requisite personality dualities and gather persons about himself to form autonomous satraps of the Illuminati. He might simply withdraw his manifestation from the plane of duality entirely and cease to exist.

Figure 12. The schema of Liber AOM.

For out of Chaos arise the two prime forces of existence, the solve et coagula of existence. The Light power and the Dark. The light power is the expanding, outgoing, dualizing, increasing expression of Chaos, responsible for the new birth, creation, incarnation, and variety. The dark power is the contracting, returning, transcending, withdrawing expression of Chaos, responsible for death, dissolution, reabsorption simplicity and return to the source.

These twin forces lie at the root of all mystic quests and all forms of magical and mundane action. They are the basic spiritual principles of the universe. Adherents of one will always call the other black. Thus the expansion into existence can as easily be called the dark ascent into matter, and the withdrawal from existence can be called the return to the light. But this is mere moral philosophy and ultimately devoid of meaning. The positive and negative paths of magic converge and form a unity which itself diverges from the mystic paths. While mysticism is at the root concerned with following either the light power or the dark, magic aims to play the one off against the other. The magician aims to become a center of creation and destruction himself, a living manifestation of the Chaos force within the realm of duality, a complete microcosm, a god.

The work of the adept is arranged under the headings shown in figure 12.