Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic - Peter J. Carroll 2000
Why Magick? Irrationale
We find ourselfs incarnate in an awesomely vast post-modernist universe of accidental origin amongst semi-intelligent apes grasping for emotional gratifications, power, personal identity and answers to silly questions, whilst trading these commodities between themselves. Yet the recommended gratifications and socially-approved identities seem such dull travesties of what two whole kilograms of brain might achieve. Worse still, the apes’ gods and Gods, for all their cosmic pretensions, appear as laughably-parochial anthropomorphisms, abstracted from faulty language structures, compounded by the pack-animal urge to obeisance.
Contemptuous of all the rubbish on sale, some attempt to create their own powers, gratifications, identities and explanations, and call themselfs magicians.
Hubris, then, accounts for the best of it:
But Why Not!
As belief in one’s capabilities self-evidently leads to increasing capabilities, magicians consider it worthwhile to believe in their ability to accomplish the impossible, even if they only succeed at this occasionally.
Indeed, and although it hurt lots, we even learnt enough mathematics during the sabbatical to challenge the Big Bang Theory.
Commentary 2
As nothing has any meaning other than that which we choose to give it, we must either invest belief and meaning in something or abandon the game and go straight to oblivion.
In selecting beliefs, we might as well go for maximum entertainment value and capability enhancement, regardless of the so-called ’facts’; for if a human really wants something, statistics count for nothing.
Personally, we attribute much of our success to a generous contempt for the apparent facts which a science education inadvertently taught us.
Spot the treble entendre.
We doubt that any facts actually exist.
We only have observations and interpretations.
Most of the interpretations remain questionable.
Belief in any god enhances self-belief but at the price of all the theological nonsense that accompanies it. Why not then adopt belief in oneself directly as a magician?
If it occasionally fails them fall back upon
Pm = P + (1-P) M 1/P (2nd equation of magic, Liber Kaos).
Belief Bends Probability (sometimes).