Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic - Peter J. Carroll 2000

Heresy IV Elitism

Our ancient Celtic ancestors said: “Never give a sword to a man who cannot dance.”

We might well add: “Never give a wand to anyone who cannot handle ordinary reality.”

Magick will tend to amplify whatever tendencies a person has. It will increase general incompetence in life, just as readily as it will augment competence.

Although we have seen those who started off reasonably well-organized and made a magnificent success of their lives with magick, we have observed plenty of unpromising cases taking a powered nose-dive to disaster with occult assistance.

The casualty list has grown considerably since we wrote the above.

Magic doesn’t suit everyone. Only those prepared to take full responsibility for themselves should apply.

The rest should find themselves the cheapest and most benign sources of outside guidance.

Commentary 23

The best orders and the best books on magick make the neophyte work very hard to gain anything. For, in brutal fact, nothing of any value comes from involving people who do not pursue excellence for its own sake in magick.

Magick does not offer an escape from ordinary reality: rather it offers a full-on confrontation with it, which one can easily lose.

When inexplicable or extraordinary things happen many people look for occult explanations and hidden meanings. For the rest of the time they think they know roughly how or even why ordinary things happen, and what remains impossible.

The magician turns this process on its head and regards ’ordinary reality’ as extraordinary and perhaps ultimately inexplicable. Thus everything takes on an intensity and an hypertrophied sense of meaning. The magician finds the most conventionally ordinary things deeply weird and considers nothing impossible.

Nevertheless the magician needs to dance carefully on the edge of the abysses..........