History/Magic

Q: You've referred to the Illuminates of Thanateros as the "magical heirs to the "Zos Kia Cultus" and as "a satrap of the Illuminati," and in the flow chart on page 8 of the Weiser edition of Liber Null, you make I.O.T. look like the culmination of everything from Sufism to Freemasonry. How do you answer critics who say that this is pretentious?

A: The chart in Liber Null was presented to show the development of certain traditions of esoteric ideas; each of the groups shown appears to have taken some inspirations from one or more older groups and added something of its own. Each group may be considered as the "Illuminati" of its era in the sense that it possessed the keys to the next advance of enlightenment. This, I believe, is all the Illuminati actually consists of, and I like to think that Chaos Magic is the obvious esoteric current for the postmodern era.

Peter J. Carroll Interview Excerpt From Abrasax Magazine, Vol.5, No.2.

There seems to be a trend developing where the number of overlapping traditions is increasing and the time it takes to mutate new traditions is decreasing. You could for example draw a line from the IOT to Meta Magick.

Carroll explains:

Whenever history becomes unstable and destinies hang in the balance, then magicians and messiahs appear everywhere. Our own civilization has moved into an epoch of permanent crisis and upheaval, and we are beset with a plague of wizards. They serve an historic purpose, for whenever a society undergoes radical change, alternative spiritualities proliferate, and from among these a culture will select its new worldview.

Its for the wizards to determine how that new spirituality will manifest. Most will end up crying in the wilderness or being put to the stake in various ways, but a few will bequeath to humanity a greater gift than they realise.

Psychonaut p113

See Also

• Qabalah
• Magick