Available HERE . How do you write a review of a book which is about spiritual enlightenment, awakening, attainment, initiation or whatever you wish to call it? And not just about awakening, but an actual full scheme for attaining it? I shall of course outline the contents, but what about evaluating what is written here? I shall also try to give some of the flavour of Chapman’s teachings; but sadly for those who hate cliches, it really is the case that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Ultimately, what draws a student to a teacher is itself part of the mystery. It seems to me that I can only evaluate what Alan Chapman is presenting as someone who has practiced the system; the only laboratory in which such writings can be tested is that of personal experience. So I shall have to tell my own Magia story. The book is a transcript of teachings delivered over six days at a retreat in Greece. It consists of those twelve sessions, with some unpacking, all rendered in blank v...
It's got quite a range of offerings, not all of which were to my taste; but of course that's how it is with anthologies. Personal takes on the history of CM from Pete Carroll and Jaq Hawkins, some good articles full of basic practical hints, and just for variety, one of those pieces which tell you how you must do magic. Lionel Snell is of course represented, with a great piece, Virtual Reality, Cybermagick and the Future of Chaos , resuming one of the main themes of his work over the last 50 years - VR. He is the man who invented Johnstone's Paradox, the idea that, if it's ever going to be actually possible to upload human-level consciousness into computers, then the odds are we are already living in such an emulation. This theory is now claimed without attribution by shameless plunderers of Lionel's originality. The essay ends with this computer analogy, symbolizing coding as magic, and the consensus world as the desktop: 'The moral of m...
EPOCH - Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, by Peter J. Carroll and Matt Kaybrin, pub. Arcanorium College. http://www.esotericon.org/ This book has taken me some months to review. Partly because of its sheer size and scale, but also because it represents in some ways a summation of Peter Carroll's total contribution to magical practice and history. So it really made me think about what was important and what wasn't about this man's extraordinary work. I've known Pete Carroll since 1979, from meetings in the Sorcerer's Apprentice coffee mornings in Leeds. I was one of the founder members of the first IOT group in West Yorkshire, begun in 1980 and centred on the village of East Morton, where Ray Sherwin had a house, and where Pete Carroll lived for a while. So we go back a long way, and his work, particularly Liber Null , has often inspired me. Not only that, but nothing has yet come along to replace Chaos Magic as the forefront magical current; its history is the h...
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