Reviews by Shade Oroboros
The Apophenion: A Chaos Magic Paradigm by Peter J. Carroll,
Mandrake 2008, 160 pages, illustrated,
footnoted and indexed.
In the wide wonderful world of Chaos Magick, it is kind of a big event when Peter Carroll writes a new book. This one does of course have many magical elements, but it is actually devoted to addressing profoundly fundamental issues: the nature of existence, time and space, the structure of the universe and the (un?)reality of the Self. The man has clearly been thinking vary hard about stuff, specifically Relativity, Quantum Theory and Chaos. On the way he discards the very notion of ‘being’ in favor of Panpsychism, trashes the concept of any individual ‘consciousness’ by redefining ‘mind’ as a verb rather than a noun, proposes a new personal pantheism, reexamines causality in magical terms, and completely blows off the current theories of the Big Bang theory of the universe in favor of a new physics model of Vorticitating Hyperspherical Spacetime.
I am nowhere near doing justice to his thesis, and definitely lack the math skills to grok his appended equations. But as far as I can follow his thought, it seems to make more sense than many other theories, largely works for me, and is well worth some very serious consideration. I have the lurking feeling this all this is important.
Apophenia, by the way, is the goddess of finding unsuspected meaning, patterns and connections.