Peter J. Carroll Quotes

Science has brought us power and ideas but not the wisdom or responsibility to handle them.

Any sufficiently advanced form of magick will appear indistinguishable from science.

Flat Earth theory serves well enough for a trip from the cave to the water hole and back, and a third dimension going up into the sky and down underground serves to accommodate gods and devils — A lot of people still think like that, believe it or not.

WE CAN ONLY ESCAPE THE BLOODY AND IGNORANT NIGHTMARE OF HISTORY BY EXPLORING ALTERNATIVES WHICH TODAY LOOK FRIGHTENINGLY WEIRD.

New Age-ism I could Love it: —
If dolphins had as much intelligence as cats, And stopped trying to rescue sinking pieces of wood. If crystals actually did something useful, Other than grease the wheels of commerce. If the Goddess had made animals taste less good, So I didn't want to eat them. If astrology could tell me anything, Other than the trite and obvious. If whales could do something more impressive, Than merely occupy a lot of space. If corn circles came from enlightened aliens, Rather than Wiltshire pranksters on cider. If channellers could speak in hieroglyphics, Instead of pop-psychological twaddle. If sharing, caring, non-sexist men, Could do anything useful in a crisis.

It has taken us two million years to elevate politics from the level of a monkey squabble, to a level comprehensible to a six year old child.

Indeed, linear extrapolations make no large-scale sense in a universe that has spatial and temporal curvature.

Magick will not free itself from occultism until we have strangled the last astrologer with the guts of the last spiritual master.

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

We doubt that any facts actually exist. We only have observations and interpretations. Most of the interpretations remain questionable.

As a great master once observed: "There are two methods of becoming god, the upright or the averse." Let the mind become as a flame or a pool of still water.

The pseudoscience of astrology has no place in magick. Astrology has already died twice: once with the classical gods, and a second time after the Enlightenment. The complete failure of contemporary psychology to create anything other than a vocabulary of intellectual rubbish has encouraged astrology to resurface.

Matter can be conveniently divided for descriptive purposes into space, time, mass, and energy. However we can only describe any one of these phenomena in terms of the other three. Any definitions we care to make about matter are thus tautological.

Does the universe as a whole exhibit any kind of consciousness that we can interact with? Does the universe seek to evolve greater complexity and more sophisticated consciousness? Could it use some help from us in this? Do all species seem worth preserving regardless of their economic value to us? Does some mysterious circularity in time connect consciousness and the very existence of the universe? Most Neo-Pantheists like to think so.

I regard physics as that subset of magic that works fairly reliably. I regard magick, in the traditional sense, as a kind of physics that we strive to understand and render more reliable. So it all comes down to the same thing, a quest to understand and manipulate the world with a self-consistent and coherent theory.