Chaos Magic in Business — How to bring Magic to Business!!!

(The following are the five classes Peter Carroll taught at the Maybe Logic Academy in 2006 that explored how entrepreneurs can apply Chaos Magic to their businesses.)

In the Spring of 2006, Peter Carroll taught a five-week course called “Chaos Magic in Business” at the Maybe Logic Academy. When I saw the advertisement for the course then I was curious as I’d never thought about applying magic to your business. However, after reading Carroll’s explanation of how Chaos Magic can help you create and then maintain your own business, I became interested in taking the course.

The title for Week 1 is “Illumination.”

If you remember Carroll’s Chaos Magic course, he taught about ‘Illumination” in his last lesson. He mentions in this course that he chose to make the subject of Illumination, through a Chaos Magic lens, first because of the knowledge it will bring you at the beginning of your business journey. For the Chaos Magic in business, says Carroll, having such clarity is the most important aspect, as we need to have as clear a vision as possible to conjure success.

Carroll dedicated the first week to the examination of “what a commitment to business means for us, what it entails in terms of desires and beliefs, and what sort of Beliefs and fears we have that could hold us back from achieving it.” In the pursuit of that, Carroll suggests the use of different color boxes to be used for the course. Each box and its associated color, participants were asked to write things out and put the pieces of paper in the different boxes.

The first week was meant to “fill the pit,” which entailed writing out all our negative feelings about business. These were to be placed in a black colored box. Then we were also asked to write out all the positive things we could think about business, and starting our own business, on sheets of paper and place them in “the Lamp,” or the white box.

By the end of the week, Carroll said he hoped that participants had performed a ritual to affirm and reinforce their personal quest for a successful business. I really liked that Peter’s explanation of what businesspeople do. “Businesspeople look at what others may want to exchange for what they have and end up with more than they started with, by providing it or organizing it.”

He also provides a nice explanation for the role of magic in people’s lives. “What do magicians do? Well magicians can see opportunities for ritual self-reconfiguration and parapsychology where others cannot.” He continues, “The magician can often see through the apparent complexities of all the phenomena in life to points where a bit of deliberate investment of belief, or a bit of psychic push can make all the differences between success and failure.”

Carroll then asked participants to “Meditate upon what you perceive as the positive and negative aspects of starting up a business and becoming successful.

“Represent each aspect with a brief note on an appropriately shaped and colored piece of card or something. On the reverse of the negative notes try to develop counter arguments if possible. On the reverse f the positive notes consider any limitations that your ideas may have.

Carroll then lists thirteen points deserving of much contemplation. Listed they are:

1. What social class or income level do you want to end up in? Why?

2. What kind of people do you admire and whom do you despise? Why?

3. Which interests you more, the misfortunes of the rich or of the poor? Why?

4. Does fear of failure bother you? Why? What’s the worst that could happen?

5. Do you feel more comfortable in the company of people who own less or people who own more than you? Why?

6. Do you feel more comfortable leading or following? Why?

7. Is it important to you what other people think of you? Who? Why?

8. Do you regard business as an end in itself or as a means to something else? Why?

9. If you suddenly acquired a vast amount of money what would you do with the rest of your life?

10. What percentage of your soul are you prepared to sell for success?

11. Re: 10, Do you think you will be able to buy it back at a profit?

12. What experience do you really want from business?

13. What experiences for you really NOT want from business?

Then Carroll cracks an egg of knowledge when he said, “Many negative ideas people have about achieving or striving for success and wealth seem to lurk in the subconscious.”

Carroll next asked participants to go back to the thirteen points and zero in on Question #6. Are you a leader or a follower? Carroll asks you to honestly assess where you sit on a hierarchical “pecking order” of sorts. Perhaps for some this question is irrelevant as he basically equates the nuanced biological systems of human interaction to other animals of “lower order” for the purposes of this class it may be fun to ask yourself these questions, just for an experiment, and see what you find out. As for me, I know that in some instances I am a leader, however for others, perhaps because of a lack of knowledge, its wiser for me to be a follower. The term is “play your position.” I found this true many times in work situations. When you are the new guy on a construction site, or in an office setting, or nearly every work situation I can think of, it makes more sense to follow the lead of someone until you know what you are doing. So, it seems wisest to remain flexible, but do not be afraid to step up and lead when your time comes to show and prove.

Finally, Peter listed “The Illumination Ritual” He says that one should plan for complete privacy in which to conduct this ritual. He then suggests participants to conduct a Gnostic Pentagram Ritual, as this clears the mind. Then do a Mantra ritual, which doing a Mudra and next a Visualization exercise, followed by an Incantation. Then conclude the whole ritual with a Laughter Banishing.

I am incredibly happy to be sharing “Chaos Magic in Business” at this moment in time. Personally, with Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson slated to be published later this year, I am shifting gears again from the realm of pure creation, (authoring the book), to presentation, publicity, and sales. In this respect, I am planning to create a Book and Music tour to support and celebrate the book’s publication. On the tour, I plan to publicize Chapel Perilous and also sell other books, pamphlets, clothing, and music that I will create for the tour. I am looking forward to implanting some of the magical knowledge learned this class.

One other thing I would add Carroll’s great introduction to business is the importance of creating your corporation. In America, (I am not 100% sure how it is in other countries) to start one’s own business (on the books) one must choose what sort of business you want. Examples are Corporation, Sole Proprietorship, LLC, etc. With that chosen you must register this with the Secretary of State of the State in the state where you want to open your business. After doing that, you next need to file your “doing business as” name and then have this announced in a newspaper for four weeks. I found that there are websites you can go to where you pay a one-time fee and pick whatever newspaper to make the announcement. You pay the fee, then it announces your DBA (doing business as) name, and you receive a letter roughly five weeks after doing this. This is your proof that you then take to a local bank, or online bank, where you then open your business bank account. After that, You’re in Business!!!

Week 2 of Peter Carroll’s “Chaos Magic in Business” was titled “Divination.” For this week he told participants to utilize their Green Box. “In Chaos Magic,” wrote Carroll, “Divination is understood as Discovering information in the broadest possible sense.” This does not depend on a fixed Destiny in the future, but on the idea of a Flexible future, “in which we may be able to see some of what might happen and that may even influence it by the mere act of looking and the type of questions we ask.”

Carroll suggests using Divination here as a form of Lateral Thinking. Lateral thinking is defined as a manner of solving problems using an indirect and creative approach with a type of reasoning that is not immediately obvious. The term was first used by Edward de Bono, the psychologist and writer, who Robert Anton Wilson wrote about in his book The New Inquisition. Wilson, ever the pataphysicist, loved such creative ways to come up with new and interesting ideas.

Carroll wrote that “participants need to decide what they want to know and choose techniques accordingly.” This is always so important. We need to Envision what we want for ourselves during our short residency on this crazy tilt-a-whirl carousel called Life. One must never lose one’s dreams and visions.

The objective of the week was to Fill up the Green Box with Ideas and Inspirations and Items of Intelligence gleaned by both ordinary and psychic metaphysical means. He also suggested to write down to ideas on Green Cards, but you can also write the ideas with Green colored markers too.

“There is no point,” writes Carroll, “in using Divination to discover or confirm what you could find by ordinary means.” The magician must first do everything he/she/they can on the material plane and “then throw in the magic.”

Carroll’s next suggestion is to “Mae an audit of all the skills and abilities you possess. Don’t forget the trivial things.” Then make a list of all your friends and contacts, or at least those of them that could prove useful to your goal. Followed by an examination of your hobbies, interests, and pleasures. This all seems like a good practice of taking inventory, and perhaps something we should routinely during our life in general.

Next Carroll told participants to look for the strongest business we could find. Call then and find out exactly what they do and ask them what they charge. This is simple market research. If you want to start a business it is good to study the field.

Then Carroll suggested the ole “Blag and Bluff” which entailed compiling a list of what you could probably get away with by watching someone doing it for a day or reading a book about it the night before. Now with YouTube around, and the Internet in general, we can teach ourselves so many skills just through observational learning. For instance, I did a major engine fix on my Hyundai Elantra nearly two years ago when it died on me on April 30th, 2021. I did not have the money at the time to take the car to a mechanic and so I fixed it one piece at a time in the driveway of the house where my girlfriend and I were renting a room. It took 2 ½ months of working under the hood every day for hours a day and sometimes into the night, but because of YouTube videos I was able to teach myself how to replace the Alternator, Water Pump, various hoses, timing belt, serpentine belt, air filter, and a few other things. It was one of the most difficult fixes I’ve ever done, but the moment the car was back on the road was glorious! With those skills I could go out there and perhaps get a job as a mechanic. (Of course, I would need to take some classes on how to fix other car engines.) However, using only primitive tools like wrenches and screw drivers for the job, my right hand got all jammed up and I’m afraid it’s still messed up from the work. I think I’d rather be a writer than a mechanic. But I fixed my car, and that’s the most important thing!

One of Carroll’s last suggestions for Week 2 was for the curious magician to wander, or drive, around a commercial business area and look for enterprises, products, and services that seem to be succeeding. Then look for the same that seem to be failing. After this examination, we must “look for gaps in the market.”

Looking for gaps in the market is a practice of Magic. Both Peter Carroll and Grant Morrison, and probably many other fine magicians, say that Magic is about “Paying Attention!” If you pay close enough attention to things and events, you will find the gaps. You could say that Timothy Leary did a major magically exercise when he broke out of Prison back in the dayo. It’s all a prison break. You want to break out of the prison within yourself.

Now we get to the Fun Stuff. After collecting all this information on the material plane then we do some Divination. Carroll recommends doing some Sortilege or Scrying in order to see some visions, whether these are in the cards, smoke in a mirror, or visions from our dreams. “In each case,” he writes, “the magician seeks some subtle Sleight of Mind that allows inspiration, precognition, or intuition to surface from the subconscious.”

My only addition would be for all of us to find those areas that hold ourselves back from achieving our highest potential and Get working to Crack open the Egg and Birth a New You!!!

In Week 3 of Chaos Magic in Business, Peter Carroll had us looking at the magical art of Invocation. For the week, he suggested participants start a Blue Box for which to enter our scribblings. Firstly, Carroll describes Invocation in the context of Chaos Magic as “calling up into, or from within, yourself certain qualities, attitudes, and powers that you need to accomplish something.” He calls this “an extreme form of method acting in which the magician strives to become possessed and inspired…by the qualities invoked.”

Carroll mentions that the Chaoist view of self is a fluid, non-essential construction. We have not one single fixed self, but many selves within our psyche that can be developed and nurtured. This of course reminds me of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson’s view of “the self.” Wilson writes about this in Quantum Psychology, and it is the heart of Leary’s Interpersonal Grid. The aim in Leary and Wilson’s model is to experience the flexible nature of our own psyches or personality’s and not to get stuck in only one or two responses to the world, as sadly happens to too many. And as Wilson writes in Prometheus Rising the core of the self is an experience of “no thing.” It is the wonderfully peaceful and silent center found in the heart of Jung’s mandala.

Carroll writes about invoking the “godform” of Archetype of the Businessperson for this week. He writes about how there is a common generalization of the businessperson as a greedy, ravenous, bastard who only cares about money and he counters that image with a more wholesome one. For Carroll, the businessperson is one who is “motivated by independence and success for its own sake than by monetary reward alone.”

So, when invoking the “godform” of a successful businessperson he suggests three qualities that may be beneficial to invoke. They are Organization, Confidence, and Compartmentalization. I like this quote that he drops when talking about Organization. He says that we should “learn to live like you were conducting a military operation.” I can plug this into my own experience of being involved in the Music Business when I was the Tour manager, Van driver, and Opening act for an up-and-coming Hip-Hop artist as we toured the U.S. on a month-long cross-country tour. I also accomplished magic early on in the tour because I was initially hired as only the tour manager and van driver, but I convinced the artists manager that I had the musical ability to also be the artist’s opener when I performed at the first show in Brooklyn. It was my Confidence as a performer that got me the job as the tour opener. It was my organization as a Tour manager that got me paid. (For my fellow Hip-Hop heads out there, I was the tour opener for Joell Ortiz. This guy can rhyme!) As the legendary MC, Rakim once said in a rhyme, “I don’t go on tour, I go to War,” and this was my perspective over that month of driving thousands of miles to perform. For some reason, Joell’s managers did not want me depositing the money we were making for the shows into a bank account. So, I was literally walking around with thousands of dollars in my pockets. It’s not my practice to do this. I think this makes people sitting ducks for robbers, but walking around New Orleans with this much money only added to my militant mindset. I was ready for whatever. However, I would never do that again, and if confronted with a similar situation I would demand from managers that they give me a bank account to deposit so many bills into after each performance. Luckily, no one tried to rob me, and I everyone got paid. My job as a tour manager, van driver, and opening act also left me thoroughly exhausted, but I held it together until the end of the tour and then I collapsed into a lovely slumber that Nandor from What We Do in the Shadows would be jealous.

Carroll writes that your Organization will inspire confidence in others whom you are dealing with, and I agree. However, while there is some room for “faking it until you make it,” I think it is best just to get your skills up and “show and prove” by letting those skills do your talking for you. Next Carroll writes, “From Organization and Confidence, Compartmentalism can develop.” I take this to mean that a successful businessperson can concentrate very deeply on the task at hand without getting distracted by the other things that need to be done. This, again, works well with the Production realm. There are a ton of things to do each day that you are on tour or shooting a film or running a coffee shop, bar, or restaurant, etc., and its better to single mindedly go through the list one by one than letting your mind worry. “Worry,” writes Carroll, “produces Nothing, worrying about several things at the same time often proves fatal.” Truer words have never been written. You will really see the value in such a statement when you go out there and try something with no “safety net,” to catch you. Once you are in that “do or die” situation, you will be amazed at how sharply you can focus your concentration. Of course, I do not recommend that people go out and test themselves in life-or-death situations, but I agree with Colin Wilson, that we have amazing abilities to concentrate when and if that time arrives. The key is to “keep that same energy” and apply it to the more mundane aspects of everyday life in business and beyond.

Carroll next provides the details on what participants were to use the Blue Box for that week. In the Blue Bow we were to enter all are resolutions and affirmations for our Invoked “godform” of a successful businessperson. He adds that we should also seek to “devise a personal Name or Sigil for these aspirations.” He continues, “Meditate upon the selected Qualities and attributes during the week and towards the end of the week, devise and perform a Ritual to invoke it and imprint it.”

Finally, Peter recommended all the techniques used in Illumination used for Invocation. So, the GPR, Sigils, Gnosis, Mantra, Mudra, Visualization, and Incantation are all on the table for your work. He also recommended adding a Symbolic Rebirth or Baptismal Ritual into the mix. I like this, because we are essentially giving birth to a New aspect to Ourselves. It reminds me of the front cover of the New Falcon edition of RAW’s Prometheus Rising, where a new being is birth from the rigid robot form beneath it.

The supplemental reading material for the week were the following: Liber Null, pages 41–44 and 66–67 (dark side approach). Also, Liber Kaos pages 75–79 and 94–97

My own addendum, which I think Carroll would agree with, would be to have as much fun as possible when doing all of this. We tap into our imaginations when doing magic, and doing so can be so much fun!!!

In Week 4 of ‘Chaos Magic in Business,’ Peter Carroll covered the topic of Evocation. The color of the box for Week 4 was Yellow. Carroll provides his interpretation of “Evocation as the deliberate manufacture of some sort of spirit, servitor, fetch, or egegore to their bidding with a certain amount of independent initiative.” His psychological explanation of the practice of Evocation goes that it is “the establishment of a partially independent department within the subconscious which acts parapsychologically.”

“In Business terms,” Carroll suggests, “regard it as your first employee.” A servitor has a material basis or ‘groundsleeve’ which frequently consists of a “homuncular or bestial figure which the magician will often carry around with them.” He suggests that we “visualize it slipping inside your bank manager’s head when you apply for finance.” Carroll shares his experience of creating a servitor and improving it over the years.

He then recommends some reading on Evocation. From Liber Null read the folling pages 36–40 (Evocation). From Liber Kaos read the following pages, 92–94 (Sleight of Mind Evocation), 163–164 (Sorcery Evocation), 173–174 (Ritual Evocation.)

Carroll asked participants to Build Up all ideas they wanted in their servitors and to fashion the materials for the groundsleeve. Then he suggested participants to get clear on the details of the ritual we designed. We were then to put all these ideas into the Yellow Box. He recommends using Epoxy modelling putty or carving some wood to create your servitor.

“The main reasons for setting up in Business are to create personal achievement, autonomy, and independence. If you achieve these things, then the money tends to follow because money tends to like these things.” He follows this up with an interesting take, “Money likes action because we created it to facilitate action.” This notion of velocity money makes sense. Except when we look at the practice of Compound Interest, which motivates people to sit on their money and keep in in an account so to collect the interest. While I like Carroll’s takes here, I do not agree with everything he has to say. Now that being said, I’m willing to try looking at things from his reality-tunnel for the fun of it and to try these exercises out.

“It’s a mistake,” he writes, “to try and invoke or evoke money without offering it what it wants, — a good time, which means, for money, the chance to make things happen.” I like his counterbalance to the previous statement as well when he writes, “It’s also a mistake to release it without extracting the maximum possible action from it.” This makes sense. I take all this to mean, spend money on good products and services. Don’t shy away from spending money on self-care and gifts for friends and loved ones. However, don’t just throw your money away on shit. Be a wise consumer and seek the finer things in this life.

Carroll’s final word on money for this week is also interesting. He calls money a “demonic stuff,” and urges that we “handle appropriately.”

In the fifth and final week of ‘Chaos Magic in Business,” the class explored the topic of Enchantment in ways to achieve you business goals. Carroll points out a fact of business and life that uncertainty dominates everything in business. He writes, “In normal business, you can strive to reduce uncertainty by gathering as much intelligence as possible and by offering trades that look as attractive as possible.”

Carroll adds that the business magician will also try to augment intelligence gathering with Divination and then close the deal using Enchantment. In Chaos Magic, Enchantment is about “nudging probability in your favor by psychic means.” While this is not a foolproof plan, it is an ability that “we can learn and improve upon with practice.” After you’ve done everything in the material plane, Carroll says to then throw in some spells.

Carroll offers some good advice when he writes, “Never leave mundane preparations knowingly incomplete or insufficient and then try and make up the difference with magic.” If the magician’s preparations are incomplete, Carroll says, they are “subconsciously challenging the magic to fail.”

He asks participants to brush up on their knowledge of Enchantment through reading some of his work on the subject. From Liber Null, participants were urged to read the following pages: 20–23, 31–35, and 55–56. Then from Liber Kaos, he suggested reading pages 41–51, 87–90, and 116–120.

“It may prove profitable to prepare some enhancements in advance,” he writes. He also recommends making spells for situations they may encounter by taking card shapes and writing on the one side their will and on the other a Sigil or graphic or mantric spell to encourage it to happen. After which the spells can be concentrated on with full gnosis. Finally, he suggests story this slips of paper in a Red Box.

About the spell, Carroll says that its best to obliterate the obverse side of the spell prior to using it. Or we can collect a few spells in Sigilized form over a week and then charge them all at once as a way to forget what each individual one was for. Carroll further suggests participants to make Glyphs or symbolic representations of certain entities like money or intended customers or institutions like banks, lawyers, tax authorities, etc. that we will be dealing with in out business practice.

“In each case a meditation on such entities as ‘sentient spirits’ with their own needs so as to understand what they want and how to placate them.” He urges participants to be proactive with this. “Don’t wait fir Difficulties to manifest. Lay down the preparation for those spells in advance in the Enchantment box!!!

And this concludes the reviewing of Peter Carroll’s “Chaos Magic in Business” course. Hopefully, it will help you to become your own boss and start your own business.

Thank You for reading these posts.

Reporting from the Interzone of the Underground

Prop Anon!