Gordon White > Quotes

“Over the last century, a new power narrative has emerged that warps archaeological data into a specific shape the way a magnet affects iron filings. It is the unspoken belief that humanity is on a journey from worse to better, from primitive to complex, uncivilised to civilised. Our civilisation of perpetual war, total surveillance, obesity, runaway mental illness, overmedication, environmental degradation, widespread unemployment and scientific materialism has nothing to learn from the past because it is better. Enjoy that smartphone made by suicidal Taiwanese slave labour. Continue shopping.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“As Patrick Harpur points out, we cannot ‘explain’ or ‘decode’ a myth. To look for the historic or scientific ‘truth’ of a myth is but to retell the myth, albeit in a less satisfying way. We render unto materialism the control of our most precious mythologies if we allow them to be ‘scientifically explained’ to us. A new language is required. New words.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Anyone else who misspent their largely-sexless adolescence playing role playing games would be aware that games nights are often accompanied by peculiar states of consciousness and even the odd poltergeist effect.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“We thought that replacing the singular, authoritative voice of the twentieth century newscaster with the digitally-enabled vox populi of the internet would forever change the narrative. All it did was ruin the spelling.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“There is no greater defence against the grim, uncompromising wasteland of the late capitalist world than the unshakeable awareness that it will end and you will not.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“Civilisation is the tobacco of river spirits. They seem to crave it, to will it into being up and down their banks, even though the relationship appears damaging over the long term.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“It took me more than ten years to begrudgingly admit to myself that meditation is the single best thing you can do to improve your health and your magic and that I should probably do more of it.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“whatever we build in the imagination will accomplish itself in the circumstances of our lives.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“History may well be written by the victors, but victors change and if we do not unwrite history then the propaganda from the previous regime still stands.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“You are certainly free to join whatever nineteenth-century swingers club masquerading as a magical order you like, but do it on your own time.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“Magic departs from mysticism because it proudly proclaims its unshakeable intention to do noteworthy things in this world, rather than seeking merely to transcend it”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“The goal of the magician, particularly the chaos magician, is to position his or her life so that it responds positively to volatility rather than negatively. Volatility should make your life better, not worse, just as the thousands of microtears in your muscles during weight training lead to larger biceps. Be the bicep, not the teacup! It’s easier than it sounds, and it gets easier the further you stray from society’s recommended life. As”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“A Greek term, kaos means the void, the abyss, the First Created Thing. The word derives from the Proto-Indo-European term for gaping, or yawning, as in an opening mouth, a primal scream issuing from behind ancient teeth.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“mysticism is fundamentally irrational and that is its great power and solace. “Proving” mysticism with science is like using a slide-rule to measure wind speed.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“If you are dispensing leeches in the twenty first century you are LARPing, not practicing herb lore.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Becoming invincible is the process of immunising yourself against the monoculture.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“The scant pieces of the common approach to the gods suggest an entirely different, low-tech, more transactional relationship. A similar ethos informs this book. We are not here to found a sci-fi religion or roleplaying circle. Pick an ambivalent ally and move on.”
― Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

“When Michael Cremo visited Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk Historical Museum, the head of the archaeology collection, Dr Larisa Churilova, showed him artefacts that indicated an early Stone Age belief in reincarnation. Her reason for not publishing her findings was that the editors of journals are uncomfortable with cultural interpretations. They just want to print things like ‘a stone flake two centimetres long was found at a depth of one metre in the excavation.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“The journey –the adventure- may well be a microcosmic expression of the universe experiencing the universe, rather than sitting at home on the unmanifest couch, fondling the cat and ordering pizza via an app. Everything”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“What Creator god worth its salt would give even the slightest shit about a sacrificed goat or how often you masturbate? Besides, there is an element of self-respect here. He’s just not that into you. It is the neuroses-inducing idiocy of a personally approachable universal creator that is the savage belief. (Had Meister Eckhart been a Victorian explorer, Christianity would have put a better foot forward than it did with the retired vicars of the nineteenth century or the happy-clappy, flyover morons wandering about Africa and the Amazon today.)”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“The very best magicians are scavengers of the useful and banishers of the useless.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Israelites standing uncomfortably under a banana tree spirit, warily eyeing the ancestral death masks, like confused foreign guests at a wedding reception. The”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“As it got away from its founders, chaos magic came to mean ‘doing whatever you want’ in popular parlance, which is probably close to the opposite of its original formulation. In the modern world, ‘doing whatever you want’ leads to Type II diabetes and very public bankruptcies. But the supposed freedom that chaos magic offers -the apple in its garden- is a stark one. Chaos magic is not ‘doing whatever you want’, it is ‘trialling a lot of things and retaining those that work’. It is entirely unforgiving of failure or –more specifically- excuses for failure. Chaos magic lacks any certificates of participation. You achieve what you set out to do or you have failed. Success could be lasting apotheosis or it could be bedding your secretary. This only looks like elitism to failures. To scientists, it looks like science.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Particularly in physics, science’s fifty-year drift into the unscientific has recently reached a surreal apogee. String theory is widely considered ‘the only game in town’ when it comes to cosmology yet it has not made a single testable prediction about the universe. Ever. This has led some string theorists to suggest that if a theory is ‘elegant’ and ‘explanatory’ enough, it need not be tested experimentally! To put it another way, scientists’ science no longer needs to be scientific but you should still listen to them when they tell you what is true and what is not. And these are the guys telling us magic is irrational?”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Giordano Bruno, my unofficial patron saint, wrestled with these familiar imbalances between lived personal experience and available physical evidence in this very town. Precisely what Bruno was doing in Oxford in 1583 is a matter of endless academic discussion. But it clear he was preaching and debating his own hermetic infinitism. Having stepped beyond Ficino’s Catholic veneer and returned to a fully pagan hermetic system, he believed his use of Egyptian symbols, talimans and visualisation had uncovered humanity’s ‘source religion’ and our clearest insight into the nature of reality. What he found in the Hermetica was a fervent belief in mankind’s stellar origins and immortal destiny among innumerable worlds. The”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“There is a reason the stories of a culture are always kept with its priests. To tell someone where they are from is to tell someone who they are. A slave, a weaker gender, a god-king’s subject, a sinner, too brown-skinned to understand property ownership.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Discoverer of Göbekli Tepe and its chief excavator, Dr Klaus Schmidt, famously warned against what he called ‘Holy Land Syndrome,’ which is the propensity for archaeologists to head out into the field with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other. Holy Land Syndrome precludes the finding of something you didn’t already expect to find.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Particularly when it comes to chaos magic, building your own optimal metaphysics becomes more challenging when you have to shoehorn it into whatever preferred version of a Supreme Being you have selected, as they all tend to be quite unsophisticated and clunky from a metaphysical perspective. Put simply, you are better off developing a regular meditation practice than trying to force a square Creator into a round hole.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“All archaeological evidence of contact is accompanied by cultural evidence, but not all cultural evidence of contact is accompanied by archaeological evidence. Stories”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“A ‘true’ magic circle is the growing of ears to hear the stars and voices to speak the language of the dead. It is building nerve endings that let you caress the spines of demons. It is opening eyes that can see angels dancing between subatomic particles. It is having a portable research lab and postal address in this world and the next. Divination, enchantment, malefica, prayer. These all blur into the right action in the opportune moment.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments