Liber Null & Psychonaut: The Practice of Chaos Magic (Revised and Expanded Edition)

by Peter J. Carroll, Ronald Hutton (Foreword)

“The most original and probably the most important writer on Magick since Aleister Crowley."—Robert Anton Wilson, author of the  Prometheus Rising  and other works

Peter Carroll’s classic work has been profound influence on the Western magical world and on the practice of chaos magick in particular . In  Liber Null and Psychonaut , Carroll presents an approach to the practice of magic that draws on the foundations of shamanism and animism, as well as that found in the Greek magical papyri, the occult works of Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley, and the esoteric meditative practices of classical India and China. Also very much at work in the text are 20th century scientific ideas of quantum physics and chaos theory.

The result is a profoundly original work of magical studies that also includes a selection of extremely powerful rituals and exercises for committed occultists with instructions that lead the reader through new concepts and practices to achieve Carroll’s definition of magic itself: the raising of the whole individual in perfect balance to the power of infinity.

This Weiser Classics edition is a thoroughly revised republication of Liber Null and Psychonaut , first published by Weiser in 1987, and includes a new foreword by Ronald Hutton , a leading authority on modern witchcraft and paganism.

Genres: Occult, Magick, Nonfiction, Magic, Witchcraft, Spirituality, Philosophy

224 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2022

About the author

He maintains a personal website at www.specularium.org

and acts as Chancellor to Arcanorium College:- www.arcanoriumcollege.com

Peter Carroll began his career in Magic at London University where the Chemistry proved so tedious that he settled on a pass degree in that and an unauthorized first in Magic, with Liber Null & Psychonaut emerging as his postgraduate thesis over the next several years whilst teaching high school science.

He then set off around the world wandering in the Himalayas, building boats in India and Australia and seeking out unusual people.

Then after a stay in Yorkshire, he headed back to the Himalayas for a while again before returning to settle in the west of England to found a family and a magical order. Appalled by the compromises made by so many magi to make a living out of their writing or teaching, Carroll decided to make his fortune with a natural products business so that he could write and teach only what had value and interest for him.

Past Grandmaster of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros

Chancellor of Arcanorium College

Acting Marshall, Knights of Chaos

A Bard of Dobunni Grove


*Whilst Carroll derides the very low predictive power of natal astrology he nevertheless looks forward to his Uranus return.

Reviews

[Michael]

I wasn't terribly impressed with this book at the time I read it, although it does contain some interesting material. Essentially it is the compiled handbooks (or "libers") of the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT, worked out by Peter Carroll and others during the 1970s and early 1980s. The IOT prides itself on exploring occult traditions while breaking with much of the hierarchy and stick-up-the-ass seriousness of traditional magical study. Chaos Magic, as I used to say, is what happens to you when you start to take Discordianism seriously (if you stop taking it seriously, you're in the Church if the Subgenius).

"Liber Null," the first half of the text, is essentially a collection of working notes towards a syllabus in basic magic, it has many weaknesses. It is the sort of system that will work excellently for a certain type of student, and not at all for others, and which can only be adapted for different needs by an experienced Teacher. Indeed, this is the problem with most beginning books on magic; only very rare individuals can apply something directly from a book without interaction with others of varying levels of experience. While the book implies that the student may apply to the IOT, they are notoriously unresponsive (and may have published the book more to discourage inquiries rather than encourage them), and thus "study groups" of varying quality have spring up locally and on the internet.

The other problem with publishing a program like this in book form is that students will tend to rush through it, having no guide to appropriate levels of progress, and will attempt powerful and impressive-looking Workings before they have truly mastered the basics (the concept of "Mastery" is one our current society is largely uncomfortable with in the first place). The first 11 pages of the book, "Liber MMM," could readily be a program of two or more years for an average student, but it doesn't look very impressive, and there's all those other pages with cool stuff to try, so people will rush ahead and start invoking Goetic spirits and messing around with "aethers" before they've learned the mind control techniques they need. This is also a reason that traditional schools used to dole out their wisdom very slowly, and guard it so jealously from the newer Initiates, but those days have been exploded, for better or worse, by the end of Secrecy in our culture.

"Psychonaut," the second half of the text, is a more philosophical discussion of Chaos Magic, and is more interesting from an outside perspective. It is composed of 40 short essays on subjects ranging from "Shamanism" to "Levels of Consciousness" to "Chemognosis." This latter, which refers to the use of chemicals for mind-altering purposes as a method of self-transformation has unfortunately become the bulk of Chaos Magic's legacy, although it's position in "Psychonaut" is far from central. As with the techniques in "Liber Null," it seems, without guidance students will make what they want of a magical text and follow the path of least resistance. Many independent Chaos Magicians one meets are little more than druggies with a spiritual justification for their habits. More important is the final essay, which explains Carroll's "Catastrophe Theory of Magic," one of the more original contributions of Chaos Magic to the field of occult study. It is essentially based in a topological model in which forms or paradigms are distorted without altering their perceived basic features.

The work overall will be more or less useful to people who study it from differing backgrounds and perspectives. It has, no doubt, been a key text in the trainning of some very successful magicians. For me, it was a rather dry read with little new that tended to race through the more important subjects and leap to speculative areas. Your Mileage May Vary.

[Garrett Cook]

"When we are born, we are soft and supple, in death we are stiff and inflexible. To be inflexible is to be the servant of death"- the Tao Te Ching

Even if chaos magick is not a magical tradition you practice, even if you are not a practicing magician at all, there is much to learn from Liber Null. It is a guide to psychic flexibility, to seeing shades of meaning in your environment and to expressing intent. As such, this is a seminal work not just for the magician, but for the artist as well. Learn to be flexible, learn to be adaptable and learn that your world and the reality around you are every bit as flexible.

[Lizbeth Gabriel]

My head hurts. It really hurts. Also, my copy is missing a page of text and half its contents table. Damn to demise all marshmallows in existence and some theoretical ones.

How can someone actively choose to experiment on everything that makes them who they are AND work 9-5? The advice is pretty clear: change your personality, change your sexuality, do all the things that normally you would not do, try a different lifestyle, support a point of view you don't agree with and so on. Keep doing that that until you manage to disentangle your inner core from your present personality, because personality is essentially a completely arbitrary construction based on experience and chance. Once you stop identifying with your personality/ ego, magick can happen because you don't identify with any desire, and consequently don’t sabotage your own efforts by fear or need. Also, by deconstructing your personality you peel away all those superficial/ ego gratification needs that don’t originate from your inner core, but from your fears, complexes and so on. What remains is aligned with the portion of you that is transcendent, in other words, with the needs of your soul. Yep, do all that AND at the same time hold down a job, maintain your relationships, practice magick and try to see life for the cosmic joke it is. Excellent theory, but I am afraid that this can only be done by not having to work, not being in a relationship and not having a family of any kind. And probably having friends who don’t mind dealing with a person whose completely inconsistent and erratic behavior changes from day to day.

It's an interesting book with some excellent ideas but very little practical application for the practitioner who also wants to have a life outside the occult. It's also difficult to follow at parts. Still a good read for someone who wants to be introduced to Chaos Magick. One of the classics. As with all classics, pick and choose the elements that suit you and ignore the rest.

[Nick Imrie]

This book made me think of Daniel Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book. Ingram is famous for popularising the dry and methodical vipasanna style of Buddhist meditation amongst materialist rationalist-types, and then claiming that achieving the higher levels of meditative practice will give magical powers. Completely antithetical to their worldview!

Carroll's book is an introduction to Choas Magic which begins with a few scant pages on the importance of meditation to acheive the single-pointed awareness necessary to work magic, and then gets into the real fun stuff of spells, sigils, demons, astral travel, and so on. It used to be the case that monks generally agreed that it took many lifetimes to gain enlightenment. The rationalists tend to agree that it's hard work, but can be done in about the amount of time it takes to get a PhD (my current path to enlightenment is following the traditional PhD route: guilt, procrastination, and despair).

Carroll gives no indication of how long he thinks one ought to take to achieve single-pointedness. This is in keeping with the radical individualism of chaos magic: what works for you is what works for you - but on the other hand, it makes me seriously doubt my ability to put the contents of this book in a proper context when I can't even tell if the first few pages are meant to be simple preliminaries or a seven year course of study.

Carroll also talks a lot about how we have to accept that we live in a reality of dualities. There is no light without dark, warmth without cold, joy without suffering. Any attempt by the ego to cling to oneside of the duality and deny the other will simply result in a great deal of fruitless internal struggle. The chaos magician must work with both sides. Fair enough, but many other paths that practice meditation (if I've understood them correctly) hold that meditation will allow one to experience non-duality in a way that seems impossibly paradoxical to the mudane mind. So maybe one doesn't need to be a skilled meditator to practice magic?

I don't know, I don't know. Something just seems slightly off - I'm not in anyway advanced enough in metaphysics or comparative religion to judge this book, and yet when I read other books on these sorts of topics I tend to get moments of: 'Huh, this is just like that from another angle!', but with Psychonaut I got the opposite - it doesn't seem to gel. This is probably a criticism of my limited reading, rather than this book.

Anyway - putting aside niggles that I can't quite put my finger on, this is interesting. Chaos magic was super edgy when it started in the 70s, blossoming out of the tie-dye peave, love, and strology of the hippies. Carroll's book has that radical, punk tone: aggressive and iconoclastic. Smash the ideology that confines your potential! Freedom! Create your own reality. I can totally imagine Carroll writing this while wearing mirror glasses and black leather. I can see that it was a necessary counter-revolution to the peace-and-love brigade, but I am a bit wary of any system which tells me that 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'. Especially when that's followed up with descriptions of how an advanced magician might get his girlfriend knocked up, kill himself, and project his soul into the foetus!

Just to be clear - there are not detailed instructions on how to do that! Much of the instruction here is barebones, which is as it should be. The fundamentals of what's absolutely necessary presented so that you can add whatever else makes it work for you. Since it was published in 1987, all of that information is available for free on the internet, anway. Just check tumblr.
The more theoretical stuff is really interesting. There's a lot of overlap with New Thought. Both systems are far more interested in using what has been empirically shown to work, and nevermind whether there's a coherent explanation behind it. Does magic really work? Is it just psychology? Who cares if it gets results? But yes, it really works, it is both inside you and outside you, as you are both yourself and more than yourself.

There's some very interesting reflections on the ego, and it's role in thwarting your magical ability. IIUC, the ego is, of course, not real, but an amalgamation of habits, emotions, memories, and opinions about yourself. All these things can all be changed. Carroll recommends deleting any habit, and installing a new one, just to prove this to yourself. Since any desire on your part is accompanied by the ego's ambivalences, fears, graspings, contradictions, if you try to accomplish any magical aim in a mundane frame of mind your ego is sure to counteract itself - hence the need for meditation to allow your will to exercise itself without the least bit of attachment to the consequences. This really echoes New Thoughts on the need to be absolutely committed to your goal.

Since our consciousness is ineffable, it has no form of its own yet it can only be expressed in some form, a magician can really trip himself up by confusing that form - whether it's his ego, his god, his fears, desires, and names - for the real thing. He's sure to end up either mad or a religious maniac. That false god, which is called Choronzon, should be banished whatever form it appears in, and we should refrain as much as possible from trying to define that infinite mystery.
This really threw some light about prohibitions on naming the divine in other traditions.

I was also intrigued by the concept of the 'psychic censor'. This is the part of ourselves that prevents us from remembering dreams or noticing sychronicities. This is a necessary part of real life - otherwise we'd all be living in the dream all the time, but unhelpful for the budding magician who will have to push past it. This reminds me a lot of people's descriptions of DMT trips, in which many people report the same feeling of having to cross a barrier, and of being in a place where they know they ought not be.

No modern book of magic or alternative religion would be complete without a small detour into physics, and Carroll provides the usual speculations about quantum entanglement. I used to be the sort of fedora-tipping atheist who sneered at this sort of thing. I'm a lot more humble now. I don't understand anything about physics or how it works, and I've read far too many physicists who cheerfully agree that nobody knows how the universe really works to ever sneer at someone trying to make sense for themselves. As the chaos magicians suggest: just do what works.

[Al Baker]

One of the Seminal texts on postmodern magick. A true classic which definitely changed my view on magick dramatically, perhaps even my life. A liberating book that inspires creativity, and self-expression. If you're tired of overly-complex rituals based on some medieval mythos that seems like a joke to you, then this is the book for you. I mean, if you don't believe in the supernatural at all, then how could you take things like demons, angels, Gods, and Goddesses seriously? Yet you can still do magick just as effectively if not more so, than someone who buys into some religions philosophy as being True independent of the believer, or the group. Islam and Christianity are good examples of this herd mentality that Chaos magick can easily make use of or toss out the window. Even Thelema has in some circles a bit of Orthodoxy and dogma -- required beliefs to progress. But Chaos Magick has no such limitations. Creativity, boldness, and self awareness are required instead, not subjugation to the magickal authorities. More importantly though, this book teaches you how to use ANY belief to accmplish your will. Even beliefs completely anathema to Chaos Magick will work, because Chaos is not subject to non-contradictory identification unless you want it to be that way. You can will rationality just as easily as absurdity.
The most powerful teaching in this book, I think, is Sigil Magick -- which may have originated with another occultist named AO Spare. Incredibly simple, yet highly effective and based on fairly sound psychological principles of trance, self-hypnosis, self programming. Sigil Magick really works, and so do servitors, because what matters is what you put into it, and how you use these tools. On a psychological level, this book is far more entertaining, fun, and creatively inspiring than blabbing at some therapist for the rest of your life.
At the very least it is a useful book for learning about your True Self, or your whole self by experimenting with different personas, or adopting myths that help you get a handle on aspects of your psyche that you want to understand, control, or make use of. You learn alot about yourself by identifying your desires in life, but most people put limitations on their life by trying to be too 'realistic' all the time, too enslaved to strict rationality; thus unfulfilled, and complacent.
This book cuts through all the bullshit and gives you tools to do real magick meaning it teaches you how to do your will in the real world. Artists could benefit from this book as well because it allows you to learn the basic underlying structures of any ritual, giving you the template in which you can create any ritual you desire for any purpose.
Chaos Magick does have a few problems though. It is all too easy to try and pigeonhole it into just another belief system full of dogmas, strict rules, and the typical personality cult magick often leads to. It also could result in lazy lazy, self congratulatory, pointless magick since 'anything goes'. But as William Blake wrote, 'The fool who persists in his folly will become wise'.

[Pieter-Jan]

Despite its notoriety, chaos magic isn't the blackest magic out there, but the postmodern twitch on the oldest of arts. It is only as notorious as the magician wills it. The 'chaotic' aspect of it has nothing to do with full blown anarchic and nihilistic appliance of magic to whatever means. It has to do with the understanding of the nature of reality as being (the son/daughter of) pure Chaos. Then again, this insight isn't the discovery of a single genius or a truth that has been transmitted from one generation to the next in whatever occult order or witch coven. The obsession with chaos is very postmodern and thus historic.
The postmodern core of chaos magic is key in understanding what is being presented here. Gone are the grand metaphysical narratives and bombastic arcane mythologies of before. What you get here is the skeletal essence of magic and you can flesh it as you desire. Hence why the book leaves upon so much space when the author touches upon the practise that follows the theoretical presentation of what Chaos is and how magic operates. Hardly any prefabricated ritual is offered here and it is up to the reader to find his own niche in the magical art.
In this book Carroll lays bare the very machinery with which magic works, or rather, a set of ideas on how it works. In this way Carroll is offering one of the most scientific presentations on magic. This is no Crowley who bombards you with an enrapturing and bewitching style of writing, but a more down-to-earth and rather sober attitude. The book gives you your toolbox and off you go.
The relativism which is inherent in chaos magic is where I don't fully agree with, although I do recognize this phase in thinking (and practising) is a necessary part of evolution. I might agree with Carroll's ( actually Hassan-I-Sabbah's ) postulate that "nothing is true, everything is permitted", but that does not make me doomed to be a "nihilist" or a "vitalist". I do still believe that "The road to excess is the path to wisdom". By devoting oneself to something, even if irrational, to make the Kierkegardian leap of faith, is what makes life worth living. Vitalism exhausts itself sooner or later. To be truly alive is to assume the impossible and live by it. The narrative, yes even mythology, is what needs to return to the occult to make the magician mobile and not a fancy empiricist and dilettante of the arts.

The merit of Carroll's work is that he (and other chaotes) have shown us how magic truly works, whatever the god or demon it is we are devoted to, or the myth we live by. This in itself is of tremendous importance if we wish our magic to work and not get stuck in orthodoxy for the sake of the belief system itself.
But we cannot stop there. The machinery needs to serve a purpose. Let that be magicians their new mission.

[Jeffrey]

LIBER NEQUAM

When I was thirty, I read these two volumes religiously and dedicated myself to IOT°4. After a decade of practice, I counted myself an adept, and put it all behind me. Twenty-five years later I have re-read these books and humbly offer my opinion on their efficacy.
This volume is split into two parts as the eponymous title indicates. Liber Null is a four volume set describing the theory and philosophy of IOT(Illuminates Of Thanateros). Psychonaut is more concerned with the practice of IOT.
As such, I found Liber Null to be more dramatic and useful. I had no desire to lash myself to IOT. The four books of Liber Null happily pointed me in the right direction. At least in part. Much of the theory of Chaos Magick, as envisioned by the author is tied to the care and feeding of the ego. It took many years to undo this. Only after greviously wounding the ego was I able to be liberated from the dance of Thanateros and truly appreciate the power and responsibility of an adept.
So, be warned. There are some gems scattered amongst the drek and dross, but some are toxic. And those gems can be found elsewhere in a more enduring form. Take care.

[sardonic]

Lately, I have been very interested in the ways that Western Occultism (and in particular the campy, ritualistic, high magick which characterizes post-Enlightenment occultism) informs fascism (and vice versa) and is largely just a racist white washing of Eastern traditions. I'm not going to go into that here besides to point towards the first diagram in this book which is one of the most ludicrous depictions of a lineage of "magical traditions" that I have ever seen. This leads to me to my main issue which is that this book is not an intellectually rigorous foray into its subject matter by any standard. While I appreciate that the concepts the author is attempting to tackle are not easy to articulate and the author has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about them, he makes too many generalizations and claims about history and society to be presented without any kind of research or bibliography. Actually, most of the "philosophical" theories presented pretty much read like some guy making stuff up. There is a made up alphabet/symbolic language, made up words, made up demons and deities, etc. Mind you, this is while the author makes clear he believes the project of modern occultism to be trying to re-explore some "ancient" and universally human shamanic tradition and rediscover knowledge lost since that time. I was endlessly amused by the final essay of the book in which this guy presents some "mathematical" postulates which he calls catastrophe theory that amount to demonstrating geometric manipulation of a sheet of paper and a fancy analogy about its four corners.

The practical information I did find interesting. The initiatory exercises, rites, and practices provided a window into the mindset of the 20th century European occultist. I think despite all of the fluff and postulating about Life and Death and Hate and Love there are some core concepts which he is able to put forward very plainly and comprehensibly. In particular here I am referring to the discussion in Liber Null about taking control of your mental and emotional states and a more general thread through the book of understanding the force of perception. Particularly considering psychiatry's place in our current society I found some of what was discussed to be quite prescient. I want to quote something here:

Any state of mind may arbitrarily be chosen as an objective for transmutation, but there is a specific virtue to the ones given. The first is an antidote to the imbalance and possible madness of the magical trance. The second is a specific against obsession with the magical practices in the third section. They are:

1) Laughter/Laughter
2) Non-attachment/Non-disinterest

[..]Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played upon itself.
The trick is to see that joke played out even in the neutral and ghastly events which surround one. It is not for us to question the universe's apparent lack of taste. Seek the emotion of laughter at what delights and amuses, seek it in whatever is neutral or meaningless, seek it even in what is horrific and revolting. Though it may be forced at first, one can learn to smile inwardly at all things.

The concept taken up here should be very familiar to anyone who is even mildly in proximity to meme humor and internet culture in general.

Anyway, not sure if I would necessarily recommend this to anyone although I did genuinely enjoy reading parts of it but much of it made me feel like I was trapped at a bar with some guy poorly mansplaining philosophy to me and I indulge him because I don't want to deal with his feelings or, God forbid, a debate. It was pretty taxing to get through the whole thing, but I succeeded in transmuting my boredom into motivation! Or something

[Terra Bosart]

This was my first introduction to Chaos Magic, and it came across quite well. The writing and descriptions and concepts resonated with me so well that I began magical practice again. This book, along with Liber Kaos, challenged my perspectives and dropped me off where I started. Lovely.

[Perejfm]

Me interesaba para ver cómo funciona la magia del caos, como las creencias pueden modelar la realidad, como históricamente la magia. Más alla de que proporciona algunas referencias esotéricas interesantes me parece un poco flojito filosofícamente y también un tanto aburrido. Siento que la magia del caos es un tema mucho más jugoso de lo que aquí lo pintan, no profundiza en ninguno de los temas. Tengo la biblia psíquica comprada pero ahora me da un poco de palo.

[Vladimir]

This book is an incoherent piece of trash full of badly elaborated ideas. I can't speak for the practical magical side of things although he doesn't seem to be capable od providing concrete instructions for anything. My interest in this book was more academic than anything else, but if the theoretical foundations are so rotten I can't imagine that it has any practical value for potential believers. The author either intentionally misuses both Western, Hindu and Buddhist references or he doesn't understand them at all. I'm talking about the basic concepts, nothing particularly advanced or nuanced. It reads like a compilation of disjointed Reddit posts by someone trained at the University of Wikipedia and mentored by hellraiser666 on an obscure occult message board. The title of the book sounds cool, so that gets it the one star.

[Wesley]

Ah... This book was interesting. Sure it's all in our heads - but how big are our heads? Hah. If your mind is stuck in familiar ruts, this book might be a good place to go "off road". Caveat emptor.

[Dafna]

This book was amazing. I'm not quite sure how to go about writing a review for it, so I'll start by saying, that many magicians who turn to writing, have a very arrogant manner of introducing the subject matter. They stress secrecy, over complicate things for the reader, and the entire work serves as a way for them to feed their ego. Making it less about actually wanting to introduce the subject to new adepts. This is not the case with Carroll. His writing is straightforward and isn't bogged down with bs.
The wealth of information in these books is also very impressive, and I would recommend these books to anyone who was interested in a heartbeat. Excellent.

[kit]

Very good--if often pompous and opaque--text from Pope Pete. Probably not a good introductory book on Chaos Magick, as the spiralling idea-play sometimes nears the Crowleyesque. Still, it can be an exciting read, even if the concepts aren't as easily appliccable as when outlined by Hine.

[Heidi’s Zee]

Love this text for how serieus it takes itself. It gives ‘dark fantasy.’

Hoe staan wij in de werkelijkheid? Materie is rauw gepresenteerd. Technieken uit dit boek zouden een levenslange oefening kunnen zijn.

[Aaron]

I never get tired of reading this.

[P]

Efectivamente, me he vuelto loco
Eres la producción más frustrante que he leído en mi vida, tus explicaciones, tus intentos de conjuración, tus pautas, tus esquemas, tus glifos intentan invocar el caos
Y por eso mismo, falla

(Fuera del Chaos stem self, interesting reading)

[John Walker]

Being interested in Magick, the occult, consciousness, religion and all things esoteric; I was excited to read this book.

It’s touted as a completely essential text for anyone even remotely interested in the above subjects.

I can’t say I’d agree.

The book (whilst definitely not a terrible read) is confusing, contradictory and shallow.

The author brings many interesting ideas to the table about consciousness and the non-dualistic nature of true reality (causality) and is keen to point out gods, deities and demons as aspects of consciousness (archetypes) rather than manifesting entities… however the author does not extend this idea into our physical reality - failing to also expose our experiences within the physical plane as similarly illusory happenings within a realm of pure consciousness.

The author also gives little explanation as to how to conduct magick and what their own experiences with magick rituals, ceremonies have been.

The book reads like a collection of interesting ideas that one might have very early on in their interest of occult, esoteric, philosophical and religious journey rather than a clarified and confident understanding given by a learned master or shaman.

I’d definitely come back to the book from time to time and open it randomly to gain some food for thought - but no more than that.

If interested in this type of learning, I’d recommend Ram Dass as a jumping off point - then studying aspects of Hinduism (specifically Tantra), Kabbalah and Hermeticism.

If you’re completely new to these types of topics, then this book is possibly a good entry point - but even at that… it is confusing due to the authors own lack of understanding / conclusions.

[Eben Mishkin]

Extremely Interesting

An extremely interesting text. About the same level of difficulty as most serious esoteric works. Difficult but doable.

Unfortunately, it definitely has some of that trend that seems to run through western esotericism of elitist unkindness for everyone else’s own good. While I would commend this book for being quite specific in the reasoning for such unkindness and clear in the global and personal benefits it can bring, in the end it still has it.

There’s also the eternal problem, which I commend the book for addressing, that science has moved on since the original writing of the book and some of the ideas that form the basis are no longer the scientific consensus.

On the plus side, lots of information. Clearly a formative text. And manages to be a fairly cohesive worldview as far as it goes. Even where I profoundly disagree, it seems well thought out and consistent.

In the end, while I don’t think it will be a favorite of mine, I think it gives everything one should expect from a text of this kind. And I think it is good for arranging one’s own thoughts for and against its claims, making it a valuable leaping off point for more study.

[Tim]

I loved Liber Null, but Psychonaught was beyond me at this point. I will take it up again, but not until I have finished Prometheus Rising and Introduction to Chaos Magick (re-read).

[Jessecooperlevy]

The neon bible. It's what every harry potter fan should read upon growing up and being discouraged.

[Rose Kryjak]

Learned nothing from this book. Didn't appreciate the dismissive and self-satisfied tone, either.

[Alexander]

A diverting miscellany of Pop Occult wank templates beloved to obese, ponytailed goth bros. (Imagine Deepak Chopra weaned on White Wolf and Chaosium tabletop RPGs and early Dead Can Dance records.)

That said, there are some pithy moments:

“Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played on itself…. The trick is to see that joke played out even in the neutral and ghastly events which surround one. It is not for us to question the universe’s apparent lack of taste.” (17)

“The advantages of hand forging one’s own instruments, or discovering them in some strange way, cannot be over-emphasized.” (19)

“White Magic leans more toward the acquisition of wisdom and a general feeling of faith in the universe. The Black is concerned more with the acquisition of power and is reflective of a basic faith in oneself. The end results are likely to be not dissimilar, for the paths meet in a way impossible to describe.” (25)

“Chaos is...the force which adds increasing complexity to the universe by spawning structures which were not inherent in its component parts.” (28)

“Metamorphosis may be pursued by seeking that which is not, and transcending both in mutual annihilation.” (41)

“The magician...programs himself into identity with the god by arranging all his experiences to coincide with its nature.” (43)

“The solution is to become omnivorous. Someone who can think, believe, or do any of a half dozen different things is more free and liberated than someone confined to only one activity…. For this reason Sufi mystics were required to master a handful of secular trades in addition to their occult studies.” (45)

“An idea cannot be said to be completely understood till you understand the conditions under which it is not true. Similarly you cannot possess a personality until you are able to manipulate and discard it at will…. Scheme against your most sacred principles in thought, word and deed…. The only clear view is from atop a mountain of your dead selves.” (48)

“[The] magician vows ‘to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally.’” (49)

“Those who self-righteously value their own contradictions are mighty on this earth…. Every moment the consortium of ‘I’ puts forward a new face.” (59)

“In the arena of Anon compete numerous selves, souls, familiar spirits, demons, obsessions, and an infinity of possible experiences. Each game is short, and then the pieces are hurled through death into unrecognizable new configurations.” (67)

“The pinnacle of excitation and the cave of absolute quiescence are the same place magically and physiologically.” (68)

“Reflecting on the meaninglessness of anything as he becomes conscious of it, he laughs aimlessly at everything. He may be granted the grace of being swept up onto the divine madness of ecstatic laughter.” (70)

“Raving blind rage is a magical state of mind. It is useful for casting one’s will upon the universe and may, for skilled practitioners, be a gateway to trance states.” (82)

“The ecstatic laughter of divine madness is the sweeping up of every perception into a vortex of surprise at its very existence.” (84)

“Lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilizations.” (90)

“Magic is opposed to a psychiatry and medicine designed to patch up the damaged automaton and plug him back into the system.” (114)

“I usually advocate astrology persuasively to ordinary people but ridicule it to my magician friends. Humor and random belief allow the use of astrology to disorder what people think either way. Does this mean that I am: a) lying, b) mad, c) enlightened, d) aware of our ability to live almost any truth?” (115)

“Magical training is designed to open up the neglected dream level, to provoke an examination of the contents of the robotic level, and to add new programs to it. It should also teach the method of turning awareness on or off at will, and of entering the gnostic level and acting within it.” (123)

“No rites are given for the creation of Adepts or Masters, for each seeker must devise his own entrance into these grades and await the recognition of his peers.” (129)

“The priest arouses within himself a resurgence of the Chi, or Kundalini, or Sacred Firesnake, as it is variously known. Other participants may assist by delivering such incantations as the incomparable ‘Hymn to Pan,’ by projecting a visualization of the averse pentagram into the priest, and if need be, by administering the Osculum Infame. (This so-called obscene kiss to the devil’s hindquarters has been much misunderstood. All that is required is that one breathes onto the peritoneum, the space between the genitals and the anus – inside of which the kundalini awaits to be aroused.)” (131)

“Belief in a god or belief in one’s ego are the same thing. Every man is already his own diseased vision of God.” (166)

“We cannot perceive Chaos directly, for it simultaneously contains the opposite of anything we might think it is.” (192)

“Humanity has proved itself totally incapable of handling even a moderately dangerous substance like plutonium with responsibility. Imagine what it would do with machine-enhanced sorcery, or even simple, reliable telepathy. It is in the interests of the survival of the species that occultists continue to ridicule and discredit their own arts in the eyes of orthodox science.” (199)

[Spencer]

(Bonkers)

Seek laughter in the revolting

The magician aspires to the infinite void by a moment of not thinking

White magic leans toward the acquisition of wisdom and has a basic faith in the universe. Black magic deals with power and has a basic faith in ones self

Chaos adds complexity to the universe. Its the force of evolution. The source of consciousness. The impulse to both merge and escape from duality. To escape from duality is the mystic quest. You reincarnate til the first impulse is exhausted, then, onto non duality.

Ether is dualistic matter, tenuous, half formed. Its all the possibilities of nonexistent chaos. Not precise in space or time. We can manipulate ether - magic. Thought gives it shape. Kia gives it power

Incubi and succubi are preexistent independent beings created by other peoples pathological sexuality. The seek intercourse w the living in sleep. They are predatory and stupid

The mind must be surrendered in invocation. The aim is temporary possession by the god

Always disagree. Cynicism, sadness, laughter is the magicians privilege

Scheme against your most sacred principles in thought word and deed.

The most powerful minds have the fewest fixed principles

Reorganization of desire is the key to will.

The magician should try to extend his luck

Living without restraint is the highest virtue.

A god is a man wielding the force of chaos. To him Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. There is no purpose in his existence. The universe is mad and arbitrary. But the great goddess chaos will lend her power to her favorites

Kia, is the great energy seeking form. The self is malleable, and both non existent and existent.

Casting of bones, stones, runes offers the best method of divination. Its just above randomness, and just below deliberateness
And assumes no causality like astrology

Crystals can trap entities by being plunged into their form

The magician strives to see ones hands in their dreams. In time they can travel to place in their dreams. And then they go to that place in time and their dream double is their

The wizard cannot be human hearted because chaos power is not human

Only in extremes can the spirit discover itself. Therefore abandon all fixed patterns

Ones next incarnation will be whatever creature of which ones activities are most reminiscent

If u deny yourself anger you loose access to the rapture of love

The magician cultivates laughter

Magic aims to play light power off of dark power. Like a god

Magic is anti ideological. Is psychological mindfuck - with disinformation, humor, random belief

Existence itself is a continuous initiation. No two initiations are the same.

Exorcism is only effective if its a recent possession. A god can displace a demon if the person believes

Salt is good at picking up random psychic debris

Moon bathing can intoxicate the moon watcher if not focused

Women are more psychically powerful during menses at the full or new moon. 4 am is the best time to perform related ritual

Nitris oxide taps the seat of inspiration but tend to slip through ones fingers.

The secret of the universe is the secret of the universe

We mixed our megalomania with shamanic sensibilities and came up with monotheism

The first gods were amoral men with 2 horns. Its fierce god power.

Baphomet is the psychic field generated by the totality of living beings on this planet and represented by pan, kali, etc

The dragon myth is ubiquitous and represents our oldest parts of our brain. Its in every culture, even those without reptiles. In every human brain is a crocodile, a wolf, a man.

Our minds are malleable. We can believe anything. The only thing unchanging is kia and is the center of consciousness. It has no attributes. There is no one home.

The ego is what the mind thinks we are. The larger the ego is the more it invites attack. It is a fortress and a prison. Mystics are bullshitting themselves. They have inflated their own ego into godlike proportions. The absolute is either ineffable or less than us.

Gnosis is experiencing the divine fragment within yourself

The universe is chaotic. And contains a hidden variable. This variable may be conscious will.

Occultists must ridicule their own arts. Its too dangerous that the powerful get hold of this

There are 3 realities-
Primary: the void, chaos, god, quantum realm, mind of pan
Secondary: the aethers, auras, morphic field
Tertiary: the physical world

As above, so below. Therefor man contains elements of primary and secondary reality

[grace eigen]

couldn’t sleep due to constant anxiety over the world burning, so i fell down a reddit rabbit hole on sigilism and ran through this. not sure i believe in any of this shit but it’s intriguing nonetheless.

[Sharilyn Neidhardt]

whoa it turns out I've been a chaos magician this whole time

[Theresa]

Solid book. Straightforward, practical, no dogma. Covers sigils, altered states and advanced techniques.

[Claudio Yáñez Valenzuela]

¡Estupendo clásico de la literatura del Caos! Cierto es que lo tenía como lectura atrasada -no sé bien porqué- pero oye, qué gusto ponerme serio y leer a Libertad Null, fue un placer.

[Salem ☥]

...Okay

[Nechifor Roberto]

I first rated this book three stars, and I have since raised it to four. On a first reading it seemed to be an edgy fanfic, and its reincarnation rites, blood rituals and similar excesses nearly made me put it down. What kept me reading were the sections on astral projection and altered states that surround that material, because they overlap with my interest in the US Army's 1983 assessment of the Monroe Institute's Gateway Process and in the declassified research on psychoactive substances. I read it in parallel with Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Kabbalah: Key to Your Inner Power, and the parallels between the two sent me into further reading on Kabbalah, ritual and Romanian folk practice. It also kept connecting to the books that shaped me long before this one, from Fight Club to Nietzsche and the Stoics to modern political, economic and social theory. A book that keeps reorganising how I read other books has earned a higher rating than I first gave it. I read the revised and expanded edition, and much of what I discuss here comes from its "Magical Perspectives" essays, which the original edition does not contain.

Carroll's central claim is that belief is a tool. The magician adopts a belief for as long as it produces results and then discards it, and results are the only measure of a practice's worth. Coming from a computer science background, I read the book as an abstraction layer over religion, mysticism and metaphysics. It separates the methods of a tradition from its claims about the world, so that very different traditions can be compared as different implementations of the same underlying operations. This answered a question that had long puzzled me, namely why cultures with no contact with one another arrive at such similar myths, rituals and institutions. Carroll attributes the similarity to a common shamanic origin. My own reading is closer to convergent design in engineering: people share the same cognition and the same needs (belonging, meaning, a sense of control), so they arrive at similar solutions independently. Either way, the book supports his observation that once local symbolism is stripped away, "all systems show a remarkable uniformity of method."

The part of the book I valued most is its account of consciousness, which rests on the concept of Kia. Carroll argues that will and perception only appear to be separate functions to the thinking mind, and that the unity behind them is Kia, the "elusive 'I'" at the centre of experience. Kia has no fixed qualities, so it can never be observed directly, and in the expanded essays he adds that consciousness arises only at the point where this formless centre meets matter, meaning the ego, the mind, the senses and the body. In his account we have both of these things but are neither of them. I found this one of the clearest models of the self I have come across in an occult text, because it explains why the self feels completely real and yet impossible to locate. It lines up with Kashmir Shaivism, which pairs pure awareness with an active power in much the same way, and with current philosophy of mind that treats the ego as a model the brain builds of itself. It is also close to the Gateway report, which describes consciousness as an energy field that can be tuned, through sound-induced brain synchronisation, towards an "Absolute" behind all experience, much as Carroll's gnosis lets Kia reach towards Chaos.

From this model Carroll derives a view of change that I found persuasive. Because Kia has no built-in nature, every belief, habit and identity a person holds has been acquired, and anything acquired can be changed. He defines free behaviour as whatever "increases one's possibilities for future action" and limiting behaviour as whatever narrows a person's options, which is a practical and almost measurable definition of freedom. He describes the ego as a castle built against reality that eventually becomes a prison, because every belief commits its holder to rejecting its opposite. He then turns the theory into a method with the "dice of belief," an exercise in which the reader rolls a die and lives inside the worldview it selects (paganism, monotheism, atheism, nihilism or one of two chaoist options) for a set period. The deliberate rebuilding of one's own beliefs is, for me, the most useful idea in the book.

This part of the book made me realise how much Fight Club, both Palahniuk's novel and Fincher's film, shaped my resistance to social programming and my path towards working out who I am, and returning to it with Carroll in mind, the parallels are closer than I remembered. The narrator is practising chaos magic without knowing it. He joins support groups for illnesses he does not have and adopts their beliefs for the one result he wants, which is to cry and finally sleep, and the guided meditations in those groups open his chakras and send him into a cave to meet his power animal, a penguin. Months of insomnia, an exhausted state in which everything feels like "a copy of a copy of a copy," then produce Tyler Durden, a personality built out of the narrator's own desires that goes on to act in the world by itself, which is very close to what Carroll calls a servitor. Tyler even repeats Carroll's critique of monotheism when he tells the narrator that a man's father is his "model for God." What stayed with me most is how the story ends. Project Mayhem strips the space monkeys of their names and their consumer identities, only to bind them to a new messiah, and the narrator can only get himself back by destroying the figure he created.

Fight Club is also what led me to Nietzsche, and at times Carroll reads like it condensed both into an occult field guide. Carroll's motto, "nothing is true, everything is permitted," is the maxim of the medieval Assassins that Nietzsche quotes in On the Genealogy of Morals. His treatment of belief as a tool is Nietzsche's perspectivism, the view that there are only interpretations and no view from nowhere, put into practice, and his rebuilding of the self is a working version of Nietzsche's self-overcoming. Zarathustra tells his disciples to lose him and find themselves, which is exactly the lesson the space monkeys never learn and the one that kept me from becoming one.

The same ideas take on a political edge when read next to John Stuart Mill. Carroll's dice of belief is close to a literal programme of what Mill, in On Liberty, calls "experiments of living," and the ego as a prison is an internal version of the "despotism of custom" that Mill saw as the main threat to individuality. Carroll's own politics lean further than Mill's, towards Hayek and even Herbert Spencer, since his liberation chapter rates personal flexibility above any "reorganization of political power" and claims that the most adaptable creatures, cultures and ideas always win out. His formless Kia is also almost identical to Max Stirner's description of the self as a "creative nothing" that owns its ideas without being owned by them. There is a less flattering reading as well. Critics of neoliberalism, from Michel Foucault to Byung-Chul Han, argue that a self treated as an endlessly revisable project becomes a form of self-exploitation, in which people optimise themselves for the market in place of pursuing their own ends. Carroll's book supports both readings, and I think the difference lies in whose purposes the practitioner is rebuilding themselves for.

The techniques themselves correspond to psychological research more closely than I expected. Carroll's use of belief resembles open-label placebo studies, in which a placebo keeps working even when the patient knows it is a placebo. His sigils, which compress a goal into a symbol that is then deliberately forgotten, work much like implementation intentions, where a goal is attached to a specific trigger and handed over to automatic processing. His states of gnosis, reached through either stillness or overstimulation, match findings that even arbitrary rituals reduce anxiety and improve performance, and his banishing rituals read naturally as clearing state between operations. His idea of the egregore is broader than the one I had picked up elsewhere. Carroll uses the word for the psychic field of an entire species, and says the human egregore is what people perceive as God, while later chaos magicians use it for the collective belief of any group. In that later sense it explains a great deal about why churches, lodges, armies, brands and Project Mayhem all rely on ritual, costly commitment and a division between inner and outer circles.

The book also kept reminding me of the Romanian folk tales and practices I grew up with, and reading further about them made the parallels hard to ignore. Carroll's inhibitory gnosis, in which the mind is quietened until only one point of focus remains, is close to the Jesus Prayer repeated on the knotted prayer rope until thought stops, and to the strict black fast. His excitatory gnosis has a direct counterpart in the Căluș, a trance dance once performed to heal people believed to have been struck by the Iele, the fairies of Romanian folklore. The sign of the cross works as a reflex banishing, Psalm 90 carried as an amulet for centuries behaves like a charged sigil, and the pomelnic, the slip of paper with names handed to the priest for prayer, is a written intent passed to a collective power. Folk charms against the evil eye and garlic rubbed on the doors on the Night of St Andrew fill in the rest, while feasts such as Boboteaza (Epiphany) and Sânziene (Midsummer) set the timing for protection, blessing and love divination, much as Carroll times his own operations. Even the old warning that a curse returns to the person who casts it has its counterpart in Carroll's insistence on banishing. None of this appears in his book, which made the resemblance all the more striking.

The expanded essays push Carroll's model further. In "Baphomet," he describes Baphomet as the composite egregore of all life on the planet, and argues that the dragons and serpents slain by gods in mythologies across the world come from the oldest layers of the human brain. Evolution, in his account, added new structures on top of old ones without removing them, leaving us with "an ape, a wolf, and a crocodile" living in our skulls, so that gods subduing titans and dragons becomes a story about human consciousness suppressing its own older drives. As a developer I recognise this as legacy code still running beneath newer systems. Paul MacLean's "triune brain," the model Carroll relies on, is now considered outdated, but later models still describe the brain as older systems modified and extended over time, so the core of the argument survives the correction.

Baphomet is also where the Stoics fit, and where I understood why Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus had resonated with me as quickly as Nietzsche had. Among Baphomet's older names Carroll lists the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and Stoic physics rests on the same idea: a single living cosmos animated by pneuma and ordered by the Logos, which reads like Carroll's Chaos and aether without the occult vocabulary. Marcus's exercise of viewing human affairs from above, as one small part of a living whole, is close to Carroll's picture of each Kia as a fragment of the planet's life, and Carroll's line that "a denial of death is also a denial of life" is the Stoic memento mori in another form. Marcus's summary in the Meditations, that the universe is change and that our life is what our judgements make of it, could stand as a one-line version of Carroll's whole programme, and Epictetus begins the discipline of the self from the same place, teaching that what disturbs us is our judgement about events. The difference lies in the anchor. The Stoics rebuild the self around virtue and reason, while Carroll leaves Kia without any fixed nature, and I find the Stoics useful as the ballast that keeps Carroll's freedom from turning into mindless hedonism.

The remaining essays return to the individual mind. "The Psychic Censor" argues that the mind filters out most of reality so that ordinary life remains possible, and that gnosis is the means of slipping past the filter. The idea resembles Aldous Huxley's description of the brain as a "reducing valve" and current predictive processing accounts of perception, although Carroll loses me when he claims the censor also blocks telepathy and precognition. "The Demon Choronzon" then argues that there is "nobody at home," and that any identity can be rebuilt by sufficiently strong persuasion. At first this seemed to contradict Carroll's earlier chapter on the Holy Guardian Angel, which treats the magician's true will as the purpose of his existence. On a closer reading the two fit together, since Choronzon identifies the real Holy Guardian Angel with Kia itself and only attacks the names, images and missions that magicians attach to it, which the earlier chapter had already warned against. Tyler Durden is the clearest image I know of that failure: a product of one's own mind mistaken for a saviour.

Kabbalah was the clearest example of Carroll's approach to symbol systems. He treats the Tree of Life, the framework most of Western occultism has organised itself around since the Golden Dawn, as one filing system among many, interchangeable with the Taoist trigrams or the Vedic elements. From a CS perspective the Tree is a graph of ten nodes joined by twenty-two paths, and the Sefer Yetzirah, the early text behind it, describes creation as the combination and permutation of the twenty-two Hebrew letters, which reads remarkably like an encoding scheme. Carroll's approach makes it possible to study the Tree as a data structure for organising experience without accepting the theology attached to it.

Prophet's book made the comparison much richer. The two make an unusual pair, since Prophet writes as the devotional teacher of her own syncretic movement and Carroll writes as an iconoclast, yet the parallels kept accumulating. Ein Sof, the hidden "Cause above all causes" from which the ten sefirot emanate, occupies the same place as Carroll's Chaos, an unknowable ground that he says could just as well be called God or Tao. Prophet points out that the Hebrew letters of Ayin, "Nothingness," also spell Ani, "I," which is almost exactly Carroll's Kia, a void at the centre of the self. The Zohar's accounts of souls ascending at night to study in celestial academies sit beside Carroll's chapters on astral projection, and the Lurianic image of divine light shattering into sparks scattered through the world echoes his picture of Kia breaking apart at death and reforming in new beings. Prophet's practice of cultivating the quality of each sefirah in turn, working towards "forgetting the self," is a devotional version of Carroll's deliberate rebuilding of belief. Her blend of Kabbalah, Christianity, Hinduism and the teachings of her own movement is, in practice, close to the chaos magician's approach, even though she presents the result as revealed truth. Both books also try to borrow the authority of physics, Prophet by comparing the Kabbalistic creation to the big bang and Carroll by appealing to quantum indeterminacy. The parallels are interesting, but I treat them as educated guesses and move on to more tangible ground.

Following this thread into history changed how I read the Bible as well. I started with the suspicion that Christianity was a diluted version of Kabbalah, and the history turned out to be more interesting than that. Kabbalah only appeared as a written system in twelfth and thirteenth-century Provence and Spain, more than a thousand years after the Gospels, so it cannot be Christianity's source. Both instead draw on the older Jewish mysticism of the Second Temple period, with its divine Logos, its heavenly "Son of Man" and its visions of God's throne-chariot, and what separates them is how they handled that material. The rabbis restricted mystical teaching to a few qualified students at a time, while Christianity preached closely related ideas to everyone, and the Council of Nicaea in 325 turned them into a binding creed, defining Christ's divinity with homoousios ("of the same substance"), a technical term from Greek philosophy. One tradition kept its mystical material esoteric and the other made it public and doctrinal, which goes a long way towards explaining why Christianity can feel like a simplified version of something deeper.

Carroll makes the political side of this explicit in the Baphomet essay, where he argues that in the monotheistic age religion "became a fully institutionalized instrument of the state." His sequence of historical aeons (shamanic, pagan, monotheist, atheist) resembles Frazer's progression from magic to religion to science, and it is speculative as history, but as a model of how belief systems displace one another and attach themselves to power it holds up well. The historical record offers plenty of support. Polybius wrote that religion was what held the Roman state together, Constantine convened Nicaea partly to unify his empire, Rome turned the Jewish Temple tax into a levy for the temple of Jupiter, medieval Europe ran on compulsory church tithes, and the sale of indulgences helped trigger the Reformation. The Talmud shows the other side of the same relationship, since it allowed Jewish communities to govern themselves for centuries without a state of their own. The split between an inner, initiatory tradition and an outer, public one also reappears in the ritual societies that politicians, officers and wealthy families have joined, from the Freemasons to the Italian P2 lodge. Taken together, these examples suggest that control over ritual has historically been as closely tied to authority as control over force.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent carries the same argument into modern media. Their "propaganda model" describes a set of filters, among them ownership, dependence on advertising and reliance on official sources, that shape what reaches the public and produce a consistent worldview without anyone coordinating it, much as an egregore does. Carroll's psychic censor works as the individual version of those filters, and his Choronzon chapter, with its claim that persuasion can rebuild anyone, is the extreme case of the same mechanism. His aeon chapter even predicts that technological super-states will try for "a stranglehold on human consciousness" as a consumer religion of the masses comes to dictate politics, which reads like a magician's version of Chomsky, with the Fight Club narrator's IKEA catalogue as its scripture. Edward Bernays built modern public relations on the same tools Carroll gives the individual magician, namely symbols, emotion and staged events, which is why the book works as self-defence as much as practice: the techniques that let a person rebuild their own beliefs also make it easier to notice when someone else is building them.

Three things keep the book from five stars. The reincarnation rites, blood rituals and similar excesses obscure the psychological framework that gives the rest of the book its value. The appeals to quantum physics in support of the "aether" have aged badly and add nothing to the parts that work. The book also leaves most of the synthesis to the reader, although that may well be deliberate in a text that refuses to offer a fixed worldview.

I would recommend this book to readers who think in terms of systems and who have found religion either too literal to accept or too significant to dismiss, ideally read alongside a book on Kabbalah, since each makes the other easier to understand. The two together have left me with far more to read than I have time for, but I'm a sucker for diving into rabbit holes.