“A Witch is a Rebel in Physics.” –Thomas Vaughan, Anthroposophia Theomagica, 1650
Not black, not white, but “off-white” magic, to use Carroll’s term. “You do not have to sell your soul to succeed with off-white magic. You merely have to recognize the existence of your other seven.”1 Hakim Bey pondered in his “Anarchist Meditations on N. Herbert’s Quantum Reality” what the socio-cultural paradigm would look like when it finally catches up with the scientific paradigm of quantum theory:
Quantum mechanics, considered as the source of such a paradigm, at first seems to lack any social ramifications or parallels, almost as if its very weirdness deprives it of all connections with ‘everyday’ life or social reality…my groping attempt at a synthesis is suggested by what I call Chaos Theory, which hold to the axiom that reality itself subsists in a state of ontological anarchy. ‘The one gave birth to the two, the two to the 10,000 things’ – but all this is the tao & nothing but the tao. Yin & Yang have no being in themselves, but act as interpenetrating modalities of the tao. The real/unreal dichotomy enslaves us in false consciousness. Looked at from one point of view, nothing is real; from another point of view, everything is real; from another, ‘nothing is real except the Real’; from yet another, ‘I am the Real’ (ana’I Haqq, a Sufi ‘koan’). These semantricks create a set of paradoxes – and the resolution will give us an essentially metalinguistic certainty of being’s oneness. Such oneness cannot be structured or defined in any way. It has no ‘ruler’ and no ‘laws’ – hence, ontological anarchy.2
If Quantum Theory is approaching Chaos Theory, and “off-white” magic is approaching Chaos Magic, then what is post-anarchism in the political realm? In other words, if today our revolutionaries are anarchists, then will the revolutionaries of the realized anarchist society be chaotes? Would the next political paradigm after Anarchism be Chaos? And what would revolutionaries look like at this point?
Our society says, “There are laws, but they may be bent for or against you.” The anarchist society will say, “The only law is that there are no laws.” The chaotic society will later question the entire lot of it with: “What is a law, anyway?”
Speculations along this path lead me to hypothesize that the post-post-anarchist (post-chaotic) society would be entirely mysticist, non-concrete, and non-linguistic. A world where all expression and communication is abstract and subjective; a world where statements are made with dance, questions posed with music, and emotions and ideas expressed with art. On a temporal continuum of the degrees of autonomy of human civilization: in the modern society your choices were made for you; in the post-modern (present) society, your choices appear to be infinite, but this is merely a diaphanous guise meant to mask the fact that your choices are still being made for you; in the anarchist society you may make your own choices, provided you do not choose not to choose, or choose to restrict the choices of another; in the post-anarchist, chaotic society, you are completely free to (not) make and (not) unmake your own choices; in the post-chaos society, the concepts of choice and freewill, of coercion and control, become extinct, as there is no way to express “must do,” “should have done,” “considered doing,” or “could have done” through non-linguistic expression. In the post-chaos society, there is only “doing.”
In one sense, this represents a return to paleolithic society, the primitivist ideal, and the “zero-work” movement, as Bey aptly points out: “Chaos Theory…envisions a Quantum-Social-Paradigm with distinctly anti-authoritarian implications – in one sense a reprise of the Paleolithic/shamanic worldview, in another sense wildly post-postmodern. Such a ‘movement’ or change would transcend all current definitions of Anarchism, whether communist, syndicalist, libertarian-capitalist [They call themselves anarchists! Ha!] or individualist. So far there is no name for what I’m talking about.”3 In keeping with the non-linguistics of this conceptual future paradigm, there very well may not ever be a term for it. It is the Beginning and End of the Circle, the alpha (الأول, Al-’Awal) and omega (الأخر, Al-’Akhir), and its name is unspeakable, known only to those resplendent future revolutionaries who will sing and dance in the epoch without time.
To avoid dissolving into mystical remarks (if a quantum mechanical analysis of magic can be considered sufficiently un-mystical enough), I return to P. Carroll’s PsyberMagick, where he outlines the concept of “psispacetime” with mathematical theorems which appear vague and mildly inconsistent with quantum mechanics. However, the overall ideas expressed by the theorems and their subsequent philosophical implications undo any possible mathematical ambiguities or errors. Their Fifth Equation of Magick, to calculate the “’psispacetime’ separation between events in a six-dimensional Pythagorean form,” is given as
where s is spacial separation (space-like interval in physics)
t is temporal separation in “ordinary time” (time-like interval in physics)
a & b are temporal separations in two dimensions of “imaginary time”
i is (-1)1/2 (imaginary unit in mathematics)
and c is the speed of light
Squaring the i‘s yeilds:
0 = s2 – (ct)2 + (ca)2 + (cb)2
Ignoring questions of why imaginary units were included only to be squared out, Carroll goes on to argue that quantum non-locality is the limited case, which, after pausing to consider this for a moment, I must agree with. What Carroll is asserting here is essentially what is known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility for a quantum particle always occurs, rendering the sci-fi author’s wet dream of infinite parallel universes, one for every possible action of every particle over every Planck second, existent. Thus, Carroll’s “imaginary time” corresponds to timelines (and, hence, parallel universes or many-worlds) branching off from our timeline of consensus reality.
This idea is relatively (no pun intended!) new to physicists, and may seem downright strange to laypersons, but it is not at all new to mystics. Emanuel Swedenborg, eighteenth century Swedish scientist, went (arguably) insane halfway through his life. (His visions began at age forty and he lived to be eighty-four.) He subsequently wrote twenty-six books in Latin on how “God” had allowed him to experience “the dimensions of Heaven and Hell,” which spatially overlap our physical dimensions, but remain invisible to most people.
Carroll continues (with diagrams!) to show how the magical acts of enchantment and divination can effect shifts between ordinary time and imaginary time.
Enchantments thus ‘land’ at a distance in the future twice as great as the radius of the circle of imaginary time probabilities with which they interact. Retroactive enchantment acts on a circle of probabilities at t -1…which then feed back to the present at t0. As we can only observe the instant of the present in t, any debates about what ‘really’ occurred at t -2 become academic. Note the probability circle increases in size with time by a factor of πt. Thus, if tomorrow contains a million possibilities, the day after contains 3 million. Enchant long!4
“Unseen Chaos (po-te-kitea)
Unpossessed, Unpassing
Chaos of utter darkness
Untouched and Untouchable” –Maori Chant
There is clearly a distinct need for an anarchist grimoire. I’ll start work on it, anyone with suggestions or contributions should contact me at isis(at)patternsinthevoid(dot)net.
1 Carroll, Peter J. PsyberMagick. New Falcon Publications. Tempe, Arizona: 1995. p. 9
2 Bey, Hakim. “Anarchist Meditations on N. Herbert’s Quantum Reality”. Hermetic.org. http://hermetic.com/bey/quantum.html. 9 March 2010. ¶s 3, 24.
3 ibid. ¶ 30
4 Carroll, Peter J. PsyberMagick. New Falcon Publications. Tempe, Arizona: 1995. p. 29
Not black, not white, but “off-white” magic, to use Carroll’s term. “You do not have to sell your soul to succeed with off-white magic. You merely have to recognize the existence of your other seven.”1 Hakim Bey pondered in his “Anarchist Meditations on N. Herbert’s Quantum Reality” what the socio-cultural paradigm would look like when it finally catches up with the scientific paradigm of quantum theory:
Quantum mechanics, considered as the source of such a paradigm, at first seems to lack any social ramifications of parallels, almost as if its very weirdness deprives it of all connections with ‘everyday’ life or social reality…my groping attempt at a synthesis is suggested by what I call Chaos Theory, which hold to the axiom that reality itself subsists in a state of ontological anarchy. ‘The one gave birth to the two, the two to the 10,000 things” – but all this is the tao & nothing but the tao. Yin & Yang have no being in themselves, but act as interpenetrating modalities of the tao. The real/unreal dichotomy enslaves us in false consciousness. Looked at from one point of view, nothing is real; from another point of view, everything is real; from another, ‘nothing is real except the Real’; from yet another, ‘I am the Real’ (ana’I Haqq, a Sufi ‘koan’). These semantricks create a set of paradoxes – and the resolution will give us an essentially metalinguistic certainty of being’s oneness. Such oneness cannot be structured or defined in any way. It has no ‘ruler’ and no ‘laws’ – hence, ontological anarchy.2
If Quantum Theory is approaching Chaos Theory, and “off-white” magic is approaching Chaos Magic, then what is post-anarchism in the political realm? In other words, if today our revolutionaries are anarchists, then will the revolutionaries of the realized anarchist society be chaotes? Would the next political paradigm after Anarchism be Chaos? And what would revolutionaries look like at this point?
Our society says, “There are laws, but they may be bent for or against you.” The anarchist society will say, “The only law is that there are no laws.” The chaotic society will later question the entire lot of it with: “What is a law, anyway?”
Speculations along this path lead me to hypothesize that the post-post-anarchist (post-chaotic) society would be entirely mysticist, non-concrete, and non-linguistic. A world where all expression and communication is abstract and subjective; a world where statements are made with dance, questions posed with music, and emotions and ideas expressed with art. On a temporal continuum of the degrees of autonomy of human civilization: in the modern society your choices were made for you; in the post-modern (present) society, your choices appear to be infinite, but this is merely a diaphanous guise meant to mask the fact that your choices are still being made for you; in the anarchist society you may make your own choices, provided you do not choose not to choose, or choose to restrict the choices of another; in the post-anarchist, chaotic society, you are completely free to (not) make and (not) unmake your own choices; in the post-chaos society, the concepts of choice and freewill, of coercion and control, become extinct, as there is no way to express “must do,” “should have done,” “considered doing,” or “could have done” through non-linguistic expression. In the post-chaos society, there is only “doing.”
In one sense, this represents a return to paleolithic society, the primitivist ideal, and the “zero-work” movement, as Bey aptly points out: “Chaos Theory…envisions a Quantum-Social-Paradigm with distinctly anti-authoritarian implications – in one sense a reprise of the Paleolithic/shamanic worldview, in another sense wildly post-postmodern. Such a ‘movement’ or change would transcend all current definitions of Anarchism, whether communist, syndicalist, libertarian-capitalist [They call themselves anarchists! Ha!] or individualist. So far there is no name for what I’m talking about.”3 In keeping with the non-linguistics of this conceptual future paradigm, there very well may not ever be a term for it. It is the Beginning and End of the Circle, the alpha (الأول, Al-’Awal) and omega (الأخر, Al-’Akhir), and its name is unspeakable, known only to the resplendent future revolutionaries who will sing and dance in the epoch without time.
To avoid dissolving into mystical remarks (if a quantum mechanical analysis of magic can be considered sufficiently un-mystical enough), I return to P. Carroll’s PsyberMagick, where he outlines the concept of “psispacetime” with mathematical theorems which appear vague and mildly inconsistent with quantum mechanics. However, the overall ideas expressed by the theorems and their subsequent philosophical implications undo any possible mathematical ambiguities or errors. Their Fifth Equation of Magick, to calculate the “’psispacetime’ separation between events in a six-dimensional Pythagorean form,” is given as
where s is spacial separation (space-like interval in physics)
t is temporal separation in “ordinary time” (time-like interval in physics)
a & b are temporal separations in two dimensions of “imaginary time”
i is (-1)1/2 (imaginary unit in mathematics)
and c is the speed of light
Squaring the i‘s yeilds:
0 = s2 – (ct)2 + (ca)2 + (cb)2
Ignoring questions of why imaginary units were included only to be squared out, Carroll goes on to argue that quantum non-locality is the limited case, which, after pausing to consider this for a moment, I must agree with. What Carroll is asserting here is essentially what is known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility for a quantum particle always occurs, rendering the sci-fi author’s wet dream of infinite parallel universes, one for every possible action of every particle over every Planck second, existent. Thus, Carroll’s “imaginary time” corresponds to timelines (and, hence, parallel universes or many-worlds) branching off from our timeline of consensus reality.
This idea is relatively (no pun intended!) new to physicists, and may seem downright strange to laypersons, but it is not at all new to mystics. Immanuel Swedenborg, nineteenth century German scientist, went (arguably) insane halfway through his life. (His visions began at age forty and he lived to be eighty.) He subsequently wrote twenty-six books in Latin on how “God” had allowed him to experience “the dimensions of Heaven and Hell,” which spatially overlap our physical dimensions, but remain invisible to most people.
Carroll continues (with diagrams!) to show how the magical acts of enchantment and divination can effect shifts between ordinary time and imaginary time.
Enchantments thus ‘land’ at a distance in the future twice as great as the radius of the circle of imaginary time probabilities with which they interact. Retroactive enchantment acts on a circle of probabilities at t -1…which then feed back to the present at t0. As we can only observe the instant of the present in t, any debates about what ‘really’ occurred at t -2 become academic. Note the probability circle increases in size with time by a factor of πt. Thus, if tomorrow contains a million possibilities, the day after contains 3 million. Enchant long!4
Fig. 1: Enchantment probabilistic effects in imaginary time
“Unseen Chaos (po-te-kitea)
Unpossessed, Unpassing
Chaos of utter darkness
Untouched and Untouchable” –Maori Chant
1 Carroll, Peter J. PsyberMagick. New Falcon Publications. Tempe, Arizona: 1995. p. 9
2 Bey, Hakim. “Anarchist Meditations on N. Herbert’s Quantum Reality”. Hermetic.org. http://hermetic.com/bey/quantum.html. 9 March 2010. ¶s 3, 24.
3 ibid. ¶ 30
4 Carroll, Peter J. PsyberMagick. New Falcon Publications. Tempe, Arizona: 1995. p. 29
4 Comments
Hi. I really like the song Black Magic As Revolutionary Action and wanted to ask you a few things about it but couldn’t find a way to contact you…
This is one of the most free-wheeling speculations about the future I’ve seen in a while. I’m unfortunately illiterate in math, so I didn’t follow all of it. Wilson elsewhere refers to this future “state” as, “A return /of/ the Stone Age, not a return /to/ the Stone Age.”
Have you found retroactive enchantment to demonstrate the results Carroll suggests it could?
BTW: Nice blog – glad to see someone still writing about these things :)
I can’t say I spend too much time trying to change the past, but if anything I would argue that it’s easier than Carroll makes it seem. And, I would argue, that there is some sort of inverse relation for magickal enchantments on the past, that is to say, the farther back something happened the easier it is to change. Historiography is a good example, always written and then re-written by the winners, as the saying goes.
And thanks for the compliment, I read a bit of your blog too, but I haven’t had time look at it in enough detail to raise any questions. In particular, however, I remember liking your post on how individuals with psychological “disorders” should be regarded in an anarchist society or group.