The Mysterious Self
Chaos magic, the occult, and what remains hidden from the understanding
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the mode of thinking G.W.F. Hegel calls “understanding” believes that there is a division between what we can know and what we cannot. We can know the various “expressions” of the truth, but the deep unity that lies at the heart of things must remain forever a mystery to us.
For the understanding, this doesn’t matter because the expressions that we do see are expressions of the truth, and so truth is not something hidden from us. We only have to carefully read the expressions of the truth in order to know what is true.
But this is not satisfying to consciousness because consciousness by definition seeks absolute knowledge. It has to know what lies beneath.
It is the tantalising thought that, despite the fact that so much is known to us, there is yet something unknown that lies even deeper, that can lead one to investigate the occult. If philosophy can’t get us there then there must be other ways to access what is unknown.
The occultist Peter Carroll writes that while we see “duality” all around us, what is “singular” is hidden from us. “Duality” describes the way the human mind ordinarily sees the world. Nothing exists without its opposite. Some examples Carroll gives: no happiness without misery, no birth without death, no good without evil. This is just the way the human mind understands things: by sorting and dividing. I can understand what good is because it is not-evil, and vice versa.
But beneath all this is a unity. There is a desire to know and understand. There is something that does the thinking, sorting, understanding. There is a unity of “will” and “perception.” The unity is found in something Carroll suggests we might call “spirit” or “soul.” Carroll calls it “Kia”.
Chaos magic is all about letting the will do its thing without the mind getting in the way. A core tenet of Carroll’s theory is: your greatest enemy is your own mind. The world is shaped by the beliefs we have about the world; therefore, by changing our beliefs we can change the world. The mind and its limited methods for sorting and making sense of the world, its systems of belief, must be repeatedly bypassed in order that the will can proceed unhindered.
And so the practices of chaos magic involve various ways to distract the mind so that the will can focus on its object and its object alone. Ordinarily, when you think about what you desire, the mind will mess things up for you, because it will divide and subdivide the wish according to its own preconceptions and you’ll end up with only a confused idea of what you want. Mixed in with your desire to, say, “obtain the Necronomicon” (one of Carroll’s own examples), will be the fear that you are unable to attain it, or what will happen if you do; there will be conflicting ideas and wishes and you will be pulled in all directions at once.
In short: the mind rarely knows what it wants. There are many different kinds of mind, infinite possible personalities an individual can have. Each mind will find a different way to express their wishes. But these expressions of desire are accidental, limiting, and not essential to the desire itself. Magical practices allow you to bypass the various ways a wish can be expressed so that you can focus on the will’s desire. For example: a sigil can be constructed that represents the desired object. Then the sigil is focused on, its meaning deliberately forgotten, so that the mind is unable to twist and turn the meaning of the desire while at the same time the object of desire is held in place, in symbolic form, for the will to focus on.
A book like Peter Carroll’s Liber Null describes a certain kind of thinking. By definition, a magical kind of thinking: you can transform reality by transforming your own mind. Carroll describes his theory of magic as “practical” and “personal,” because it’s about getting what you want. Being becomes all about desire. The world revolves around me.
But it’s not as simple as just manipulating things to suit your appetites. You have to consider desire itself. The question becomes: how can I know what I want? And you discover the answer to this question by pushing the mind aside and letting the will do what it will.
At the level of what Hegel calls the “understanding,” consciousness of the self has become something beyond knowing. At this level of consciousness, self-consciousness can’t be any kind of knowing because knowing is object-oriented. And so the subject remains something utterly mysterious. I feel the presence of myself but I don’t know what I am.
When the self is lost to consciousness, as it is to the understanding, magic is the only way to be true to yourself, to follow that feeling of yourself that you can’t describe. It’s the dark side of the understanding; our view of the world is clear and scientific, while the “I” becomes something occult and mysterious.
For a philosopher like Hegel, it’s not enough to leave the “I” in the dark. The form of thinking that relies only on the understanding must be left behind because more than understanding is required for absolute knowing. Hegel would say that the “I” can be known. And so it would seem there’s no room for the occult in Hegel’s thinking.
In order to leave magical thinking behind, consciousness must become self-consciousness. In other words, consciousness must turn its eye upon itself, and the self become the object of knowledge.