Kaos Hieroglyphica

I wrote my first book on chaos magic back in 2004, Kaos Hieroglyphica. I had been actively studying and practising magic for almost ten years at that point, and received some insight or illumination that allowed me to create a mystical system through the expansion of Pete Carroll's "Eight Colours of Magic" system with ideas from traditional Hermetic alchemy.

Carroll's system consisted of a series of colours and loose areas of magical objective, such as wealth, love, ego, war etc., each paired with a polarising opposite. Finding some of these opposites arbitrary and meaningless, after a fwe years of working with them as presented, I had an illumination regarding renaming and reorganising a few of them. Seven of his eight colours came from Queen's scale qabalah. The eighth he dubbed Octarine.

Carroll borrowed the concept of Octarine as the colour of magic itself from the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett, as the colour of magic itself, and associated it with the planet Uranus. This was the obvious choice of planet for various simple reasons:

• In Gustav Holst's suite 'The Planets', Uranus is given the appelation 'The Magician'
• In contemporary astrology, Uranus is considered a 'higher octave' of 'Mercury'. Carroll left Mercury with the role of a trickster, mirroring the distinction Aleister Crowley made between 'magic' (stage magic and illusionism) and 'magick' (the study of occult science and the art of causing change in conformity to will).

However Carroll placed Octarine in a polarity with Yellow, which he called 'Ego magic', and attributed to the sun. To him this concerned the power of laughter, charisma and the creation of glamours. I saw what he was getting at, but for me this polarity still seemed clumsilly placed. A forced fit.

So one of my first revisions was to introduce Pluto as lord of the underworld, to represent ancestral magic, and move Octarine, and thus Uranus as god of the heavens, into polarity with this. The Octarine-Invisible polarity. Heaven and Hell if you like.

My other main revision was to rename the magics of Mercury and Jupiter from 'Thinking' and 'Wealth' to 'Work' and 'Play'. Mercurial work, I should stress is anything but dull, remember he is a trickster and therefore a master of efficiency.

Kaos Hieroglyphica represented my first attempt to put this system into a format for others to work with. I have since refined it quite a bit and one of the future books I plan to release involves and updated look at the system then presented.

Reviews

• by Peter J Carroll
• by Shade Oroboros