For thirty-five years the standard complaint against Peter Carroll had been that he wrote books for people who distrust books. Liber Null taught its readers to treat every symbol system as disposable scaffolding; Psybermagick mocked the very idea of a magical canon in numbered koans; The Apophenion and The Octavo dissolved gods into neurology and physics respectively.

Then, at the spring equinox of 2014, Arcanorium College issued a lavish folio volume, bound in hardback, illuminated in full colour, accompanied by a deck of fifty-four altar cards the size of small icons: a book that looks, feels, and behaves like precisely the kind of authoritative illustrated grimoire that chaos magic was invented to make impossible.

EPOCH: The Esotericon & Portals of Chaos, produced over some four years with the digital artist Matt Kaybryn, is Carroll’s most physically beautiful publication, his most systematic, and his most paradoxical. It gives the paradigm-hopping tradition a home paradigm: a complete replacement for the Qabalistic Tree of Life, a working pantheon of thirty-six illustrated god-forms, a matured Necronomicon, and a visual liturgy. Whether this represents the fulfilment of chaos magic or its quiet betrayal is the question this chapter keeps in view throughout.

A Book That Is Also an Instrument

Begin with the object, because the object is the argument. The 2014 Esotericon is a large-format hardback: roughly eleven inches by nine, just over two hundred pages, set in three columns across a landscape page like a mediaeval antiphonal that has been to design school. The paper is heavy, the printing crisp, the margins generous. Reviewers reached instinctively for the vocabulary of the deluxe: “lavish” was the word that stuck.

The accompanying Portals of Chaos deck consists of fifty-four cards, each nine inches by five and three-quarters: nearly twice the size of a tarot card, deliberately too large to shuffle comfortably, because shuffling is not their primary purpose. Kaybryn described their unusual lamination as “Chaos Magician proof”: wipe-clean, wax-resistant, built for the altar rather than the card table. One early reviewer reported spilling candle wax on his Thoth card and peeling it off without a mark, which tells you something about the intended context of use.

The title itself is an acronym, and Carroll being Carroll, the acronym does double duty. The Esotericon (the book) and the Portals Of CHaos (the cards) together form the Epoch: at once the name of the artefact and a claim about it. An epoch is a boundary in time; the Epoch announces itself as the boundary object between one dispensation of magical thought and the next.

Carroll had played the acronym game since the IOT’s earliest days, and the community returned the favour: Dave Lee, reviewing the book, recalled the order’s old jokes (CHAOS as “Constantly Hagiographizing Austin Osman Spare”) and awarded the new title full marks. But beneath the wordplay sits a serious design decision. The Epoch is not a book with illustrations. It is a two-part magical device of which the text is the manual and the images are the working surfaces.

Carroll and Kaybryn conceived book and deck as a single instrument; the later Mandrake marketing copy called it “a portable temple, encoded in text and image,” and for once the marketing copy is a fair description of the design brief.

The collaboration matters more than the usual author–illustrator arrangement. The project gestated for about four years in the online seminars of Arcanorium College, Carroll’s web-based teaching institution, with drafts and images circulating among students and colleagues for critique. Kaybryn’s renderings are digital paintings of considerable density (hyperreal figures, deep starfields, architectural backdrops) executed in a deliberately computer-inflected style at a moment when digital art still carried a whiff of the illegitimate in occult publishing. The choice was polemical.

A tradition that claims to be the magic of the present tense should not counterfeit nineteenth-century lithography; it should look like the century it inhabits. Only four of the fifty-four figures were painted from photographic models (Nikki Wyrd, co-author of The Book of Baphomet, sat for Ma’at), the rest being built from imagination, and the results range from the serene to the frankly unnerving.

Gordon White, whose Rune Soup review remains the most-quoted early response, credited the images with re-arming deities he had gone stale on: his Eris, he noted with approval, had her danger restored.

Distribution was its own small manifesto. Carroll and Kaybryn declined to sell through Amazon, judging its terms unjustifiable, and moved copies through Arcanorium’s own shop, sympathetic occult bookstores, and Weiser Antiquarian in the United States. For a book positioning itself as the flagship grimoire of a tradition, this was commercially eccentric and entirely in character: the Epoch was priced modestly (thirty pounds at launch) for an object of its production values, because Carroll, who had made his money elsewhere, has never needed his magic to pay rent. The first edition sold through, went out of print, became a collector’s item, and stayed that way for a decade until the 2025 Mandrake reissue: of which more below.

Within the arc of the corpus, the Epoch occupies a precise position. Liber Null and Psychonaut supplied technique; Liber Kaos supplied theory; PsyberMagick supplied attitude; The Apophenion and The Octavo supplied, respectively, a goddess and a cosmology. The Epoch supplies the thing every previous book had conspicuously withheld: content: a furnished universe, a populated pantheon, a stable set of correspondences.

It is Carroll’s consolidation volume, the place where three decades of scattered inventions (Baphomet from the Mass of Chaos, Apophenia from 2008, the Elder Gods from Liber Null’s reading list, the eight-colour planetary scheme from Liber Kaos) are gathered into one architecture and given faces. Dave Lee called it Carroll’s magnum opus “in terms of Big Thinking,” and ranked it second only to Liber Null in the corpus.

That judgement (the iconoclast’s handbook first, the icon-maker’s folio second) captures the productive contradiction that organises everything below.

The Long View: A History of Magical Thought

The Esotericon opens not with ritual but with historiography: a long, opinionated résumé of magical and esoteric thought from the Palaeolithic to the present, together with a forecast of where the whole enterprise is heading. Gordon White called this introduction one of the most breathtaking exercises in “aggregated data” a reader is likely to encounter: meaning that Carroll works, as he always has, at the level of macro-trend rather than case study. Individual shamans, heresiarchs, and Renaissance magi appear only as data points in a curve.

This is the method Carroll had practised since the aeonics chapters of Liber Kaos, and it remains the feature of his writing that readers either relish or resent. Detractors point, fairly, at the exceptions the curve flattens; admirers reply, also fairly, that no one else in occultism even attempts curves.

The story Carroll tells runs in broad strokes. Magic begins as the default technology of animist cultures, where the world is saturated with spirit and the specialist (the shaman) negotiates with it directly, without priesthood or scripture. Pagan antiquity organises the spirits into pantheons and the negotiation into civic religion, while keeping magic legal, plural, and more or less respectable.

Monotheism centralises the divine, criminalises the competition, and drives magic into the grimoire underground, where it survives by wearing its persecutor’s uniform: hence centuries of sorcery conducted in Hebrew and Latin under licence from angels. The Renaissance briefly re-opens the pagan inheritance through Neoplatonism and Hermeticism; the Enlightenment then removes the divine altogether, and magic goes into its long nineteenth-century convalescence, re-emerging through Romanticism, spiritualism, and the great synthetic systems of the Golden Dawn.

The twentieth century (Crowley, Spare, the psychologisation of the occult, and finally chaos magic itself) completes the transfer of magical agency from gods to psyche.

What distinguishes the Esotericon’s version of this now-familiar arc is the frame Carroll places around its two ends. He compresses the entire inherited edifice (Platonic metaphysics, pagan pantheon, monotheist theology, and their Golden Dawn amalgam) into a single formation he calls the Platonic Pagan-Monotheist paradigm: the long dispensation in which the divine and the real were located above and outside, accessible by ascent, emanation, or petition.

Against it he sets the emerging Quantum Neo-Pagan paradigm: a dispensation in which divinity is plural again, but understood as generated from within (by minds, cultures, and perhaps the panpsychic substrate that his Apophenion had argued for) and in which the deep structure of the world is stochastic rather than geometric, quantum rather than Platonic.

The chaoist contribution to the history of magic, on this account, is not sigils or servitors, which are technique, but the paradigm shift itself: the recognition that gods are made, that making them is a craft, and that a magical culture which knows this can practise theism with clean hands. James Wilber’s review put the pivot neatly: from looking for god from without to looking for god from within.

Two features of this historiography deserve notice before we proceed, because both drew fire. First, Carroll’s aeonics paints with a deliberately broad brush, and specialists will wince at particular strokes: Dave Lee caught a claim about the absence of animal sacrifice in ancient Egypt that the cat cemeteries of Bubastis rather embarrass, and Wilber, himself an aeonics enthusiast, objected on principle to the flattening. Second, the treatment of Crowley is conspicuously rough.

Carroll reads the Thelemic aeons in their crudest possible form in order to knock them down, and reserves his admiration instead for MacGregor Mathers: an inversion of the usual occult genealogy, in which Mathers is the dusty compiler and Crowley the genius who set the compilation on fire. Lee found the preference puzzling until he finished the book, at which point it explained itself: Mathers was the last man to build a psychocosm on the scale Carroll was now attempting.

The Esotericon’s opening history is, among other things, a job application for Mathers’s old position (cartographer-general of the Western tradition) submitted by a man who spent his early career arguing the position should be abolished.

Not content to release a new grimoire, the Chancellor of Arcanorium College has produced three. Oh, also, one of them is a Necronomicon.Alexander Cummins, reviewing EPOCH

The Chaobala: Replumbing the Tree of Life

The structural heart of the Epoch (the invention on which everything else hangs) is the Esotericon Tree, which Carroll christens the Chaobala. The name declares the ambition: this is to chaos magic what the Qabalah was to the Golden Dawn synthesis, a master scheme of correspondences onto which every technique, entity, and state of consciousness in the system can be pegged. The difference, and Carroll insists on it, lies in the provenance claimed.

The Qabalistic Tree of Life presents itself as a revealed map of emanation: ten sephiroth descending from the unknowable godhead, twenty-two paths, the whole apparatus underwritten by Neoplatonist metaphysics in which the perfect precedes and generates the imperfect. Carroll regards that metaphysics as the longest-running category error in Western thought, and he had said so in every book since Liber Kaos. The Chaobala therefore makes no claim to antiquity, revelation, or necessity.

It is offered as a tool of confessedly human manufacture, built from the current scientific picture of the world, and expected (this is the point most readers missed) to be superseded in its turn.

Why replace the Tree at all, rather than simply ignore it as earlier chaos magic had done? The Esotericon’s answer is historical. When Mathers and his Golden Dawn colleagues packed the elements, the tattvas, the tarot, the planets, the angels, and Dee’s Enochiana into the Qabalistic filing cabinet, they gave the Anglophone occult revival its lingua franca; Crowley’s 777 merely alphabetised the drawers.

Every subsequent magician has inherited not just the correspondences but the cosmology smuggled inside them: a geocentric, emanationist, ascent-shaped universe that no practising magician actually believes in between rituals. Carroll’s argument is that maps leak. Work daily with a diagram whose deep grammar says the perfect world is elsewhere and upward, and some of that grammar gets into your results.

A magic that takes its physics from the twenty-first century needs scaffolding drawn to the same scale, and the Qabalistic scheme ends, as Gordon White observed, at the orbit of Saturn: the map runs out precisely where the universe starts getting interesting.

Elemental Magic deals largely with the natural world here on Earth, and Planetary Magic deals largely with the Human Condition, but Stellar Magic addresses the possibilities of the Trans-Human Condition.The Esotericon, on the three spheres of the Chaobala

The Chaobala’s architecture is a three-storey psychocosm. The ground floor is the Elemental sphere, a pentagram of earth, water, air, fire, and aether: the domain of the natural world and of practical sorcery, occupying roughly the position Malkuth holds in the Qabalistic scheme: except that where Malkuth is the lowest and least of the emanations, the Chaobala’s elemental floor is simply where embodied life happens, with no stigma of fallenness attached.

The middle storey is the Planetary sphere, an octa-star of eight planetary powers (the seven classical planets plus Ouranos) which replaces the middle Tree, the Ruach, as the map of the human psyche and the human condition. Its population is not eight but thirty-six, because Carroll attributes god-forms both to single planets and to all twenty-eight pairwise combinations of the eight, a move examined in detail below.

The top storey is the Stellar sphere, and here the heresy becomes explicit: where the Qabalist finds the Supernals (the triad of divine intelligibility toward which the adept ascends) the Chaobala offers Forbidden Knowledge, the domain of the Lovecraftian Elder Gods, deep space, deep time, and the trans-human. Carroll rejects the traditional grammar of Awakening outright; there is no perfected summit state in his cosmos, only an expanding frontier of dangerous capability.

Dave Lee, who has spent decades around both systems, called the result “the most anti-traditional psychocosm ever, a triumph of radical materialism,” and he did not entirely mean it as a compliment.

Two threshold beings articulate the storeys, and their selection is among the book’s shrewdest touches. Between the elemental and planetary spheres stands Baphomet, Carroll’s god of biological life: the point at which mere matter becomes desiring, striving organism, and hence the natural door between the magic of the world and the magic of the psyche.

Between the planetary and stellar spheres stands Nyarlathotep, Lovecraft’s crawling chaos, cast (in Nikki Wyrd’s memorable phrase) as bouncer to the alien cosmological deities beyond: the messenger-trickster who decides whether the psyche is ready for what deep space contains. The arrangement quietly reproduces the tripartite anthropology that runs through all of Carroll’s work (body, mind, and whatever the mind becomes next) while keeping each floor of the building open for ordinary pathworking.

And pathworking is the intended use: the Esotericon recommends the systematic tour (evoke and invoke one’s way up from Earth to Azathoth) as a curriculum of self-construction, the chaoist equivalent of climbing the Tree, with the cards as stations. Wilber caught the resemblance exactly: it can be seen, he wrote, as akin to travelling up the Tree of Life: a magician working through each invocation learns the parts of their own psyche in ascending order of strangeness.

The reception of the Chaobala split along a predictable seam. Practitioners hungry for coherence embraced it: White found in it the first magical map that incorporates actual space rather than stopping at the edge of the solar system (on his half-joking Kardashev scale of psychocosms, a Type III worldview) and confessed it made him want to compile 777-style tables for the first time in his life.

Wilber predicted, accurately so far, that the scheme would influence chaos magic for years and commended its “elegance and breadth” even to magicians with correspondence systems of their own. The doubters’ case was put most seriously by Lee, and it is worth stating in full because it frames this chapter’s conclusion: any fixed attribution set will feel arbitrary somewhere (why is Osiris Saturn-Jupiter rather than Saturn-Sol?

why is Vulcan given Jupiter at all?), and (more fundamentally) when an open-ended metasystem starts issuing definitive maps, one may reasonably ask whether the map-making impulse it was founded to critique has simply recaptured it. Carroll’s implicit answer is the provenance clause: a map that admits to being made this decade, by these two men, for these purposes, cannot enslave its users the way a map claiming divine authorship can. Whether admission is really inoculation is another matter.

The First Grimoire: Elemental Magic

The First Grimoire is, by design, the least exotic thing Carroll ever published: a basic primer of elemental magic for the twenty-first-century beginner, covering the classical four elements plus aether. Its position in the book is pedagogically deliberate. A newcomer who buys the Epoch for its pictures can start here with banishing, visualisation, basic evocation and invocation, elementary enchantment and divination, and be doing something useful within a week; the deeper waters wait upstairs.

Veteran readers noticed at once that much of the material reworks ground covered in Liber Null and Liber Kaos: Nikki Wyrd found it the flattest section of the book, and Lee remarked, not unkindly, that if you did not own Carroll’s earlier works, here they were.

Both reviews also conceded the craftsmanship: the recycled material includes some of Carroll’s most durable practical advice, notably his cheerfully actuarial doctrine that unreliable divination and unreliable enchantment are still worth doing because even modest shifts in probability compound over a career.

What rescues the First Grimoire from mere recapitulation is the double reading it gives each element. Every element carries its classical interpretation (the qualities, temperaments, and tools of the Agrippan inheritance) and beside it a modern one, in which the elements become something like a folk taxonomy of physical and psychological reality: states of matter, modes of energy, and registers of experience.

Earth is soil and stone, but also solidity, wealth, permanence, and the body’s stubborn needs; water is ocean and rain, but also fluid dynamics, emotional weather, and empathy; air is atmosphere, but also information exchange, language, and the intellect’s restlessness; fire is combustion, but also thermodynamic transformation, will, and libido.

Aether (the fifth element that rationalism discarded and physics keeps almost reinventing) Carroll retains as the medium of magical information itself, continuous with the “shadow time” substrate he had theorised in The Octavo. The result reads less like a nature-mysticism and more like a user interface: five icons under which the whole of ordinary experience can be filed for magical purposes.

The chapter’s practical machinery is compact and characteristically ecumenical about gnosis: any method of reaching single-pointed excitation or quiescence will serve, and the elemental forms are offered as the training set on which a novice learns the two skills (altered state plus directed intent) that Carroll has always maintained constitute the whole of magical technique. The tool attributions repay a moment’s attention, because they occasioned a small comment-thread theology of their own when White’s review went up.

Carroll assigns the sword to fire and the wand to air, reversing the Golden Dawn convention that most modern readers absorbed from tarot decks. The choice is not perversity; it follows the older grimoire streams that armed the will with steel, and it preserves the internal logic of his system, in which the wand (the instrument of directed communication) belongs with the element of mind.

That a two-line attributional choice from 1978 was still generating forum arguments in 2014 says something about how correspondence systems actually propagate: not by proof, but by the prestige of the books that carry them. The Epoch understands this perfectly, which is why it is such a handsome book.

Baphomet: The Spirit of the Biosphere

Every Carroll book since 1978 has contained Baphomet somewhere (the Mass of Chaos B in the Liber Null material remains one of the most performed rituals the IOT ever produced) but the Esotericon is where the deity finally receives a full theology. Standing at the gate between the elemental and planetary spheres, Baphomet is defined as the god of all biological life on Earth: the aggregate psychic field of the biosphere, the sum of everything that eats, breeds, fears, and dies, from archaea to primates.

This is Carroll’s most sustained exercise in deliberate theogenesis after Apophenia, and the two projects are complementary. Apophenia was conjured from an abstraction (the perception of pattern) and given a person; Baphomet is the opposite operation, an inheritance of accumulated historical imagery given a new job description. Where Apophenia had to be introduced to the world, Baphomet had to be renovated, and the renovation required Carroll to do something he usually avoids: take a long, respectful walk through someone else’s history.

The history, as the Esotericon rehearses it, is a five-act comedy of misidentification. The horned intermediary between humanity and the animate world is as old as figurative art (the antlered figure of Les Trois-Frères, whatever it originally meant, stands conveniently at the head of the lineage) and pagan antiquity multiplied the type into Pan, Cernunnos, and the goat-footed crowd of fertility and wilderness deities. Monotheism, having no vacancy for such a being, filed the horned god under devil.

The name itself enters history in 1307, in the torture-assisted confessions of the Knights Templar, who were alleged to worship an idol called Baphomet: most plausibly a garbled “Mahomet,” the accusation being the standard mediaeval smear of secret Islam, which makes the deity’s founding document a paperwork error extracted under duress. Éliphas Lévi then performed the nineteenth century’s greatest act of occult image-making: his 1856 Sabbatic Goat: winged, hermaphroditic, torch between the horns, solve and coagula on the forearms: synthesised the accusation, the horned god, and Hermetic polarity into a single unforgettable figure that has served ever since as the trademark of magic itself.

Crowley adopted the name as his own motto in the O.T.O.; twentieth-century Satanism borrowed the goat for shock value; and by the 1970s Baphomet was available for reclamation precisely because everyone disreputable had already claimed him.

Carroll’s renovation keeps Lévi’s essential insight (Baphomet as the union of opposites, male and female, human and animal, above and below) and swaps its metaphysical basement. The oppositions united are no longer alchemical abstractions but the actual polarities of biology: predator and prey, growth and decay, sex and death. Baphomet is Gaia with teeth, or as the Esotericon has it, the deity one gets by taking the biosphere seriously as a psychic whole rather than as a flow of nutrients.

The move places Carroll in unexpected company. The same decade produced a flowering of chaos-adjacent eco-theology (Vayne and Wyrd’s Book of Baphomet appeared in 2012, and their circle had been working Baphomet as nature-current for years) and the Esotericon canonises this convergence: chaos magic, of all traditions, acquiring a green deity. It is worth pausing on how uncharacteristic this is.

Carroll’s earlier theology was resolutely psychological (gods as self-fragments) or cosmological (Chaos as substrate); Baphomet is neither, being genuinely ecological: a god with a habitat, whose welfare and humanity’s are the same fact viewed at two scales. The pantheist possibilities are handled with Carroll’s usual dryness, but a reader who wants a devotional relationship with this figure will find the Esotericon quietly permits one, which from the author of PsyberMagick is nearly a confession.

Kaybryn’s Baphomet portal is among the deck’s most contested images: a horned, androgynous colossus rising above a mountain of skulls, flanked by the teeming green. Wyrd, whose personal deity this is, found the skulls odd and said so in print, and the disagreement is itself instructive, because it demonstrates what happens when a tradition of private gnosis acquires official art. Before 2014, every chaos magician’s Baphomet was their own; after 2014, there was a canonical picture to disagree with.

The skulls, for what it is worth, are defensible theology: a biosphere deity that omitted extinction would be sentimental, and sentimentality is the one heresy the Esotericon never commits. Baphomet presides over the compost as well as the bloom.

That is precisely why the deity can serve as the Chaobala’s lower gate: the passage from elemental to planetary magic is the passage through life-and-death itself, and the Esotericon’s pathworking sequence has the practitioner confront the whole biological bargain (you are an animal; the animal dies; the pattern persists) before being admitted to the more flattering company of the gods of the psyche.

The Second Grimoire: Planetary and Bi-Planetary Magic

The Second Grimoire is the largest and, by common consent, the core of the book: a field guide to the gods of the human condition. Its organising conceit is combinatorial. Take the seven classical planetary powers (Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) add Ouranos as the eighth (a nod both to modern astronomy and to the “Ouranian” current that has run through Carroll’s work since the IOT’s barbaric language experiments), and you obtain eight pure archetypes.

Then pair them: eight powers yield twenty-eight possible two-planet combinations, and Carroll assigns a deity to every one. Eight single-planet god-forms plus twenty-eight bi-planetary god-forms gives the Esotericon’s pantheon of thirty-six, each described in the text (identifying features, mythic history, spheres of competence, suggested employments) and each given a full-page portal by Kaybryn.

The scheme is at once tidy and audacious: a complete periodic table of the psyche’s personifications, generated from first principles and then populated with the most resonant names the world’s pantheons could supply.

The population of the thirty-six is deliberately cross-cultural and occasionally mischievous. Alongside the expected Olympians and Egyptians stand Norse and Vedic figures (Thor, Odin, Kali), Levantine recoveries (Asherah), Afro-Caribbean powers (Baron Samedi, and the splendid fusion form Bob-Legba, which grafts the opener-of-ways onto the SubGenius prophet of slack), and (the book’s driest joke delivered with its straightest face) Jehovah, filed as one god-form among the others, useful for certain operations, no longer entitled to the building.

Carroll also coins deities outright where the combinatorial grid exposed a vacancy: Apophenia (imported from his 2008 book and now given a card), her sister Pareidolia, and a rehabilitated Choronzon.

Lee singled out these treatments of “previously-little-celebrated deities” (Lucifer, Ma’at, Apophenia, Pareidolia) as among the book’s best, and White’s review testified to the practical effect: the Esotericon’s firming-up of the differences between Thoth, Hermes, and Mercury, three figures that a century of lazy syncretism had melted into one another, unlocked workings for him that twenty years of standard attributions had not.

He embodies both the innate and the experience-won techniques of continually up-trading for power. Invoke Him for as much of it as you desire.The Esotericon, on Jupiter

That sentence, quoted with delight in nearly every review, displays the Second Grimoire’s characteristic register: the god described not as a metaphysical entity but as a competence: a bundle of “techniques” that a human nervous system can temporarily install. This is the doctrine of invocation Carroll has taught since Liber Null, now applied at scale. The magician does not believe in Jupiter; the magician runs Jupiter, as one runs software, for the duration of a negotiation or a career move, and then banishes thoroughly.

Belief is treated as an instrument with a duty cycle, not an identity. This is what the chapter’s subtitle-question (how to access archetypes without belief commitment) amounts to in practice: the full phenomenology of pagan devotion (altar, image, hymn, offering, possession) set inside a bracket that the magician opens and closes at will. The neo-pagan revival supplied the archetypes and the appetite; chaos magic supplies the bracket.

Sceptics of the method have always asked whether a bracketed god is a god at all; Carroll’s answer, implicit in the Quantum Neo-Pagan frame, is that the bracket is where all gods have always lived: the pagans just decorated it more honestly than the monotheists.

Not every attribution persuaded everyone, and the disagreements are part of the design’s interest. Lee accepted Vulcan’s Mercury but balked at his Jupiter, and would have paired Osiris with Sol rather than Jupiter under Saturn; White, conversely, found the book’s Jupiter (rendered by Kaybryn against an astral Manhattan skyline) the first honest portrait of that god he had seen, a deity of kings and financiers rather than benign abundance, and his Eris restored to genuine menace after decades of Discordian whimsy.

The pattern in the reception is telling: nobody disputed the grid, only the tenants, which is exactly what happens with every correspondence system that achieves adoption. Carroll would presumably regard the arguments as the system working as intended: a fixed scheme with disputable contents keeps its users thinking, where a revealed scheme merely keeps them obedient.

Crowley’s Horus comes in for particular revision: the Esotericon goes to town, as White put it, on the Thelemic presentation of the hawk-headed child of force and fire, offering instead a Horus defined by focused, dutiful vengeance-into-kingship: a correction that says as much about Carroll’s long quarrel with Thelema as about Egyptology.

The Second Grimoire is, among its other functions, the most sustained act of comparative theology ever conducted inside chaos magic, and it earns Hutton’s later verdict: icons which sum up what the deities of Western and not-so-Western culture “have cumulatively come to mean.”

Theometry: The Natural History of the Gods

Between the god-form entries, the Second Grimoire carries a theoretical payload that deserves separate treatment, because it is the Esotericon’s real intellectual novelty. Carroll needs to justify not merely which gods he has chosen but the very idea that a pantheon can be chosen: that deities can be audited, retired, promoted, and where necessary manufactured. The justification is a discipline he treats with the seriousness of natural history: call it theometry, the comparative measurement of gods across time. Its central datum is that gods have biographies.

Deities are born (usually from older deities, by fission, fusion, or migration), they mature, they change careers, they decline, and they die, or rather, they enter the peculiar afterlife of the archive, from which magicians periodically resurrect them. Asherah, the Hebrew god’s excised consort, appears in the deck precisely as such a resurrection; Jehovah appears as the most spectacular case study in divine career change on record, a Levantine storm-and-war god who talked his way into a monopoly.

None of this is original to Carroll as scholarship (the history of religions has said as much for a century) but the Esotericon may be the first grimoire to build the insight into its operating instructions.

The engine of divine change, on Carroll’s account, is co-evolution. Humanity and its gods make each other, continuously and in both directions. A culture’s deities encode its self-model (its notions of agency, virtue, causation, and threat) and those deities then discipline the psyches of the next generation, which in turn remodels the gods. Paradigm shifts in the human self-image therefore register as theological revolutions, with a lag.

The shamanic world of negotiable local spirits mirrors the permeable tribal self; the pagan pantheon, with its specialised departments, mirrors the differentiated civic self of urban antiquity; the monotheist God, singular, jealous, and remote, mirrors (and enforces) the singular accountable soul of confession and contract; and the modern deletion of the divine mirrors the machine-self of rationalism, which promptly discovered it could not live in an empty building and began furnishing it with substitutes, from Reason to the Market to extraterrestrials.

Aeonics, the macro-historical scheme Carroll had run since Liber Kaos, here acquires its theological column: each aeon gets the gods its psyche requires, and the gods return the favour by stabilising that psyche.

The forecast that follows is the book’s wager. If gods track self-models, and the emerging self-model is the chaoist one (the self as an ensemble of selves, beliefs as tools, pattern-recognition as the engine of both) then the next dispensation’s gods will be openly made, and the interesting question becomes quality control.

Carroll’s argument for the neo-pagan revival is essentially engineering pragmatism: the polytheist pantheon is simply better psychological architecture than the monotheist monolith, because a plural psyche is better served by a plural heaven, and a magician alternating between Athena’s duty and Dionysus’s dissolution commits no contradiction that the psyche itself has not already committed. Monotheism, on this reading, was an aeon-long experiment in running a multimind on single-user software; the Esotericon quotes its costs without rancour and shelves the product.

Lee relished the corollary he found in the Jehovah entry: that belief in such a being is “massively counter-intuitive and counter-rational,” which is precisely why it required, and produced, such formidable machinery of faith.

It is here that the Esotericon’s relationship to its Golden Dawn ancestry becomes explicit. Carroll describes the Mathers synthesis with genuine admiration (the last serious attempt to give Western magic a comprehensive, workable map) and then observes that it was drawn just before Darwin, Freud, and quantum mechanics rendered its underlying picture of humanity obsolete. The synthesis does not need mockery; it needs updating, and the update must be paradigm-deep, not cosmetic.

This is the closest Carroll ever comes to declaring a lineage: not Crowley’s heir, a claim he has always deflected, but Mathers’s: the systematiser’s successor rather than the prophet’s. Readers who recall the young Carroll of 1978, for whom all systems were arbitrary scaffolding to be discarded after use, may find the older Carroll’s pride of cartography startling.

The reconciliation, if there is one, lies in theometry itself: if all maps age and die like gods, then making a new map is not a betrayal of the insight: it is the insight, applied. A tradition that knows its gods are mortal owes them replacement.

The Third Grimoire: The Necronomicon Matured

Chaos magic’s attachment to H. P. Lovecraft is as old as the tradition itself.

From the beginning, Carroll had pointed to fiction as legitimate raw material for belief-work, and Lovecraft’s mythos (a mythology invented by a documented atheist, encumbered by no prior church, and engineered for maximum dread) was the obvious quarry; the Psychonaut-era IOT worked mythos material alongside its Baphomet masses, and the various commercial Necronomicons of the 1970s (Simon’s pseudo-Sumerian edition above all) demonstrated that a fictional grimoire could function as well as a “real” one, thereby proving a core chaoist theorem before chaos magic existed to state it.

Gordon White has called the Necronomicon the “crashed spaceship” at the origin of the tradition: the impossible object everyone reverse-engineers. The Esotericon’s Third Grimoire is Carroll’s mature settlement of this forty-year account, and reviewers were unanimous that it is the strongest thing in the book.

Wilber’s summary is exact: not a slavish pseudo-reproduction of the fictional volume, not a goetia with Lovecraftian names pasted over the demons, but a thematic reconstruction: an answer to the question of why the mythos grips magicians, converted into a system.

The answer the grimoire gives is cosmological. Lovecraft’s horror was the horror of scale (the discovery that the universe is vast, old, indifferent, and inhabited by processes for which humanity is not the point) and that is also, Carroll observes, simply the modern astronomical picture, experienced without anaesthetic. The Elder Gods of the Third Grimoire personify that picture.

They are the god-forms of deep space and deep time, of what intelligence might become when it is no longer human, and the grimoire situates them accordingly: where elemental magic works the natural world and planetary magic works the human condition, stellar magic addresses the trans-human condition. The deck’s official terminology sorts its three spheres as Elements, Bi-Planets, and Stellar god-forms; the stellar cards are portals in the most literal sense the system possesses: windows onto the outside of the human frame.

Nyarlathotep guards the threshold because communication is his portfolio: he is the only mythos power that bothers to talk to us, which is exactly what makes him untrustworthy and indispensable at once.

To evoke Azathoth the magician repeats the incantation as many times as necessary whilst visualizing the Triconorbis sigil of a vortex swirling within a triangle. If possible, the magician should try to expand this vision into that of a vortex within a tetrahedron and then to transform it into an omni-directional vorticitation within a pentachoron…The Esotericon, Third Grimoire — the Azathoth evocation

That passage repays unpacking, because it displays the Third Grimoire’s signature fusion of pulp atmosphere and geometry homework. A pentachoron is the four-dimensional simplex (the 4-D analogue of the tetrahedron) and Carroll’s Azathoth working asks the practitioner to build a hyperdimensional figure in the visual imagination and then set it spinning in every direction at once, using the inevitable failure of visualisation as the gnosis itself.

The blind idiot god at the centre of the universe, piping amid the thin monotonous drums, is thus quietly identified with Carroll’s oldest metaphysical commitment: Chaos, the stochastic substrate, the quantum vacuum that The Octavo had dressed in equations.

The other five powers receive similarly double-coded treatments: each Elder God given full evocation and invocation protocols, sigils, incantations in appropriately writhing typography, tool consecrations involving unguents that Nikki Wyrd found deliciously apposite, and illustrations of robed magicians assuming god-forms whose hoods do not contain what hoods should contain.

Six Elder Gods receive this complete ritual apparatus, with the remaining Great Old Ones of the card set treated more summarily; the grimoire aligns the powers with the classical siddhis and with their modern engineering analogues, and the whole is framed (this is Lee’s central reading) as a magic of the Faustian bargain: the mythos as a system for working on forbidden knowledge as such.

Lee’s verdict (“far and away the best Necronomicon, qua grimoire”) rested on this double coding. Earlier magical Necronomicons had offered atmosphere without system or system without atmosphere; Carroll’s offers both, and adds a third register that is entirely his own: the identification of the mythos with the actual Promethean programme of technological civilisation.

The powers the Elder Gods personify (mastery of consciousness, of biology, of spacetime, of entropy, of matter at the smallest scales) are precisely the powers humanity is currently acquiring, and the grimoire’s pervasive atmosphere of warning is therefore not genre decoration but argument.

Lovecraft’s protagonists are destroyed by knowledge they are not structured to survive; Carroll’s wager is that magicians, of all people, ought to train for exactly that situation, since the alternative is to let the knowledge arrive among a species with no rehearsal whatever.

Lee caught the lineage here too, comparing the scheme to Leary’s SMI²LE programme of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, but where Leary sold transcendence as sunshine, Carroll sells it as risk, complete with a sly nod to role-playing games and the advisability of tracking one’s sanity points.

White, the least squeamish of reviewers, announced that he would not be working the grimoire until he could rent a cottage under the dark skies of Exmoor and do it properly, which as endorsements go is more convincing than praise.

The Portals of Chaos: Fifty-Four Doors

The Portals of Chaos deck is not a tarot, and the book’s substantial chapter on the history of cartomancy exists partly to explain why not. Carroll traces the tarot from Renaissance card game through Lévi’s Qabalistic annexation to its modern career as the Western psyche’s standard-issue mirror, and concludes that its structure (trumps, suits, and courts locked to a fifteenth-century social cosmos and a nineteenth-century correspondence scheme) carries exactly the inheritance the Chaobala was built to replace. The Portals therefore start over.

Fifty-four images, one per node of the new psychocosm: the elemental portals, the thirty-six god-forms of the bi-planetary sphere, and the stellar powers, with Baphomet and Nyarlathotep holding the two gates. No suits, no numbered pips, no Fool’s journey; the deck’s narrative is the Chaobala itself, climbed rather than shuffled. (The physical deck runs to fifty-five with its title card, a detail that has confused bibliographers and completists ever since.)

The book’s instructions for the cards invert the expected priority. Divination is permitted but explicitly demoted: these are, in Wyrd’s summary of the guidance, cards for magicians rather than fortune tellers, intended to prompt working relationships with the powers rather than to map futures, and their sheer size makes conventional spreads physically awkward in any case, a design decision functioning as doctrine.

The primary uses are evocation and invocation: the card propped on the altar as the focal image of the rite, the painted portal serving the function that the visualised god-image or the temple statue served in older systems.

Enchantment follows naturally (a working conducted “through” the appropriate portal borrows its power’s domain) and the book’s quantum chapter supplies the theory, arguing (in the vein of The Octavo) that a spell’s effect is linked to its target at the future point of fulfilment and entangled backward to the moment of casting. White, who test-drove the forms for weeks before reviewing, reported the practical upshot: the cards re-tuned entities he had failed to reach through decades of text-based correspondence work.

This is the deck’s real theoretical significance, and it deserves a name: visual gnosis, the use of a made image as the engine of altered state rather than as its record. Classical Golden Dawn practice demanded that the magician construct god-forms in the trained imagination, an aptitude unevenly distributed and slowly acquired; the tattva system that Wyrd invoked when she found the elemental cards flat exists precisely because raw geometric visualisation is hard.

Kaybryn’s hyperreal portals move the burden: the image is supplied, at a density no imagination could sustain, and the practitioner’s work shifts from constructing the vision to entering it. Several reviewers noticed the consequence without naming it: White’s remark that the Aether card “shook something loose” that twenty years of concept-work had not, Wyrd’s observation that the figures’ slight manikin quality reads as archetype rather than portrait, keeping the images usefully non-human.

The deck democratises a skill bottleneck, exactly as the sigil method had democratised another one in 1978. It also, less comfortably, standardises the resulting visions: ten thousand magicians now approach Thoth through the same painting, Easter eggs and all. Art that works as an instrument works on everyone who uses it, and a tradition of radical individualism thereby acquired, in one publishing event, a shared visual unconscious.

The Epoch Reborn: The 2025 Edition

The first edition’s afterlife followed the standard trajectory of the desirable occult book: sold through, out of print, and traded at collector’s prices for a decade, with signed copies moving through Weiser Antiquarian’s catalogue at multiples of the launch price.

In April 2025, Mandrake of Oxford (the small Oxford house that had published The Apophenion and The Octavo) brought the work back as The Epoch, now available in hardback and, for the first time, paperback, with the Portals deck reissued separately in a slipcase (and print-on-demand distribution in the United States through, of all things, a board-game manufacturer: an arrangement Carroll would surely file under Mercury).

The new edition is described as updated and refined rather than merely reprinted, and it has grown: 292 pages against the original’s 216, with revised layout and typesetting, improved reproduction of Kaybryn’s art, and the abandonment of the original’s handsome but unwieldy landscape folio format for a conventional portrait octavo. The portable temple became genuinely portable.

The revision also registers a decade’s drift in Carroll’s theoretical centre of gravity. Between the two editions he had poured his energy into Hypersphere Cosmology: his standing alternative to big-bang orthodoxy, in which the universe is a finite, unexpanding hypersphere whose apparent redshift arises from small positive spacetime curvature rather than recession. The Epoch’s frame narrative of magical history now terminates in that picture, and the defining relation of the model (the condition that the universe’s gravity, size, and light-speed lock into a single balance) stands behind the reissue’s cosmological chapters as the hypersphere equation:

The most consequential name attached to the 2025 edition, however, belongs to neither author.

Professor Ronald Hutton (Fellow of the British Academy, historian of paganism and witchcraft, and the scholar whose Triumph of the Moon taught modern paganism to read its own history honestly) supplied an endorsement that the publishers, understandably, printed everywhere: this really is “a pantheon for the present day,” with “up-to-date technowizard artwork” and a commentary that “soars over millennia of tradition,” concluding that this is “a book to which goddesses and gods, historically so sensitive about their images, should be happy to belong.” The blurb repays a second reading.

Hutton is precisely the historian whose life’s work established that modern pagan traditions are creative constructions rather than survivals, and here he is certifying the Epoch as a legitimate construction, judged by the only standard his historiography allows: not antiquity, but quality. It is difficult to imagine a more exact academic ratification of Carroll’s theometry.

Phil Hine’s companion blurb (“a talismanic grimoire for the digital age”) supplied the practitioner’s seal from chaos magic’s other great systematiser, and the reissue thereby arrived endorsed from both flanks, academy and temple.

The timing gave the new edition a weight no one intended. Carroll died in the spring of 2026, within a year of the reissue, and the tributes that followed (from the IOT he had founded and long since left, from the bloggers who had reviewed the Epoch a decade earlier, from two generations of magicians raised on Liber Null) made clear that The Epoch had become, in retrospect, his summa: the last major statement seen through the press in his lifetime, with the interviews and retrospectives of the final years (treated in the next chapter) serving as its commentary. The 2014 edition had been a proposal; the 2025 edition reads, now, as a bequest.

Assessment: Iconography After Iconoclasm

Assessed as a book, the Esotericon is the easiest verdict in the corpus: it is Carroll’s best-made object, his most generous act of teaching, and (reviewers across a decade agree) the most complete single statement of what chaos magic had become by its fourth decade. Its three registers had never before coexisted in one Carroll volume.

The systematic register (the Chaobala, the combinatorial pantheon, the correspondence tables) satisfies the appetite that 777 once served; the devotional register (Baphomet, the god-form entries, the permission to love one’s made gods) admits what three decades of results-magic rhetoric had suppressed, namely that magicians keep altars because altars do something; and the visual register (Kaybryn’s full partnership, insisted upon by Carroll in every interview) gives the tradition what every durable magical culture has possessed and chaos magic had conspicuously lacked: an iconography.

Egyptian religion had its tomb walls, Vajrayana its thangkas, the Golden Dawn its Waite–Smith deck conquering the world one card at a time. Chaos magic, born in a Yorkshire of photocopied zines, had possessed only the eight-rayed star and an attitude. After 2014 it possessed fifty-four paintings.

Assessed as an event in the history of the tradition, the verdict is harder, and the difficulty is the interesting part. Chaos magic’s founding gesture was iconoclasm: nothing is true, all frameworks are provisional, burn the maps and keep the matches.

The Epoch is, unavoidably, an icon-making and map-fixing project, and Dave Lee’s review named the danger with the authority of a founder-generation witness: when an open-ended metasystem congeals into a single elegant subset, the congealing is usually a symptom of decadence, because it is the lazy part of the mind that loves closure, and the beautiful subset risks being mistaken for the whole.

On this view the Epoch is chaos magic’s Council of Nicaea: the moment a movement of wandering heretics acquired a creed, a calendar of saints, and very good church art. The fact that the creed explicitly denies its own permanence does not by itself prevent this; every canon includes a clause about its own humility, and the clause is always the first thing devotees stop reading.

Carroll’s defence, assembled from the book’s own arguments, runs roughly so. First, the provenance clause is not buried but structural: the Chaobala teaches its own contingency in its architecture (a top storey of forbidden rather than divine knowledge admits no final resting state), and a scheme that dates itself and names its makers invites revision in a way that revealed schemes cannot.

Second, theometry converts canon-formation from betrayal into obligation: if gods and maps are mortal artefacts, then refusing to build good ones is not purity but abdication, a tradition electing to remain a critique of other people’s furniture while sitting on the floor.

Third, and most pragmatically: the alternative to a well-made shared iconography is not no iconography but a bad one, assembled from whatever imagery drifts in, and by 2014 chaos magic’s drift-assembled imagery was already congealing around skulls, static, and borrowed horror-film production design. The Epoch at least congealed on purpose, with a historian’s bibliography and a painter of the first rank.

The honest conclusion is that both readings are correct and the tension between them is the work’s meaning. The Epoch is simultaneously the fullest realisation of Carroll’s project (the Quantum Neo-Pagan paradigm actually built, furnished, illustrated, and shipped) and the clearest evidence that the project’s founding energy had passed from revolution to consolidation, from Liber Null’s match to the Esotericon’s cathedral. Carroll seems to have understood this perfectly.

The book’s title is a boundary marker, and boundaries face both ways: an epoch is where something ends as much as where something begins.

He built the tradition its temple, filled it with mortal gods, engraved the demolition instructions above the door, and (after a decade’s pause and one final, enlarged edition blessed by the academy) left it to a generation that will decide whether to worship in the building, renovate it, or honour its architect in the manner he taught: by burning the map and drawing a better one. On the evidence of theometry, he expected all three, in that order.

This is a book to which goddesses and gods, historically so sensitive about their images, should be happy to belong.Ronald Hutton, endorsement to The Epoch