An Ode to Peter J. Carroll - The Wizard Has Gone
Molly Hankins April 30, 2026
The unexpected passing of occult author, scientist, and chaos magic pioneer Peter J. Carroll on April 22 marks the end of an era, one paved by iconic writers and psychonauts like Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson. About as little is known about his life as his death, because Peter always insisted on being a mystery and letting his work speak for itself. Reading the post announcing his passing, on his website Specularium.org entitled ‘The Wizard Has Gone,’ I found his obituary to reveal more about his personal life than he ever had. He was a husband and father of two daughters, and he had incredible success as an entrepreneur, although he never spoke of his business dealings. He was also my teacher, and a willing mentor to any dedicated occultist seeking to utilize his chaos curriculum to become an adept reality hacker.
His most famous book, Liber Null and Psychonaut, brought me into the chaos magic universe, introducing both a classical Hermetic and a distinctly math and physics-based perspective. I was hooked. Up until that point, my study of magic and theoretical physics had been separate, and as a layman, I was scrambling to understand even the most entry-level quantum concepts. Carroll brought them together, practically and poetically, with his description of the aether.
“Kia is consciousness, the elusive I,” he wrote. “Between chaos and ordinary matter, and between Kia and the mind, there exists a realm of half-formed substance called aether. It is dualistic matter but of a very tenuous, probabilistic nature. It consists of all the possibilities which chaos throws out which have not yet become solid realities. It is the ‘medium’ by which the ‘non-existent’ chaos translates itself into ‘real’ effects.” On reading this I immediately thought of the quantum field and wave-particle duality. If aether could be programmed to act upon the quantum field of possibility to structure matter, then perhaps directing our perception collapses the wave state of infinite possibility into particles of matter? I reveled at the idea that chaos magic was a system I could use to manipulate my perception in order to manipulate reality.
And I did find this to be true, more or less. But Chancellor Pete, as he liked his students to call him, was such a paradox that I found it hard to keep up with him. He told me that any chaos magician who was at all worthy would ultimately end up making their own contributions, which I loved. Then he’d seem cross when I sought to find my own way through the Arcanorium curriculum. I didn’t mind, he was curious about my methods and I would answer his questions in lengthy emails written with the feverish ecstasy of any student who’s had the privilege of studying under a teacher who’s also a personal hero.
In one exchange, lamenting the things going wrong in my life and being worried that my sloppy, amateur chaos magic efforts were the underlying cause, he reminded me that, “At times like these it often helps to review all the things which haven't gone wrong.” That’s how he talked to me - a little cheeky, a little dry, but always extremely on point and even borderline sweet at times. It makes sense that he had daughters. From his books I expected him to be a scathing hard-ass, and he certainly was. But Pete was also patient, with a surprising edge of softness and an unbelievable generosity with his time. Arcanorium College was a free program from which only two students had graduated when I started in 2024. I never finished, and truthfully I’m not sure I ever intended to. I just wanted to learn from him, and I did up until the year he died. He was always looking for someone to replace him as Chancellor. I hope he found them.
“Do everything possible to achieve successful outcomes by ordinary means, and then throw in Magic”
In Liber Kaos he wrote, “The magical view is that time is cyclic and that all processes recur. Even cycles which appear to begin or end are actually parts of larger cycles. Thus all endings are beginnings, and the end of time is synonymous with the beginning of another universe.” Pete really did create a whole universe with his work in chaos magic, going all the way back to the magazine he launched in the mid ‘70s with collaborator Ray Sherwin, The New Equinox. They also founded “Illuminates of Thanateros” together, a fraternal chaos magic society, its title combining the names of two Greek gods, Thanatos and Eros, the gods of death and sexual love respectively. They represented the two extreme poles of methods for attaining magical consciousness, with sex being the positive charge and death being the negative.
Pete reached the negative end of that pole right when he said he would, in the early hours of the morning around 4 am. In Psychonaut he wrote, “This is the time the mind and body-mind is at its lowest physiological level. It is the time of dream and the time when most people are born and most people will die.” It’s quite fitting that our last email exchange was about what to do with grief, because I wanted to figure out how to harness it as energy to charge the metaphorical battery of my magic practice. He wasn’t so keen on the idea of using my sadness as fuel to manipulate the aether. It was desperate and probably perilous from a magical perspective, plus he heavily cautioned against acting as what he called a ‘crisis magician,’ frantically seeking to influence reality only when things go wrong.
Instead, Chancellor Pete suggested I use that energy in the physical world. A dear friend had died suddenly, and I was behind on my Arcanorium course work. He told me about when his mother redecorated the house after his father passed away so that their home became her home, and suggested I find a similarly immersive outlet. “Choose something challenging and meaningful to commemorate your friend,” he wrote, signing off as he always did - Stokastikos Pete. His well-known pseudonym Stokastikos was an homage to the Greek words stokhos, which means to aim for a target, and stokhastikos, the ability to guess. I learned from Liber Null that turning the fear of loss and death into an act of love through physical work directs our perception to positively manipulating matter, a solid guess on his part of an aim to make me feel better. The act also put me in the vibration of creation, death’s eternal opposite.
“Do everything possible to achieve successful outcomes by ordinary means, and then throw in Magic AS WELL,” he shared on Stokastikos’ Problem Solving Page, insisting the practice be used to augment achievement rather than to compensate for real or perceived failure. Pete never revealed anything about his life’s achievements with any specificity, including making sure a single photo of himself never appeared on the internet. But now that the wizard is gone I suspect more information will come out, if only because the people who loved him want to share. I am honored to be one of those people and eternally grateful to Chancellor Pete for entertaining me as a student. Chaotic as I was, it was extraordinarily appropriate, and working with him helped me become my own hero.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
