Pieces of Eight Quotes

“Anyone else who misspent their largely-sexless adolescence playing role playing games would be aware that games nights are often accompanied by peculiar states of consciousness and even the odd poltergeist effect.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“We thought that replacing the singular, authoritative voice of the twentieth century newscaster with the digitally-enabled vox populi of the internet would forever change the narrative. All it did was ruin the spelling.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“A Greek term, kaos means the void, the abyss, the First Created Thing. The word derives from the Proto-Indo-European term for gaping, or yawning, as in an opening mouth, a primal scream issuing from behind ancient teeth.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“If you are dispensing leeches in the twenty first century you are LARPing, not practicing herb lore.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“The journey –the adventure- may well be a microcosmic expression of the universe experiencing the universe, rather than sitting at home on the unmanifest couch, fondling the cat and ordering pizza via an app. Everything”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“What Creator god worth its salt would give even the slightest shit about a sacrificed goat or how often you masturbate? Besides, there is an element of self-respect here. He’s just not that into you. It is the neuroses-inducing idiocy of a personally approachable universal creator that is the savage belief. (Had Meister Eckhart been a Victorian explorer, Christianity would have put a better foot forward than it did with the retired vicars of the nineteenth century or the happy-clappy, flyover morons wandering about Africa and the Amazon today.)”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Particularly when it comes to chaos magic, building your own optimal metaphysics becomes more challenging when you have to shoehorn it into whatever preferred version of a Supreme Being you have selected, as they all tend to be quite unsophisticated and clunky from a metaphysical perspective. Put simply, you are better off developing a regular meditation practice than trying to force a square Creator into a round hole.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Magic has always been about seizing power or subverting it, the goal in either case being freedom from the conditions of reality in which the magician finds him or herself.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“This process is an update of the archetypal shamanic journey and his or her ongoing role for the tribe: seeking out these beings, trafficking with them for personal or tribal gain and generally just avoiding their ire.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“One end accepts too much, the other end accepts too little, and there in the middle is the western magical tradition exemplified by the experiments of John Dee and Edward Kelley, or Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuberg.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“At the paranormalist end, Jacques Vallée once famously remarked “just because a message comes from Heaven doesn’t mean it’s not stupid.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Anyone with even trifling experience with spirit work will have seen how they often make their presence, wishes or intentions known via a string of the most baroque, apparently-acausal, largely-trivial events and coincidences.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Magic is, if anything, extradimensional diplomacy.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Peter J Carroll writes of the need for every sorcerer to have a ‘wizardly’/Ouranian archetype in his or her cosmology. Saint Cyprian of Antioch certainly fulfils this function.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Live an active life closer to nature and you will be physically and psychologically healthy. Team Animism wins again.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“The very best magicians are scavengers of the useful and banishers of the useless.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Learn and tell your history or lesser people will tell it for you. This is your lore. Keep it.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“The magicians of the Golden Dawn built a history that now appears inaccurate but was cutting edge for its time. They haunted the British Museum like the ghosts in the spirit masks they peered at from behind glass. Emulate them. From a chaos magic perspective, the hypothesis that historical accuracy improves the effectiveness of sorcery over historical inaccuracy is solid.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“It is more useful for the magician to consider living systems not as some unaware little eddies in a universal consciousness field, but as ‘outposts’ of the spirit world.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Every wizard needs to build rather than rent a metaphysics. And such a metaphysics needs to not only improve the success of your practical enchantments but also allow you to interrogate reality in an increasingly sophisticated way.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Particularly in physics, science’s fifty-year drift into the unscientific has recently reached a surreal apogee. String theory is widely considered ‘the only game in town’ when it comes to cosmology yet it has not made a single testable prediction about the universe. Ever. This has led some string theorists to suggest that if a theory is ‘elegant’ and ‘explanatory’ enough, it need not be tested experimentally! To put it another way, scientists’ science no longer needs to be scientific but you should still listen to them when they tell you what is true and what is not. And these are the guys telling us magic is irrational?”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Materialism, it must be understood, is a premise of science, not a finding.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Terence McKenna once famously said that science asks “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” That miracle is the instantaneous arrival of all the laws of nature and all the matter and energy in the universe, appearing out of nowhere at the moment of the Big Bang, before going on to expand in uneven and unexplained ways.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“A ‘true’ magic circle is the growing of ears to hear the stars and voices to speak the language of the dead. It is building nerve endings that let you caress the spines of demons. It is opening eyes that can see angels dancing between subatomic particles. It is having a portable research lab and postal address in this world and the next. Divination, enchantment, malefica, prayer. These all blur into the right action in the opportune moment.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“As it got away from its founders, chaos magic came to mean ‘doing whatever you want’ in popular parlance, which is probably close to the opposite of its original formulation. In the modern world, ‘doing whatever you want’ leads to Type II diabetes and very public bankruptcies. But the supposed freedom that chaos magic offers -the apple in its garden- is a stark one. Chaos magic is not ‘doing whatever you want’, it is ‘trialling a lot of things and retaining those that work’. It is entirely unforgiving of failure or –more specifically- excuses for failure. Chaos magic lacks any certificates of participation. You achieve what you set out to do or you have failed. Success could be lasting apotheosis or it could be bedding your secretary. This only looks like elitism to failures. To scientists, it looks like science.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

“Gnosticism may rightly be described as an alien religion in that it explores mankind’s cosmic alienation; the belief that this is not all there is to life or to being a human.”
― Gordon White, Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments