One of Michael’s older pieces, apparently. Carroll basically sums up what, to me, is one of the main “points” of Technoccult the web site:
Science usually begins as magick and then dissociates itself from it. Remember how chemistry grew out of alchemy, astronomy grew out of astrology, and medicine grew out of various shamanic practices. If some form of magick can create a real effect of some kind then it will eventually end up as a science. Some of what now passes for parapsychology will become science one day. I loathe the anti-scientific attitude of many modern occultists. I do not think that any scientific understanding we may achieve of magick will diminish magick in any way, it will expand the subject, both in theory and practice.
See also this interview from the first issue of New World Disorder
For the last 17 years I have managed a trading company that I established, I have 20 staff and a large building and a respectable 7-figure turnover. Royalties from books rarely make anyone a living unless they write a best-selling novel. I gave up lecturing when I retired from the Pact. Early on I realized that you can only make money out of magic by setting up a cult or running a correspondence course, and this did not appeal to me. I immensely enjoy having my own business, with all the attendant risks and rewards.
August 12, 2004 at 12:54 am
“Science usually begins as magick and then dissociates itself from it.”
Of course, this is partly what I’ve been interested in of late, the translation of magic into science and what happens at that moment, how it is possible, what the general effects of this translation are. The graticule is a rhetorical device which translates magic into science, and the act is very much dissociative. It is a dissociating technology, and it dissociates science not only from its origins but scientific disciplines one from another.
The goal is kind of but not really to develop methods of putting it back together. The big question for me is not so much how we get back to magic or how we could make magic more scientific but rather what happens when science “ends” the way magic “ended.”
August 12, 2004 at 2:37 am
eventually I’ll have my book written & I’ll be able to reference myself, but one of the three themata of Memwar memwar.blogspot.com is that the interactions with technology will become increasingly based on magical techniques.
for example
vibrating commands to nanites in the bloodstream initiating self-transformation at a genetic level
chanting an invocation to skinwalk into an animal’s form
pretty much the same thing. I’m interested in how closely greek ideas of atoms and their driving spirits parallels conceptual mem & nanotech models, & see the ‘singularity’ as the point where science & magic come together to tag-team tradition
starry-eyed idealism I know