On Peter Carroll and Multiple Selves

There seems little point in practising magic unless you want to do at least a few extraordinary things with this incarnation.

-Peter J. Carroll

Since Crowley, no other individual has exerted a more significant impact on contemporary occultism than Peter J. Carroll. Hearing of his recent passing was deeply saddening — it's doubtful we will see anyone capable of challenging magical discourse to such a degree anytime soon.

I have no intention of trying to write a definitive eulogy for Carroll; if something like that is even possible. I do, however, want to reflect on his influence and how I've come to develop some of his ideas in my own work. Most specifically I want to draw your attention to his ideas around Multiple Selves, which has been formative in my work on physical transformation.

Putting aside the specifics of Carroll's ideas and theories, it frequently goes under appreciated just how strong and charismatic a writer he was. This is particularly evident in his first two books — Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos — where his dry British wit and systematic way of organising sophisticated concepts no other author seemed able to clearly communicate is most obviously displayed.

In my view, these two books are the most significant in Carroll's collection. I'm aware that he later distanced himself from some of the ideas in these works, but I believe his initial contributions set the foundation for my understanding of Chaos Magic. They exude a genuine enthusiasm and energy that is both palpable and inspiring. Compared to his later writings, the Sabbatic elements of Austin Spare's work are more evident in Liber Null, along with a more open attitude towards the existence of a spirit world — which Carroll becomes increasingly unsympathetic to from Psybermagic onwards.

Growing up on the Victorian Surf Coast in the 90s, Liber Null was the first time I read someone writing about magic that made me think: oh shit, this guy is really taking this seriously. Like, really seriously. Not parroting ideas or speculating on an idealised magic from the past — just a cold-blooded exploration of operative magic. Stylistically it's a forceful, matter-of-fact text that challenges you to put practice before theory; shoot first and ask questions later. Importantly, Carroll states his entire perspective on practical magic within the first few sentences:

that altered states of consciousness are the key to unlocking one's magical abilities; and that these abilities can be developed without any symbolic system except reality itself.

Agree or disagree, his literary predecessors — Crowley, Spare, Grant, LaVey — all danced around this idea with varying degrees of laborious obfuscation. Carroll just stated it plainly. Importantly, it lays the groundwork for personal experimentation without being tied to any specific system. That the results arising from this experimentation might diverge from Carroll's own interpretations is both a feature and a bug of Chaos Magic more generally — something that became clearly apparent in the development of the order he initiated, The Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT), following his resignation.

Critics of Carroll often miss the provocation embedded in those first two texts: to establish a purely magical paradigm as distinct from both a materialist and a transcendental one. Read in historical context, he is responding to the overrepresentation of imprecise and vague mystical ideas that had come to dominate magical theory and practice. Once you understand this, you can see why he pushes back so hard on concepts like the Holy Guardian Angel, astrology, and the independent reality of a spirit world.

Honestly, you'd be hard pressed to find many practicing chaos magicians who are completely on board with the hardline distinction between transcendental and magical worldviews to the degree Carroll proposes. I certainly am not. Nevertheless, it is a critical line of thinking that is important to understanding how it flavours his more influential and contentious ideas — multiple selves, the aeonic model, colours of magic, equations of magic, and sleight of mind.

The concept of Multiple Selves is something Carroll develops as a response to monotheistic paradigms and to challenge the idea of a self-consistent single personality. You can see the gestation of his thinking in Liber Null, where he redefines the concept of a personal soul or Holy Guardian Angel in Chaoist terms:

We, each of us, have a real Holy Guardian Angel, or Kia, which is our power of consciousness, magic, and genius. We also have a regrettable capacity to become obsessed with the mere products of our genius, mistaking them for the genius itself.

His further development appears in his comments on Ritual Illumination in Liber Kaos, where he makes a utilitarian distinction between the paradigm of Atman — "doctrine of a personal soul" — and Anatta — "hypothesis of no soul." Carroll's prejudice towards a no-soul philosophy is partly cautionary: magic provides tools to bloat petty aspects of yourself into monstrous proportions if not handled with maturity. But the further consideration is more practical. An Anatta-ist perspective provides psychological distance, where modifications to the self become "a matter of the addition or the deletion of certain patterns of thought and behaviour."

This is fundamentally what fuels Carroll's attempt to build out a multi-mind model and an eight-fold division of the psyche into practical magic. His views solidify in Psybermagic, where he writes:

You don't have to sell your soul to succeed with off-white magick. You merely have to recognise the existence of your other seven.

Carroll informs us that all the secrets of magick can be achieved by this recognition, along with the capacity or willingness to play various roles in extremis. The observation is not without criticisms — on the surface it is a trope of postmodernism, emphasising reductionism and fragmentation. We might also ask: why limit ourselves to only eight selves?

As someone who has worked with the model and achieved significant results, and helped others do the same, I think I'm qualified to comment. Firstly, I think Carroll is incorrect around the nature of a Core Self — an error that arises from him trying to unpack his theoretical starting point and rebuild it in a fashion that doesn't require transcendental reference to function. At the same time, Carroll's core technology remains the use of extraordinary states of consciousness — "gnosis" — paired with ritual to implant belief. This proves effective regardless of the model.

In my own work with clients from a variety of backgrounds, including those for whom Carroll's framework is too niche or potentially alienating, there are more accessible models for multiple selves. Performance coach Todd Herman's The Alter-Ego Effect and Joe Dispenza's frequently cited observation that "your personality creates your personal reality" both, in their different registers, demonstrate that changes at the level of self-identity can produce dramatic alterations to behaviour, health, physicality, and external circumstances — a perspective largely central to Carroll's core ideas.

Distinct from Carroll, Herman offers a view of the Core Self that is closer to my own:

The Core Self is where possibility exists. It's this deep inner core where a creative force resides waiting to be activated by the power of intention. Because human beings have this incredible ability to imagine, create, and decide, it gives you the opportunity to change something in an instant. The Core Self is where your deep desires, aspirations, and dreams reside.

What Herman's framing offers — which Carroll's model ultimately resists — is a teleological dimension. The Core Self is not simply a neutral switching station between functional selves, but something closer to an orientation device; it points toward something. This distinction matters enormously in practical work, particularly when the goal is physical transformation.

Carroll's technology remains largely intact and, in my experience, irreplaceable: the induction of extraordinary states of consciousness paired with deliberate ritual to install new belief structures at a level beneath ordinary critical resistance. What changes with a richer model of the Core Self is the target of that technology. Rather than simply collapsing a limiting self and substituting a more functional one — which risks a kind of spiritual entrepreneurialism, forever auditing and restructuring an identity with no stable foundation — we are instead returning the client to what was always latent. The work becomes less archaeological and more horticultural.

This reframing has had concrete consequences in my practice. Clients who approach physical transformation through the lens of becoming something foreign to themselves tend to plateau or regress, often dramatically. The identity cannot hold what the body is being asked to embody. Those guided toward understanding transformation as the expression of something already present — already true of them at the level of the Core Self — show markedly different results. The body, it turns out, is a remarkably faithful scribe. It records what you believe yourself to be with a precision that no amount of disciplined behaviour can fully override.

Carroll's Multi-Self model is primarily an intellectual strategy to reject the need for an essential self with a corresponding True Will or inherent purpose. Its utility rests in providing an objective vantage point from which to manipulate and magnify aspects of the psyche — what therapeutic psychology refers to as self-distancing.

But what if this initial premise — the one being rejected — is incorrect? I believe there is a Core Self whose will is to pursue continuous expansion; not necessarily in a fixed direction, but along a definite trajectory.

Carroll spent decades insisting that the magician needs no fixed north — that the compass itself is the destination. And yet his life's work traces an unmistakable arc: the restless physicist-sorcerer, always pressing against the membrane between experimental science and operative magic, always trying to close the distance between what can be measured and what can be willed. If that isn't a Core Self pursuing its own expansion, I'm not sure what is.

Perhaps that's the most honest tribute I can offer him: to take seriously both what he built and where I think he stopped short. The tools he gave us are real. The states, the ritual, the deliberate dismantling of a self that no longer serves — these work, and they work in the body as much as the mind. What I've found, in my own practice, is simply a destination. Not a fixed one. But a direction.

That, I think, Carroll would have found worth arguing about. And I mean that as the highest compliment.