This interview was conducted on the 9th of May 2025 by Daniel Domaradzki.
The Idea and the Inspiration
Question: What got you inspired to start the Chaos Magick idea in the first place?
I picked up a copy of Mastering Witchcraft by Paul Huson back around 1970 at age 17. This seminal book remains in print. Basically it consists of a manual on how to actually attempt more or less freestyle magic for yourself. It doesn’t promote Wicca as a religion and it approaches magic without new age mysticism or moral judgement. Soon after, I went to university and got very bored with chemistry at that level and started reading all the greats of magic – the Grimoires, Eliphas Levi, Mathers (Golden Dawn), Crowley, Spare, and many other lesser lights. I started experimenting with practical work – meditations, invocations, spell castings, evocations, and divinations. I met with others and got into intense discussions and practical work with them. My scientific background led me to a reductive approach to magic – what lies underneath the romance of sorcery, exactly what do we need to do to make it work – and what just functions as window dressing or supporting belief structure.
The Chaos flavour arose from several sources. Quantum science revealed that reality basically runs on randomness rather than cause and effect which only arises on a probabilistic basis. In my own magical experiences I found enchantment far more effective than divination and this confirmed to me that reality exhibits a fair bit of indeterminacy, and that we can nudge the hand of chance more readily than anticipate it. Plus of course, I spent my formative years in an era when much social change and upheaval began (it hasn’t stopped since), and Michael Moorcock wrote novels about capricious chaos gods whimsically overturning established order as a matter of principle, so I came to view magic as a Luciferic and Promethean quest to overturn religion and steal the fire of the gods and demons who personify our own abilities writ large.
Pete’s Approach to Chaos Magick
Question: Your approach is highly practical – can you elaborate on how individualizing other belief systems helps you achieve better results in magick?
I prefer to select my beliefs for their utility. Many of my contemporaries got into the belief systems of authoritarian politics (usually Marxism, sometimes Fascism) or into eastern mysticism or even into conventional religions in their formative years but I couldn’t see the uses of those, such belief systems did not seem to give useful results, particularly when out of context.
If you get given just one wish in life, it makes sense to ask for an unlimited number of wishes by wishing to become a Magician. (Even if that can seem a bit out of context in the modern world.)
The magical belief systems that I inherited from my fairly recent predecessors (Mathers, Crowley, Spare, etc.) consisted of a mixed bag of Imagined Ancient Religions, Neoplatonism, and Post-Enlightenment Rationalism, Psychology, & Parapsychology. These belief systems do not sit comfortably together at all. Rather than attempt a messy integration of these paradigms, it seemed a better policy to adopt the meta-belief that belief has some power to shape both subjective and objective reality. Thus I adopted a situationist approach to belief – believe whatever you need to, to get the job done. The first part of doing anything consists of casting a spell upon yourself.
Magick and Science
Question: Can you give us some advanced examples of how you utilize science in magick?
That great theoretician of modern magic, Lionel Snell, said that pseudoscience has become the natural language of magic. (In past ages magicians used largely religious terminology). I certainly use some of the interpretations of quantum physics to bolster my magical beliefs. Physicists who use other interpretations of quantum physics might describe that as pseudoscience. Rather amusingly, we currently have no scientific way of deciding between the various interpretations.
I do not favour the loose use of the scientific term ‘energy’ in magic. I think magic works through attention and information transference. However, the use of a rather loose concept of ‘magical energies’ can help with the focusing of intent.
I do use magic in my science; I invoke the imaginary (?) deities of Apophenia and the Elder Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos to inspire and perhaps even inform my enquiries into the technicalities of reality – consciousness, the cosmos, matter, space, and time.
Pete’s Experiences
Question: The way you act is very “British” – you don‘t argue with fools, you keep most harsh opinions to yourself, and you certainly DO NOT SHOW OFF. Would you be willing to open up a bit more and sate our readers’ curiosity by telling us about what you have witnessed, practiced, and come up with when you were traveling?
I refer you to my replies to question five for a selection of what I have done and talk here about what I have observed.
Humans have extraordinary suggestibility. I have seen whole nations in thrall to nonsensical religions and ideologies. You don’t realise how peculiar your own culture can appear until you have seen other people’s. Our extraordinary suggestibility arises with our intelligence – we have a greater ability to learn from each other than any other earthly species, but few manage to take control of their own suggestibility.
When it comes to beliefs, Nothing has ultimate Truth, Everything remains Possible, and the consequences may prove Ghastly.
I guess that I went travelling looking for enlightenment but I came back with the question – precisely what do I want enlightenment about?
Unbelievable Magickal Phenomena
Question: What are the most unbelievable phenomena you witnessed in your practice?
I prefer to think of the improbability rather than the unbelievability of events that have arisen from a life inspired by the ideas and practices of magic.
For example:
Several instances of poltergeist type activity in my early career when I felt full of fury and let it rip for the heck of it – objects would teleport very usefully, or sometimes they would shatter pointlessly without any physical contact.
Several instances of telepathic communication of useful unexpected information whilst dreaming, later verified by normal means, from my Mother, and bizarrely from my Father just following his death.
Writing a book of magic at age 23 that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and now appears in numerous languages, despite having a very poor record of English grammar and spelling (my spelling remains abysmal.)
Surviving numerous near death scrapes, including clinging to the back of a railway carriage through the night for hundreds of miles, sailing a self-made open ‘boat’ through a tropical typhoon that sank and killed many on more professionally made boats, climbing to seventeen thousand feet in the Himalayas without any sort of proper equipment or preparation and getting my altitude sick companion and myself back down alive.
Abstracting the geometry and the algebraic equations of magic and hypersphere cosmology (particularly the hyperspherical lensing equation) from raw data, having had no proper maths tuition since age 16.
Somehow, without previous experience or capital, turning a little lock-up rented shop into a fair-sized enterprise with an extensive wholesale and export network and substantial property holdings.
As you have observed, I don’t like to show off, but I do seem to have become improbably lucky in this life, and I put it all down to my belief in magic.