Epoch. The Esotericon & Portals of Chaos

" This really is a pantheon for the present day: up-to-date technowizard artwork, a commentary which soars over millennia of tradition, picking out what is useful and relevant at the present, and icons which sum up what deities from the whole span of Western and not-so-Western culture have cumulatively come to mean. This is a book to which goddesses and gods, historically so sensitive about their images, should be happy to belong." Professor Ronald Hutton - Fellow of the British Academy " Not content to release a new grimoire, the Chancellor of Arcanorium College has produced three. Oh, also, one of them is a Necronomicon. Elemental, Planetary, and Lovecraftian grimoires are joined by an accompanying tome of digitally and painstakingly rendered icons. The Portals of Chaos, and its Chaobala systemisation, marks a particularly cohesive collection of Carroll's work. But it also contains much exciting new material. Exploration of bi-planetary sorcery - a central component of Renaissance magic somewhat absent in modern occult discourse - is a particularly important feature. Epoch is a useful resource both for those just starting out and for experienced magicians. There is something here to excite and challenge occultists of many different dispositions and practices. " Alexander Cummins - Author of 'The Starry Rubric' "The enormous scope of the theory expounded within, coupled with the extraordinary pictures (which are better than anything of this ilk since Freida got down with her paintbrushes), provoke many thoughts as well as providing a neat summary of some complex ideas. Simultaneously a history and a prediction, it casts a spell covering spacetime and beyond, allowing your magick to have results." Nikki Wyrd -Author of 'The Book of Baphomet' Pulled together, it is a fantastic cohesion of ideas in need of cohering, doubly so because the cohesion makes no claims to antiquity and doesn't have to fit with either Neoplatonic emanations or Sanskrit body centres. Getting your head around the Chaobala is getting your head around a substantially updated magical cosmology. If that kind of thing is your jam, this kind of book is your toast. Gordon White - Runesoup Without a doubt, the Epoch will have a great influence on the chaos magick paradigm and modern magick in general for years to come. I think every magician, even if they have their own correspondences, should examine the Chaobola system for its elegance and breadth. James Wilber - Scroll of Thoth Some three or more years ago we began with a project that would eventually involve a great deal of research and writing and practical magic, and the creation of a great deal of artwork. The concepts with which we began rappidly crystalised around the ideas below: The idea of a 'Chaos Tarot' has periodically surfaced over the years, however the conventional idea of tarot seems far too limiting, and the several attempts to merely introduce Chaoist symbolism into the Conventional tarot format have not proved particularly interesting or groundbreaking. Visual images can convey ideas and speak to our subconscious often far more effectively and more immediately than words. Moveable images on cards also provide many interesting possibilities that a book of images cannot provide so easily. However it seems a waste to confine such a resource to just Divination, when it could also have application to Enchantment, Evocation, Invocation, and Illumination as well. Plus the symbolic systems from which conventional tarot derive and the symbolic systems into which more recent commentators have attempted to fit it, now often have little appeal or relevance. The symbolic systems used in the past to generate or explain the 78 images usually ended up confected in such complex ways that the supposed meanings of the resulting cards bore only a highly etiolated relationship to them. Randomly generated images and meanings would have served the same purpose. The Tree of Life (Naples arrangement), the Hebrew Alphabet, Astrological symbolism, elemental symbolism, alchemical symbolism, numerological ideas and all, make a rather messy 'universal kabala' with little explanatory power. This proposed Portal Deck does not have to have 78 cards; it can have whatever number we deem useful. It would seem nowadays more appropriate to start afresh with something closer to our own physical,psychological and metaphysical maps of ourrealities: - To perhaps consider the relationship between the classical elements of earth, air fire, water and aether and the concepts of mass, energy, space, time and information. To perhaps consider using the 8 colours of magic as the basis of a 'biplanetary' scheme that integrates a neo-pagan pantheon with both the eternal and the current challenges of the human condition. To perhaps consider a replacement of the trancendentalist concepts of the platonic-pagan-monotheist esoteric paradigm with an approach derived from the emerging quantum-neo-pagan esoteric paradigm,by examining what the Lovecraftian perspective of cosmic indifferentism may have to offer. - Elemental Magic - Planetary Magic - Stellar Magic - Magical Cartography - Chaobalistic - Theometric Principles