You may have noticed that I am chronically tardy to post journal entries; most of the last year was taken up with a change of day-career, organising events such as the Oxford Symposium, Glastonbury Conference, and Oxwick Retreat, and the small matter of getting married.

I was however spurred into thinking very hard about writing something when three friends died in the space of a week at the end of April, one of whom being Peter J. Carroll. I found out after a long and rewarding day of OTO initiations, and was knocked for six to be honest. I resolved to write something as soon as possible. And then didn’t.

I still was intending to and still not doing so when I was called earlier today by one of my oldest friends to break the news that Gordon White had also passed away, and I realised that I genuinely had to remark upon the fact. After a cursory trawl of my GMail to find my earliest discourse with Gordon, it seems that had been lost in a “you’re-running-out-of-space” purge some years ago; curiously however, I did find this email from October 2013:

…in fact I've been meaning to contact you about that weekend, so thank you! In case you haven't heard, the Occult Conference is now going to have quite the special guest in Pete Carroll who is launching his new book/opus, coming with his entourage of NZ artist Matt Kaybryn and also (and this I'm keeping quiet, so I'd appreciate discretion) Ronald Hutton, who contributed to the historical sections. The contents list are up on www.specularium.org so have a look.

I think the cat’s out of the bag now, seeing as that event was 12 years ago, but it’s funny that one of my earliest remaining emails to Gordon mentions Pete. In effect, this is a memorial post for a binary star-system who orbited at very different ends of the Chaos Magick current, but were both hugely influential in my life and, to a greater or lesser extent, real friends of mine.

In lieu of having written about Pete in a timely fashion, I’m going to write separately here and then share some thoughts. It may be egocentric of me, but really, they have left for better pastures, and it is we who are left who seek to console ourselves by remembering them.

Gordon White

Hi Gordon, my name is Sef…

You know, I can’t actually recall who first showed me RuneSoup. It may have been someone in OTO, it may have been passed around Gentlemen 4 Jupiter by Jack, or turned up on someone’s Facebook wall. After reading through the Whiskey Rants and then Archonology at whatever stage they were at, I sent him a fairly crude “hey, what’s up?” style email wanting to talk about pre-history and occult orders and animism and…. And everything. His response opened with “Hi Sef, I know who you are…” which was gratifying if not a little unnerving. We instantly seemed to be on the same wavelength, hit it off, and got into some incredibly deep conversations over email, which switched to Google Hangouts, and according to my chat logs became Google Chat in 2014.

The real magic of Gordon was spending time with him. He ended up coming to Glastonbury and, probably in 2012 after I’d moved there, we met up and had the first of many, many whiskies together. We discussed our UPG, we eyed each other up, and decided we were cool. Gordon was internet-famous already and I was getting around the UK occult scene pretty steadily, but the big break came in 2013 when I took over The Occult Conference from Jamie Alexzander (by ambushing him after he said he was stepping down) with the intention of making it an OTO concern - what actually happened, as Gordon refused to stop calling it, was that it became SefCon.

Now, that was always something I had avoided, up until the point I gave in to it and that, of course, went very badly. But Gordon believed in the project; even if he vehemently disagreed with my faith in initiatory orders, he agreed that ecumenicalism was the only way to save occult discourse. Whenever I was in London, or he was in the South West, we would get together for food, drinks, and conversations on magic and our lives until the wee small hours. He was my best friend for a long time.

Travelodges and Crowley-Crawls

Gordon attended some of my run of The Occult Conference in Glastonbury, and gave a quite brilliant lecture for The Visible College: Autumn Session in 2014 which I will link to at the end of this piece. It was titled “An Archaeology of Dragons” and was drawn from his research for Star.Ships which Scarlet Imprint published in 2016. I filmed all of the lectures and learned some important lessons, such as

Video editing is difficult, and takes a long time even with a professional suite;
I just don’t look that good on camera; and
You should send videos to all speakers individually to put up on their own channels when YouTube doesn’t let you host them yourself, instead of sending them all to one person.

Photo credit: Nic Phillips — Gordon, Sef, and Nic Phillips - Credit to Nic

Despite these mis-steps, the event was successful and led to further work with other genuinely fantastic practitioners. Gordon was the person who put me on to my website hosting platform which I’ve now been using for 12 years, and he helped to develop the original branding for TVC - though I think he was always pushing me to be more whimsical and less stuffy, much as he ribbed me about G4J throughout our friendship. Any success TVC enjoys as a ‘brand’ is thanks to him.

Around our esoteric event calendar, I continued seeing Gordon, including memorable nights in London where we drank in the Fitzroy Tavern or he smuggled me into a speakeasy under a Brazilian restaurant. In 2016 I attended the launch of Star.Ships with the Scarlets, Gordon, and one of my closest friends Danny Buckler, first in Watkins and then to a nearby pub, and had such a lovely evening it was midnight by the time I got on my motorbike and nearly caught hypothermia riding across Salisbury Plain in jeans and a leather jacket.

There is no feeling in the world like being part of the cool kids, and time with Gordon was always just the best adventure. In joy or sorrow, laughter or pain, he was an excellent compatriot who always knew just where to go to have the perfect evening in London, as if he had stepped out from the pages of an occult fantasy novel involving Harry Dresden, Peter Grant, or John Constantine. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d told me he had all three on speed-dial. I like to think one of them would have been my number.

The All-Red Shift

It’s impossible to be quite as close to someone who has moved to the other side of the world, but for a long time we kept in contact regularly. In 2018 I went through what could be termed as coming to the end of a catastrophic trajectory, and things were very bleak for me for a long time. I had a few friends who supported me more than others, and Gordon was one of them. He said this to me, and for all we had bantered about astrological veracity in the past, it really stuck with me:

“You fought some really really bad space weather, and it won.”

I withdrew generally but also lost touch with Gordon. We reconnected over the last few years, and he was happy to see things turn around for me. I was pleased to be able to say I had weathered the space-storm and, though we were in very different places in our practice and focus by this point, we were still friends.

I am heartbroken that I have not spent as much of the time since speaking to him, and now won’t get the chance. Gordon once described himself to me as the journalist here to watch the end of the world, and wherever he is documenting from, it’s their gain and our loss.

Peter J. Carroll

Formative Encounters

While I’m writing this chronologically by meeting, it’s only proper to say that I had heard of Pete Carroll first. I grew up in Manchester and spent my formative magical years in New Aeon Books on Oxford Street in the early 2000s, having arrived just too late to see the original grotty glory of the Tibb Street shop. Weirdly though my Dad had an office in the Corn Exchange until the IRA kindly blew it up, becoming the amusing-to-occultists-ly titled Triangle, and used to buy my video games as a kid from the stall next to Golden Dawn Books before it made it out to its own premises as New Aeon.

There I heard all about the glory days of the ‘80s, where the Wiccans and Chaotes and Thelemites were all either having a party or a fight, often simultaneously. Pete Carroll along with Ray Sherwin (and the other household names for those who wear black and consider having a good time and getting results more important than memorising Liber 777) had formed what became the IOT just over the Pennines, and there had been a Lodge in Manchester for most of the last twenty years, at times run by people I came to call mentors and friends. So, yes, I had a copy of Liber Null & Psychonaut, along with bootleg copies of some 3-letter libers, and it certainly shaped my early studies and thoughts on esoteric practices.

An Old-Fashioned Hello

By the time I moved to the South West I was getting around the occult scene, and giving the odd talk here and there on angels, qabalah, and weirder things like quantum theory applied to metaphysics (which had mixed results depending on audience). As noted above, I took on the Occult Conference in Glastonbury in 2013 to see what I could do for Spring Equinox, 2014, and was sitting in my clerical job in Taunton one day when I thought I’d check the website’s contact form purely on instinct.

After reading the message, I declared a lunch break and ran out of my office to call a friend, punch-drunk from being touched by greatness:

"Dear Sef Salem,
Hi, its Pete Carroll here. Nikki Wyrd drew my attention to your conference and I asked her if launching my forthcomming book and card deck The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos at your event would provide an additional attraction of interest to participants. She thought it might well do so, (she's part of the editorial team) thus I'd like to run the idea past you.
….
We have spent nearly 4 years on this project and I believe we have created something rather novel and unique that will become an esoteric classic.
It would be an honour to show it at a gathering of precisely the traditions it concerns.
If this idea interests you please get in touch.
All the best, Pete Carroll." ‍ ‍

There are certain moments you think “Crikey, perhaps I’ve made it” - this was certainly one of them. Pete could easily have found my email address or even phone number, but he chose to use the website contact form which mostly consisted of concerned evangelicals wanting to pray for my soul or others inviting me to ayahuasca ceremonies of dubious provenance. This was a mark of character in my mind, that he was addressing the event as much as the organiser, and certainly the kind of idiosyncratic formality I learned was on-brand for the wizard.

And so we met, for the first time, the night before the 2014 Occult Conference at The Ring o’ Bells in Wookey, at the time run by Julie & Nigel Bourne who were also speaking at the event. They had put on a speaker’s dinner for the event and I still hold that moment as one of the highlights in a long career of getting to know really rather famous occultists as a by-product of organising and attending events. Pete has been reclusive for a long time, and I was seated next to him by accident. At the time, I was radioactively-engaged in promulgating Thelema, perhaps erring over the line into proselytisation, and though I tried to keep it down in such esteemed company we did have a quick back-and-forth on the subject. Pete seemed to tire of the discussion so I moved on and enjoyed the table-conversation for the rest of the evening.

The launch itself was a great event, with Professor Ronald Hutton introducing Pete, Pete talking about the work with Matt Kaybryn, and our second laptop failure of the day when his device ran out of battery. People had seen enough though, and Pete and Matt left with a long list of pre-orders.

Epistles at Dawn

Shortly after the event, I was surprised again to receive an email from Pete, apologising for not fully engaging and taking me to task over my views on Thelema at the Speakers’ Dinner due to suffering a cold. He proposed that we continued the debate in a series of essays to each other, on the Blog of Baphomet - so, we did. He needled my fervour, and I challenged his assumptions. It’s safe to say that I was rhetorically outclassed but I think I held my own, and called in back-up on occasion.

After a few of these, I started to receive concerned messages from friends, worried that I was under magical attack, enduring curses, or engaged in a witch-war with the arch-magus of IOT. These I immediately mentioned to Pete and raised a big laugh during one of our regular Bristol burger-pint-and-stroll meetings which we had enjoyed during the Summer, walking along the river Avon or around St Mary Redcliffe and chatting about our respective histories and misadventures. It was both heartwarming and deeply wyrd to hear Pete’s side of tales of the IOT I had heard a decade or more before back in Manchester, but this time from the top of the tree.

Far from falling out over the essays, Pete and I privately nicknamed them “Epistles at Dawn” and were hoping to have them published as a small chapbook, but in the end that didn’t turn out. We kept in touch and met a few times afterwards, but he withdrew to focus on Arcanorum College.

Epistles at Dawn (or, Exploring Chaos and Thelema with Pete and Sef)

While it’s challenging if not outright embarrassing to read one’s writing from 12 years ago, I highly commend you to read at least Part 6, with Pete’s thoughts on his own legacy:

I hope that people will remember me as someone who did for magic a little of what Charles Darwin did for natural history.

The Wizard’s Castle

In 2023 I had a confluence of events leading to the resurrection of The Visible College, amongst other things; right before things kicked off for me, two people mentioned Pete in a day, so I reached out to him, never being capable of looking a gift-omen in the mouth. We arranged to meet at a pub, and from there go for a walk, but the rain was absolutely hammering down. After an hour or so and a pint or two, he looked me up and down and said “yes, you aren’t all that weird, alright then” and invited me home for lunch.

There had been a moratorium on bringing occultists home after an unfortunate experience some decades before, but I was permitted entry and we spent a few hours discussing his current projects, including hand-made phurba-style wands and a variety of magical weapons. He was never to be seen without a wand, discreetly tucked about his personage somewhere.

I was excited to share the system of Star Club’s framework, and he made approving noises not least about the anarcho-syndicalist working-group structure. He even, in what is one of my more obscure occult-celebrity scrapbook moments, made me a cheese omelette, which was very good I have to say.

Later that year, I arranged to introduce another friend from overseas to him, and we finally went on that walk to the castle. My friend snapped a quick shot of me walking behind Pete, looking not unlike his minder, and I think it was a true afternoon of being content in an improbable moment.

He had been a ferocious debater, inspired magician, and unlikely friend. As someone said to me today, “you could squeeze all of our time together into one day, but every moment of it utterly worthwhile”. I was indeed, as Pete had hoped during our discourse, enriched by the experience of knowing him.

I have thought long and hard in the process of writing these two pieces whether it is appropriate to post them together. Also, whether it is appropriate to share as much as I have of my experiences; I did not know Pete as well as many, and I think Gordon was one of my closest friends for a long time. Both shaped the person I am today, publicly and privately, and I will miss them.

More than anything, I am grateful for the time I had with them both, and for their volumes of work on my bookshelves which will be re-read soon.

They may travel separately, but it is my strongest desire that they travel well.

“Together we will take the road that leads into the West, And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.”