Hall, Nicholas: Chaos & Sorcery

Preface of Peter J. Carroll: The Chaos Current has recently spawned a number of excellent grimoires by practical sorcerers who write from hardwon experience. This book must rank amongst the best of them. I have had the honour of knowing and working with Nick Hall for some years and I have seen him perform many of the acts of sorcery that he writes of in this book. The results are often as awesome as is the presence of the man himself. Having conjured with Nick on many occasions, I would not relish the prospect of conjuring against him. Rather than invest belief in abstruse metaphysical theory, Nick has chosen here to build a system from an eclectic range of practical procedures culled from many cultures. Informing the whole treatise however is the chaoist meta-belief that belief structures reality. This is pragmatic magick at its best. Devise or discover a technique that seems worth investing belief in, and if you can validate it, include it in your grimoire, without worrying how or why it works. Many times in the course of reading this text I stopped to make a note of something that seemed well worth trying out. That, I think, is the mark of a useful book. Unless the vast majority of magicians work in complete isolation from their more public peers, then the ratio of civilians who merely collect magic books to actual working magicians may be estimated at ninety nine to one. This is a book for the one-percenters, although it may inspire a few of the rest to actually pick up a wand for a change. All it takes is guts and imagination, not much specialist knowledge is required.