The occultist Peter J Carroll has died, best known as one of the founders of the Chaos Magic current. As he reflected last year:
'As I turned 72 in January it occurred to me that Chaos Magic really began fifty years ago in a squat in insalubrious Deptford, London, where certain insights emerged during intense study, furious practice, wild experimentation, and meetings with remarkable and/or dubious people'
Chaos Magic basically said: - Make spells by any Analogical Process you like. Invoke or Evoke anything you can Imagine. Use any kind of Gnosis that works for you. Select Beliefs for their Utility. Treat Divination as the Imagination of Possibilities. Magic modifies Probability. Specify precisely what Illumination you seek. As such it represents a radical breakaway from the Authority of Antiquity' (Chaos Magic at 50, 2025).
Carroll was one of several young occultists who moved to squat in Speedwell House c.1976-78, having previously been involved with an informal group that became known as the Stoke Newington Sorcerers. The now demolished Deptford council block became for a while a laboratory for the development of Chaos Magic, an attempt to update occultism in an age of punk rock, chaos theory and cybernetics. Their experiments included invoking the Celtic underworld deity Gwyn ap Nudd (sometimes known as the King of the Fairies) and forming a rock band Vitriol to perform at the time of planetary eclipses. Carroll wrote up some of his Deptford research in his book ‘Liber Null’ (1978), considered to be the founding text of the Chaos current.
According to Charlie Brewster, another of those involved, 'the beginning of chaos magic' can be dated to 'the Deptford Olympics Goat Roast, which coincided with the Montreal Olympics in 1976. This was a sports day held in a waste ground behind Speedwell House. Pete had obtained a goat from the Halal Butchers in Deptford High Street and this was barbequed on a spit over a huge bonfire, followed by a live punk ensemble thrashing away and a home made pyrotechnic display provided by some of the local anarchists' (as told to Jaq D Hawkins, The Chaonomicon, 2017).
The Speedwell sorcerers rubbed shoulders with punks and anarchists in the squats. Joseph Porter, founder of the band Blyth Power, has described a visit in the late 1970s to friends living in ‘Speedwell House, a condemned block of flats just off Deptford High St. Technically they were squatting, as the council had given up on trying to collect rent there. The whole place was a magic maze of brickwork, stairways and balconies, covered in graffiti and full of lost souls... Coming back one day after a hard day posing in the West End, I found a minor music festival happening in the courtyards below. The Realists, This Heat, and a host of Deptford's alternative heroes played and jammed until late at night, the whole scene illuminated by the beams of a car's headlights. This was Deptford Fun City at its finest’('Genesis to Revolutions').
A resident recalled to Anita Strasser in her book 'Deptford High Street':
'I arrived in Deptford early 1977 and knew I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I lived in Speedwell House, which was given to Goldsmith's to rent out to students for a low price. It was a good council block but we had no bathroom — there were counters in the kitchen with lids on and under the lid was the bath. So, you'd be having a bath while someone was cooking. Squeeze and Dire Straits used to play around here before they became famous. But Speedwell House became infamous because of two murders, and the council wanted to raze it to the ground without rehousing the students. We prepared for war, eyen looking up recipes for Molotoy cocktails, we were so angry. The council got wind of it and rehoused everyone to the Crossfield estate'.
Anarchist papers from the time include contact addresses at Speedwell House for the London branch of the Anarchist Communist Association (Bread and Roses, September 1978) and for the formation of a 'non-sexist anarchist group' for the Lewisham area' (Zero, August 1978). This was the period too of clashes with the far right National Front. Carroll recalled 'pitched battles' with the NF in his memories of his friend Brewster, so maybe they were there on the historic day of the 'Battle of Lewisham' on 13 August 1977.
