Chaos Magick

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

(For the essay Nihilism, metabelief and magick by Conor, click on its title)

Chaos magick is a modern branch of magick. It is characterized by rejecting any one fixed belief system in favour of a fluid use of belief as a tool. The credo of chaos magick is "Nothing is true; everything is permitted." As chaos magicians, we think that any belief system (or B.S. for short) is insufficient to capture the complexity and the brute real-ness of the universe. However, we note that beliefs open up new possibilities of experience and action and close others off. We seek to make ourselves master of our own beliefs, not to be dominated by them like the dogmatist, but to rise above them to the Pinnacles of Emptiness and from there, to command our beliefs to serve The Will. Beliefs make perfect slaves, if you know how to tame them, but they are very poor masters.

The defining technique of chaos magick is adopting various beliefs about yourself or the universe as is expedient. This was explicitly formulated on page 00061 of the Principia Discordia. The usual method of embedding a belief is acting as if you believed it. Fake it 'til you make it. Soon your beliefs will align themselves with your actions. (This is more or less how we came to believe in The Eight Gods.) NLP can also be used to construct and destroy beliefs, by noting the submodalities of things you believe, and swopping them for the submodalities of things you doubt.

Chaos magick is sometimes called "results magick", because it takes on board only those methods or concepts that produce the desired result. This should not be taken to mean that the point of magick is results (the point of magick is always in the present, never the future). But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the only way to verify things is whether they produce results. By experimenting with techniques, discarding those that don't produce results and accepting those that do, we weed out superstition and come to a more scientific, accountable kind of magick.

While chaos magick is, by defintion, unique to the individual practitioner, certain techniques are commonly used by chaos magicians. Sigilization seems pretty en vogue, especially. Following Austin Osman Spare, chaos magicians tend towards techniques whose power comes from heightened states of consciousness, rather than from symbology (as is the case with much ritual magick).

Chaos magick is doing for magick exaktly what Bruce Lee did for martial arts and the beats did for literature: encouraging personal instinct, spontaneous engagement with the moment and the environment and not disallowing anything that will create the desired effekt.

In contradistinction to traditional systems of magick - whose symbolism is traditional and mythological - Chaos magicians seem to have a penchant for using absurd, pop or kitsch entities and symbols. These may be taken from fiction, tradition or may be something you just made up.

In the practice of chaos magick, you make up methods and meanings and beliefs as you go along.
In the philosophy of chaos magick, you make up truth as you go along.

The Scene

Chaos magick was drawn together by Peter Carroll, though the theory was basically laid out already by Malaclypse the Younger, Austin Osman Spare, Robert Anton Wilson, Hassan i-Sabbah and cats like that. (And yes, Aleister Crowley, though some chaos magicians, caught in the defilement of jealousy and begrudgery, don't like to admit it.) Carroll founded the Illuminates of Thanateros, a fraternal pact of chaos magicians.

Austin Osman Spare was an English Taoist mystic, writing in the first few decades of the 20th century. His writings propose a magick that focuses on trangressing conception and entering undifferentiated consciousness. "The most solecistical of fools now asks-"how can we escape the inevitable evolutions of conception-as all is ever conceiving"? My answer shall permit all means, all men, all conditions." Reject all thoughts and ideas. Use any means necessary. Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted.

I regret to have to say that chaos magick has been discredited by idiots who are stupid enough to equate Magick with parapsychology. These fools think that the doctrine of chaos magick (which says only that there is no one True narrative of Reality) means that there is no such thing as wisdom, no insights left for them to find, and no need to cultivate their understanding of What's What. Thus they have concluded that mysticism is a lie and only black sorcery is magick. They masturbate over sigils and think that this act makes them magicians. It does not. It makes them wankers - nothing more.

You could say that the world of chaos magic is divided between the romantic-artistic current and the scientific-rationalist current.
Kaotic romanticism is typified by William Burroughs, Genesis P-Orridge and Hakim Bey. Genesis P-Orridge (best know as the singer f Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV) founded T.O.P.Y., Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, a magickal brotherhood emphasizing sex, art, individuality, exploration and self-discipline. The classic texts of this school are CHAOS: The broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism by Hakim Bey and T.O.P.Y. manifesto.

Some bigwigs in the world of chaos magick are:

• Peter Carroll (who has been taking a break from the occult to turn his attention to other things, like trying to prove that time is three-dimensional). His training program, Liber Null is very good. Most of his other works read like dogma and seem to completely miss the point of "Nothing Is True; Everything Is Permitted". Still, there's some interesting dogma in there, such as his attempts to provide a model for understanding magic based on modern physics. He claims to be a follower of Spare, but he's really little more than a parapsychologist.
• Phil Hine, who has kindly made many of his writings available on his site. His books Prime Chaos and Condensed Chaos are definitely worth a read for their wise and sensible insights into the nature of desire and the magical path.
• Frater U.D., who may or may not be evil. Expelled from the Illuminates of Thanateros after Peter Carroll "publically accused Fra. U.D. of abusing his position and of membership of an ultra right wing mind control cult with a seriously nasty agenda." Author of 'High Magick: Theory and Practice', 'Secrets of Western Sex Magick', 'Practical Sigil Magick' and these essays.
• Hakim Bey, who wrote 'CHAOS: The broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism'. He defines sorcery as "the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non- ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results", which is as good a definition as any.
• Robert Anton Wilson
• William Burroughs, a member of the Illuminates of Thanateros

Links

• Chaos Matrix. Excellent collection of texts
• Chaos Current. The records of some nicely innovative wizards
• Tools of Chaos on Web Archive
• Autonomatrix Guild of Chaos Magic. Includes hundreds of rituals.
• Temple X'Fod