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Yes, there are other ways. But how many of you here really want to go hang out in midnight fields with a large groups of Latino Folk Catholics, and have an apparition of the Virgin Mary heal your maladies? None, I imagine.
Point! I liked his 'Star Ships' tremendously... but when was that? 2015? His other stuff he talks about, I already was using much of his core ritual tech at that time, long before him (not that it's a competition) ... the grims, The Four Kings. But he HATES the G.V. Like, major points off there, bucko. (Kidding, kidding.)
And shamanic energy healing.. I mean, I support it in the abstract... but please don't make me.
I harbor a secret fascination for Animism and Shamanism, it's "Who I Am, it's What (I want to) Do".
It's like Deep calls to Deep. Or something equally bizarre, it does seem a little strange, like the Shaman/s in the movie "The Relic".
While this might seem disingenuous today using video conferencing to bring together a group for rites and rituals was a Chaos Magick practice used to good effect in the early days of that medium. People everywhere could participate in real time from anywhere. What would the ancients have said? I think some of the IOT sections picked up on this early on?
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Some incredible UPG there! Your intro phrase including "Experienced" jumped right out there, it wasn't missed. You've got some interesting insights. Have you checked out the
@MorganBlack
I've tried that and it's an innovation, so if I sounded a bit harsh regarding White, it's likely my bad! He's someone who has contributed something to the corpus, which maybe some of us might think about doing as well, so yeah, good post!
When you think about it in reality Kelly and Dee were Chaos Magicians of their time....Thelema was a Chaos Magick movement.. anything where it truly branches off tradition can be seen as Chaos Magick and in my opinion that is progress... Most Magick if not all is working on bringing Chaos ....The multiversal infinite energy and possibilities into order.. Chaos Magis just tend to create their own craft ...often utilising bits and pieces from other traditions and ...we are not all atheist I personally believe the real work of the Goddess has to be like this... It must evolve to prevent stagnation or entropy
Dee and Kelley? Absolutely chaos magicians. They were winging it with angelic downloads and planetary spreadsheets, half possessed and half improvising. That’s not tradition, that’s tactical madness... and their system still works.
Thelema? Early days were pure rupture. Crowley kicked the door in, rewrote the rules, and dared the divine to keep up. Who gives a fuck what some mediocre modern armchair occultists might say about the man. His shit still works, too. That’s chaos magick: not “I reject tradition,” but “I’ll gut it, stitch it to a comet, and see what screams.”
Chaos magicians aren’t just scavengers. We’re engineers. We steal, we test, we burn what doesn’t work. Odin doesn’t hand out gold stars, he hands you a rope and asks what you’ll sacrifice. If your craft isn’t evolving, it’s rotting.
Magick is dragging infinite possibility into form. Chaos magicians just do it without asking permission...and we make it bite.
Dee and Kelley? Absolutely chaos magicians. They were winging it with angelic downloads and planetary spreadsheets, half possessed and half improvising. That’s not tradition, that’s tactical madness... and their system still works.
Thelema? Early days were pure rupture. Crowley kicked the door in, rewrote the rules, and dared the divine to keep up. Who gives a fuck what some mediocre modern armchair occultists might say about the man. His shit still works, too. That’s chaos magick: not “I reject tradition,” but “I’ll gut it, stitch it to a comet, and see what screams.”
Yeah, Carroll didn't deny the the past, just for example Spare, Crowley, Mather's GD innovations incorporating Enochian, et al. That's made clear early on in Liber Null. Crowley and Spare hadn't been gone That long (1940's - 50's) prior to the advent of Chaos, 1970's. So yeah, not denying tradition, but acknowledging: "we've got a lot to work with" and then going Forward to expand! It's evolving steadily, and often not slowly either.
I really didn't mean to minimize this contribution.
There's another development that happened that was a real Original, IMO.
That's Grant Morrison's concept of Hypersigils. The short synopsis briefly introduces the concept.
Overview of Hypersigils
"Hypersigils are a concept developed by Grant Morrison, referring to works of art that function as tools for magical transformation.
Unlike traditional sigils, which are static symbols, hypersigils incorporate narrative elements like character development and plot,
allowing them to evolve over time."
I have not worked with Hypersigils enough to be able to describe results, still wrapping my head around all the implications. Maybe someone here has though, and can give thoughts and insights, be interesting!
Yeah, I'd categorize Gordon White as a number 2 chaos magician. He's definitely NOT a number 1. He's gone so far down the animism and shamanism path that it's sometimes easy to forget that he still considers himself a chaos magician. He does still practice and regularly teach sigil magic techniques. And yep, he's the guy who popularized the shoal technique.
Another thing that I forgot to mention about those in the number 2 category, which most certainly applies to Gordon, is that they don't seem to buy wholesale into the "belief as a tool" idea. I mean, they agree that belief can, and does often, impact magic, but they don't subscribe to the idea that "you can do anything you want as long as you believe it's real". I think anyone who has done magic long enough knows that things are rarely that simple, so I sympathize with this.
While we're on the subject of chaos magic + animism, I think Aidan Wachter is solid. Jason Miller is another highly experienced teacher/writer, but his personality makes him a bit of an acquired taste for some, lol.
Oh, and @Asteriskos, Phil Hine's "Condensed Chaos" might appeal to some people as a starter primer on Chaos Magic.
Yeah, all good points! One of the things I noticed about Gordon White was that he departed from the "business as usual, go to work 9-5 lifestyle" and started using the net (his blog) for an income source. At first he offered a "premium" subscription along with his free blog. The last I looked it appears required to have a subscription now. The blog is still there but hasn't been updated for a long while, at least any free verson that I saw.
I got a mention in about Phil Hine being around fairly early in the "scene" but didn't list any of his works.
So to amend that I recommend any and all of Phil Hine's stuff, books, and he's written Lots of essays and articles use the search engine of Choice!
Personally I've got nothing but Good to say about Aidan Wachter! 98% of his stuff resonates with me and the rest I can deal with!
Sometimes I Sits and Thinks, and Sometimes I just Sits, I Think I like Aidan Wachter's stuff! Seriously!
If you grew up in America, then you're educated in a scientific materialist Anglo-Saxon school system too, so materialism is your default worldview too, to a greater or lesser extent. Chaos Magic is a great way to open up your sense of the possible. But materialism has become our unconscious default lens through which we interpret reality. It's drunk with our mother's milk, and flavors the structures of how we're taught to think about the world.
Classic Chaos Magic was supposed to liberate us from dogmas, including the dogmas of Chaos Magic itself. Paradigm shifting, just so brilliant! But Pete Carroll also embodied the limitations of his time. We know vastly more about traditional magic than they did.
He hated animism as "foul necromancy," and his rejection of astrological timing is particularly telling. Much entire Western magical tradition from the Picatrix to the grimoires of the medieval and Renaissance periods, from Agrippa on, treat astrological timing as fundamental to magical success. Yes, you can ignore it. You do you, buckaroo.
Again most of this is a non argument augment. What Carroll's writes about is New Thought / Neo-Platonic Mind Mysticism , with some very excellent additions, not the animist necromancy he despised.
Not knocking it. Great Stuff. Chaos Magic offered me a backdoor to trad magical practice. It was intellectually safe-framed in psychological terms. It uses a language we educated middle class kids can relate to, of results-based empiricism, and postmodern philosophy. For me is allowed engagement with Goetic evocation and other grimoire practices. The spirits could be "treated as if real" without necessarily being ontologically real. And which i still think is an excellent approach early on , until you have enough of your own animist-appearing events you need to come to terms with, This halfway house of belief was super useful for me at that early stage of my magical career. And there is no reason to leave it.
When I was very young, I tried to straddle the line for a long time, but getting involved in New World spirit traditions - while pretty much intellectually indefensible to us moderns - was extremely helpful. However, the operative models of Chaos Magic are insufficiently nuanced to deal with the lived experiences of evocation. Once you are dealing with events that act with a kind of intelligence and volition, you're like, well whatever. I can keep trying to mind-fuck myself back to modernity , or just deal with things at 80% of face value. The more animist traditional practices are useful here, even while I encourage people not to take the various framework mythologies too literally.
I think Carroll has modified some of his early views in light of reality? Carrol did not create Alone either. I'm almost positive it was Ray Sherwin more than Carroll that Stressed the Animism and Shamanism roots of All Magic. If someone knows different say it here!
If you look at the diagram in the intro (page XXII) to the new edition of Liber Null (physical copy) everything
descends from Animism and Shamanism. Graphics put stuff into perspective faster sometimes than text can.
I'm going to include that here for the sake of illustration. (This is the updated version not from the original edition)
But the graphic design communicates the Myth of Progress , the idea human history is a linear journey of continuous improvement and advancement . And for us to reach the Perfect Future, the best of all possible worlds, we must throw off all those primitive superstitions.
Don't get me wrong, I love reasoned thought, education, self-reflection, turning down emotional impulsivity, critical thinking, empiricism, and scientific methodology. Wonderful tools. I am also not a fan of throwing people into volcanoes, or cutting out hearts on the top of pyramids, or being emotional slaves to the Achetypes, but that when Anglo-Saxons (as I am on my dad's side ) look out at the world from their ivory towers, they only see The Jungle and think, " Ah, these dirty savages. We must educate them in the Queen's English and into being dutiful office workers for the imperial bureaucracy."
and his rejection of astrological timing is particularly telling. Much entire Western magical tradition from the Picatrix to the grimoires of the medieval and Renaissance periods, from Agrippa on, treat astrological timing as fundamental to magical success. Yes, you can ignore it. You do you, buckaroo.
Yeah it isn't any wonder this caused lots of WTF moments and got lots of folks Knickers tied into Knots as well.
I'm not defending his position at all, just saying his Perception and Insights might not be perfect?
@MorganBlack Yeah, you and I have similar understandings of Pete Carroll. One of the most innovative thinkers of his time, yet he could sometimes get too attached to his own opinions and biases, which all of us can easily fall into, so no judgments there.
Where we (like Pete) tend to falter is in thinking that our experiences now explain everyone else's. Pete has very likely studied astrology quite extensively, and could never get the positive results he expected, so he now lumps it into the "it's BS" bin with other stuff. The problem is that every person is so different (race, ancestry, past lives if you accept the idea of reincarnation, psychological and biological makeup, social influences, location in the world, etc.) that it shouldn't be surprising that not everything works for everyone the same way. So many invisible factors could be impacting their own magical experiences. The Wiccan path may be just what one person needs, while it may do absolutely nothing for me. That doesn't mean that it's a better or worse path.
This is also why, while I hold a lot of respect for Pete, I don't recall him as the end all, be all, of chaos magic. Yes, he wrote the first major books on it, but as Asteriskos says, there were others involved (yes, including Ray Sherwin, who was far more interested in the shaman/animism side of it). The problem is that Pete's legacy was louder and lasted longer than the rest, and it's easy to forget that.
@Asteriskos, I think the latest book (This is Chaos) does indicate that Pete has softened a bit. The contributors in that book hold all sorts of differing views from Pete, including on animism and astrology (some of these contributors have even outwardly expressed their surprise that Pete even wanted them to be a part of it), so the fact that he still desired their contribution does indicate his maturity and evolution.
And yes, I did see that diagram before, but I struggle with the "Sorcery" part being more directly from animism/shamanism. Personally, I would have said that sorcery is more like chaos magic itself, in that it has no problem with drawing from any of those threads, whatever works. Sorcery could have showed up in multiple places in this diagram at the same time, blending various threads into one.
Probably the biggest problem is the diagram itself. Maybe the reality is far more messy than the diagram entails. I'm not necessarily arguing that, just wondering out loud.
