[Tutorial] An essay on Chaos Magick. (By yours truly)

[Accipeveldare]

Chaos magick as a whole is essentially achieving a kind of.... Symbiosis with the universe. Actually, that's literally what it is in a simplistic sense. Chaos magick is the ideology that belief itself is what manifests things into reality. Let me explain further.

We as humans have our own individual beliefs. Some are atheists, and some believe in some kind of spiritual force/forces. This is where chaos magick comes into play. The idea that these beliefs are interchangeable tools instead of set rules of the universe. For example, lets use the Christian idea of eternal damnation. Knowing that I do not believe in a "lake of fire" we can pretty much say that in my mind, it isn't real. For other people who DO believe in the idea of damnation it may be real to THEM but since it isn't in my personal beliefs, it cannot touch me do to not being real in my mind. What I'm getting at is that we essentially have our own individual realities. There isn't only one pantheon that is supreme. These pantheons only become real when you believe in them. We make our own realities. We cultivate them with belief. For if we don't believe in something then it becomes fake to us and we never experience it. Let's use the idea of hell from Michael A. Aquino's book, "The Diabolicon". It states that Lucifer wanted a place where we could be away from God so he constructed Hell. However, since it is away from God's domain, it is essentially pure chaos. Unless, we make peace within the chaos. You see, we ourselves ARE the universe. We ARE the cosmos. Therefore, we manifest our perspectives into reality. This would make Hell literally what you alone perceive it as. This is the gist of Chaos magick as well.

 

[Anziel_Merkaba]

As someone who started practice as a chaos wizard, and has collaborated with many people of various practices, I can tell you that the long-term end result of chaos magic is Hermeticism. Not Hermetic kabbalah, just Hermeticism, primarily just following the Hermetic principles.

Really the only difference between the psychological model (and chaos magic that is heavily influenced by it) and Hermeticism is that the external world is also part of your mind.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Chaos magick as a whole is essentially achieving a kind of.... Symbiosis with the universe. Actually, that's literally what it is in a simplistic sense. Chaos magick is the ideology that belief itself is what manifests things into reality. Let me explain further.

We as humans have our own individual beliefs. Some are atheists, and some believe in some kind of spiritual force/forces. This is where chaos magick comes into play. The idea that these beliefs are interchangeable tools instead of set rules of the universe. For example, lets use the Christian idea of eternal damnation. Knowing that I do not believe in a "lake of fire" we can pretty much say that in my mind, it isn't real. For other people who DO believe in the idea of damnation it may be real to THEM but since it isn't in my personal beliefs, it cannot touch me do to not being real in my mind. What I'm getting at is that we essentially have our own individual realities. There isn't only one pantheon that is supreme. These pantheons only become real when you believe in them. We make our own realities. We cultivate them with belief. For if we don't believe in something then it becomes fake to us and we never experience it. Let's use the idea of hell from Michael A. Aquino's book, "The Diabolicon". It states that Lucifer wanted a place where we could be away from God so he constructed Hell. However, since it is away from God's domain, it is essentially pure chaos. Unless, we make peace within the chaos. You see, we ourselves ARE the universe. We ARE the cosmos. Therefore, we manifest our perspectives into reality. This would make Hell literally what you alone perceive it as. This is the gist of Chaos magick as well.

This is very interesting. I usually say that "Magic requires a belief system to function, but it doesn't matter what belief system it is; only that you believe it."

The mechanism of belief is the screwdriver that you use to get the back off the TV that is the universe

Really the only difference between the psychological model (and chaos magic that is heavily influenced by it) and Hermeticism is that the external world is also part of your mind.

I'm afraid I have to disagree here. I understand that (as in my signature) it's going to be the first thing that occurs when one finds out the universe is malleable by thought. But then the first thing I think of isn't always right As epidemiologist Ben Goldacre always says: "I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That".

Consider instead the idea that you do not change the universe, you experience the version of it where it is changed. Or as the old Zen koan puts it in The Gateless Gate:

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: "The flag is moving."
The other said: "The wind is moving."
The sixth patriach happened to be passing by.
He told them: "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving."

 

[HoldAll]

I think that Peter J. Carroll and the other chaos magick pioneers were too optimistic in their relativist opinion that belief can be truly arbitrary and easily altered at will.

First of all, belief is informed by our emotional make-up, temperament and mentality. People are more comfortable with one pantheon/paradigm than with others, and it would take a major effort to switch to another one somehow doesn't like - which Carroll recommends as an exercise (to get rid of those limiting personal preferences, I suppose) but I'm not very convinced that you could employ this approach for actual magical workings.

Second, the weight of tradition: Not all pantheons/paradigms are created equal. If you pitch the Greek Olympians millions believed in and about whom hymns and countless books were written against the gods of an obscure South Sea tribe, guess who would win? You might even be better off with a pantheon you made up yourself and are intimately familiar with than with those tribal gods about nothing much is known.

Third, the 'coolness factor': again, it's a matter of personal preference. Why do certain memes go viral while others just disappear without a trace? Why do some songs become smash hits or some movies unexpected blockbusters? Of course you might find a given pantheon/paradigm cool because everybody else think it isn't, there is that too.

The worst-case scenario therefore would be working with a pantheon/paradigm you don't like, that has no traditional base whatsoever and that you find extremely uncool. Granted, such an operation would be probably educational - if you don't mind it being a failure, that is.

So for me the pragmatic thing to do would be to narrow these unlimited horizons envisaged by early chaos magick enthusiasts a bit and take these three factors into consideration as well. To use your example of leaving crystals outside to charge them by moonlight isn't a bad idea in itself - the moon has a special traditional meaning for devout Wiccans and so that method has probably power for them. However, if you think the whole idea is silly it's futile to even try it. If you were a truly iconoclast chaos magician, you could leave an object to be be charged by the parking lot lights of an all-night 7/11 - which could very well work if you have the required anarchic mentality.

Being wildly and irreverently creative while at the same time skillfuly navigating between those constraints above is what chaos magic is all about, in my opinion. Try to make Venus the godess of war and Mars the god of love just because you can though will hardly work, for example, because regrettably there are practical limits to arbitrary belief and sheer chaos magick willpower. Granted, I could build myself some imaginary pantheon with comic book superheroes (it's been even done with the Tree of Life) but do I have to just to call myself a chaos magician? This reminds me of a photo of some graffiti on a wall where somebody had sprayed "Spread anarchy" and somebody else underneath "Don't tell me what to do!".

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I think that Peter J. Carroll and the other chaos magick pioneers were too optimistic in their relativist opinion that belief can be truly arbitrary and easily altered at will.

First of all, belief is informed by our emotional make-up, temperament and mentality. People are more comfortable with one pantheon/paradigm than with others, and it would take a major effort to switch to another one somehow doesn't like - which Carroll recommends as an exercise (to get rid of those limiting personal preferences, I suppose) but I'm not very convinced that you could employ this approach for actual magical workings.

I agree with you - there is a certain amount of wiggle room, but hacking your own brain in order to modify your belief systems has its dangers too - especially if you succeed!

I realise now that I originally read what Carroll wrote and then unconsciously modified it to what you're saying
Basically using my own belief systems, whatever they might be. You are never going to get the same intensity from something you have to convince yourself of that's against your normal beliefs. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Well, don't do that."

 

[HoldAll]

I agree with you - there is a certain amount of wiggle room, but hacking your own brain in order to modify your belief systems has its dangers too - especially if you succeed!

I seem to remember that Carroll wrote about a guy who decided to adopt evangelical christianity as a random belief system for a lark and then in fact became a devout evangelical christian for real...

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I seem to remember that Carroll wrote about a guy who decided to adopt evangelical christianity as a random belief system for a lark and then in fact became a devout evangelical christian for real...

Everyone has a purpose in life, even if that purpose is just to be a terrible warning to others...

 

[Jackson]

I... would not generally have connected Peter J. Carroll's ilk with Luciferianism, though my associate holds a similiar view of the cosmos.

I seem to remember that Carroll wrote about a guy who decided to adopt evangelical christianity as a random belief system for a lark and then in fact became a devout evangelical christian for real...

I'm seem to remember "Anton Long" writing about a Nazi Satanist group as a lark, that in fact became Nazis rather than Satanists for real.