Chaos magic

Template:Short description Template:For Template:Use dmy dates Template:Chaos magic Template:Magic sidebar Chaos magic, also spelled chaos magick,Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp is a modern tradition of magic.Template:Sfnp Emerging in England in the 1970s as part of the wider neo-pagan and esoteric subculture,Template:Sfnp it drew heavily from the occult beliefs of artist Austin Osman Spare, expressed several decades earlier.Template:Sfnp It has been characterised as an invented religion,Template:Sfnp with some commentators drawing similarities between the movement and Discordianism.Template:Sfnmp Magical organizations within this tradition include the Illuminates of Thanateros and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.

The founding figures of chaos magic believed that other occult traditions had become too religious in character.Template:Sfnp They attempted to strip away the symbolic, ritualistic, theological or otherwise ornamental aspects of these occult traditions, to leave behind a set of basic techniques that they believed to be the basis of magic.Template:Sfnmp

Chaos magic teaches that the essence of magic is that perceptions are conditioned by beliefs, and that the world as we perceive it can be changed by deliberately changing those beliefs.Template:Sfnp Chaos magicians subsequently treat belief as a tool, often creating their own idiosyncratic magical systems and blending such different things as "practical magic, quantum physics, chaos theory, and anarchism."Template:Sfnp

Scholar Hugh Urban has described chaos magic as a union of traditional occult techniques and applied postmodernism Template:Sfnp – particularly a postmodernist skepticism concerning the existence or knowability of objective truth.Template:Sfnp Namely, according to him, chaos magic rejects the existence of absolute truth, and views all occult systems as arbitrary symbol-systems that are only effective because of the belief of the practitioner.Template:Sfnp

HistoryEdit

Origins and influences (1900–1982)Edit

Template:Further

File:Austin Osman Spare.jpg

Austin Osman Spare in 1904. His ideas formed the basis of chaos magic.

Austin Osman Spare's work in the early to mid 1900s is largely the source of chaos magical theory and practice.Template:Sfnmp Specifically, Spare developed the use of sigils and the use of gnosis to empower them.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp Although Spare died before chaos magic emerged, he has been described as the "grandfather of chaos magic".Template:Sfnp Working during much the same period as Spare, Aleister Crowley's publications also provided a marginal yet early and ongoing influence, particularly for his syncretic approach to magic and his emphasis on experimentation and deconditioning.Template:Sfnp Later, concurrent with the growth of religions such as Wicca in the 1950s and 1960s, different forms of magic became more common, some of which came in "explicitly disorganized, radically individualized, and often quite 'chaotic' forms".Template:Sfnp In the 1960s and the decade that followed, Discordianism, the punk movement, postmodernism and the writings of Robert Anton Wilson emerged, and they were to become significant influences on the form that chaos magic would take.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp

During the mid-1970s chaos magic appeared as "one of the first postmodern manifestations of occultism",Template:Sfnp built on the rejection of a need to adhere to a "single, systematized convention",Template:Sfnp and aimed at distilling magical practices down to a result-oriented approach rather than following specific practices based on tradition.Template:Sfnp An oft quoted line from Peter Carroll is "Magic will not free itself from occultism until we have strangled the last astrologer with the guts of the last spiritual master."Template:Sfnp

Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin are considered to be the founders of chaos magic,Template:Sfnp although Phil Hine points out that there were others "lurking in the background, such as the Stoke Newington Sorcerors".Template:Sfnp Carroll was a regular contributor to The New Equinox, a magazine edited by Sherwin, and thus the two became acquainted.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp

In 1976-77 the first chaos magic organization Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) was announced.Template:Sfnp The following year, 1978, was a seminal year in the origin of chaos magic, seeing the publication of both Liber Null by Carroll and The Book of Results by Sherwin – the first published books on chaos magic.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp

According to Carroll, "When stripped of local symbolism and terminology, all systems show a remarkable uniformity of method. This is because all systems ultimately derive from the tradition of Shamanism. It is toward an elucidation of this tradition that the following chapters are devoted."Template:Sfnp

Development and spread (1982–1994)Edit

New chaos magic groups emerged in the early 1980s – at first, located in Yorkshire, where both Sherwin and Carroll were living. The early scene was focused on a shop in Leeds called The Sorceror's Apprentice, owned by Chris Bray. Bray also published a magazine called The Lamp of Thoth, which published articles on chaos magic, and his Sorceror's Apprentice Press re-released both Liber Null and The Book of Results, as well as issuing Psychonaut and The Theatre of Magic.Template:Sfnp The "short-lived" Circle of Chaos, which included Dave Lee, was formed in 1982.Template:Sfnp The rituals of this group were published by Paula Pagani as The Cardinal Rites of Chaos in 1985.Template:Sfnp

Ralph Tegtmeier (Frater U∴D∴), who ran a bookshop in Germany and was already practicing his own brand of "ice magick", translated Liber Null into German.Template:Sfnp Tegtmeier was inducted into the IOT in the mid-1980s, and later established the German section of the order.Template:Sfnp

As chaos magic spread, people from outside Carroll and Sherwin's circle began publishing on the topic. Phil Hine, along with Julian Wilde and Joel Biroco, published a number of books on the subject that were particularly influential in spreading chaos magic techniques via the internet.Template:Sfnp

In 1981, Genesis P-Orridge established Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY).Template:Sfnp P-Orridge had studied magic under William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the 1970s, and was also influenced by Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, as well as the psychedelic movement.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfnp TOPY practiced chaos magic alongside their other activities, and helped raise awareness of chaos magic in subcultures like the Acid house and Industrial music scenes.Template:Sfnp Along with being an influence on P-Orridge, Burroughs was himself inducted into the IOT in the early 1990s.Template:Sfnp

Pop culture: (1994–2000s)Edit

From the beginning, chaos magic has had a tendency to draw on the symbolism of pop culture in addition to that of traditional magical systems; the rationale being that all symbol systems are equally arbitrary, and thus equally valid – the belief invested in them being the thing that matters.Template:Sfnp The symbol of chaos, for example, was lifted from the fantasy novels of Michael Moorcock.Template:Sfnp

Preluded by Kenneth Grant – who had studied with both Crowley and Spare, and who had introduced elements of H.P. Lovecraft's fictional Cthulhu mythos into his own magical writingsTemplate:Sfnp – there was a trend for chaos magicians to perform rituals invoking or otherwise dealing with entities from Lovecraft's work, such as the Great Old Ones. Hine, for example, published The Pseudonomicon (1994), a book of Lovecraftian rites.Template:Sfnp

From 1994 to 2000, Grant Morrison wrote The Invisibles for DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, which has been described by Morrison as a "hypersigil": "a dynamic miniature model of the magician's universe, a hologram, microcosm or 'voodoo doll' which can be manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of 'real' life."Template:Sfnp Both The Invisibles and the activities of Morrison themself were responsible for bringing chaos magic to a much wider audience in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the writer outlining their views on chaos magic in the "Pop Magic!" chapter of A Book of Lies (2003)Template:Sfnp and a Disinfo Convention talk.Template:Sfnp

Morrison's particular take on chaos magic exemplified the irreverent, pop cultural elements of the tradition, with Morrison arguing that the deities of different religions (Hermes, Mercury, Thoth, Ganesh, etc.) are nothing more than different cultural "glosses" for more universal "big ideas"Template:Sfnp – and are therefore interchangeable: both with each other, and with other pop culture icons like The Flash, or Metron, or Madonna.Template:Sfnp

Post-chaos magic: 2010sEdit

Alan Chapman – whilst praising chaos magic for "breathing new life" into Western occultism, thereby saving it from "being lost behind a wall of overly complex symbolism and antiquated morality" – has also criticised chaos magic for its lack of "initiatory knowledge": i.e., "teachings that cannot be learned from books, but must be transmitted orally, or demonstrated", present in all traditional schools of magic.Template:Sfnp Innovations continue into the 2020s, as found in social media, fandoms, and webcomics.Template:Sfn

Beliefs, core concepts, and practicesEdit

Belief as a toolEdit

The central defining tenet of chaos magic is arguably the idea that belief is a tool for achieving effects.Template:Sfn In chaos magic, complex symbol systems like Qabalah, the Enochian system, astrology or the I Ching are treated as maps or "symbolic and linguistic constructs" that can be manipulated to achieve certain ends but that have no absolute or objective truth value in themselves. Religious scholar Hugh Urban notes that chaos magic's "rejection of all fixed models of reality" reflects one of its central tenets: "nothing is true everything is permitted".Template:Sfnp

Both Urban and religious scholar Bernd-Christian Otto trace this position to the influence of postmodernism on contemporary occultism.Template:Sfnp Template:Sfn Another influence comes from Spare, who believed that belief itself was a form of "psychic energy" that became locked up in rigid belief structures, and that could be released by breaking down those structures. This "free belief" could then be directed towards new aims.Template:Citation needed Otto has argued that chaos magic "filed away the whole issue of truth, thus liberating and instrumentalising individual belief as a mere tool of ritual practice."Template:Sfn

Magical paradigm shiftingEdit

Peter J. Carroll suggested assigning different worldviews to the sides of a die, and then inhabiting a particular random paradigm for a set length of time (a week, a month, a year, etc.), depending on which number is rolled. For example, 1 might be paganism, 2 might be monotheism, 3 might be atheism, and so on.Template:Sfnp

Phil Hine has stated that the primary task here is "to thoroughly decondition" the aspiring magician from "the mesh of beliefs, attitudes and fictions about self, society, and the world" that his or her ego associates with:

Our ego is a fiction of stable self-hood which maintains itself by perpetuating the distinctions of "what I am/what I am not, what I like/what I don't like", beliefs about ones politics, religion, gender preference, degree of free will, race, subculture etc all help maintain a stable sense of self.Template:Sfnp

Cut-up techniqueEdit

The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged, often at random, to create a new text. The technique can also be applied to other media: film, photography, audio recordings, etc. It was pioneered by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.Template:Sfnp

Burroughs – who practiced chaos magic, and was inducted into the Illuminates of Thanateros in the early 1990s – was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes".Template:Sfnp Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration"Template:Sfnp – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness".Template:Sfnp Burroughs stated:

I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.Template:Sfnp

David Bowie compared the randomness of the cut-up technique to the randomness inherent in traditional divinatory systems, like the I Ching or Tarot.Template:Sfnp

Genesis P-Orridge, who studied under BurroughsTemplate:Citation needed described it as a way to "identify and short circuit control, life being a stream of cut-ups on every level. They are a means to describe and reveal reality and the multi-faceted individual in which/from which reality is generated."Template:Sfnp

ReferencesEdit

CitationsEdit

Template:Reflist

Works citedEdit

Template:Refbegin

Template:Refend