Taken from Condensed Chaos, by Phile Hine:
WHAT IS CHAOS MAGIC?
What do you think of when you hear the word "Chaos?"
-"A state of things in which chance is supreme"
-"An unorganised state of primordial matter before the creation"
-"A confused state or mass"
-"Chaos was the primal source, first of all"
-"This isn't anarchy, this is Chaos"
-"In the beginning, there was only Chaos"
-"Agents of Chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition..."
-"One must have Chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star"
-"Matter is illusion, solidity is illusion, we are illusion. Only Chaos is real"
-"In the limitless heavens, shines the countenance of Chaos"
Chaos is all this and more. A term which means something different for everyone, none of us can ignore Chaos. Over the last twenty years or so, Chaos has become the buzzword of a revolution in thought and method, spawning a new form of science, new technologies; a whole new emerging world-view. While Chaos Theory has been generating debate within the scientific community, Chaos Magic has been creating controversy within occult circles. It has been labeled variously as "English Thelema", "the blackest form of dark power" and "git 'ard magic". At the core of this revolution is the recognition that the scientific world-view which has set the limitations of acknowledged human experience is crumbling, that new visions and models are required, as are new ways of being, and more importantly, new ways of doing. Chaos Magic is a new approach to "doing" magic.
CORE PRINCIPLES OF CHAOS MAGIC
While magical systems usually base themselves around a model or map of the spiritual/physical universe, such as the Tree of Life (which can sometimes be described as a Cosmic Filofax), Chaos Magic is based on a very few 'Core Principles' which generally underlie its approach to magic (they are not universal axioms however, so feel free to swap 'em around).
1. The Avoidance of Dogmatism. Chaos Magicians strive to avoid falling into dogmatism (unless expressing dogmatism is part of a temporary belief system they have entered). Discordians use 'Catmas' such as "Us Discordians must stick apart!" Thus Chaos Magicians feel entitled to change their minds, contradict themselves and come up with arguments that are alternatively plausible and implausible. It has been pointed out that we invest a lot of time and energy in being right. What's wrong with being wrong occasionally?
2. Personal Experience is paramount. In other words, don't take my word that such-and-such is the case, check it out for yourself. Magic has suffered extensively from 'armchair theorists' who have perpetuated myths and out-of-date information purely due to laziness of one kind or another. Sometimes it's interesting to ask awkward questions just to see what the self-appointed experts come out with. Some will emit a stream of verbal diarrhea rather than admit to not knowing the answer, whereas a true adept will probably say "I haven't a f*****g clue." Quite early on, Chaos Magicians came to the startling discovery that once you strip away the layers of dogma, personal beliefs, attitudes and anecdotes around any particular technique of practical magic, it can be quite simply described.
3. Technical Excellence. One of the early misconceptions about Chaos Magic was that it gave practitioners carte blanche to do whatever they liked, and so become sloppy (or worse, soggy) in their attitudes to self-assessment, analysis, etc. Not so. The Chaos approach has always advocated rigorous self-assessment and analysis, emphasised practice at what techniques you're experimenting with until you get the results that you desire. Learning to 'do' magick requires that you develop a set of skills and abilities and if you're going to get involved in all this weird stuff, why not do it to the best of your ability?
4. Deconditioning. The Chaos paradigm proposes that one of the primary tasks of the aspiring magician is to thoroughly decondition hirself from the mesh of beliefs, attitudes and fictions about self, society, and the world. 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, whilst the little ways in which we pull against this very stability allows us to feel as though we are unique individuals. Using deconditioning exercises, we can start to widen the cracks in our consensual reality which hopefully, enables us to become less attached to our beliefs and egofictions, and thus able to discard or modify them when appropriate.
5. Diverse Approaches. As mentioned earlier, 'traditional' approaches to magick involve choosing one particular system and sticking to it. The Chaos perspective, if nothing else, encourages an eclectic approach to development, and Chaos Magicians are free to choose from any available magical system, themes from literature, television, religions, cults, parapsychology, etc. This approach means that if you approach two chaos magicians and ask 'em what they're doing at any one moment, you're rarely likely to find much of a consensus of approach. This makes Chaos difficult to pin down as one thing or another, which again tends to worry those who need approaches to magic to be neatly labelled and clear.
6. Gnosis. One of the keys to magical ability is the ability to enter Altered States of Consciousness at will. We tend to draw a distinct line between 'ordinary consciousness' and 'altered states', where in fact we move between different states of consciousness--such as daydreams, 'autopilot' (where we carry out actions without cognition) and varying degrees of attention, all the time. However, as far as magic is concerned, the willed entry into intense altered states can be divided into two poles of 'Physiological Gnosis'--Inhibitory states, and Excitatory states. The former includes physically 'passive' techniques such as meditation, yoga, scrying, contemplation and sensory deprivation while the latter includes chanting, drumming, dance, emotional and sexual arousal.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHAOS
The Chaos Magic movement had its first stirrings in the late nineteen seventies, in England. While the new phenomena of punk rock was grabbing the newspaper headlines, and scientists across the world were beginning to delve into the mysterious mathematical world of fractals and non-linear dynamics, a new approach to magical practice was being synthesized in the wilds of West Yorkshire. At the time, English occultism was very much dominated by the three strands of popular Witchcraft, Western Qabalah, and Thelema. At least, there were enough people interested in these approaches to spawn supporting magazines. In one such magazine, The New Equinox, there appeared the early writings of Peter J. Carroll, who is considered the foremost exponent of modern Chaos Magic. By 1978, there appeared the first advertisements for the "Illuminates of Thanateros", an order who's practices were composed of a blend of shamanism, Taoism, Tantra and Thelema. The announcement of this new order was shortly followed by the first edition of Peter Carroll's Liber Null, which while describing the basic philosophy and practical approaches, did not contain the term 'Chaos Magic'. Liber Null was closely followed by The Book of Results by Ray Sherwin, which lucidly explained Austin Osman Spare's great magical innovation--sigil magic. Austin Osman Spare is considered by many to be the "grandfather" of Chaos Magic. An obscure figure, brought to light by the work of Kenneth Grant, Spare was a superb magical artist, sorcerer, and spiritualist. At a time when many of his contemporaries sneered at table-tapping and contacting 'spirit guides' in favour of elaborate Rosicrucian ceremonies, Spare was painting the spirits he was in contact with, and using his own system of 'sentient letters'--sigils--to manifest his desires. Spare was not particularly enamoured of the Golden Dawn-style approach to magic, and makes some very acid comments on the subject in The Book of Pleasure (1913).
The Book of Pleasure (subtitled: The Psychology of Ecstasy) contains the essentials of Spare's magical philosophy, and the key techniques with which he applied it. It is not an easy book to read, and Spare is often referred to as an "incomprehensible mystic." His vocabulary is wide, his use of grammar is strange, and he uses many terms in ways that give them a different meaning from their usual context. Nor was he attempting to write in a "textbook" style that modern readers are used to, and The Book of Pleasure is very stylistically reminiscent of an old Grimoire before it has been tidied up. Fortunately, The Book of Results gave a very clear exposition of sigil magic, and Liber Null also dealt with Spare's concept of the alphabet of desire. Another powerful influence of the development of Chaos Magic was the work of Aleister Crowley. Crowley synthesised a magical world-view--a psychocosm--out of his studies in magical and esoteric fields such as the Golden Dawn, Yoga, Alchemy, Kabalah, and from his experience in other disciplines. Moreover, it is Crowley's life, rather than his voluminous magical and mystical writings that is of interest. Crowley took his personal experience, magical and otherwise, and created his own enclave, beyond the boundaries of conventional morality. He deliberately sought extremes of experience, concealing, and at the same time, revealing himself through a series of colourful personalities. Part of Crowley's attraction for the modern magician is that he created something which has enduring power--a psychocosm which continues to be developed and twisted into different forms. Crowley did not so much 'follow' a tradition, he embodied a dynamic process of reality engagement--creating his own path from whatever he happened to find in front of him.
The early growth of Chaos Magic was characterised by a loose network of informal groups who came together to experiment with the possibilities of the new current. With the demise of The New Equinox, the 'chaos kids' reported their results and heresies in the pages of a new British Occult magazine, The Lamp of Thoth. The early Chaos books were joined by two tapes 'The Chaos Concept' which discussed the basics of Chaos Magic, and 'The Chaochamber', a science-fiction Pathworking which combined elements of Star Trek, Michael Moorcock, and H. G. Wells. The Sorcerer's Apprentice Press then re-released Liber Null and The Book of Results, as well as Pete Carroll's Psychonaut. These, together with articles from the growing Chaos corpus in The Lamp of Thoth, drew more people into experimenting with the new approach. Thanks to the efforts of Ralph Tegtmeier, the Chaos approach was also receiving attention in continental Europe.
The simple message of Chaos Magic is that, what is fundamental to magic is the actual doing of it--that like sex, no amount of theorising and intellectualisation can substitute for the actual experience. Carroll's Liber Null, therefore, presented the bare bones of the magical techniques which can be employed to bring about change in one's circumstances. Liber Null concentrated on techniques, saying that the actual methods of magic are basically shared by the different systems, despite the differing symbols, beliefs and dogmas. What symbol systems you wish to employ is a matter of choice, and that the webs of belief which surround them are means to an end, rather than ends in themselves.
An important influence on the development of Chaos Magic was the writing of Robert Anton Wilson and Company, particularly the Discordian Society who revered Eris, the Greek goddess of Chaos. The Discordians pointed out that humour, clowning about and general light-heartedness was conspicuously absent from magic, which had a tendency to become very 'serious and self-important'. There was (and to a certain extent remains) a tendency for occultists to think of themselves as an initiated 'elite' compared to the rest of humanity. The Discordian Society is, in its own words "...a tribe of philosophers, theologians, magicians, scientists, artists, clowns, and similar maniacs who are intrigued with ERIS GODDESS OF CONFUSION and with Her doings." The existence of the Discordian Society was first popularised in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's blockbusting Illuminatus! trilogy, and also in Malaclypse The Younger's book Principia Discordia which sets out the basic principles of the Discordian Religion--a religion based around the Greek Goddess, Eris.
Traditionally, Eris was a daughter of Nox (night) and the wife of Chronus. She begat a whole bunch of Gods--Sorrow, Forgetfulness, Hunger, Disease, Combat, Murder, Lies--nice kids! The ancient Greeks attributed any kind of upset or discord to her. With the fall of the ancient empires, Eris disappeared, though it is suspected that she had a hand in 'manifesting' the first bureaucracies, triplicate forms, and insurance companies. She didn't put in a personal appearance again on spaceship Gaia again until the late 1950's, when she appeared to two young Californians, who later became known as Omar Ravenhurst and Malaclypse The Younger. Eris appointed them the "Keepers of the Sacred Chao" and gave them the message to: "Tell constricted mankind that there are no rules, unless they choose to invent rules." After which Omar and Mal appointed each other High Priest of his own madness, and declared themselves each to be a Society of Discordia, whatever that may be. Eris has since climbed her way from historical footnote to mythic mega-star, and the Discordian Movement, if such a thing can be said to exist, is growing on both sides of the Atlantic, helped by the Discordian tactic of declaring that everyone is a genuine Pope. More people are getting into the idea of a religion based on the celebration of confusion and madness. The central Greek myth that Eris figures prominently in is the ever-continuing soap opera of 'Mount Olympus--Home of the Gods'; the episode which inadvertently brought about the Trojan War. It seems that Zeus was throwing a party and did not want to invite Eris because of her reputation as a trouble-maker. Infuriated by the snub, Eris fashioned a golden apple inscribed with the word Kallisti, ("to the prettiest one") and tossed it into the hall where all the guests were. Three of the invited Goddesses, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, each claimed the apple for themselves and started fighting and throwing food around. To settle the dispute, Zeus ordered all three to submit to the judgement of a mortal over just who was 'the prettiest one', and said mortal was Paris, son of the King of Troy. Zeus sent all three to Paris, via Hermes, but each Goddess tried to outwit the others by sneaking out early and offering a bribe to Paris. Athena offered Paris victory in battle, Hera, great wealth, while Aphrodite 'merely loosened the clasps by which her tunic was fastened and unknotted her girdle,' also offering Paris the most beautiful of mortal women. So, Aphrodite got the apple, and Paris got off with Helen, who unfortunately happened to be married to Menelaus, King of Sparta. Thanks to the meddling of Athena and Hera, the Trojan war followed and the rest, as they say, is history.
Nowadays, in our more chaos-positive age, Eris has mellowed somewhat, and modern Discordians associate her with all intrusions of 'weirdness' in their lives, from synchronous to mischievous occurrences, creative flashes of inspiration, wild parties. She does get a little bitchy at times, but who doesn't? It was the Discordians that pointed out that amidst the long list of dualisms that occultists were fond of using, the opposites of humour/seriousness had been left aside. Humour is important in magic. As a colleague of mine once said, we're too important to take ourselves seriously. Some members of the I.O.T. Pact, for example, use Laughter as a form of banishing, and of course there is nothing like laughter to deflate the pompous, self-important occult windbags that one runs into from time to time. Important: rituals, when silly, can be no less effective than when you keep a straight face. Magic is fun--otherwise, why do it?
Unlike the variety of magical systems which are all based in some mythical or historically-derived past (such as Atlantis, Lemuria, Albion, etc.), Chaos Magic borrows freely from Science Fiction, Quantum Physics, and anything else its practitioners choose to. Rather than trying to recover and maintain a tradition that links back to the past (and former glories), Chaos Magic is an approach that enables the individual to use anything that s/he thinks is suitable as a temporary belief or symbol system. What matters is the results you get, not the 'authenticity' of the system used. So Chaos Magic then, is not a system--it utilises systems and encourages adherents to devise their own, giving magic a truly Postmodernist flavour.
Needless to say, Chaos Magic quickly began to acquire a 'sinister' reputation. This was due to three factors; firstly that its "pick'n'mix/D.I.Y" approach to magic was frowned upon by the 'traditionalist' schools, secondly that many people associated chaos with 'anarchy' and other negative associations, and thirdly
that some Chaos Magic publications were hyped as being 'blasphemous, sinister, and dangerous' in a way that they were not, which proved all the same to be an attractive glamour for those who required such a boost to the ego. Although there were Satanic orders around at the time of Chaos Magic's early promotion, they certainly did not promulgate themselves as visibly as other occult groups. Chaos Magic was thus both attractive for those people looking for a "dark" glamour to become involved with and equally, those who needed a "satanic opponent" to bolster up their fantasies of being "whiter-than-white."
What is notable concerning the growth of Chaos Magic is that from its beginnings, it has been very much perceived as "experimental" magic. This means not only experimenting with magical techniques and practices, but also questioning and testing a great many of the concepts which many people who become involve in the occult accept as implicitly 'true'. The late nineteen-eighties gave rise to the second great surge of interest in Chaos Magic, with the rise of specialist occult magazines such as Chaos International in which practising Chaos Magicians made their technical and philosophical findings known to their peers. This period was one of a great surge of interest in occultism, with the availability of affordable Desktop Publishing systems leading to a surge of self-publishing and special-interest occult magazines being a contributing factor. The diversification of esoteric studies into separate (and almost mutually exclusive) fields continued, and the late eighties also gave rise to the mushrooming of interest in shamanism of one type or another. An important (but often overlooked) element of growing occult movements is the availability of information in the public domain. If you go into any bookstore catering to occult interests, there is likely to be a wide range of titles catering to virtually any subject, from Astrology to Zen. Chaos Magic has not, so far, reached such a high level of visibility. Instead, the ideas have spread by word of mouth, through the information-highways of Internet and Compuserve, through limited edition books and specialist magazines. In a subculture where commercial trends tend to create the illusion of 'separate' occult traditions and approaches, Chaos Magic texts represent the move towards diversity of approach and fluidity of movement between the colour-coded zones of the occult belief-market.
The development of Chaos science and Chaos Magic do go hand in hand, with uncanny (or fortuitous) synchronicities; for example, in 1987 the University of Leeds, England hosted an exhibition of the scientific possibilities of Chaos. Later that year, Leeds was the venue of the first ever "Symposium of Chaos Magic" and, around this period, appeared to be a centre of Chaos Magic activity, with groups such as the aforementioned I.O.T., the 'Circle of Chaos' and 'Leeds Order of Neuromancers' operating around the city.
In a very magical way, 'Chaos' has become fashionable--the buzzword of the Nineties. Fractal designs have crawled their way from computer screens onto t-shirts, rave posters and postcards. The chaos science of non-linear dynamics is now used in fields as diverse as economics to linguistics and has been widely popularised through the character of Ian Malcolm in Spielberg's Jurassic Park. It is somehow appropriate that, just as the rise of personal computers assisted the paradigm breakthroughs which allowed chaos science to emerge, so the practical application of chaos formula has led to improvements in computer development--from the use of fractals to model three-dimensional landscapes to fractal-based data compression formula. At a very basic level, Chaos challenges the way in which we habitually experience the world.
WHAT IS CHAOS MAGIC?
What do you think of when you hear the word "Chaos?"
-"A state of things in which chance is supreme"
-"An unorganised state of primordial matter before the creation"
-"A confused state or mass"
-"Chaos was the primal source, first of all"
-"This isn't anarchy, this is Chaos"
-"In the beginning, there was only Chaos"
-"Agents of Chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition..."
-"One must have Chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star"
-"Matter is illusion, solidity is illusion, we are illusion. Only Chaos is real"
-"In the limitless heavens, shines the countenance of Chaos"
Chaos is all this and more. A term which means something different for everyone, none of us can ignore Chaos. Over the last twenty years or so, Chaos has become the buzzword of a revolution in thought and method, spawning a new form of science, new technologies; a whole new emerging world-view. While Chaos Theory has been generating debate within the scientific community, Chaos Magic has been creating controversy within occult circles. It has been labeled variously as "English Thelema", "the blackest form of dark power" and "git 'ard magic". At the core of this revolution is the recognition that the scientific world-view which has set the limitations of acknowledged human experience is crumbling, that new visions and models are required, as are new ways of being, and more importantly, new ways of doing. Chaos Magic is a new approach to "doing" magic.
CORE PRINCIPLES OF CHAOS MAGIC
While magical systems usually base themselves around a model or map of the spiritual/physical universe, such as the Tree of Life (which can sometimes be described as a Cosmic Filofax), Chaos Magic is based on a very few 'Core Principles' which generally underlie its approach to magic (they are not universal axioms however, so feel free to swap 'em around).
1. The Avoidance of Dogmatism. Chaos Magicians strive to avoid falling into dogmatism (unless expressing dogmatism is part of a temporary belief system they have entered). Discordians use 'Catmas' such as "Us Discordians must stick apart!" Thus Chaos Magicians feel entitled to change their minds, contradict themselves and come up with arguments that are alternatively plausible and implausible. It has been pointed out that we invest a lot of time and energy in being right. What's wrong with being wrong occasionally?
2. Personal Experience is paramount. In other words, don't take my word that such-and-such is the case, check it out for yourself. Magic has suffered extensively from 'armchair theorists' who have perpetuated myths and out-of-date information purely due to laziness of one kind or another. Sometimes it's interesting to ask awkward questions just to see what the self-appointed experts come out with. Some will emit a stream of verbal diarrhea rather than admit to not knowing the answer, whereas a true adept will probably say "I haven't a f*****g clue." Quite early on, Chaos Magicians came to the startling discovery that once you strip away the layers of dogma, personal beliefs, attitudes and anecdotes around any particular technique of practical magic, it can be quite simply described.
3. Technical Excellence. One of the early misconceptions about Chaos Magic was that it gave practitioners carte blanche to do whatever they liked, and so become sloppy (or worse, soggy) in their attitudes to self-assessment, analysis, etc. Not so. The Chaos approach has always advocated rigorous self-assessment and analysis, emphasised practice at what techniques you're experimenting with until you get the results that you desire. Learning to 'do' magick requires that you develop a set of skills and abilities and if you're going to get involved in all this weird stuff, why not do it to the best of your ability?
4. Deconditioning. The Chaos paradigm proposes that one of the primary tasks of the aspiring magician is to thoroughly decondition hirself from the mesh of beliefs, attitudes and fictions about self, society, and the world. 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, whilst the little ways in which we pull against this very stability allows us to feel as though we are unique individuals. Using deconditioning exercises, we can start to widen the cracks in our consensual reality which hopefully, enables us to become less attached to our beliefs and egofictions, and thus able to discard or modify them when appropriate.
5. Diverse Approaches. As mentioned earlier, 'traditional' approaches to magick involve choosing one particular system and sticking to it. The Chaos perspective, if nothing else, encourages an eclectic approach to development, and Chaos Magicians are free to choose from any available magical system, themes from literature, television, religions, cults, parapsychology, etc. This approach means that if you approach two chaos magicians and ask 'em what they're doing at any one moment, you're rarely likely to find much of a consensus of approach. This makes Chaos difficult to pin down as one thing or another, which again tends to worry those who need approaches to magic to be neatly labelled and clear.
6. Gnosis. One of the keys to magical ability is the ability to enter Altered States of Consciousness at will. We tend to draw a distinct line between 'ordinary consciousness' and 'altered states', where in fact we move between different states of consciousness--such as daydreams, 'autopilot' (where we carry out actions without cognition) and varying degrees of attention, all the time. However, as far as magic is concerned, the willed entry into intense altered states can be divided into two poles of 'Physiological Gnosis'--Inhibitory states, and Excitatory states. The former includes physically 'passive' techniques such as meditation, yoga, scrying, contemplation and sensory deprivation while the latter includes chanting, drumming, dance, emotional and sexual arousal.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHAOS
The Chaos Magic movement had its first stirrings in the late nineteen seventies, in England. While the new phenomena of punk rock was grabbing the newspaper headlines, and scientists across the world were beginning to delve into the mysterious mathematical world of fractals and non-linear dynamics, a new approach to magical practice was being synthesized in the wilds of West Yorkshire. At the time, English occultism was very much dominated by the three strands of popular Witchcraft, Western Qabalah, and Thelema. At least, there were enough people interested in these approaches to spawn supporting magazines. In one such magazine, The New Equinox, there appeared the early writings of Peter J. Carroll, who is considered the foremost exponent of modern Chaos Magic. By 1978, there appeared the first advertisements for the "Illuminates of Thanateros", an order who's practices were composed of a blend of shamanism, Taoism, Tantra and Thelema. The announcement of this new order was shortly followed by the first edition of Peter Carroll's Liber Null, which while describing the basic philosophy and practical approaches, did not contain the term 'Chaos Magic'. Liber Null was closely followed by The Book of Results by Ray Sherwin, which lucidly explained Austin Osman Spare's great magical innovation--sigil magic. Austin Osman Spare is considered by many to be the "grandfather" of Chaos Magic. An obscure figure, brought to light by the work of Kenneth Grant, Spare was a superb magical artist, sorcerer, and spiritualist. At a time when many of his contemporaries sneered at table-tapping and contacting 'spirit guides' in favour of elaborate Rosicrucian ceremonies, Spare was painting the spirits he was in contact with, and using his own system of 'sentient letters'--sigils--to manifest his desires. Spare was not particularly enamoured of the Golden Dawn-style approach to magic, and makes some very acid comments on the subject in The Book of Pleasure (1913).
The Book of Pleasure (subtitled: The Psychology of Ecstasy) contains the essentials of Spare's magical philosophy, and the key techniques with which he applied it. It is not an easy book to read, and Spare is often referred to as an "incomprehensible mystic." His vocabulary is wide, his use of grammar is strange, and he uses many terms in ways that give them a different meaning from their usual context. Nor was he attempting to write in a "textbook" style that modern readers are used to, and The Book of Pleasure is very stylistically reminiscent of an old Grimoire before it has been tidied up. Fortunately, The Book of Results gave a very clear exposition of sigil magic, and Liber Null also dealt with Spare's concept of the alphabet of desire. Another powerful influence of the development of Chaos Magic was the work of Aleister Crowley. Crowley synthesised a magical world-view--a psychocosm--out of his studies in magical and esoteric fields such as the Golden Dawn, Yoga, Alchemy, Kabalah, and from his experience in other disciplines. Moreover, it is Crowley's life, rather than his voluminous magical and mystical writings that is of interest. Crowley took his personal experience, magical and otherwise, and created his own enclave, beyond the boundaries of conventional morality. He deliberately sought extremes of experience, concealing, and at the same time, revealing himself through a series of colourful personalities. Part of Crowley's attraction for the modern magician is that he created something which has enduring power--a psychocosm which continues to be developed and twisted into different forms. Crowley did not so much 'follow' a tradition, he embodied a dynamic process of reality engagement--creating his own path from whatever he happened to find in front of him.
The early growth of Chaos Magic was characterised by a loose network of informal groups who came together to experiment with the possibilities of the new current. With the demise of The New Equinox, the 'chaos kids' reported their results and heresies in the pages of a new British Occult magazine, The Lamp of Thoth. The early Chaos books were joined by two tapes 'The Chaos Concept' which discussed the basics of Chaos Magic, and 'The Chaochamber', a science-fiction Pathworking which combined elements of Star Trek, Michael Moorcock, and H. G. Wells. The Sorcerer's Apprentice Press then re-released Liber Null and The Book of Results, as well as Pete Carroll's Psychonaut. These, together with articles from the growing Chaos corpus in The Lamp of Thoth, drew more people into experimenting with the new approach. Thanks to the efforts of Ralph Tegtmeier, the Chaos approach was also receiving attention in continental Europe.
The simple message of Chaos Magic is that, what is fundamental to magic is the actual doing of it--that like sex, no amount of theorising and intellectualisation can substitute for the actual experience. Carroll's Liber Null, therefore, presented the bare bones of the magical techniques which can be employed to bring about change in one's circumstances. Liber Null concentrated on techniques, saying that the actual methods of magic are basically shared by the different systems, despite the differing symbols, beliefs and dogmas. What symbol systems you wish to employ is a matter of choice, and that the webs of belief which surround them are means to an end, rather than ends in themselves.
An important influence on the development of Chaos Magic was the writing of Robert Anton Wilson and Company, particularly the Discordian Society who revered Eris, the Greek goddess of Chaos. The Discordians pointed out that humour, clowning about and general light-heartedness was conspicuously absent from magic, which had a tendency to become very 'serious and self-important'. There was (and to a certain extent remains) a tendency for occultists to think of themselves as an initiated 'elite' compared to the rest of humanity. The Discordian Society is, in its own words "...a tribe of philosophers, theologians, magicians, scientists, artists, clowns, and similar maniacs who are intrigued with ERIS GODDESS OF CONFUSION and with Her doings." The existence of the Discordian Society was first popularised in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's blockbusting Illuminatus! trilogy, and also in Malaclypse The Younger's book Principia Discordia which sets out the basic principles of the Discordian Religion--a religion based around the Greek Goddess, Eris.
Traditionally, Eris was a daughter of Nox (night) and the wife of Chronus. She begat a whole bunch of Gods--Sorrow, Forgetfulness, Hunger, Disease, Combat, Murder, Lies--nice kids! The ancient Greeks attributed any kind of upset or discord to her. With the fall of the ancient empires, Eris disappeared, though it is suspected that she had a hand in 'manifesting' the first bureaucracies, triplicate forms, and insurance companies. She didn't put in a personal appearance again on spaceship Gaia again until the late 1950's, when she appeared to two young Californians, who later became known as Omar Ravenhurst and Malaclypse The Younger. Eris appointed them the "Keepers of the Sacred Chao" and gave them the message to: "Tell constricted mankind that there are no rules, unless they choose to invent rules." After which Omar and Mal appointed each other High Priest of his own madness, and declared themselves each to be a Society of Discordia, whatever that may be. Eris has since climbed her way from historical footnote to mythic mega-star, and the Discordian Movement, if such a thing can be said to exist, is growing on both sides of the Atlantic, helped by the Discordian tactic of declaring that everyone is a genuine Pope. More people are getting into the idea of a religion based on the celebration of confusion and madness. The central Greek myth that Eris figures prominently in is the ever-continuing soap opera of 'Mount Olympus--Home of the Gods'; the episode which inadvertently brought about the Trojan War. It seems that Zeus was throwing a party and did not want to invite Eris because of her reputation as a trouble-maker. Infuriated by the snub, Eris fashioned a golden apple inscribed with the word Kallisti, ("to the prettiest one") and tossed it into the hall where all the guests were. Three of the invited Goddesses, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, each claimed the apple for themselves and started fighting and throwing food around. To settle the dispute, Zeus ordered all three to submit to the judgement of a mortal over just who was 'the prettiest one', and said mortal was Paris, son of the King of Troy. Zeus sent all three to Paris, via Hermes, but each Goddess tried to outwit the others by sneaking out early and offering a bribe to Paris. Athena offered Paris victory in battle, Hera, great wealth, while Aphrodite 'merely loosened the clasps by which her tunic was fastened and unknotted her girdle,' also offering Paris the most beautiful of mortal women. So, Aphrodite got the apple, and Paris got off with Helen, who unfortunately happened to be married to Menelaus, King of Sparta. Thanks to the meddling of Athena and Hera, the Trojan war followed and the rest, as they say, is history.
Nowadays, in our more chaos-positive age, Eris has mellowed somewhat, and modern Discordians associate her with all intrusions of 'weirdness' in their lives, from synchronous to mischievous occurrences, creative flashes of inspiration, wild parties. She does get a little bitchy at times, but who doesn't? It was the Discordians that pointed out that amidst the long list of dualisms that occultists were fond of using, the opposites of humour/seriousness had been left aside. Humour is important in magic. As a colleague of mine once said, we're too important to take ourselves seriously. Some members of the I.O.T. Pact, for example, use Laughter as a form of banishing, and of course there is nothing like laughter to deflate the pompous, self-important occult windbags that one runs into from time to time. Important: rituals, when silly, can be no less effective than when you keep a straight face. Magic is fun--otherwise, why do it?
Unlike the variety of magical systems which are all based in some mythical or historically-derived past (such as Atlantis, Lemuria, Albion, etc.), Chaos Magic borrows freely from Science Fiction, Quantum Physics, and anything else its practitioners choose to. Rather than trying to recover and maintain a tradition that links back to the past (and former glories), Chaos Magic is an approach that enables the individual to use anything that s/he thinks is suitable as a temporary belief or symbol system. What matters is the results you get, not the 'authenticity' of the system used. So Chaos Magic then, is not a system--it utilises systems and encourages adherents to devise their own, giving magic a truly Postmodernist flavour.
Needless to say, Chaos Magic quickly began to acquire a 'sinister' reputation. This was due to three factors; firstly that its "pick'n'mix/D.I.Y" approach to magic was frowned upon by the 'traditionalist' schools, secondly that many people associated chaos with 'anarchy' and other negative associations, and thirdly
that some Chaos Magic publications were hyped as being 'blasphemous, sinister, and dangerous' in a way that they were not, which proved all the same to be an attractive glamour for those who required such a boost to the ego. Although there were Satanic orders around at the time of Chaos Magic's early promotion, they certainly did not promulgate themselves as visibly as other occult groups. Chaos Magic was thus both attractive for those people looking for a "dark" glamour to become involved with and equally, those who needed a "satanic opponent" to bolster up their fantasies of being "whiter-than-white."
What is notable concerning the growth of Chaos Magic is that from its beginnings, it has been very much perceived as "experimental" magic. This means not only experimenting with magical techniques and practices, but also questioning and testing a great many of the concepts which many people who become involve in the occult accept as implicitly 'true'. The late nineteen-eighties gave rise to the second great surge of interest in Chaos Magic, with the rise of specialist occult magazines such as Chaos International in which practising Chaos Magicians made their technical and philosophical findings known to their peers. This period was one of a great surge of interest in occultism, with the availability of affordable Desktop Publishing systems leading to a surge of self-publishing and special-interest occult magazines being a contributing factor. The diversification of esoteric studies into separate (and almost mutually exclusive) fields continued, and the late eighties also gave rise to the mushrooming of interest in shamanism of one type or another. An important (but often overlooked) element of growing occult movements is the availability of information in the public domain. If you go into any bookstore catering to occult interests, there is likely to be a wide range of titles catering to virtually any subject, from Astrology to Zen. Chaos Magic has not, so far, reached such a high level of visibility. Instead, the ideas have spread by word of mouth, through the information-highways of Internet and Compuserve, through limited edition books and specialist magazines. In a subculture where commercial trends tend to create the illusion of 'separate' occult traditions and approaches, Chaos Magic texts represent the move towards diversity of approach and fluidity of movement between the colour-coded zones of the occult belief-market.
The development of Chaos science and Chaos Magic do go hand in hand, with uncanny (or fortuitous) synchronicities; for example, in 1987 the University of Leeds, England hosted an exhibition of the scientific possibilities of Chaos. Later that year, Leeds was the venue of the first ever "Symposium of Chaos Magic" and, around this period, appeared to be a centre of Chaos Magic activity, with groups such as the aforementioned I.O.T., the 'Circle of Chaos' and 'Leeds Order of Neuromancers' operating around the city.
In a very magical way, 'Chaos' has become fashionable--the buzzword of the Nineties. Fractal designs have crawled their way from computer screens onto t-shirts, rave posters and postcards. The chaos science of non-linear dynamics is now used in fields as diverse as economics to linguistics and has been widely popularised through the character of Ian Malcolm in Spielberg's Jurassic Park. It is somehow appropriate that, just as the rise of personal computers assisted the paradigm breakthroughs which allowed chaos science to emerge, so the practical application of chaos formula has led to improvements in computer development--from the use of fractals to model three-dimensional landscapes to fractal-based data compression formula. At a very basic level, Chaos challenges the way in which we habitually experience the world.
