Chaos magic
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Chaos magic, sometimes referred to as "chaos magick," is a modern and eclectic form of magic that emerged in the late 20th century. It emphasizes flexibility, individual experimentation, and the power of belief. Unlike traditional magical systems with rigid structures and rules, chaos magic encourages practitioners to use whatever techniques, symbols, or rituals work for them, often borrowing from multiple traditions or creating their own.
Core Principles of Chaos Magic
Belief as a Tool
Chaos magic posits that belief itself is a powerful force. Practitioners temporarily adopt beliefs that suit their purposes, discarding them when they're no longer useful. This approach is often called "paradigm shifting." Results-Oriented Practice
The focus is on achieving practical results rather than adhering to spiritual or doctrinal purity.
Adaptability and Eclecticism
Chaos magicians freely mix and match elements from various traditions, pop culture, or personal imagination. For example, they might combine sigil magic with imagery from movies, video games, or mythology.
Minimalism
Many chaos magic practices are simple and stripped of unnecessary complexity. For example, sigil magic (a key technique) involves creating symbols to represent desires, charging them with intent, and then forgetting them to let the unconscious mind work.
Rejection of Dogma
Chaos magic resists rigid rules or hierarchies. Each practitioner is encouraged to define their own path and methods.
Techniques in Chaos Magic
Sigil Magic
Practitioners distill their desires into symbolic representations, which are then "charged" through meditation, emotion, or ritual.
Altered States of Consciousnes
Techniques such as meditation, trance, or even dancing are used to shift awareness and amplify magical intent.
Egregores and Servitors
Practitioners create thought-forms or energetic constructs to carry out specific tasks or functions.
Borrowing from Pop Culture
Symbols and archetypes from modern media are often used in chaos magic, reflecting its "use what works" philosophy.
Origins and Influences
Chaos magic grew out of the Western occult tradition, with figures like Austin Osman Spare being a significant precursor. Spare's ideas about the subconscious and sigilization heavily influenced later chaos magicians. The movement gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly with the publication of "The Book of Results" by Ray Sherwin and "Liber Null & Psychonaut" by Peter J. Carroll.
== Beliefs, core concepts, and practices Belief as a tool == The central defining tenet of chaos magic is arguably the idea that belief is a tool for achieving effects. 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".
Both Urban and religious scholar Bernd-Christian Otto trace this position to the influence of postmodernism on contemporary occultism. 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. 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."
Magical paradigm shifting
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.
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.
Cut-up technique
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.
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". Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration" – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness". 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.
David Bowie compared the randomness of the cut-up technique to the randomness inherent in traditional divinatory systems, like the I Ching or Tarot.
Genesis P-Orridge, who studied under Burroughs 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."
Controversy and Criticism
Chaos magic's unorthodox approach has drawn criticism from traditional occultists who see it as lacking depth or discipline. However, its practitioners often argue that its pragmatism and adaptability are precisely what make it powerful.
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Chaos_magic ]
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