chaos magick

[lord of the 4 realms]

i want to know about chaos magick, i want to no the idea, wat it can do, cud som1 answer this  

[Rustig]

Alrighty tighty-

Chaos magick started around 1960/1970s thanks to a man named Austin Osman Spare who developed/rediscovered a system of magick known as Sigil Magick, and numerous techniues (such as Gnosis) that didn't fit into its own magickal system. These ideas was taken up by the Illuminates of Thanateros, founded by Ray Sherwin and Peter Carroll, and Chaos Magic just sort of spouted up out of nowhere.

Chaos magic's defined differently by pretty much every one of its practicioners (myself included), but I'd define it as a "system" of using material from different systems, so long as they work. Chaos magic isn't *really* a system in itself, it's more a metasystem that underlies how you approach other systems (like Tantra, Santeria, Ceremonial Magic, etc).

The idea of chaos magic is that "Nothing is true; everything is permitted", a statement usually attributed to Hassan I Sabbah. Basically - there are no rules, unless you choose to make rules. That pretty much opens the way to just about anything you want. Chaos magic puts forward the idea that only beliefs that /do/ something positive for you should be kept; others should be discarded. Also encouraged is a pretty ecletic mix of different magical systems, without becoming too deeply rooted in one, so that any Chaote can become a Jack of all trades.

What can it do? The answer depends on who you ask. Personally, I think it can do anything fairly probable; I doubt you're going to be growing wings and flying with it, but you could well amass a good deal of money, for example.

Anyhow: Perhaps a couple of links to sites pertaining to chaos magic can explain this better than me, and so ye shall have:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic
http://chaoscurrent.com/
http://www.jaqdhawkins.co.uk/Library.php
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/
http://www.chaostatic.com/

I recommend chaosmagic.com as well, but it seems to be down a lot. =|

Anyway, hope that bumps your research a wee bit.  

[lord of the 4 realms]

in my eyes its based on creation, manipulating future events, and destruction  

[Rustig]

lord of the 4 realms

in my eyes its based on creation, manipulating future events, and destruction

You could really say that about... well, just about anything, really. X3  

[Amble]

I'd personally recommend Spiral Nature. It's a very eclectic mix of essays about lots of different topics, with a modest collection (around 30) of articles about parts of chaos magic. It's useful for the grey area and for seeing what is possible but it won't explain it any more or help you understand the concepts.  

[Chieftain Twilight]

i've found that studying more about Shamanism, Eastern and Middle-Eastern religions, Paganism, and Hermetic systems, as well as looking more deeply into other works by Carrol and his colleagues, realy helped my research, and helped me to put together a good Magical Practice.

furthermore, my own personal philosophies, mainly about constantly chalenging my own beliefs and turning every experience into a lesson or question or classroom, and every person i meet as simultaneously a Student for me to tecah and a Teacher for me to learn from, helped me to form a personal approach to life. i would highly recommend poetry, and philosophy, as well as a heavy dose of research on Bruce Lee.

finally, as for Chaos Magic itself, i would realy define it as a paradigm of thought, or as a membrane of philosophy. it is a way of opening one's mind to learn in a way uninhibited by rules or facts. more of a methodology or state of mind than anything else. or perhaps the very opposite of a state of mind?

you see, within most structures of learning magic or beliefs, there is this idea that wisdom is definite and objective, and that therefore if it adds up then it must be so, end of story. Chaos Magic has the approach of ALWAYS questioning it, even if it DOES fit! that even though it makes sense, you have to question the validity of logic itself. always be aware that what you think you know for sure could ALWAYS be completely wrong. after all, how can you be certain that you are even sane? or that anyone is, for that matter?  

[PrometheanSet]

lord of the 4 realms

in my eyes its based on creation, manipulating future events, and destruction

Uhm... well, why did you ask if you just want to plug your own idea?

I'll agree with the meta-system idea. But we forgot about servitors, egregoires, and the like!

Though, I have noticed another perspective out there that Chaos magic isn't a meta-practice, but a supplement to *any* practice - anyone can use a sigil, or make friends with an egregoire. And with practice, they can make a servitor and use those sigils. And don't forget ye ol' Chaostar!


*How* the system works is up in the air. There's several different perspectives on it, most of which draw from Mathematical "Chaos Theory", and a lot of New Age peculiarities. One of them basically leads down that windy road towards "The Secret", which negates the premise of needing magic as anything but training wheels. Another views all of magic and religion as a self-induced psychological drama for the sake of therapy. Others still make completely no sense when you actually understand the words the writers used. But "how it works" isn't nearly as important as "how you work it".  

[Hazelwish]

While most "magic" is really the manipulation of energy (at least in my view), a lot of Chaos Magic, particularly the use of sigils, seems more like hacking into the subconscious.

I've also heard that Chaos Magic grew out of the hacking subculture and that it's a good idea to be wary of any related websites. (Whether this is true or not, I don't know.)  

[Rustig]

Hazelwish

While most "magic" is really the manipulation of energy (at least in my view), a lot of Chaos Magic, particularly the use of sigils, seems more like hacking into the subconscious.

I've also heard that Chaos Magic grew out of the hacking subculture and that it's a good idea to be wary of any related websites. (Whether this is true or not, I don't know.)

It's untrue that it grew out of the hacking subculture, certainly: Chaos Magic was around in the 70's, and even ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, was still only in its infancy back then.

That's not to say that it hasn't grown because of the hacking subculture, though, but it's not a big'n (not like Postmodernism, or Spare).

(And, completely incidentally, I notice the definition I gave three years ago could be misread to make it seem as though Spare came up with Chaos Magic in the 70s - a pretty awesome feat, since he was dead by then.)

PrometheanSet

I'll agree with the meta-system idea. But we forgot about servitors, egregoires, and the like!

Though, I have noticed another perspective out there that Chaos magic isn't a meta-practice, but a supplement to *any* practice - anyone can use a sigil, or make friends with an egregoire. And with practice, they can make a servitor and use those sigils. And don't forget ye ol' Chaostar!

It's rather interesting that Chaos Magic is starting to become the system du jour for a lot of folk who're coming into the occult/magick for the first time - interesting, because Chaos Magick presupposes the aspiring Chaote will have had experience of dogmatic belief, overly-zealous ritualised magic and what-have-you. Now, though, it's almost like the techniques popularised/developed by Chaos Magic are being incorporated into more and more folks' systems, including folk who are just starting out. I'm rather excited about the prospect of a new generation of folks who're coming into it with a new, playful attitude to shake things up - not through chaos magic, but through a new system entirely that uses chaos magick as its launchpad. It's pretty groovy stuff, methinks.

(Also, I think you mispelled egregore, unless you're using some other spelling or adopting a spelling that looks cooler - "egregoire" makes me think of some badass thoughtform comprised of the notion of "books of shadows", occult books and so on.)  

[PrometheanSet]

Well, tbh, I'm not one of those that found Chaos Magic before delving into a dogmatic belief system. I grew up catholic, and as a rite of passage joined the Church of Satan xd but when Taoist ideas kept calling, and the CoS visibly was an oversimplified idea of Thelema with nihilism.

Before leaving those dogmas, I found Chaos magic grew on me. I tried a couple of the books that people wrote, but they didnt seem to have anything new to contribute except for conceptual revisions - both the new and old seemed like the useless pseudo-scientific ramblings of a drugged out New Ager.

Now as for the Hacker Subculture: Chaos Magic started before personal computers took off, but you can notice a correlation between when it exploded in the 80s and similar growth among the hacker communities.

However, these weren't "spread a virus to melt everyone's computesr" hackers. Out of these same hackers grew the Free Software movement which started GNU-Linux. (Not to talk down, just fyi for completion's sake.) These hackers were alarmed at how resources which were shared freely were becoming privatized for profit. Google Video has some good documentaries on these software hippies.

Overclocking your processor or video card is a modern example of what a lot of these people did back then. And Linux? Thats an operating system where it's legal to hack it and spread your revisions.

But as for Egregores - yeah, I can never spell it perfectly, but I know its not originally an occult concept. Rather than originally being a thoughtform, this was a (French?) word for the spirit of a group or collaborative venture. The egregore of "Toys for Tots" is compassion, love, and fairness... egregores exist independent of our direct interaction with them.

But we've taken those ideas farther. Try contemplating your city or town's personality, and talking to it's Egregore. Make friends with it, and you'll notice a difference in your daily life.

Or, look up Ellis, an Egregore created as a Linking Sigil that has grown her own personality; the group that created her has built a small pantheon of Egregores around her, but refuses to write a canon of mythology. They cite the independence of each person's perception for this lack of structure.  

[Rustig]

Hah, you're very much preaching to the choir, dude - I'm a former chaote myself. I've obsessed over the Invisibles, read Phil Hine and Pete Carroll, wanked over squiggly lines to change the world, researched the DK/MU and Ellis, and built up tiger-servitors meself. =P Chaote a me nihil alienum puto and all that.

When I say that there's a movement towards starting off magick with a pseudo-chaos-magick bent, I was really referring to the next "generation" of magicians ("generation" in terms of the era that they enter into magic, not necessarily their age).  

[Hazelwish]

PrometheanSet

Now as for the Hacker Subculture: Chaos Magic started before personal computers took off, but you can notice a correlation between when it exploded in the 80s and similar growth among the hacker communities.

However, these weren't "spread a virus to melt everyone's computesr" hackers. Out of these same hackers grew the Free Software movement which started GNU-Linux. (Not to talk down, just fyi for completion's sake.) These hackers were alarmed at how resources which were shared freely were becoming privatized for profit. Google Video has some good documentaries on these software hippies.

Ah, this is probably what the person who told me that meant. When I looked into Chaos Magic, I looked more into the magic itself rather than its history. I probably should have done both, in retrospection.

I have another question. Considering Chaos Magic is pretty much "everything goes," do you think it's possible to create a servitor by less traditional means? Instead of using a sigil, for instance, could you create one by pure imagination? I've heard that imaginary friends sometimes become thoughtforms, especially if the child is older. What if someone thought up an imaginary friend with the specific intention of turning it into a servitor? My question isn't necessarily "Will it work?" because I'm fairly certain I've done this before on accident. I'm just wondering if it's reliable.  

[Rustig]

Hazelwish

PrometheanSet

Now as for the Hacker Subculture: Chaos Magic started before personal computers took off, but you can notice a correlation between when it exploded in the 80s and similar growth among the hacker communities.

However, these weren't "spread a virus to melt everyone's computesr" hackers. Out of these same hackers grew the Free Software movement which started GNU-Linux. (Not to talk down, just fyi for completion's sake.) These hackers were alarmed at how resources which were shared freely were becoming privatized for profit. Google Video has some good documentaries on these software hippies.

Ah, this is probably what the person who told me that meant. When I looked into Chaos Magic, I looked more into the magic itself rather than its history. I probably should have done both, in retrospection.

I have another question. Considering Chaos Magic is pretty much "everything goes," do you think it's possible to create a servitor by less traditional means? Instead of using a sigil, for instance, could you create one by pure imagination? I've heard that imaginary friends sometimes become thoughtforms, especially if the child is older. What if someone thought up an imaginary friend with the specific intention of turning it into a servitor? My question isn't necessarily "Will it work?" because I'm fairly certain I've done this before on accident. I'm just wondering if it's reliable.

I wouldn't say Chaos Magic is "everything goes", but "everything that gets results goes". It's not that Everything Works With Chaos Magick; it's that Chaos Magick Uses What Works. If it got results no matter what you did, it'd (debatably) be a lot more popular.

That said, I did attempt the whole Imaginary Friend to Servitor idea (because I was pretty young when I got introduced to the idea) : it didn't stick for me, though. However, there's no way to know for sure just by asking on a forum - that's something you really have to test for yourself, otherwise we horrible armchair magicians will roll in and start theorising about what could work and what might happen or what we got to happen, when really, it's down to you.  

[PrometheanSet]

I normally use sigils and servitors independently: sigils for a "fire and forget" issue. But with something recurring, or especially important, I use ye ol' psionic ideas to make my servitor.

Literally, I make a psiball, and program it as I would a computer program or script: using emotions, imagery, people, places, techniques, or any necessary tangible as references. The "computer code" forms the logic tying them all together.

Add the programming to the energy you're continuously pouring into it. Don't forget to define an expiration date ( say "none") and then give it a shape. I'm one of those weirdos that keeps adding updates to the old code: sometimes my servitors behave as poorly as windows! Every so often, I go for a complete rewrite.

Unless someone can "spoof" being me with their aura, physical appearance, etc, good luck pretending to have my "MAC address".

If its important enough to keep around for a while (as the fact that I made them indicates) I tend to define acceptable sources of energy for them to feed from. This is where it gets a little dangerous, and why I rewrite the code: if they get fed elsewhere, then input can slip in from there too. Too far after that point, and they develop free will as Egregores. Sometimes that's actually useful, but mostly it just gets to be too much trouble. Its your responsibility to make sure your creations don't go "feral" and cause you trouble.

For the longest time, I didn't understand that people used sigils to make servitors! With something written down like that, you can't upgrade it...


Qigong is useful for additional practice with psionics. If you need more guidance, look around at psipog.net for getting started.  

[Obscurus]

It's interesting that a connection between hacking and Chaos Magic was brought up. Chaos Magic is one of the things that got me interested in hacking again. Of course, I've always thought of psionics and magic as being a kind of "reality hacking" anyway.

What's even more fun is if you can find some of the references to cybermagic(k) out there. I've never tried any of it yet, but the idea definitely intrigues me.

Along with Qigong, something else that can help enormously with psionics is Robert Bruce's NEW Energy Ways system. Tactile imaging can make a huge difference.