Chaos magic: what it is, where it came from and how it works

Belief as a tool

Chaos magic starts from a simple and radical idea: no belief is true in itself, but any belief can be used. A practitioner might work with Greek gods one week, fictional entities the next and no entities at all after that, judging each system by its results. Peter Carroll called this paradigm shifting.

It does not mean anything goes. It means technique matters more than doctrine. Chaos magic is, above all, a laboratory.

Where it came from

Austin Osman Spare

The English painter Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) created the sigil method that chaos magic adopted. In The Book of Pleasure (1913) he proposes writing down a desire, removing the repeated letters, combining the rest into a symbol and "forgetting" it in a state of mental vacuity. The desire, kept away from the conscious mind, would come to pass. Spare distrusted orders and pompous rituals, and that attitude passed into chaos magic.

Discordianism

The Principia Discordia, written by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley in the 1960s, presented a parody religion centred on Eris, goddess of discord. It was a joke and serious at the same time, and it showed that an openly invented system can work. Robert Anton Wilson spread these ideas through the Illuminatus! trilogy.

Peter Carroll and the IOT

In 1978, in England, Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin founded the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT). Carroll published Liber Null that same year and Psychonaut in 1982; Sherwin published The Book of Results. The books offered practical exercises, an ethic of results and a new vocabulary. The name "chaos magic" comes from this group.

The core techniques

• Sigils. Spare's method, still the gateway. Try it in the sigil generator and go deeper with the guide to sigils.
• Gnosis. Altered states used to "charge" the sigil. Carroll distinguishes inhibitory gnosis, through silence and deep meditation, from excitatory gnosis, through dance, intense breathing or ecstasy.
• Servitors. Entities created by the magician for a task, with a name, form and function. See servitors.
• Paradigm shifting. Temporarily adopting a complete belief system, with its gods and rules, and then dropping it.
• Banishing by laughter. Laughing to dispel the charge of a ritual, a Discordian legacy.

How it spread

In the 1990s, Phil Hine wrote Condensed Chaos (1995), the most accessible manual of the current, and the internet multiplied groups and practices. The comics writer Grant Morrison, in Pop Magic! (2003), brought chaos magic into pop culture, suggesting sigils in the form of logos and entities drawn from comics. Today it influences practically all contemporary magic, even among people who do not call themselves chaotes.

The scholar Egil Asprem points out that chaos magic has deeper roots than it seems: Crowley's pragmatism, Jung's psychology and the counterculture of the 1960s were already pointing in this direction.

Criticism

Critics say chaos magic can turn into spiritual consumerism, taking symbols from living traditions without respect. The most experienced chaotes partly agree: shifting paradigms does not give you licence to appropriate other people's religions. Another criticism is that "it works" is hard to measure. That is why the current values record-keeping, the magical diary and honesty about results.

Getting started

Start with the guide to chaos magic, make your first sigil and keep a diary. And if you want to see how far the idea of belief as a tool can go, read about Yog-Sothoth, a fictional entity used in practice.