Hi everyone, I hope your Magick is strong today !
As the title says I would like to know your opinion of the best Chaos Magick book to start with as I am a absolute beginner in this.
I really love to learn through books firstly to construct a solid base then try to make my own research in the midst off internet wich can be very confusing without basics knowledge studied before.
Thanks in advance for your time and propositions that’ll help me start finally in a more serious way Magick and others beginners who’ll look to find some indication of path to follow to start their journey.
I’ve also started more than a year ago the use of some(very basic one’s) sigils, and now I want more knowleeeedge, and yeah there is quite some on here !
Awesome ! I’ll check into all of this and I see that Liber Null & psychonaut looks like a must have, I’ll also check the others, already so much to look at, I thank you !
Liber Kaos and Liber KKK are decent if you want to move past the surface. Advanced Magic for Beginners is a more grounded version.
Most of early chaos magic as described in Liber Null is A O Spare’s own personal system that you may or may not like.
IME it’s not all that great and the more important concepts in Chaos Magic you should probably focus on are godforms (Fotamecus especially) and paradigm shifting. Both of these can be found in chaosmatrix if its still around.
An important part of chaos magic is finding the balance between self-indulgence and pushing your limits, the former led to the ‘death’ of the chaos magic community and the latter tends not to resemble the common perception of chaos magic at all.
Also it’s worth noting that the first exercise in Liber KKK where you build a servitor to enact your will is an extremely important achievement because it tends to break the limits of what people consider servitors “able” to do.
Phil Hine is probably one of the early pioneers of Chaos Magick. So if you can find any books written by him online, that would be a good place to start.
Liber Kaos has some interesting ideas that usually go unexplored, lots of “limits” built into the way he describes the system too however so watch out for those. It’s certainly a good start but the best chaos magic comes from the self.
First off, there are different eras and styles in Chaos Magick. I learned the mid/late 80s style as popularized by New Falcon Press. Knowing this will make a huge difference, because the 70s Chaos is very different, 90s Chaos is different again, internet Chaos is different yet again, and don’t get me started on pre-Chaos Discordianism or the Surrealists who preceded them. Different denominations give different practices, and each one swears they’re the Only Game In Town, which is NOT the case.
The single best 80s style Chaos Magic book I’ve read is Angel Tech, by Antero Alli. It not only explains Timothy Leary’s 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness, it also gives many exercises for you to experience them yourself. Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising does the same, but Antero’s book is more profound.
NLP is very similar to Chaos Magick. A companion NLP to Ali’s book is Using Your Brain For A Change, by L. Michael Hall, an article he expands out in The User’s Manual For The Brain, volumes I & II.
Between Alli and Hall’s books you can understand what was cutting edge in Chaos Magick in the 1980s. Things have changed a lot since then, but 80s style Chaos Magick had a rigor that is largely missing in more recent styles. Going back to an earlier era can help you build a more solid practice from the get-go.