Thoughts on Chaos Magick?

I’m new to this page,and new to the works of Koetting,and consider myself a “dabbler wanting to go much deeper”. In some of these “dabbles” over the years, I’ve had some brilliant experiences and witnessed some results.I was wondering if anyone here has experience with chaos magick,or would share some insights and thoughts about it.
Although I’ve only recently discovered Koetting on youtube,i’m looking forward to getting enough funds together to pick up his books. It’s very nice to see and hear someone break things down simply and offer so much practical information.

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It depends, if you got the smarts and CAN handle freedom, then Chaos will make you moist.

Many years ago I went through a spiritual awakening, heightened awareness, I started to build out my own magical theories and method of casting.
I discovered Chaos magic last year, and even if I did not base my own system on it, I refer to myself as a “Chaos magician” to people to easier describe my take on magic.

Chaos magic, the deal is, can you handle Chaos itself?
Can you handle the raw state of existence and take apart reality?

I use science a lot, not because I am a scientist, but because I have a pantheistic religion with mysticism approach.
I spend the majority of my time to take shit apart, scientific concepts as well as religious and moral, to understand and assimilate.

A lot of what is described in Liber Null is far from what I do, I don’t use sex magic and the sigil system I don’t use.

Use fiction as a base, as an example, you may use Dungeons and Dragons deities, Elder Scrolls daedric lords or Lovecraftian abominations as your gods.
Chaos allows that, because it is CHAOS, Chaos is the primordial state that exists prior creation.
Chaos magic is practically working with a clean slate (provided that you can make it clean by erasing whatever is on it at the moment).

There is one thing, I have mentioned several times in this post, and that is about dealing with the chaos itself.
Freedom is a concept everyone loves but few seem to be able to cope with.
I don’t say YOU may have issues, or the members overall on this board may have issues, with freedom, but most people have enormous problems dealing with it, even those who scream their lungs out for it.

I often act as GM (Game Master) for various Pen and Paper roleplay sessions (yea, I am a nerd like that), and I do that mostly because I get such perfect insight into how human minds work.
I made my own roleplay rulebook, you see, with maximum freedom.

People could not deal with it.
They needed rules, they needed A LOT of guidelines and a quest to embark on.
Left without it, they were like dead fish floating in the sea.

A Chaos magician would seize the opportunity to take that blank and clean existence and use it.

Chaos is not evil, or good, Chaos is nothing, Chaos is not a mess, Chaos is loud and silent, but it have a system, yet that itself is a contradiction, because Chaos is without a system.

That may sound like gibberish, but if you see it this way…Chaos have a pulse, if we use another term, there is a clear pattern to what qualifies as Chaos.

Lacking the ability to handle the freedom to fill out blank spaces makes you a poor Chaos magician.
That is a condition, and conditions are part of a system.

Ergo, Chaos have a system.
But at the same time, Chaos is also blank, that blank waits for you to fill it.

Oh, and welcome around, think this is one of the best, serious magic forums on the net.
All the other forums are too…lame. :slight_smile:

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Hmm, Alarich… I liked your post, it gave me some thoughts, and some thoughts that are not ready thoughts - but this makes me wonder should i look up more into chaos magic, but maybe my mind is too chaotic for it already.

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Well, Liber Null is actually not pure “Chaos”, it only gives the idea of what Chaos is by doing an example of what you can do with Chaos and giving you a body to dismantle and analyze.

Like giving you a car to teach you engineering related to building vehicles.

As example, I started my spiritual awakening ten years ago this year, I started to question the world and pretty much everything.

Through all these years, I have evolved pretty much everything from that state.

I am free, and when given a blank slate, I can fill it in moments.

That is my definition of the power of a God, to make something manifest from nothing.

If I really stuck with a fictional concept, the power of the Chaos in my heart would allow me to create it in essence. give it a soul.
By the power of Order, I give it flesh and bone, so that it may live and walk the Earth.

Not surprising, I am good at building fictional worlds and more than once I have just start talking about a story and fluently build it up as if I had been working on it for hours.

That makes me a good liar as well, if I wanted to, because I can make the lies sound so very true.

I already consider myself a fledgling god, Chaos is not just magic, it is a state, a state where you can create anything with only a thought.

As you may read, I have strong self-confidence.
If you want to become a really good Chaos magician, or really good at anything, but especially at something like Chaos, you need a strong self-confidence.

Consider yourself a cosmic object, a strong ego would be like a strong gravity well, the confidence like the force of the gravity.

It is not a random thing that I love the ideal of black holes, how much of my magic is based on black holes in magical essence.

But good magicians also have excellent insight, about what they can and can not do.
If you lack that, you are going to build a majestic magical tower without knowing anything about architecture.

Chaos magic allows you to build anything, but you still need the knowledge.

Knowledge is power, you know. :wink:

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I see my self-confidence is somewhat dependent on the moment, sometimes its higher and sometimes lower - i know i should work with that.

Yeah knowledge is always good… And what you’ve written is interesting: i’m always eager to hear teachings.

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Liber Null is a good starting point.

The main point I got from chaos magick is that the beliefs we hold shape our reality, rather than being the explanations of why things are a certain way.

So choose the belief structure that facilitates the experiences you want to have. Be a Christian on Monday, a Satanist on Tuesday, an Atheist on Wednesday.

To summarize: After some experimentation you might find that praying to your stuffed teddy bear who stood by you when no one else did yields better results than other methods. To a chaos magician it doesn’t matter what you believe or think, only that you got the results you were after.

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Whow sounds quite hardcore, and a bit confusing… Chaotic :smiley: makes me think what is true in this chaos then.

[quote=“Black Flame, post:5, topic:3669”]I see my self-confidence is somewhat dependent on the moment, sometimes its higher and sometimes lower - i know i should work with that.

Yeah knowledge is always good… And what you’ve written is interesting: i’m always eager to hear teachings.[/quote]

Gooby plz

Well, the best teacher is yourself.
I also have a fluctuating self-confidence, I even had to split my ego so that I can shield away the world, like an egg.

Start question, refine yourself, question and actually search answers.
A lot of people want to play the game of philosophy, they want the quest to be eternal.

Fuck that.

It would be like walking and walking for all eternity, walking is not fun, you walk when you try to escape, you move when you try to escape.

I know, because I move because I want to escape, but I also want power, power to change the world, remember the Chaos and Order part?

Well, Chaos is expert at spawning shit, Order is required to allow it to exist.

When you question, you activate chaos, when you find answer, you activate order.

If you are not constantly looking for answers, you are poor at most lines of philosophy, there is no meaning piling up on the questions, it is a meaningless pursuit.

I am all for results, I all for ambition, a goal.
That is my hunger, that is the pulling force that gives me energy.

Dealing with Chaos, you only need to refine the way you connect with the world, to understand it and to use it.

You need little to no books, you only need your head and an ability to create while infusing it with logic.

Just blurting shit out is not chaos, can you imagine something that exist for long without logic?

That would be childish, children don’t deserve to become gods, they don’t deserve to shape beyond their primitive worlds.

The dots need to connect.

Or at least, that is what I think, 10 different Chaos magicians would have 10 different ways to define it.

My method of magic, as I said, closely resemble Chaos magic, but it is not based on it, so of course, it is bound to not be exactly like it.

So what I tell you don’t have to be what you read elsewhere, and that is fine, I still stand by what I have written in this thread.

Chaos and Order, together in unison.
Purify them and let them push and pull, that alone will generate energy, movement, for you.

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The paradox is that the Paradigm will also shape our desires.
(I am not a Chaos magician)

Forget actual chaos. Chaos describes systems that are too complex to define.

I like to define chaos magic with what I consider it’s opposite, ceremonial magic. In both cases you are working with systems of associative pathways. With ceremonial magic, you prepare and familiarize yourself with specific areas before hand, which grants greater precision at the cost of flexibility.

With chaos magic, you just kind of freestyle it as best you can. More versatile at the cost being less reliable or precise. I like to try and keep a balance between the two, not for some cosmic balance, because it’s practical.

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The paradox is that the Paradigm will also shape our desires.
(I am not a Chaos magician)[/quote]

I am an Adept Magi of Chaos Magick. It is the path of my chosen subjective reality. The only thing that all Magi of Chaos agree upon is that which is my motto, Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted. The primary concept of Chaos Magick is that we can use any system we choose and we will get the results we desire by means of whatever paradigm we decide to utilize. Good and bad are based on on the concept of duality which is flawed by the understanding of your subjective Godhood and belief in yourself as the ultimate crafter of your universe. If you require proof of this concept think of this, it is within your power to end your current incarnation if you so choose so therefore it is also within your power to continue on in this incarnation. You and only you shape your destiny and your ultimate fate. All else is relative to your existence. Take the helm and hold on it is a wild ride when you learn the only truth. Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.

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So why does everyone refer to that as Chaos magick? Personally I see very clear designs at every level of perception one views this concept under. As I see it, this more direct form of magick requires a great understanding of the language of symbolism and the barriers to reaching the states of consciousness where we can inject our intent directly (and since we are working with symbolism we often get a symbolic result, I’ve found people often don’t even perceive the result of the work…). For me lucid dreaming and the states between waking and sleeping have proven golden to inject desire into that part of the self that influences your perceived waking reality.

I think calling it chaos is a bit unfair, that’s like saying a child is unintelligent because we can’t connect to its way of perceiving things any longer since we are the "enlightened grown up. We’re human and believe our method of deduction is logical, when try to operate the manifestation machine that is the universe we have no clue how it works and we call it chaotic?

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Everything requires your attention to exist. Yes, you can make anything real, but not all things are created equal. Using anything just because you can is retarded, a chaos magician has to be able to judge the value and usefulness of where his attention wanders.

What makes one particular selection more reliable for use over another is how robust it is, how well built. The things we focus our attention on are structures of associations, and the three factors which strengthen associations are Repetition, Emotional Reinforcement, and Novelty.

Keepsakes and momentos become more than mundane objects because of the additional associations appended to them by novel or emotional events. We don’t actually believe the sun will will rise every day, we’ve just seen it repeated so many times that association is unshakably strong.

These more powerful archetypes didn’t get that way by default. We made them that way on an individual level through our own individual experiences. Spend a lot of time doing math, and your math systems become more reliable.

Problem is, these chaotic structures were randomly self assembled with no thought or care given to magical uses or consequences. They are far from ideal.

Ritual or Ceremonial magic takes the basic elements which strengthened our more reliable systems, and harnesses them to engineer well built magical systems. Any good ritual or ceremony is going to have repetition, emotional reinforcement, and novelty in spades.

If anything ritual/ceremonial magic is like stacking your chaos deck in your favor, adding reliable tools to your selection. You can’t have chaos magic without ceremonial magic, as you can’t have something big without having something smaller to compare it to.

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[quote=“The Cusp, post:13, topic:3669”]Everything requires your attention to exist. Yes, you can make anything real, but not all things are created equal. Using anything just because you can is retarded, a chaos magician has to be able to judge the value and usefulness of where his attention wanders.

What makes one particular selection more reliable for use over another is how robust it is, how well built. The things we focus our attention on are structures of associations, and the three factors which strengthen associations are Repetition, Emotional Reinforcement, and Novelty.

Keepsakes and momentos become more than mundane objects because of the additional associations appended to them by novel or emotional events. We don’t actually believe the sun will will rise every day, we’ve just seen it repeated so many times that association is unshakably strong.

These more powerful archetypes didn’t get that way by default. We made them that way on an individual level through our own individual experiences. Spend a lot of time doing math, and your math systems become more reliable.

Problem is, these chaotic structures were randomly self assembled with no thought or care given to magical uses or consequences. They are far from ideal.

Ritual or Ceremonial magic takes the basic elements which strengthened our more reliable systems, and harnesses them to engineer well built magical systems. Any good ritual or ceremony is going to have repetition, emotional reinforcement, and novelty in spades.

If anything ritual/ceremonial magic is like stacking your chaos deck in your favor, adding reliable tools to your selection. You can’t have chaos magic without ceremonial magic, as you can’t have something big without having something smaller to compare it to.[/quote]

The one thing that is different between Chaos Magick and systematic magick is that Chaos Magick transcends the dualistic principle of good and bad. We as Magi of Chaos understand that karma, yin and yang, positive and negative, good and evil, etc are all constructs of the magician. If you are ever to truly attain true self mastery you must throw out the flawed concepts of duality. The perspective of duality steals power from your workings and will ultimately sabotage you in your work. That is why so many people that choose any of the magical paths ultimately wind up worse than when they began. You as the magician during rituals are the creator, you are God. If you are God what you say goes, your word and subjective reality are law. That is why our main mottois “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” You are the master of your destiny, it is your will that will be done. It is my will that will be done in my works and your will done in yours. It is up to you to accept the one truth that you are God. And I am in agreement with you on the fact of ritual being more powerful than unorganized magick. But you must keep ritual in the right context. You are not summoning a greater power than you, you are summoning your power of creation and manifestation. When you craft a pact with an entity you are increasing your experiential knowledge and understanding of your subjective reality. That is why these are paths to be walked. The paths lead us closer and closer to the one truth that is universal. You are Master.

Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.

A statement that renders itself meaningless by self-contradiction. You can’t have your cake and eat it. Every sentence you write is replete with implications of objective and absolute TRUTH.

My thoughts on Chaos Magic? It’s just another anti-traditional fad of Westerners who hate their own culture, and it compares in value to traditional grimoiric magic as a piece of postmodern shit smeared across a gallery wall compares with the works of Michelangelo. In other words, I doubt ‘Chaos Magicians’ can conjure a puff of smoke from a piece of charcoal. Been there, done that, deluded myself with mental masturbation etc.

[quote=“Poete Maudit, post:15, topic:3669”]

Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.

A statement that renders itself meaningless by self-contradiction. You can’t have your cake and eat it. Every sentence you write is replete with implications of objective and absolute TRUTH.

My thoughts on Chaos Magic? It’s just another anti-traditional fad of Westerners who hate their own culture, and it compares in value to traditional grimoiric magic as a piece of postmodern shit smeared across a gallery wall compares with the works of Michelangelo. In other words, I doubt ‘Chaos Magicians’ can conjure a puff of smoke from a piece of charcoal. Been there, done that, deluded myself with mental masturbation etc.[/quote]

Actually, from the perspective that everything you experience happens throught the Godself the concept that nothing is true because it is all subjective to (your) divine will is not at all contradictory. Today’s truth is tomorrow’s shed shell under that logic.

Yes it is. And you just contradicted your claim that ‘all is subjective’ by your claim that ‘everything you experience happens throught the Godself’ - although the first claim implies its own truth and actually contradicts itself if the subjective is taken to be ‘untrue’.

Today's truth is tomorrow's shed shell under that logic.

Please try that epistemological relativist nonsense on someone with a stunted intellect and a third-grade understanding of philosophy.

Yes it is. And you just contradicted your claim that ‘all is subjective’ by your claim that ‘everything you experience happens throught the Godself’ - although the first claim implies its own truth and actually contradicts itself if the subjective is taken to be ‘untrue’.

Today's truth is tomorrow's shed shell under that logic.

Please try that epistemological relativist nonsense on someone with a stunted intellect and a third-grade understanding of philosophy.[/quote]

You made me smile and cringe at the same time, quite the achievement. I’ll leave it at that.

Unfortunately, I fear that you’re correct in how Chaos Magick as turned out. However, at the beginning of the current, it was very much populated by magicians that were well versed in trad Western ceremonial magick.

The idea was to strip magick down to what works, and dump non-functional trappings that had accrued over the years.

Remembering that much of what was known in the West about magick, pre internet, was the result of a bunch of stuffy late 19thC Victorian England white guys reading books they didn’t quite understand in a museum. Then attempting to resurrect those methods, they produced all the material that formed the basis of Western ceremonial magick.

But, for all that might be owed to Mather’s, Wescott, Crowley, et al … they were still victims of that Victorian mindset. And, they embraced the then new “science” of psychology wholeheartedly.

Chaos Magick was the reaction. And, it worked/ works … if you already have a grounding in magick.

Chaos Magick (CM) is not really a system of magick in the same sense that the Lemegeton is a system. CM is a meta system. It’s a mindset that emphasizes finding that "something"in a particular system that makes reality shift in accordance to one’s will … and the dumping of any pseudo-religious bullshit that does nothing but cement practitioners to that school.

Unfortunately, once the internet hit, and CM became the cool fad … the idea that one could just imagine any damn thing, couple it with any ridiculous physical action, and magick would occur, took hold.

Which is obviously just wishcraft, ala the secret.

Additionally, Pete Carroll didn’t do the movement any favors with much of his writings and pronouncements. But unfortunately, published authors become authorities whether or not they can actually do anything.

The key, imho, in getting to a state of workable results from CM, is to skip Carroll, Hine, Sherwin, and ALL of the ridiculous recent CM authors like Julian Vayne … and simply go back to AO Spare’s own words. Often Spare was saying something much different in his writings than what Carroll et al reported. And now with the internet, you don’t have to read Liber Null, you can get your own pdf of the Book of Pleasure.

One modern author I don’t trash, is Stephen Mace. Mace’s “Stealing the Fire from Heaven” is an amazing yet easy read. And, Mace is the least pompous, most down to earth occult author I’ve read.

As far as producing a puff of smoke? Why would I do that? I however regularly evoke non-physical entities, warp time, and get great parking spots.

And, yeah, skip the discordian nonsense … just cuz you put a bunch of people in a room chanting something while walking around a balloon with a sigil on it, then pop the balloon … doesn’t make a magic ritual, chaos or otherwise.

But, going into a light trance while crafting a sigil made of the letters of a well thought out statement of intent … then artfully slipping that symbolized packet of information into the deep mind, then realizing the results in real life? Magick.

CM is basically practical witchcraft at heart, using what works, discarding what doesn’t. And, I think it’s unfortunate that it was saddled with the Chaos term. That was Carroll’s attempt at making magick “sciencey” … at the time Carroll was writing and building his fame, Chaos theory was the rage with all the theories of strange attractors and “the butterfly effect”. CM really doesn’t have anything to do with Chaos theory.

It would’ve been better to call it Sparean Sorcery … as the ideas that are in CM that work, are all his. Spare is the original rebel. What he was rebelling against was the smug conceit of the Mathers/ Crowley crowd.

My fav quote of Spare, to me sums it all up:

"Others praise ceremonial Magic, and are supposed to suffer much Ecstasy! Our asylums are crowded, the stage is over-run! Is it by symbolising we become the symbolised? Were I to crown myself King, should I be King? Rather should I be an object of disgust or pity. These Magicians, whose insincerity is their safety, are but the unemployed dandies of the Brothels.”

Cheers,

provenant

I have a love hate relationship with my self. I like the techniques sigils, servitor creation etc but hate discussing it. Chaos magicans are often just as hardcore and dogmatic as any Ceremonial Magician. Only Chaos magicians often talk themselves in circles where your left looking for the logic in a discussion.

I agree with Poete and Provenant in that the current Chaos Magick scene is kind of shitty with the made up antics passing for magic. On the other hand the same can be said for any tradition at this time, the occult as a whole is a fad and that means everyone wants to feel special and powerful. Doing money magic and winning a free scratch-off ticket is along the same results as doing a rain dance when you hear thunder outside.

I really enjoy Andrieh Vitimus’ book, Orismen recommended it to me and I was really impressed. I’ll have to check out Stephen Mace, thanks for mentioning him Provenant and glad to see you here as well!