Chaos magic

What it is

A magical current developed in Britain in the 1970s, defined less by what it believes than by its refusal to settle on anything.

Its organising principle is belief as a tool. A paradigm — Kabbalistic, Norse, Voodoo, Lovecraftian, quantum-mechanical, entirely invented — is adopted temporarily because it is useful for a particular operation, worked with intensively, and then dropped. Nothing is held as metaphysically true. The slogan borrowed from Hassan-i Sabbah by way of William Burroughs is "nothing is true, everything is permitted", understood as an epistemological position rather than an ethical licence.

This makes it the most self-aware tradition in this section, and the hardest to attack from outside: it has already conceded that its cosmology is instrumental.

Where it came from

The immediate founders were Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin in England in the late 1970s, who established the Illuminates of Thanateros. Carroll's Liber Null (1978) and Psychonaut (1982) are the movement's core texts.

The real originator is earlier and stranger. Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) was a London artist — a prodigy who exhibited at the Royal Academy at seventeen and then spent his life in poverty in Brixton, drawing. He developed the sigil method that chaos magic runs on, and his Book of Pleasure (1913) contains the essential idea.

Chaos magic was in large part a reaction against the Golden Dawn and Thelema: against grade systems, initiatory hierarchies, oaths, lineages, memorised correspondences and the whole apparatus of authority. It wanted the results without the priesthood.

How it is practised

The sigil is the signature technique, and it is worth describing because it is essentially a psychological procedure:

1. Write a statement of intent in the present tense.
2. Strike out all repeated letters.
3. Condense the remaining letters into an abstract glyph, distorted until it no longer reads as words.
4. Charge it — bring it to consciousness at a moment of gnosis, an altered state produced either by excitation (dance, drumming, exhaustion, sexual climax, pain) or inhibition (meditation, sensory deprivation, extended stillness).
5. Forget it. Deliberately. The intent is understood to work only once conscious desire has released it.

That final step is what distinguishes the method, and it is a coherent psychological proposition: the glyph carries an intention past deliberate attention, and the lust of result — wanting it visibly — is held to obstruct the working.

Later developments include pop-culture magic, working with fictional characters and invented entities on the explicit grounds that if belief is a tool then the source of the symbol does not matter; and the hypersigil, associated with the comics writer Grant Morrison, in which an extended creative work functions as the operation.

What we can and cannot say

We can say it is the most epistemologically honest current in this section. It does not claim ancient lineage — it is proudly forty years old. It does not claim its gods exist. It says openly that the framework is chosen for effect, which removes most of the objections this site raises elsewhere by conceding them in advance.

We can say the sigil method is describable in ordinary psychological terms without loss: an intention encoded to bypass conscious rehearsal, associated with a high-arousal state, then deliberately released. Whether that produces external effects has never been tested; that it does something to the person doing it is plausible and unremarkable.

We can say the practice is unusually vulnerable to a specific failure. A discipline whose central claim is that belief can be adopted and discarded at will requires considerable psychological stability to do safely, and its own literature contains warnings about practitioners who could not put a paradigm down afterwards.

And one note requires care. Chaos magic's ideas about belief, symbol and collective attention travelled into internet culture, and elements of the 2010s online right adopted the vocabulary — "meme magic" — around the Pepe and Kek business, treating mass online participation as a working. Chaos magicians themselves have written about this with considerable discomfort, since a method premised on belief being arbitrary is well suited to a politics premised on truth being arbitrary. That is a genuine problem for the current and not an outsider's smear; it was raised from inside.

We cannot say anything about efficacy, and the tradition would say that asking misses the point — which is either sophisticated or an unfalsifiable position adopted in advance, and it is fair to say it is a bit of both.

Further reading

• Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut (collected 1987).
• Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure (1913) — difficult, and the source.
• Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos (1995) — the clearest practical introduction.