Every occult movement before the 1970s made the same basic claim: that it possessed a true teaching, usually an ancient one, and that its rituals worked because they were correct. Chaos magic is the first that did not. Its founders proposed that the content of a magical system is irrelevant, that no tradition is truer than another, and that the only thing doing any work is the practitioner's own state of mind. It is the occult's answer to the postmodern condition, and it arrived on photocopied paper.
Where it came from
The current took shape in England at the end of the 1970s, among a small circle of practitioners dissatisfied with what the occult revival had become. The ceremonial orders of the previous century had left behind a heavy inheritance: grades to be climbed, correspondences to be memorized, an atmosphere of secrecy and seniority. Modern witchcraft offered an alternative with its own orthodoxies. To the newcomers, both looked like churches.
Their inspiration was an English artist of the early twentieth century, who had worked alone, despised the orders of his day and devised a stripped-down method of his own based on drawn signs and the deliberate use of trance. He had been almost forgotten. The chaos magicians revived his techniques, removed what remained of his private mythology and declared the result a method with no doctrine attached.
The name fits the period. Chaos was in the air, in the new mathematics of unpredictable systems and in the music coming out of the same English cities. Punk had just demonstrated that one could start a band without learning to play. Chaos magic made the equivalent claim about ritual.
Belief as a tool
The central idea is that belief is not a conviction to be held but an instrument to be used.
A traditional magician believes in the spirits he calls. A chaos magician holds that the belief itself is what produces the effect, whatever the effect may be, and that a belief can therefore be picked up for the duration of a working and put down afterward. One may invoke a planetary intelligence on Monday, a character from a novel on Tuesday and nothing at all on Wednesday, with equal commitment each time and no obligation to reconcile them.
This practice is called paradigm shifting. Its exponents compare it to an actor's craft: total immersion in the role, followed by a clean exit. The capacity to believe at will, and to stop, is treated as the fundamental magical skill. Dogma, in this view, is simply a belief that one has forgotten how to put down.
Dogma, in this view, is simply a belief that one has forgotten how to put down.
The parallel with the theory discussed in our primer on postmodernism is exact. No grand narrative; systems as interchangeable vocabularies; the practitioner as assembler of borrowed parts. Chaos magic is what incredulity toward grand narratives looks like when it is applied to the grimoire.
The sigil
The signature technique is the sigil, and its popularity owes much to its simplicity. The standard method runs as follows.
- A wish is written out as a plain sentence.
- The sentence is reduced, commonly by striking out repeated letters, and the remaining letters are combined into a single abstract figure.
- The figure is simplified and stylized until its origin can no longer be read from it.
- The practitioner enters an altered state, through exhaustion, intense concentration, or some other means of briefly silencing ordinary thought, and fixes attention on the figure.
- The figure and the wish are then deliberately forgotten.
The reasoning given is psychological. The conscious mind, with its doubts and its eagerness for results, is held to obstruct whatever deeper process brings things about. The sigil disguises the wish so that it can be handed over without interference.
Skeptics will observe that this is a description of structured self-suggestion, and many practitioners would cheerfully agree. Chaos magic is unusual among esoteric currents in being largely indifferent to whether its effects are supernatural. The slogan is that the method is judged by results, and how results are to be explained is treated as a matter of taste.
Print, post and screen
Chaos magic spread the way punk did: through small presses, mail order and zines. Its early texts were short, cheaply produced and written in a tone of calculated irreverence. Groups formed by correspondence. Rituals were shared as typed sheets, annotated, adapted and passed on, with no authority to rule on which version was right.
The library's reading copy of Hermes at the Photocopier, a zine of 1992, is a document of that moment. Its argument is that the photocopier is itself a magical instrument: a machine for multiplying signs, degrading them a little with each generation, and putting them beyond the control of any priesthood. A generation earlier, underground filmmakers had made the same claim for the projector, as described in The Darkened Temple.
The same habits moved easily onto the early internet, where an eclectic, self-publishing, anti-hierarchical occultism found its natural medium. Much of what now passes as general online esoteric culture, with its borrowed pantheons and its treatment of popular fiction as usable myth, is chaos magic with the label removed.
Criticisms
The movement has attracted objections from several directions, and the fair ones are these.
It is consumerism in a robe. A practice that treats every tradition as a product to be sampled and discarded mirrors the marketplace it claims to stand outside. The freedom to choose any belief looks a good deal like the freedom to choose any brand.
It takes without asking. Lifting deities and rites out of living religions, as if they were equipment, disregards the people to whom they belong and the contexts that gave them meaning. The older esoteric habit of careless borrowing, noted in our map of the tradition, is here raised to a principle.
It cannot fail. A method judged by results, in which any outcome can be counted as a result, is not open to testing. This is a weakness if the claim is that something objective occurs. It is no weakness at all if the claim is merely that the practice changes the practitioner, which is the more defensible version.
It erodes what it relies on. The techniques borrow their force from traditions that took themselves seriously. A culture consisting entirely of people who believe nothing in particular may find that it has no symbols left with any charge in them.
What it shows
Whatever one makes of its claims, chaos magic is an instructive case. It demonstrates that an esoteric practice can survive the loss of every metaphysical commitment and still give its adherents what they came for: a discipline, a set of symbols, a sense of agency. That suggests the commitments were never the whole of the matter.
It also demonstrates the limits of irony as a foundation. A system built on the principle that nothing is true depends, for its working, on the practitioner's ability to behave for an hour as though something is. In that respect it resembles the mood described in After Irony: knowing, skeptical, and unable to do without belief after all.