Nothing more. But also nothing less.The dulcet tones of one of my favourite podcasts, Weird Studies, accompanied me on a coastal walk beside a blustery, wintry Southern Ocean earlier this week.
It was a conversation with legendary magical practitioners Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford. Catch it here. So the conversation turned inevitably to… let’s call them the pros and cons of chaos magic. And I don’t think there is a word out of place.
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Perhaps this may surprise some of you, but I don’t actually think about chaos magic all that much. And I suppose that is because I have thought through its inevitable conclusion, at least to my own satisfaction, and found that Rune Soup is still largely a chaos magic project, even if I explore different labels for myself as whim and fashion dictate.
How is Rune Soup still chaos magic? Leaving aside the Sigil-A-Day project I am WAAAY behind in, there is nary a servitor or a flippant Buffy-themed Kabalistic ceremony to be found. Well, let’s steelman* some of chaos magic’s foundational premises.
There might be no ultimate truth
This is a false dichotomy. But if we take it to mean -which I believe it did in the occult scene of 80s Britain- that the reality claims of a moribund, 20th-century esotericism infested with squabbling Thelemites and hippie 70s hold-outs are absurd, then sure. You don’t need to cross the Abyss, you don’t need to mispronounce Hebrew, you don’t need to swallow an appropriated understanding of karma or any of that.
I take this to mean you can explore magic without having to onboard the claims and trappings of what is essentially a subsection of the New Age. Said with love. But 'ultimate’ and ‘truth’… honestly, even ‘might’… are janky and jarring terms in a modern philosophical context. Ritual Equivalence
Which is to say a ritual to the Sun works the same as a ritual to Superman. This was a premise of chaos magic. Never a finding.
And they don’t. Solar rituals work better when you call Sol as Sol, not Superman. We fucked around, we found out. Decades of data support this. End of.
Here’s the kicker. Here’s the update. Because of that finding, chaos magic should be a double-down on more traditional rituals because we found that they work better. Chaos magicians should be the trad caths of the occult world if they were internally consistent with their own premises. You still can do a Superman ceremony, but you cannot call it equivalent to a solar one.
Why? Because of the next premise. Efficacy as a Core Metric
If I have a personal Abyss, it is optimisation. And I might still be stuck in it. To wit: optimisation should not be the core pursuit of your life. That is, as Bayo Akomolafe says, “how capitalism dreams.” So your life would be better -it would improve- if you cease to make optimisation a core pursuit. Which is itself an optimisation of your life. See?
Efficacy I keep, albeit a little widened out. We have to make sure it doesn’t fall into erroneous Prosperity Gospel thinking where your material wealth is evidence of your magical superiority or whatever. But if you travel in Latin America, you will see it is the curanderos and curanderas who get the results who also get the clients. Steelmanning this claim, we might say that chaos magic teaches us to enchant in ways that can be measured so that we may improve at enchantment.
Another update here, which has occupied my life and teachings for the past near-decade, is it is more efficacious -it might literally be the only thing that works- to become the person your dream life happens to. That is how I fold ‘inner work’ or whatever it is called from the outside into an effectiveness frame. All of a sudden individuation becomes an essential part of career or love magic. Because it is.
And that realisation must be fed back into the system for optimisation reasons. It’s not just switching out Superman for Sol.
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Re-enchantments and Mindfucks
This is the part that always trips people up, and it is the part where I make the case that chaos magic is primarily a permission field amplifier. To begin, we must inevitably invoke the Yunkaportan distinction between
- Products of thought.
- Ways of thinking.
Sigils, servitors, glib belief shifting. These are all products of thought. They emerge from a way of thinking. And that way of thinking in the case of Chaos Magic 1.0 is that there might be one or two things wrong at the edge of late-20th century western culture.
Recall the famous Grant Morrison Pop Magic! speech at Disinfocon in early 2000. “This. Stuff. Works.” He is referring to sigil magic, of course. And he is delivering it to a culture whose starting point is that it does not. Think of the intro to Portlandia: “Remember the nineties?” The conference audience might suspect magic works, but the culture does not. And so the goal is to amplify the permission field to allow that sigils might possibly work so that one might dabble with them a little.
That is not today’s culture. We are post-UFO-disclosure-kinda, we are post Stargate Project. Aliens are real. Psi effects are real. The CIA is apparently trying to kill a former game show host to stop him becoming President again because they would prefer the country to be run by an alcoholic cop who, in the words of Tim Dillon, speaks exclusively in gypsy curses. The richest man on earth keeps threatening to physically fight world leaders while advocating for you to get brain-chipped.
We are past “this. Stuff. Works.”
There are no more languid afternoons in your friend’s beanbag, watching a DVD of Empire Records, getting a little bit stoned and braying on about reality tunnels.
What does an amplified permission field look like in what we will come to know as the lead-up to World War III? (Predicted here years ago using methods sneeringly dismissed by Chaos Magic 1.0.)
It looks like getting right with your ancestors. It looks like claiming your genuine magical lineage down grimoiric and cunning lines. It looks like leaving the farcical streets of divination for the open road of fortune telling. It looks like what sigils looked like in the nineties: giving yourself permission to explore the possible at the edge of the probable.
That is the way Rune Soup remains a chaos magic project. Chaos magic ways of thinking, rather than chaos magic products of thought. Because one of the great joys of my life is getting emails from listeners/viewers who say “I never knew biofield tuning even existed and now I’m trained and certified from Eileen McKusick herself and starting on a whole new career”, or “I heard the author on your show and bought his book and it unlocked a whole bunch of family trauma healing and I have never been happier”. Rune Soup is one method of being in service to that permission field. Joy of joys, in continues to work. Long may she beam.
So a steelmanned definition of chaos magic might be something like a collection of techniques at the edge of official reality that invite you to explore fuller, more satisfactory, more intact experiences of living a life that is wholly yours.
You see how that one applies to Chaos Magic 1.0 but also exactly explains why Chaos Magic 1.0 is no longer in play because the borders of official reality have dramatically shifted? Ways of thinking, not products of thought. A final nuance
There is a final nuance, and that is that the development of chaos magic itself closely mirrors the development of a magical aspirant over the course of his/her career, and so accommodations must be made to allow the practice to continue as is. Let me say it differently.
Think of chaos magic as a magician now in his fourth decade of practice. He began as most of us do, kicking the tyres on some of this stuff. A sigil here, a planetary hymn there. An accurate card reading here, a failed goetic evocation there. Over the years he accrues practices and spirit relationships and so on until where he is now looks nothing like where he began.
There can be a temptation for those of us who have been around for a while to dismiss or poo-poo those earlier techniques or -gross- those who still find some use in them.
Something similar came up in a private member discussion in the lead-up to recording my recent episode with Richard Metzger about his Magick Show project. Given some of the people involved, many of whom have been on the show, we were initially really, really surprised at just how 20th century the whole thing appears to be. The entirety of western magic in the 21st century -now a quarter of the way done, I remind you- is missing. Those defining high points are, in my estimation:
- The grimoire revival.
- Astrological magic’s glow-up, following on from the work of Project Hindsight the decade before.
And both of them are a bigger deal now -have much more charge now- than Leary’s eight-circuit model or servitors or finding your ‘Will’ or Gyson’s cut-ups or whatever. Both the grimoire revival and a souped-up astro-magic have facilitated and also are:
- The return of animism.
- Comparison and co-learning across cultures and cosmovisions in a non-extractive way.
Magick Show seems to be explaining Crowley like Robert Anton Wilson is still alive, like any of that has had any ‘charge’ for a very long time. But actually, it was that final point that allowed me to reframe the project as a form of ancestral magic (itself an important twenty-first-century rediscovery in western magic), which is how I explained it to Richard on the show (and financially contributed as a specific ancestral offering.) What happens if you think of the project like a video version of Cosmic Trigger I? Or perhaps a love letter to the former ways all of this was done.
And maybe that’s what beginners need. Most of us certainly did. All of this stuff is an essential part of our inheritance. People under 30 barely use YouTube, let alone read anything. How do they get the Cosmic Trigger I experience most of us had? It probably won’t be a kickstarted web documentary series either, but it will be for at least some of them. You probably still aren’t reading Robert Anton Wilson now but you would not even be at now were it not for the time when you did, yeah?
So that’s a good example of that final chaos magic nuance. When you see it as a permission field amplifier that functions in a magico-cultural sense, you can also see it performing that same function in an individual human’s life.
And that is where I have placed chaos magic in my life. In my own words, it is more or less exactly what Alan and Duncan said on Weird Studies. I leave it behind in the same way one leaves a lighthouse behind. Not abandoned but tended, something over which I am somewhat obligated toward response-ability.
Something that seems woefully out of date once you have made it to land but is absolutely essential for those still seeking landfall.
Gordon
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* Verb
to steelman ( third-person singular simple present steelmans, present participle steelmanning, simple past and past participle steelmanned)
- To repair flaws in an argument before analyzing it critically; to refute or to weaken the force of a stronger version of an argument than what was actually given.
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