Chaos Magick

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

(For the essay Nihilism, metabelief and magick by Conor, click on its title)

Chaos magick is a type of magick characterized by eschewal of any fixed belief system in favour of a fluid use of belief as a tool for acheiving ones ends. The credo of chaos magick is "Nothing is true; everything is permitted."

Chaos magick was drawn together by Peter Carroll, though the theory was basically laid out already by Edmund Husserl, Malaclypse the Younger, Austin Osman Spare, Robert Anton Wilson, Hassan i-Sabbah and cats like that. (And yes, Aleister Crowley, though some chaos magicians, caught in the defilement of jealousy and begrudgery, don't like to admit it.) Carroll founded the Illuminates of Thanateros, a fraternal pact of chaos magicians.

The defining technique of chaos magick is adopting various beliefs about yourself or the universe as is expedient. This was explicitly formulated on page 00061 of the Principia Discordia. There are, of course, an infinite number of possible models of the universe you could believe in, but in this essay, Frater U.D. does an excellent job of distinguishing those most commonly used by magicians. The usual method of embedding a belief is acting as if you believed it. Soon your beliefs will align themselves with your actions. (This is more or less how we came to believe in The Eight Gods.) NLP can also be used to construct and destroy beliefs, by noting the submodalities of things you believe, and swopping them for the submodalities of things you doubt.

Chaos magick is sometimes called "results magick", because it takes on board only those methods or concepts that produce the desired result. This should not be taken to mean that the point of magick is results (the point of magick is always in the present, never the future). But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the only way to verify things is whether they produce results. By experimenting with techniques, discarding those that don't produce results and accepting those that do, we weed out superstition and come to a more scientific, accountable kind of magick.

While chaos magick is, by defintion, unique to the individual practitioner, certain techniques are commonly used by chaos magicians. Sigilization seems pretty en vogue, especially. Following Austin Osman Spare, chaos magicians tend towards techniques whose power comes from heightened states of consciousness, rather than from symbology (as is the case with much ritual magick).

In contradistinction to traditional systems of magick - whose symbolism is traditional and mythological - Chaos magicians seem to have a penchant for using absurd, pop or kitsch entities and symbols. These may be taken from fiction, tradition or may be something you just made up.

In the practice of chaos magick, you make up methods and meanings and beliefs as you go along.
In the philosophy of chaos magick, you make up truth as you go along.

Some bigwigs in the world of chaos magick are:

Peter Carroll (who has been taking a break from the occult to turn his attention to other things, like trying to prove that time is three-dimensional). His training program, Liber Null is very good. Most of his other works read like dogma and seem to completely miss the point of "Nothing Is True; Everything Is Permitted". Still, there's some interesting dogma in there, such as his attempts to provide a model for understanding magic based on modern physics.
Phil Hine, who has kindly made many of his writings available on his site. His books Prime Chaos and Condensed Chaos are definitely worth a read for their wise and sensible insights into the nature of desire and the magical path.
Frater U.D., who may or may not be evil. Expelled from the Illuminates of Thanateros after Peter Carroll "publically accused Fra. U.D. of abusing his position and of membership of an ultra right wing mind control cult with a seriously nasty agenda." Author of 'High Magick: Theory and Practice', 'Secrets of Western Sex Magick', 'Practical Sigil Magick' and these essays.
Hakim Bey, who wrote 'CHAOS: The broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism'. He defines sorcery as "the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non- ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results", which is as good a definition as any.
Robert Anton Wilson
William Burroughs, a memeber of the Illuminates of Thanateros