Everything

A mage who gets a little bit out of her head when performing magick might use what’s often called the crazy wisdom practice: deliberately irrational activities that supposedly grant wisdom by shattering established concepts of what is and is not possible and real.

Another sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll approach to magick, crazy wisdom often involves psychoactive entheogens, trance-inducing music, vision quests, risky ordeals, sexual excess, gender inversions, social misrule, mass ecstatic rituals, and solitary isolation in which the practitioner turns her own personal reality inside out and then ponders what that means. Although it’s technically undisciplined by the standards of more rigid forms of magick, such behavior provides a potent tool for enlightenment… assuming it doesn’t kill you first!

Although its obvious adherents come from the Cult of Ecstasy, crazy wisdom has a long and respected history as part of shamanism, voodoo, witchcraft, and even certain High Ritual practices. The Order of Hermes has its own variation – the Antinomian Praxis – in which a mage smashes taboos, violates her own standards, and breaks through constraints to find what lies beyond them. Drawing strength from its obvious contradictions, crazy wisdom is dangerous, disruptive, often scary, and potentially lethal. That’s kind of the point, though danger isn’t always involved. Mystic contraries and genderqueers, who deliberately invert social expectations about identity and gender, practice a form of crazy wisdom on a social scale, fucking with people’s preconceptions in order to show greater possibilities. This is the Trickster’s Path, breaking on through like Jim Morrison in a mosh pit with Patti Smith, Br’er Rabbit, the Cat in the Hat, and several buckets of paint.

Associated Paradigms: A World of Gods and Monsters; Creation’s Divine and Alive; Divine Order and Earthly Chaos; Everything is Chaos; Everything’s an Illusion, Prison, or Mistake; It’s All Good – Have Faith; One-Way Trip to Oblivion

Associated Abilities: Art, Athletics, Carousing, Esoterica, Lucid Dreaming, Meditation, Pharmacopeia, Survival

Common Instruments: Blood and body fluids, bones and remains, brain/ computer interface, dance, drugs, music, ordeals, sex and sensuality, social domination, thought forms, toys, tricks and illusions, voice