Practices

It’s not what you think it is. Although the term “chaos magic” tends to be associated with demons and evil, occultists understand chaos magick as a postmodern and often improvisational Art. Like other mystic practices, it emphasizes knowledge, reflection, and other forms of self-improvement. This revolutionary inversion of traditional mystic disciplines, however, depends upon personal intuition and interpretation; individual freedom; a deliberately iconoclastic approach; and an often subversive use of pop-culture symbols, social behaviors, and improvised designs.

Chaos magick spits in the face of established dogma. Often regarded by outsiders as a Left-Hand Path, it’s a sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll sort of practice, raising and directing personal energy (that is, Quintessence) through extreme experiences. Obviously, this sort of thing appeals to Cultists of Ecstasy, whose more formal practices – Tantra, vision questing, ordeals, and crazy wisdom (see below) – have been integrated into the chaos-magick potpourri. Even that diverse culture, however, is too confining for many chaos practitioners, whose embrace of the Chaosphere – the whirling fractal of absolute existence – resists confinement in any form.

Playful yet serious, each chaos-magick practice draws from the individual practitioner’s experiences and desires. Depending upon the individual practitioner, it can integrate formalized ritual or involve spontaneous improvisation… or both, or neither. Flexibility and personal investment are innate elements of the practice as a whole, often connected to psychic thought forms called egregores: concepts given reality through extensive investment of psychic energy. (See the Instruments entry for Thought Forms, pp. 598-599.) Some folks use toys and Tarot cards, whereas others draw sigils, craft graphic novels, run raves, stage flash mobs, and concoct elaborate pranks on society at large. Eris, Bob, the Flying Spaghetti Monster… these deities supplant the classic divinities in a chaotic pantheon whose figureheads are less concerned with worship than with inversion. Each mage, then, is a vortex of potential whose Will spins energy into being. And if this sounds too abstract to be useful, then you’re thinking about it too hard.

Associated Paradigms: A Mechanistic Cosmos; 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; Might is Right; One-Way Trip to Oblivion

Associated Abilities: Art, Awareness, Carousing, Computer, Esoterica, Expression, Lucid Dreaming, Meditation, Pharmacopeia, Streetwise, Technology

Common Instruments: Whatever works, so long as none of it becomes too stable or confining.