The Effectiveness of Chaos Magic and the Nature of Spirits.

So yesterday was April Fools Day and I decided to make a joke post about me placing myself in a Chaos Magic trance in 1995 that led to all my current work.

Like all good jokes it touched on some real issues, including some that I have been meaning to address, so in a sense it was an excuse to make THIS post today because I knew all the right people would respond.

But first a clarification to the last post: the references to BS were meant to have a triple meaning:

1. Acronym for Belief System.
2. The idea that belief is the active force in magic being BS
3. The fact that I was making a Bullshit post on April fools day.

The one thing I did NOT want to convey, but am afraid I did is that Chaos Magic is Bullshit, because it’s not. Not at all. I made this clear in the comments, but I felt like it was a point worth making here. It deeply effected my early training, and when people see signs of it in Strategic Sorcery, there are reasons for that.

In fact Andrieh made an important point when he said that “serious non-internet Chaos Magicians get better results than traditional mages”. I don’t know about “better” results – we will tackle that chestnut in the next post – but certainly equal and impressive. When you look at people like Andrieh, and Gordon, and Peter Carroll’s recent works, it is clear that Chaos has much to offer to people not sold on the idea that everything has to come from a Grimoire or a tradition. Three things that come to mind immediately are:

1. Chaos magic serves and arises from the world we live in today. It does not fetishize Renaissance Europe, 2nd century Greece, or 1920’s rural Americaas the time and place that was ‘magic’.

2. Chaos Magic realizes that Spirits are only PART of the magic, not the whole damn thing. This is the only thing that I did not like about the new Skinner book on the PGM – the half of the introduction that had little to do with the subject at hand, but much proselytizing about magic being all about spirits and anything outside of that being new-fangled bunk. As someone initiated in the Tantric tradition, I can tell you that spirit work is but a small part of the work in that tradition, and need not be the end-all be-all of magic over all.

3. Chaos magic offers a different view of spirits than he UBER-Traditional fundamentalist idea that these are all completely self-existent beings, and those are their real names, and the hierachies are just as solid and immutable as the desk my laptop is on.

It is this idea that I want to talk about further.

I have said many times that there is a difference between fictional characters and entities traditionally acknowledged as Gods and Spirits. I still hold that there is a big gap between Scroodge McDuck and Dzambhala*, BUT I also do not buy into the idea that all the Gods and Spirits of mythology are fundamentally real and self-existent entirely apart from us either.

In fact if I had to place myself on the spectrum I would say that my views fall closer to Chaos Magic view than totally old-skool real-as-written view.

Gordon today wrote a piece on Rune Soup refuting the commonly held notion that spirits being no different than fictional characters is a core tenet of Chaos Magic. This is a mistake that I myself made, and while I totally understand that this is not a core tenet, I still have not heard a good explanation of what the core tenets of Chaos Magic actually are.

That said, I am kind of apophatic about the nature of these things. I have seen clear evidence that the spirits are NOT simply in our individual minds, but I also find it kind of silly to adhere to a view of the world where everyone’s conceptions of spirits running the world and time is absolutely as-written. In fact I would say that there is pretty good evidence that they are not entirely separate from us.

The models need to get bigger and more stretchy. Perhaps the archangel Michael that shows up during an evocation is neither just some angelic dude out there that I called NOR a part of my own mind I have exteriorized. It is perhaps something that I exist within the mind of instead. At very least it exists differently at different levels of spirit/matter/time/probability and has multiple pasts and futures. To think too linearly would mean that we have to buy into that one true religion garbage again, and I don’t think many of us would want that.

This is the reason that I have not published many channeled texts or chats with angels and demons describing themselves. It’s not that I haven’t had such conversations and received such messages, its that I look at them afterward and think – how is this useful? It rarely is.

Most of these spiritual hierarchies and emanationist ideas of the universe are, for as complicated as they may seem at first, WAY too simple. They are not a reflection of the messy world I see and leave no room for the mind that says “well, we don’t know yet, but lets explore” – Chaos Magic embraces the mess and allows for that exploration better than any tradition out there. That is one way that it has certainly influenced Strategic Sorcery.

*There are places where there is overlap – for instance when an author writes inspired by spirit or spiirtual experience. For instance while Lovecraft certainly denied the existence of his Chthulu Mythos Entities as being real, he did mention that they were inspired by fairly deep and moving dreams.