Chaos Magic - 10/march/2025

CHAOS MAGIC

Realistically we should start with Austin Osman Spare, who himself was a student of crowleys work. He influenced Peter Caroll, and the two guys who invented discordianism. Peter Caroll was the guy who founded the illuminates of Thanateros, which is the body of Chaos Magic. 

SPARE

• For the purposes of magical genealogy, Spare is considered a student of crowley, but he doesn’t quite fit the mold. Spare is closer to whatever William Blake is to the history of the occult; a poet-mystic who inspired a generation of thinkers. 

• Earth Inferno is a a collection of art, along with short poems of Osman’s own design, along with excerpts from Dante and Omar Kayyam. 

• Micrologus is ostensibly anti-psychology. “The main premise of Religion is the demanding of complete acceptance by faith of some dogmatic thesis and conclusion.”

• One of the first texts ive read that is outwardly anti-religious yet still fascinated with religion

• “Therefore pray not direct to God, but to your own damned self - by sacrifice and service to man, it is the only correct manner of prayer;” WOW

• “"Psychology" is now the equal of any other dogma, inasmuch as it demands the full acceptance of rigid conclusions from undefined qualities and premises.”

• “The offer of such very shaky nominalism - which begins nowhere and ends in an excusing pathology - presents a worse gamble than that of any religion.” What on earth does he mean by nominalism here?

• Hes clearly referring to the idea of normality. Like, anything normal is good and anything deviant from that is a pathology. Which is a legitimate criticism of psychology, but good luck excising normalization from patterns of human thought lol. That goes for religion too. 

• “Neither universe nor man is complete, completing, or dissolving, but only res urging and re-indulgtng existing forms reshaping to function new pleasures of flesh impacting flesh. At least, so I imagine, who loves fat women.” Up top big dog

• “Reasoning and its inferences are a screever's logic, and useless to put us in contact with reality - all reality being more abstract than actual as a para-Ideal we know of, but cannot grasp” ah I see. 

• “The body is the puppet of the mind”

Left off at Ethos pg 43

LIBER NULL

Chaos Magic itself starts with the Liber Null, which has two main pillars:

• Altered states of consciousness are the key to unlocking the mind

•  and that these abilities can be developed without any symbolic system except reality itself.

• Refer to themselves as the inheritors of the Zos Kia Cultus and the A.’. A.’. 

• The Illuminates of Thanateroes are named for the gods of sex and death, the two things that matter to humanity

Liber MMM

• Short treatise on meditation to induce altered states

• Collapses and psychologizes most traditional magical acts. Tarot cards and crystal gazing are all just methods of entering altered states, though “No divinatory system should involve too much randomness. Astrology is not recommended.”

Sigils

• This is one of the things the LN is famous for

• Basically when people want something, they often get in their own way psychologically speaking. The creation of a sigil is the creation of a thing to focus on, and prevent those messy conflicts from arising

• The idea being that you focus on the sigil so hard it loses its meaning, like repeating a phrase to the point where it stops being a word and becomes just meaningless sound. Once you do that, the sigil is charged. 

• You can also use other moments of mindlessness like a moment of extreme fear or pleasure

Liber Lux / Nox

• Follows a left/right division founded on the ethical intent of the magic

• Initiates are free to follow either, but you gotta comit 

• Clearly setting up a unity of both as the ideal

• Draws a division between will and perception and calls its unification Kia, (as in the ZOA)

• Kia is the basis of consciousness. It is the soul and spirit. 

• Huh, they reject notions of god or the tao, and instead lean towards a non-anthropomorphized chaos

• The churning of Chaos casts off aether, which is the cloud of all possible things Chaos could manifest as in the future. It is the kia-thought intermediary.

• Magic is conceptualized as using ritual to focus the Kia, and manipulate the Aether

Gnosis

• One of the five pillars of the work

• Comes in the form of reducing the mind to its smallest state, and expanding it to cover all things

• "There are two methods of becoming god, the upright or the averse."

• Weirdly physiological. They say gnosis can be achieved by doing things like sleep deprivation and sex. 

• So by Gnosis they mean some completely different shit

Evocation

• Little sparks of Kia can get stuck inside objects, in the sense that a beloved teddy bear kinda has a spirit

• You can find them via clairvoyance, in old books, and by making them yourselves

• “Increasing the complexity of a ritual is often a distraction” ehhhhhhh

Invocation

• In the sense of using existing relationships between things as a focus for ritual

• Like, wearing an iron crown and cutting the symbol of mars into your chest to invoke a war god

Liberation

• There is a spiritual energy generated by transgression and violence

• Be sacreligious, destroy the sacred, put a brick through your TV or be gay

• Explore rejected knowledge

• Destroy the boundaries between the exalted and profane

• Satisfy the body

• Scheme against the self

Augoides

• Its crowley. The Augoides is the perfect vehicle for Kia

Divination

• Given that all things come from and recede to chaos, divination works by reading the wripples

Enchantment

• Directly effecting events by thought alone. Like manifesting

The Liber Nox

• The inverse of the previous section. Where the liber lux dealt with metaphysical topics beyond the flesh, this one deals with the flesh.

• “Liber 59

• It is either this nothing or the flesh, and the condition of the

• flesh is dual. Eternal warfare is the price, purpose, and reward of

• Existence.”

• Sorcery: The construction of physical objects of power, using hair and natural magic to make things

• The Double: Its a light body

• Transmorgrification: This is kinda neat. Its an intentional destruction of the ego through acts to achieve union with a thought-less consciousness. 

• Ecstasy: This is the sex magic bit, clearly influenced by the typhonians

Random Belief

• Literally perennialism by dice. Kinda fun. 

Alphabet of Desire

• Some sigil construction stuff

This is also where we get some Aeon of Horus type stuff about the millennium.

PSYCHONAUT

Here’s where we get the idea that the goal is to drown the confused in counter-information, to the point where they lose their grip on reality and achieve a sort-of enlightenment. Whelp. 

This is very anti-psychiatry but weirdly jungian. This whole thing is like, a jungian individual using thelema to interact with an inanimate and aristotelian universe driven by chaos. 

There’s a lot of like, tongue-in-cheek references to the fundamental untrustworthiness of Chaotes in general, but I have trouble squaring their anti-theism with what seem like a sincere belief in action-at-a-distance magic. Or, maybe they’re taking the psychological angle. Like, the mind can’t actually shoot beams which cause people to get run over, but the practices of chaos magic can make people feel like they can. 

So what is magic to the Chaotes? It is crowleyan Will acting in a jungian “inside out” universe. Its a mechanical, psychological interpretation of thelema.