Chaos Magick: Unlocking the Power of the Subconscious Mind

Chaos Magick is a form of manifesting, which caters to the individual, and borrows from other belief systems – as the central belief in chaos magick is that “belief is a tool”.

Chaos magic is hard to define because it is an idea rather than a set of rules for magical practice. The core of chaos magic is that the practitioner is free to adopt whatever works for them. This understanding comes from the perspective that it is not necessarily the ritual or path itself that has any inherent magical qualities, but the practitioner themselves.

So a practicing chaos magician (or chaote) may choose to incorporate Thelemic rituals and beliefs alongside Wicca or Voodoo or whatever else they choose.

Chaos does not come with a specific Grimoire or even a prescribed set of ethics. For this reason, it has been dubbed “left hand path” by some who choose not to understand that which is beyond their own chosen path. A Chaos Magician will use the same spells as those of other paths, or those of his/her own making.

Mastering the role of the sub-conscious mind in magical operations is the crux of it, and the state called “vacuity” (gnostic state) by Austin Osman Spare  is the road to that end. Anyone who has participated in a successful ritual has experienced the “high” that this state induces.

According to Wikipedia:

Some common sources of inspiration include such diverse areas asscience fiction, scientific theories, traditional ceremonial magic, neoshamanism, eastern philosophy, world religions, and individual experimentation. Despite tremendous individual variation, chaos magicians (sometimes called “chaotes”) often work with chaotic and humorous paradigms, such as the worship of Hundun from Taoism or Eris from Discordianism and it is common for chaotes to believe in whatever god suits their current paradigm and discard it when necessary. Chaotes can beagnostic or atheist. Some chaos magicians also usepsychedelic drugs in practices such as chemognosticism.

According to chaos practitioners a computer is the central tool for connecting the followers, building virtual knowledge libraries and it also could be used for the simulation of the online ritual environment.

Sigils

Sigils are a technique that is exclusive to Chaos Magick, and if you are truly interested in higher learning, Sigils are a great way to begin experimenting with the power of the subconscious mind altering your reality.

Sigils are an occult method of bypassing the “nay-saying” conscious mind and implanting desires deep within the unconscious mind. This lets you use the full range of your mind to make a desire real, rather than constantly second-guessing yourself.

They were invented in the early part of the 20th century by the magician and outsider artist Austin Osman Spare, often called the grandfather of chaos magick, who developed his technique from the work of medieval magicians like Cornelius Agrippa. They have formed the central technique of the entire occult world ever since.

Because most people can’t access their unconscious mind deliberately, with techniques like sigils or self-hypnosis, they are unable to produce the “magical” results of those who can access and direct the power of their unconscious.

The theory goes like this: the conscious mind is not directly capable of performing magic (in fact, it inhibits magic,) so the subconscious mind must have the magical intent implanted in somehow it so that it might "unconsciously" manipulate aetheric information to bring about the result.

Servitors (Tulpas):

Servitors are somewhat independent energetic or thought creations. A chaos magician would create a servitor with a particular intent, such as protection. This servitor then functions semi autonomously in order to fulfil it’s purpose.

Servitors are often created in familiar forms that reflect their function.

Advanced magicians can create complex servitors that are capable of learning, maintaining and feeding itself and can even acquire personality and a form of sentience.

Chaos Magick Star

The Symbol of Chaos originates from Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories. In them, the Symbol of Chaos comprises eight arrows in a radial pattern. In contrast, the symbol of Law is a single upright arrow. It is also called the Arms of Chaos, the Arrows of Chaos, the Chaos Star, the Chaos Cross, the Chaosphere, or the Symbol of Eight.

There are a number of traditional symbols that have the same geometrical pattern as the symbol of Chaos, such as any of various eight-pointed stars, the star of Ishtar/Venus, the Eastern Dharmacakra and the Wheel of the Year, but none of these were symbols of chaos and their limbs are not arrows.

The '8' of Wands in Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot deck features prominently an eight-pointed star with arrows at the ends. Crowley described the card as representing "energy" scattering at "high velocity" that had managed to create the depicted eight-pointed figure.

Moorcock said about his version,

The origin of the Chaos Symbol was me doodling sitting at the kitchen table and wondering what to tell Jim Cawthorn the arms of Chaos looked like. I drew a straightforward geographical quadrant (which often has arrows, too!) – N, S, E, W – and then added another four directions and that was that – eight arrows representing all possibilities, one arrow representing the single, certain road of Law. I have since been told that it is an "ancient symbol of Chaos" and if it is then it confirms a lot of theories about the race mind. 

Chaos theory suggests that small changes at the beginning of a trajectory will create large changes in the distant future. This is often called the butterfly effect.

The chaos star has – as one would expect from a star that symbolizes chaos – very distinct interpretations. Because many people understand the word chaos to represent a negative situation, the symbol has been used in pop culture to mean evil, negativity, and destruction.

On the flip side, the chaos star can represent the idea of many possibilities, as opposed to a single arrow that shows one path as law. In this interpretation, the star is really a beautifully positive and inclusive symbol, and urges open-mindedness and tolerance to other’s experiences, along with creativity and an lovely blend of different possibilities.

Quotes on Chaos Magick:

“Nothing is true; everything is permitted.”

"Remember that the chaote understands that belief is a choice, there is no inherent value in anything, aside from that which you create for yourself. This includes beliefs on topics such as religion, politics, sexuality, etc which is often culturally ingrained and may be challenging to examine".
 – Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic

“…if you want a one line definition with which most Chaoists would probably not disagree, then I  offer the following. Chaoists usually accept the meta belief that belief is a tool for achieving effects; it is not an end in itself.”
– Peter Carroll

“Chaos is not in itself, a system or philosophy. It is rather an attitude that one applies to one's magic and philosophy. It is the basis for all magic, as it is the primal creative force. A Chaos Magician learns a variety of magical techniques, usually as many as s/he can gain access to, but sees beyond the systems and dogmas to the physics behind the magical force and uses whatever methods are appealing to him/herself.”
– Mark Chao

“The Chaos Magician seeks to understand the natural laws behind the workings of magic, and the reasons behind the use of ritual in the performance of a magical working.”
– Jaq D. Hawkins, Understanding Chaos Magic

“Chaos Magick is an extraordinary deconstruction of magick, semantics, and psychology designed to  eradicate consensual belief structures and, using the energy freed by this act, glimpse the fractal contours of reality.”
–Marik

“Chaos Magick is in essence shamanism devoid of culture.”
– The Heretic Heathen, on alt.magick.chaos

“Rather than trying to recover and maintain a tradition that links back to the past (and former glories), Chaos Magick is an approach that enables the individual to use anything that s/he thinks is suitable as a temporary belief or symbol system. What matters is the results you get, not the "authenticity" of the system used. So Chaos Magic then, is not a system it utilises systems and encourages adherents to devise their own, giving magic a truly Postmodernist flavour.”
– Phil Hine,Condensed Chaos

“Henceforth, whilst there are a great many theories and models proposed as to how, or why, magic works (based on subtle energies, animal magnetism, psychological concepts, quantum theory, mathematics or the so-called anthropomorphic principle) it is not a case that one of them is more "true" than others, but a case of which theory or model you choose to believe in, or which theory you find most attractive. Indeed, from a Chaos Magic perspective, you can selectively believe that a
particular theory or model of magical action is true only for the duration of a particular ritual or phase of work.”
–Phil Hine, Prime Chaos

“Chaos Magick does not use a concrete theoretical focus, the emphasis in Chaos Magick is on the Doing rather than the Explaining…Thus, in Chaos Magick a system of belief is a means to an end and is not an answer to the mystery of Life, the Universe and everything.”
– D. J. Lawrence, The Chaos Cookbook“

“…Chaos magick should be all about, getting out there and doing it. Sometimes it is also all about thinking about how to do it, and thus creatively inventing marvellous and sometimes scary new ways of how to do it. And then damn well doing it!”
–Francis Breakspear, Kaostar!


Chaos Magick reading list:

• The Book of Pleasure by Austin Osman Spare
• Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic by Peter Carroll
• Liber Kaos by Peter Carroll
• Practical Sigil Magick by Frater U.D.
• Hands-On Chaos Magic by Andrieh Vitimus 
• Prime Chaos by Phil Hine
• Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine
• The Pseudonomicon by Phil Hine
• Visual Magick: A Manual of Freestyle Shamanism by Jan Fries
• Chaotopia: Sorcery and Ecstasy in the Fifth Aeon by Dave Lee
• Chaos & Sorcery by Nicholas Hall  

Comics:

• Promethea by Alan Moore 
• The Invisibles by Grant Morrison 

(You can find some of these book on the right bar of this site)

Also read:

• The strange life of Austin Osman Spare, Chaos Magician
• Principia Chaotica by Peter Carroll
• What is a Hypersigil?

The strange life of Austin Osman Spare, Chaos Magician

By Jason Louv

Austin Osman Spare, a British outsider artist who died in the 1950s, was also the grandfather of Chaos Magick. Here’s more about his bizarre and often disturbing life.

Austin Osman Spare (1886—1956) was an English artist—and practicing occultist. He was also the inventor of many of the techniques that would later be dubbed chaos magick.

Born in the Elephant & Castle area of South London to a policeman, Spare spent his early years next to an open-air meat market; the constant exposure to the banality of death deeply colored his development as an artist. Spare’s early work was similar to Aubrey Beardsley, then in vogue as England’s “decadent” years drew to a close, and it was on the strength of his Beardsley-esque line drawings that Spare won an art school scholarship, a real chance to improve his life and lift himself up out of the poverty and squalor he had been born into.

At art school, Spare worked constantly, and also studied deeply in the nascent field of psychoanalysis and, fashionably, into the occult, delving into books by Madame Blavatsky and Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, a foundational text on Western magick. Spare would claim that as a pre-pubescent he had been sexually initiated into a hereditary occult lineage by “Mrs. Patterson,” an octogenarian witch that almost certainly never existed outside of Spare’s imagination.

Spare’s hard work paid off, and by his early twenties he was on his way to meteoric success in the art world, and was declared a wunderkind by the press. Unfortunately, his timing was off: he made a name for himself just as England was losing its fascination with all things Victorian. The Beardsleyeque, decadent aesthetic quickly became as unfashionable as bellbottoms and long hair were in the 1980s, and Spare was tossed out by the changing of the guard.

Spare would return to South London, inhabiting a basement and continuing to paint unceasingly—a true outsider both to the art world and, indeed, to English society itself. Magick and the occult, explored through the medium of painting, would now become his singular pursuit. But Spare would go his own way even in the already socially-divergent world of the occult. An early member of Aleister Crowley’s A.’.A.’. (one of his illustrations is reproduced in the second issue of Crowley’s monumental occult journal The Equinox), Spare quickly became disillusioned with the formal approach to magick that had been codified by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its alumni.

“Others praise ceremonial Magic,” he famously quipped in The Book of Pleasure, “and are supposed to suffer much Ecstasy! Our asylums are over-crowded, the stage is over-run! Is it by symbolizing we become the symbolized? Were I to crown myself King, should I be King? Rather should I be an object of disgust or pity. These Magicians, whose insincerity is their safety, are but the unemployed dandies of the Brothels.”

Crowley, however, remembered Spare fondly—the two were likely lovers for a time, as memorialized by Crowley in his poem “The Twins,” in which he compares himself and Spare to the incestuous gods Horus and Set, respectively:

"See, how subtly I writhe!

Strange runes and unknown sigils

I trace in the trance that thrills us.

Death ! how lithe, how blithe

Are these male incestuous vigils!

Ah! this is the spasm that kills us!

Wherefore I solemnly affirm

This twofold Oneness at the term.

Asar on Asi did beget

Horus twin brother unto Set.

Now Set and Horus kiss, to call

The Soul of the Unnatural

Forth from the dusk; then nature slain

Lets the Beyond be born again."

After their split, however, Crowley would have different words for Austin Osman Spare, dubbing him a “Black Brother,” Crowley’s term for a magician who refuses to surrender their ego at the peak of their development, and thereafter becomes corrupted by it.

The rest of Spare’s life was spent in abject poverty, collecting cats that he usually spent his money feeding instead of himself, and drawing portraits of South Londoners in pubs for beer money. It was during this time that he would develop his deeply personal and unique system of magick, revolving around the use of “sigils” to unlock the buried abilities of the unconscious mind, and communion with otherworldly forces through the trance medium of painting itself. Spare also claimed to regularly seek to shock his unconscious mind into trances of occult power by engaging in sex with exceedingly ugly or aged women (possibly another Spare exaggeration).

Spare likely would have been completely forgotten were it not for Kenneth Grant, an over-enthusiastic young man who had grown up on H. P. Lovecraft books, who never shook the conviction that Lovecraft was writing codified non-fiction, and who soon undertook a lifelong pursuit of Magick. Like Israel Regardie before him, Grant came into Crowley’s orbit, becoming his secretary in the final years of his life; Crowley obliged the young man by demonstrating occult processes like ether-assisted astral travel.

(Letters preserved by Grant from the time, touchingly, show that the Old Beast was largely concerned with trying to assure that Grant properly looked after himself, dressed well and comported himself as a gentleman, so that Grant could get by and get a job in post-war London. He even wrote to Grant’s father pleading him to talk sense into the young man, as the “monstrous” Aleister felt that Grant’s obsession with him and Magick might well distract Grant from actually building a life and career for himself.)

After Crowley’s death, Grant floundered, convinced his occult training had been cut short; it was almost a decade later, through the Atlantis Bookshop, that Grant was introduced to Spare; Grant felt he had met the true guru that would complete his education. The aged Spare quickly became friendly with Kenneth Grant and his wife Steffi, who adored him, and Grant would work unceasingly to draw out and record Spare’s theories, including the sigil technique, which became the foundation of chaos magick in the 1970s (it is not coincidental, perhaps, that the last three letters of Chaos—AOS—are Spare’s initials and monogram).

While Grant did preserve Austin Osman Spare’s work and place in history, he also, unfortunately, mixed-up and confused Spare’s work with ideas and terms extrapolated from both Crowley and Lovecraft—as Grant would later demonstrate in his books, he seemed to think all three men were transmitting from one source, and therefore could be studied interchangeably. Biographer Phil Baker’s recent book Austin Osman Spare: The Occult Life of London’s Legendary Artist shows how much of Spare’s writing that Grant “discovered” was, in fact, just written by Grant himself. (It seems likely that Spare thought Grant was making him appear more intellectual and mysterious than he felt himself to actually be.)

Though the sigil technique has spread wide, the rest of Spare’s work remains inscrutable even within occult circles, where he is often name-dropped, but almost never directly engaged with, let alone understood. Spare was truly downwardly mobile—he holds far more in common with the aghoris, the graveyard-dwelling, filth-eating sadhus of India, than the romantic image of the imperious, glamorous, “all-powerful” Western magician. Additionally, his writing is oblique and his paintings are scarce (where’s the coffee table book?). That often makes Spare an unattractive and difficult subject of study at best. Nevertheless, his legendary status within the occult subculture—particularly in the United Kingdom, where he occupies a kind of “top dog” status in the English occult imagination—only grows as time goes on, and the reality of the man himself, perhaps, fades into history.

[ultraculture]


You can find his book The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy, on the right side bar of our site.

Also read:

• Principia Chaotica by Peter Carroll
• Occultism, the study of hidden knowledge
• The Tulpa Effect and Slenderman

What is a Hypersigil?

The “hypersigil” or “supersigil” develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama, and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. Results can be remarkable and shocking.

After becoming familiar with the traditional sigil method, see if you can create your own hypersigil. The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a song, a dance, or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try. This is a newly developed technology so the parameters remain to be explored. It is important to become utterly absorbed in the hypersigil as it unfolds; this requires a high degree of absorption and concentration (which can lead to obsession but so what? You can always banish at the end) like most works of art. The hypersigil is a dynamic miniature model of the magician’s universe, a hologram, microcosm, or “voodoo doll” which can be manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of “real” life.

“Pop Magic” by Grant Morrison from The Disinfo Book of Lies, pg. 20.

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