Index

Internet Book of Shadows, (Various Authors), [1999], at sacred-texts.com

Chaoism & Chaos Magic, A Personal View by Pete Carroll

As there are as many Chaos Magicians as there are Chaoists

practising magic, I cannot speak for the subject in general but only

for my own Chaoism and Chaos Magic.

However, 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.

It is easy to see how other people and cultures are the victims of

their own beliefs. The horrors of Islam and the ghasty state of

politics in sub-Saharan Africa, are obvious examples, but we rarely

pause to consider the extent to which we are the victims of our own

beliefs, and the ability we have to modify them if we wish.

It is perhaps worth considering the recent history of belief in

Western cultures before mounting an attack on the very foundations

of the contemporary world view. For about a millenia and a half the

existence of "God" was an incontrovertible fact of life in

Christendom. It was never questioned or thought to be questionable.

Hideous wars and persecutions were conducted to support one

interpretation of deity against another. Learned men wrote thousands

of books of theoology debating points which seem utterly tedious and

idiotic to us now, but the central question of the existence of

"God" was never considered. Yet now, the belief in "God" as the

author of most of what goes on in the world has been almost

competely abandoned, and belief in even the existence of an absentee

"God" is in most places fading. Satanism as an anti-religious

gesture is now a waste of iconoclastic talent. The alchemists,

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sorcerers and scientists of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance

won a stupendous posthumous victory. Their questioning of the

medieval world view started a rot that brought the whole edifice

down eventually.

We can laugh looking back on it now, but I assert that we now live

under a collective obsession which is even more powerful and will

appear equally limiting and ridiculous to future historians.

Since the eighteenth century European enlightment, a belief has grown

to the point where it is now so all-pervasive, and so fundamental a

part of the Western world view, that one is generally considered mad

if one questions it. This is a belief that has proved so powerful

and useful that virtually everyone in the Western world accept it

without question. Even those who try to maintain a belief in "God"

tend to place more actual faith in this new belief for most

practical purposes.

I am about to reveal what this fundamental contemporary belief

is. Most of you will think it is so obvious a fact that it can,

hardly be called a belief. That, however, is a meassure of its extror-

dinary power over us. Most of you will think me a madman or a fool to

even question it. Few of you will be able to imagine what it would be

like not to believe it, or that it would be possible to replace it

with something else. Here it is: the dominant belief in all Western

Cultures is that this universe runs on material causality and is

thus comprehensible to reason. Virtually everyone also maintains a

secondary belief that contradicts this - the belief that they have

something called free will, although they are unable to specify what

this is - but I will deal with that later.

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We spend billions every year indoctrinating our young with the

primary belief in material causality in our schools. Our language,

our logic, and most of our machines, are built largely upon this

belief. We regard it as more reliable than "God".

Now, it has been one of the functions of the Magician to try and

break through to something beyond the normal. My own magical quest

has always had a strongly antinomian and iconoclastic element, and I

long ago decided to go for broke and attack the primary beliefs of

our culture. Religion is too easy a target as it is already fatally

disabled by our ancestors, the Renaissance sorcerers and scientists.

Contemporary Satanists are waisting their efforts.

Ideology is thankfully beeing gradually replaced with economics. The

main thrust of my Chaoism is against the doctrine of material

causality and secondarily against most of the nonsense that passes

for modern psychology.

Anyway, now I have to firstly try and convince you that there is

something seriously wrong with material causality, and that there is

something that could supersede it as a belief. These are vitally

important questions for magicians, for since the demise of

essentially spiritual descriptions of magic, the belief in material

causality has been increasingly used in a haphazard fashion to form

various ill-conceived metaphors such as "magical energy" or "magical

force" which are tactily presumed to be something analogous to

static electricity or radio waves. This is, I think, complete

bullshit. Magic can sometimes be induced to behave a bit like this,

but it is not a very effective description.

Before attempting a frontal assault on material causality I shall

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backtrack a little to gather ammunition. Few people noticed that in

the 1930`s a serious crack was discovered in the fabric of material

causality which, on the grounds of faith alone, was supposed to

cover everything. This crack was called Quantum Physics, and it was

pre-eminently Niels Bohr who, with his Copenhagen Interpretation,

poked a finger into the crack and prised open a wrap to reveal a

different reality.

Basically Bohr showed that this reality is better modelled by a

description of non-material causality operating probabilistically

not deterministically. This may sound tame at first, but the

implications for our everyday view of the world and for our theories

of magic are awesome. It brought to an end the era of the clockwork

universe paradigm which began over two hundred years ago and which

almost everyone still believes in their guts, even if they cannot

formulate it precisely. I urge magicians everywhere to give thanks

by drinking what is probably the best lager in the world, for it was

the Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen that supported Bohr and his

colleagues while they did the physics.

The majority of straight scientists find quantum physics as

distasteful as a priest would find witch-craft. If they have to use

it they prefer not to think about the implications. Even Einstein,

who started quantum physics going but made his major contribution in

Relativity, felt repelled by its implications, on ground of

scientific faith and residual Judaic belief, and wasted much of his

later life campaining fruitlessly against it.

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Quantum physics says to me that not only is magic possible in a

world that is infinitely Chaotic than we thought, but that magic is

central to the functioning of this universe. This is a magical

universe not a clockwork one. Causal materialist beliefs were a

liberating and refreshing breath of fresh air after a millenia and a

half of monotheism, but now, at their zenith, they have become

tyranny. Relativity and the fundamental physics associated with it

are probably close to a final refinement of the causal materialist

paradigm, and as such they now seem a terrible prison. For all

practical purposes they confine us to this planet forever and rule

out magic from our lives. Quantum physics, which I believe currently

to be basically an investigation of the magical phenomena underlying

the reality most people have perceived as non-magical for the last

two hundred years, shows us a way out.

It may be some time before any significant portion of humanity

learns to believe the new paradigm in their guts and live accordingly,

but eventually they will. Until then it is bound to sound like discom-

bobulating gobbledgegook or tarted-up intellectualism to most people.

I would like to mention my other favourite iconoclasm in passing

without explanation. I reject the conventional view of post-mono-

theistic Western psychology that we are individual unitary beings

possessing free will. I prefer the description that we are colonial

beings composed of multiple personalities; although generally unaf-

flicted with the selective amnesia which is the hallmark of this

otherwise omnipresent condition. And that secondly there is no such

thing as free will; although we have the capacity to act randomly, or

perhaps one should say more precisely stochastically, and the propen-

sity to identify with whatever we find ourselves doing as a result.

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All the gods and goddesses are within us and non-materially about us

as well, in the form of non-local information.

I consider that all events occur basically by magic; the apparent

causality investigated by classical science is merely the more

statistically reliable end of a spectrum whose other end is complete

Chaos. However, I would like to end with a few words about how my

Chaoism affects my personal activity in what is ordinaryly called

magic.

There are for me two main aspects of magic; the parapsychological

and the psychological. In enchantment and divination I believe that

the magician is attempting to interact with nature via non-material

causality. He is basically exchanging information with his environment

without using his physical faculties. Austin Osman Spare precisely

identified the mental manoeuvres necessary to allow this to occur. The

manoeuvres are startlingly simple and once you have understood them

you can invent an unlimited number of spells and forms of divination.

The manoeuvres are sacred but the forms of their expression are

arbitrary; you can use anything at random. Bohr and Spare are for me

Saints of the Church of Chaos.

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I consider that when a magician interacts with those apparently

sentient sources of knowledge, inspiration and parapsychological

ability that used to be called spirits, gods, demons and elementals,

he is tapping into the extraordinary resources that each of us

already contains. When activated they may also receive some input

via non-material causality from outside. Yet since we all contain

such a rich multitude within our own unconscious or subconscious and

can also receive congruent information from the collective

unconsciousness as it were, then the possibilities are practically

limitless. Given the correct technique one can invoke or evoke

anything, even things which did not exist before one thought of

calling them. This may sound like complete Chaos, and I have to

report that my own researches confirm that it is !

Chaos Magic for me means a handful of basic techniques which must

be adhered to strictly to get results, but beyond that it offers a

freedom of expression and intent undreamt of in all previous forms

of magic.

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