In sex, physical self-consciousness is abandoned in favor of intensified sensual pleasure. In sleep, everyday consciousness is abandoned in favor of the unconscious, the world of dreams. In sigils, the two states meet in a single act, and so is released a special and potent energy. A fertile power of harmony, transcending the barriers of the conscious/unconscious divide. And so it is that the sigil lets forth an energy that cuts through like a flaming sword, overcoming all that stands in its path. -
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
The best friend I had growing up was a copycat, Harry, who I loved. I never knew what he looked like. He was always given an empty plate at dinner. He collected Masters of the Universe stickers with me, and I'd buckle him up in the car when we went anywhere. Some would imply I wanted a brother, others would propose I was lonely.
My grandmother had told me that God was the best version of yourself you could imagine. I guess I couldn't imagine that at such a young age. So, here came Harry. My imaginary best friend. Monotheism was the only import from the spiritual lives of the adults around me. I didn't know any good and proper occultists. I don't think I could fathom the idea of all-knowing, all-powerful very well. My friends at school said that I would be eaten by the monsters underneath my bed or inside my closet. I didn't get scared, I just got underneath my bed, praying to God to meet them, to find their friendship.
I had some kind of social confusion. I named all my stuffed animals and talked to them endlessly, but didn't like the kids at school. Too irrational, unfocused. I talked to myself, I was always trying to answer my own questions. I didn't know what inspiration was. I knew the dark shapes I could make at night, that when I touched my chest very lightly, with just my fingertips, it felt like I could lift through the air somewhere else. Grandma Rusty did the whole bit about gold roads and seeing all the people you loved in Heaven, but no one was really dead yet for me. I'd have her for another 7 yrs.
I tried everything to get to God's voice. It never came, but at night I would feel things in the air, in the darkness of Hammond, Indiana. I would see figures in white hanging by the neck in the corners of my bedroom and mouthing words that I couldn't make out. Dreams and reality collapsed into one another a lot. I lived on a residential road, Madison Ave, 7147, next to a gravel alley way, a couple blocks from interstate 80-94. An old acid-freak couple across the street, where the male elder would where summer clothes in the winter and winter clothes in the summer. Down the block was a weird kind of castle space with an old German couple in it.
There was something out there and my senses always cued me into it. I had lucid dreams where red eyes would follow me from window to window in the house. I would go into the basement to play and I could feel the pressure. I wasn't scared of the things I was told I should be, I was scared of something bigger. Something that would pour into the house and destroy us, something pushing in all around me.
This is before I knew what the Spectacle was, before my television consumption jumped the shark, in regards to what was allowable. Imagination is such a stupid, reductive way to see wherever you're at. It's more than that, it's not just my mind, it's my whole body, it's the deep spaces that can lower you down past the concrete, past the piping and geology of this place. It's that positive void that rolls into my heart and chest when I feel love.
My parents enrolled me in Sunday School sessions and eventually I would go to catechism classes, but it never really stuck. I sort of understood the intention, but it wasn't until my actions were being deemed mortal sins that I started getting afraid. A kid named Tom, had made that male masturbatory gesture during my Freshman year of high school. Of course, I investigated it. Two days later, I was told it was a mortal sin. Two days after that, during the Ides of March in 1997, my father had a major heart attack. A three-pack a day man. I was 14. Was it my fault? Did I somehow cause it? I remember the doctors pulling my father's body from the car, that smack of skin against the sidewalk. I remember sitting in the emergency room, my mother's pale complexion and hand against her face, holding back infinite screams. My brother turning his attention to a priest, asking about the environment of heaven. I sat there, praying as hard as I could, not to let my father die because of my indiscretion. I took all that responsibility into myself.
The doctors told us he had a 3% chance of surviving the night and when he did, making a full recovery in the end, I thought that my promise to believe had something to do with it. I became a Roman Catholic. I made new friends, began going every Sunday at 1230pm, singing, watching each word that appeared in the missalette, following the sermon as though it were the only words ever spoken. At that point, I saw God as my grandmother, who had died the previous summer. I pushed and pushed to the front of the line in questions, trying to summon all the powers I had felt as a kid and aim through God. Later on, after my third year, I started going to youth retreats. There was one in particular where I was anointed as Christ and asked to field questions from other youth, in a small-group session. There were six of us who were anointed. The intensity and dedication to the belief was so real that when we met up afterwards, the other five told me that the Holy Ghost had truly entered them and they had no recollection of the session. I was a true believer and they were lying. I had felt the way God's hand had touched my shoulder as we guided a small candle out to the campground. Why didn't they remember? I saw the falsehood litter around me and I left. I started asking more intense questions of the clergy. I wanted to know the intentions, the reasons, the origins and nothing was satisfactory. I remember a close church friend, Bob, who told me when I was leaving, that he got a 1600 on his SAT's and that I shouldn't think I'm smarter then him since I was getting out. I remember looking over at him, I was done.
10 yrs I spent as an atheist, angry, perturbed at how dumb I had been. My father's heart attack was something he owned, not me. But, the moments of clarity as a kid and later, as an adolescence still gave off this deeper reality. Moments where I would see things that didn't make any sense, where I would enter a room and feel pressure or have visuals pool into the back of my eyes.
Religion invades the child's world. A child without guilt is thus given guilt. A child without fear is thus given fear. The only salvation offered is through faith. Faith, it is suggested, ends death. The price of cheating death through faith is, of course, submission. - Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
At some point, I started making an altar in the spaces I called home. It was always a touch make-shift, dirty, stones from my third grade rock collection, or the box of feathers from around the neighborhood. I had been living in Philadelphia, maybe a year in or so, when my friend John and Amanda Courie asked me if I wanted to join a Chaos Magick organization in line with the
Temple of Psychick Youth (TOPY). I wanted to describe to you how I got involved, but the answer is, 'I don't know.' I just kind of walked into it. As a kid, I wanted to believe in everything weird, anything that my friends didn't believe in. I'm 32 now. I believe in everything, in nothing, in various trip-wired dimensions. When asked, I just said yes.
The Temple asks, “What do you really want out of life?” Those shapes in the dark can be anything. Seven billion people. We can do anything, anything at all. The Temple asks, “Will you be forever addicted to self-restriction?” Maybe that was the key, located on the second page of
Thee Grey Book (1980) that pushed me out into my first
sigil. At first, I felt that the directives were just self-help guru shit, but then it started to occur to me that the weird lines from the universe in my childhood weren't gone. They were maturing into something else. I had, by this time, been involved with the Spectacle for a few years. The depression had just started to sting below the surface, into the makings of a dark heart and this felt like a fight, an antidote.
The British Occultist
Austin Osman Spare's methodology included that, “sigils are used to enable two things to occur. Effective communion with unconscious levels and the lodging of a desire or wish at unconscious levels without the conscious mind being involved or aware.” So, I said yes to chaos. Hail Eris. At first glean, I was worried about the blood. I have an intense fear of blood, like a spigot you can't stop. I followed the directions. I wrote down on a piece of paper a wish. Through Spare's method, 'the alphabet of desire', I removed all the duplicate letters and created a secondary artistic rendering of what was left. A glyph. I put the paper on the ground, next to my altar. I picked up some diabetic needles and broke into my skin, letting a drop or two out. I added a lock of hair from my head and pubis. I spit onto the page. The idea now is to charge the glyph.
You communicate, through your most intense sexual fantasy, the last element, an orgasm and the fluids associated. It was hard to achieve at first, as the internet had been part of my private habit for so many years that my imagination felt held back, or stifled. The Spectacle had invaded my own sexual appetite. Bricks of grease down the pipe. I had to make my brain break out, calling deep inside to create a desire outside of the image. I kept falling in and out of moments of closure, of complete loss of arousal and then my animal instincts kicked in and it happened. The images dissolved and I collapsed, spreading out through the entirety of my body, into the floorboards and the dirt below the house. I could feel the melt, this shift. I laid on the ground for nearly an hour, feeling so tired, as though a thousand years had passed through me. Was it a flaming sword? I don't know if I was there yet.
The Spectacle says that what appears is good and what is good appears. The cyclical prison, one that is in me and everyone I know. I made a choice to do something and the shift occurred. At that very moment, I had found something. The next morning, I burned the glyph, green flames spitting out and I let go of my desire, of the wish.
Peter Carroll writes in
Liber Null, that, “the sigil is charged at moments when the mind has achieved quiescence through magickal trance, or when high emotionality paralyzes its normal functioning.”
The sigil represents a person's true will. Carroll goes on to define magick as, “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” It's about discipline. It's about keeping a diary of one's experiments and how they turn out. To truly fight the Spectacle, one must find a way to bring autonomous space to their bodies. The body between worlds. It's through one's genetic material that a link can be established with yourself, or as Genesis puts it as, “a perfect holographic splinter, containing everything necessary to create yourself anew.” At this point, one builds their practice.
It's important to point out that a strong habit can be established through this methodology. Carroll points out that there are two ways to follow through on the objective. The first is laughter/laughter, a kind of antidote to the possible insanity of the magickal trance and the second is non-attachment/non-disinterest, a kind of mental teaching to not foreground one's experiments in obsession, or 'acting without lust of result.'
Laughter is the highest emotion, binding, holding all the other emotions inside. There is nothing that stands in opposition to laughter. Carroll states that, “laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played upon itself. The trick is to see that joke played out even in the neutral and ghastly events which surround one.” Our limited life span, the age of the universe, the difficulty of sustaining life on a planet with these ideas of consumption and social currency... This is Monty Python's, 'The Funniest Joke in the World,' where the translation has to be word by word, syllable by etc. or death stakes its claim. It's where the madness edges the razor blade while shaving.
These are the conditions, seek out laughter, it can change you.
The birth of Chaos Magick came about in the late 70s, at about the time that punk rock was spitting out at the music industry and Chaos Science was beginning to be taken seriously by mathematicians, economists and physicists... The basic message of Chaos Magick is that, what is fundamental to magick is the actual doing of it – that like sex, no amount of theorizing and intellectualization can substitute for actual experience. -
Phil Hine
What I love about Chaos Magick is that it borrows, steals, plagiarizes from all kinds of different sources. Whether it's the latest scientific declarations that we live inside a 2-D hologram, or the dimensions spaced out in Philip K Dick's
Valis, the system is built on what the practitioner chooses. One is encouraged to devise what works best for you. If the fit sucks, do something else.
The principles that guided the early adherents still seems relevant. But it's the bare bones of a system.
1) One must avoid dogma. Learn how to with change your mind, contradict yourself, listen to your gut. 2) You got to check it out for yourself, no more 'armchair theorists', make experiments, devise schemes, this is your life. 3) Don't half-ass it, get technical. It's only through self-assessment and a continued method of follow-up that you'll be able to get the results you truly desire. 4) It's time to decondition. This is the big time folks, you have to walk through socialized thought, take risks to better understand yourself and your surroundings. 5) Make the system diverse, stretch out into avenues of thought you never caught before, build out of vulnerability. 6) Perhaps the most important one, is Gnosis. The ability to enter altered states of consciousness at will.
This can be broken down into two phases. Inhibitory states and excitatory states. Hine points out that, “the former includes physically 'passive' techniques such as meditation, yoga, scrying, contemplation and sensory deprivation while the latter includes chanting, drumming, dance, emotional and sexual arousal.” These are the keys to changing your relationship with yourself and the world of the Spectacle. There is no elite practitioners of Chaos Magick, there is just us.
These are tools you could use. It's how I started to work with my vulnerabilities. This is how we can see the possibilities of a Post-Spectacular World. As I've worked my way through some of the darker depressive states of Spectacular Time, ("Illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality" – Guy Debord) I've also begun the process where I create autonomy around me, in the actual surrounding space. It's my small, endless movement to stop the pervasive ditch-weed ideology of the Spectacle. It's a choice.
Fear breeds faith. Faith uses fear. Reject faith, reject fear, reject religions and reject dogma. Learn to cherish yourself, appreciate intuition and instinct, learn to love your questions. Value your time. Use mortality to motivate action and a caring, compassionate and concentrated life. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge with Simon Dwyer
It's important at this juncture to talk about some of the problems with Chaos Magick. First and most annoyingly, is the terminology. Not unlike philosophy, where a plethora of words between authors mean the same thing, or the variations on a theme works as a kind of arrogant signature, Chaos Magick can work and look like a system that eats itself. I've used Peter Carroll's
Liber Null,
Psychonaut,
The Apophenion, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge's
The Psychick Bible as the core texts in both this essay and in my practice. These texts are pretty free of the language of alienation that one finds in the more esoteric texts. I would also suggest
Oven-Ready Chaos by Phil Hine as a solid introduction. The systems are what you want to make, you are the power that decides that making.
I must also say, that some of the magickal texts that are out there, under the label of Chaos Magick, even some of the writer's I've culled for this text will have gender-binary problems. There is also some misogyny, sometimes bad stuff. Obviously I don't want to stand by these problematic texts, but the era in which some were written many other influential art works were often just as phallocentric and restrictive in their perspective. Ideas do have removable and switchable parts; rip it up and start again.
You just have to force the hand of chance. The childhood home where my grandmother raised me, while my father went to nursing school was torn down in early 2009. My grandfather had long vacated and remarried. We aren't sure if he ever found out, advancing age and all that. The house that held a full generation of DeBoers had received tenants that destroyed the interior: defecation, animals, children, the whole works just let loose. Apparently the stairwell to the upstairs completely collapsed.
On the flip, I have more than a few eyewitnesses that my grandfather was a difficult, perhaps even mean man. He was a house painter. There's a story where his neighbor is painting his house next door and loses control of his ladder. Grandpa was standing there with either my dad or his brother (neither could remember) as he ignored the man's cries for help. He proceeded to go in and ask what's for dinner. No flinch. I paint houses, don't steal my money right in front of me. It was the 50s, the specialization bubble before the Spectacle.
Sometime, in 2012, I went back there. I sat on the gravel that was once the living room, the spot right in front of the TV, imagining that house, those memories, that seething energy, it flowed through me, calling up all the different worlds of a family's genetic makeup. The garage was gone. The shed full of paint, tools, all left behind in weeds and saw dust. The peach tree leaned over towards the ground, heavy and willow-like. The gravel rough and chalky. I meditated there, scorched. A dark heart digging out, to be restarted.
- NICHOLAS DEBOER
Nicholas DeBoer is a poet, collagist, activist, and chaos magician living in NYC. He is the author of many chapbooks and broadsides, as well as a co-editor for Elderly with Jamie Townsend and Cheer + Hope Press with Geoffrey Olsen. He also is a member of the Potlatch Discordian Network, a magickal organization operating out of Ridgely, MD. Currently he is prepping “The Singes”, the first in his epic arc “The Slip”, for publication. He is also also most certainly alive. 
In sex, physical self-consciousness is abandoned in favor of intensified sensual pleasure. In sleep, everyday consciousness is abandoned in favor of the unconscious, the world of dreams. In sigils, the two states meet in a single act, and so is released a special and potent energy. A fertile power of harmony, transcending the barriers of the conscious/unconscious divide. And so it is that the sigil lets forth an energy that cuts through like a flaming sword, overcoming all that stands in its path. - Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
The best friend I had growing up was a copycat, Harry, who I loved. I never knew what he looked like. He was always given an empty plate at dinner. He collected Masters of the Universe stickers with me, and I'd buckle him up in the car when we went anywhere. Some would imply I wanted a brother, others would propose I was lonely.
My grandmother had told me that God was the best version of yourself you could imagine. I guess I couldn't imagine that at such a young age. So, here came Harry. My imaginary best friend. Monotheism was the only import from the spiritual lives of the adults around me. I didn't know any good and proper occultists. I don't think I could fathom the idea of all-knowing, all-powerful very well. My friends at school said that I would be eaten by the monsters underneath my bed or inside my closet. I didn't get scared, I just got underneath my bed, praying to God to meet them, to find their friendship.
I had some kind of social confusion. I named all my stuffed animals and talked to them endlessly, but didn't like the kids at school. Too irrational, unfocused. I talked to myself, I was always trying to answer my own questions. I didn't know what inspiration was. I knew the dark shapes I could make at night, that when I touched my chest very lightly, with just my fingertips, it felt like I could lift through the air somewhere else. Grandma Rusty did the whole bit about gold roads and seeing all the people you loved in Heaven, but no one was really dead yet for me. I'd have her for another 7 yrs.
I tried everything to get to God's voice. It never came, but at night I would feel things in the air, in the darkness of Hammond, Indiana. I would see figures in white hanging by the neck in the corners of my bedroom and mouthing words that I couldn't make out. Dreams and reality collapsed into one another a lot. I lived on a residential road, Madison Ave, 7147, next to a gravel alley way, a couple blocks from interstate 80-94. An old acid-freak couple across the street, where the male elder would where summer clothes in the winter and winter clothes in the summer. Down the block was a weird kind of castle space with an old German couple in it.
There was something out there and my senses always cued me into it. I had lucid dreams where red eyes would follow me from window to window in the house. I would go into the basement to play and I could feel the pressure. I wasn't scared of the things I was told I should be, I was scared of something bigger. Something that would pour into the house and destroy us, something pushing in all around me.
This is before I knew what the Spectacle was, before my television consumption jumped the shark, in regards to what was allowable. Imagination is such a stupid, reductive way to see wherever you're at. It's more than that, it's not just my mind, it's my whole body, it's the deep spaces that can lower you down past the concrete, past the piping and geology of this place. It's that positive void that rolls into my heart and chest when I feel love.
My parents enrolled me in Sunday School sessions and eventually I would go to catechism classes, but it never really stuck. I sort of understood the intention, but it wasn't until my actions were being deemed mortal sins that I started getting afraid. A kid named Tom, had made that male masturbatory gesture during my Freshman year of high school. Of course, I investigated it. Two days later, I was told it was a mortal sin. Two days after that, during the Ides of March in 1997, my father had a major heart attack. A three-pack a day man. I was 14. Was it my fault? Did I somehow cause it? I remember the doctors pulling my father's body from the car, that smack of skin against the sidewalk. I remember sitting in the emergency room, my mother's pale complexion and hand against her face, holding back infinite screams. My brother turning his attention to a priest, asking about the environment of heaven. I sat there, praying as hard as I could, not to let my father die because of my indiscretion. I took all that responsibility into myself.
The doctors told us he had a 3% chance of surviving the night and when he did, making a full recovery in the end, I thought that my promise to believe had something to do with it. I became a Roman Catholic. I made new friends, began going every Sunday at 1230pm, singing, watching each word that appeared in the missalette, following the sermon as though it were the only words ever spoken. At that point, I saw God as my grandmother, who had died the previous summer. I pushed and pushed to the front of the line in questions, trying to summon all the powers I had felt as a kid and aim through God. Later on, after my third year, I started going to youth retreats. There was one in particular where I was anointed as Christ and asked to field questions from other youth, in a small-group session. There were six of us who were anointed. The intensity and dedication to the belief was so real that when we met up afterwards, the other five told me that the Holy Ghost had truly entered them and they had no recollection of the session. I was a true believer and they were lying. I had felt the way God's hand had touched my shoulder as we guided a small candle out to the campground. Why didn't they remember? I saw the falsehood litter around me and I left. I started asking more intense questions of the clergy. I wanted to know the intentions, the reasons, the origins and nothing was satisfactory. I remember a close church friend, Bob, who told me when I was leaving, that he got a 1600 on his SAT's and that I shouldn't think I'm smarter then him since I was getting out. I remember looking over at him, I was done.
10 yrs I spent as an atheist, angry, perturbed at how dumb I had been. My father's heart attack was something he owned, not me. But, the moments of clarity as a kid and later, as an adolescence still gave off this deeper reality. Moments where I would see things that didn't make any sense, where I would enter a room and feel pressure or have visuals pool into the back of my eyes.
Religion invades the child's world. A child without guilt is thus given guilt. A child without fear is thus given fear. The only salvation offered is through faith. Faith, it is suggested, ends death. The price of cheating death through faith is, of course, submission. - Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
At some point, I started making an altar in the spaces I called home. It was always a touch make-shift, dirty, stones from my third grade rock collection, or the box of feathers from around the neighborhood. I had been living in Philadelphia, maybe a year in or so, when my friend John and Amanda Courie asked me if I wanted to join a Chaos Magick organization in line with the Temple of Psychick Youth (TOPY). I wanted to describe to you how I got involved, but the answer is, 'I don't know.' I just kind of walked into it. As a kid, I wanted to believe in everything weird, anything that my friends didn't believe in. I'm 32 now. I believe in everything, in nothing, in various trip-wired dimensions. When asked, I just said yes.
The Temple asks, “What do you really want out of life?” Those shapes in the dark can be anything. Seven billion people. We can do anything, anything at all. The Temple asks, “Will you be forever addicted to self-restriction?” Maybe that was the key, located on the second page of Thee Grey Book (1980) that pushed me out into my first sigil. At first, I felt that the directives were just self-help guru shit, but then it started to occur to me that the weird lines from the universe in my childhood weren't gone. They were maturing into something else. I had, by this time, been involved with the Spectacle for a few years. The depression had just started to sting below the surface, into the makings of a dark heart and this felt like a fight, an antidote.
The British Occultist Austin Osman Spare's methodology included that, “sigils are used to enable two things to occur. Effective communion with unconscious levels and the lodging of a desire or wish at unconscious levels without the conscious mind being involved or aware.” So, I said yes to chaos. Hail Eris. At first glean, I was worried about the blood. I have an intense fear of blood, like a spigot you can't stop. I followed the directions. I wrote down on a piece of paper a wish. Through Spare's method, 'the alphabet of desire', I removed all the duplicate letters and created a secondary artistic rendering of what was left. A glyph. I put the paper on the ground, next to my altar. I picked up some diabetic needles and broke into my skin, letting a drop or two out. I added a lock of hair from my head and pubis. I spit onto the page. The idea now is to charge the glyph.
You communicate, through your most intense sexual fantasy, the last element, an orgasm and the fluids associated. It was hard to achieve at first, as the internet had been part of my private habit for so many years that my imagination felt held back, or stifled. The Spectacle had invaded my own sexual appetite. Bricks of grease down the pipe. I had to make my brain break out, calling deep inside to create a desire outside of the image. I kept falling in and out of moments of closure, of complete loss of arousal and then my animal instincts kicked in and it happened. The images dissolved and I collapsed, spreading out through the entirety of my body, into the floorboards and the dirt below the house. I could feel the melt, this shift. I laid on the ground for nearly an hour, feeling so tired, as though a thousand years had passed through me. Was it a flaming sword? I don't know if I was there yet.
The Spectacle says that what appears is good and what is good appears. The cyclical prison, one that is in me and everyone I know. I made a choice to do something and the shift occurred. At that very moment, I had found something. The next morning, I burned the glyph, green flames spitting out and I let go of my desire, of the wish. Peter Carroll writes in Liber Null, that, “the sigil is charged at moments when the mind has achieved quiescence through magickal trance, or when high emotionality paralyzes its normal functioning.”
The sigil represents a person's true will. Carroll goes on to define magick as, “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” It's about discipline. It's about keeping a diary of one's experiments and how they turn out. To truly fight the Spectacle, one must find a way to bring autonomous space to their bodies. The body between worlds. It's through one's genetic material that a link can be established with yourself, or as Genesis puts it as, “a perfect holographic splinter, containing everything necessary to create yourself anew.” At this point, one builds their practice.
It's important to point out that a strong habit can be established through this methodology. Carroll points out that there are two ways to follow through on the objective. The first is laughter/laughter, a kind of antidote to the possible insanity of the magickal trance and the second is non-attachment/non-disinterest, a kind of mental teaching to not foreground one's experiments in obsession, or 'acting without lust of result.'
Laughter is the highest emotion, binding, holding all the other emotions inside. There is nothing that stands in opposition to laughter. Carroll states that, “laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played upon itself. The trick is to see that joke played out even in the neutral and ghastly events which surround one.” Our limited life span, the age of the universe, the difficulty of sustaining life on a planet with these ideas of consumption and social currency... This is Monty Python's, 'The Funniest Joke in the World,' where the translation has to be word by word, syllable by etc. or death stakes its claim. It's where the madness edges the razor blade while shaving.
These are the conditions, seek out laughter, it can change you.
The birth of Chaos Magick came about in the late 70s, at about the time that punk rock was spitting out at the music industry and Chaos Science was beginning to be taken seriously by mathematicians, economists and physicists... The basic message of Chaos Magick is that, what is fundamental to magick is the actual doing of it – that like sex, no amount of theorizing and intellectualization can substitute for actual experience. - Phil Hine
What I love about Chaos Magick is that it borrows, steals, plagiarizes from all kinds of different sources. Whether it's the latest scientific declarations that we live inside a 2-D hologram, or the dimensions spaced out in Philip K Dick's Valis, the system is built on what the practitioner chooses. One is encouraged to devise what works best for you. If the fit sucks, do something else.
The principles that guided the early adherents still seems relevant. But it's the bare bones of a system.
1) One must avoid dogma. Learn how to with change your mind, contradict yourself, listen to your gut. 2) You got to check it out for yourself, no more 'armchair theorists', make experiments, devise schemes, this is your life. 3) Don't half-ass it, get technical. It's only through self-assessment and a continued method of follow-up that you'll be able to get the results you truly desire. 4) It's time to decondition. This is the big time folks, you have to walk through socialized thought, take risks to better understand yourself and your surroundings. 5) Make the system diverse, stretch out into avenues of thought you never caught before, build out of vulnerability. 6) Perhaps the most important one, is Gnosis. The ability to enter altered states of consciousness at will.
This can be broken down into two phases. Inhibitory states and excitatory states. Hine points out that, “the former includes physically 'passive' techniques such as meditation, yoga, scrying, contemplation and sensory deprivation while the latter includes chanting, drumming, dance, emotional and sexual arousal.” These are the keys to changing your relationship with yourself and the world of the Spectacle. There is no elite practitioners of Chaos Magick, there is just us.
These are tools you could use. It's how I started to work with my vulnerabilities. This is how we can see the possibilities of a Post-Spectacular World. As I've worked my way through some of the darker depressive states of Spectacular Time, ("Illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality" – Guy Debord) I've also begun the process where I create autonomy around me, in the actual surrounding space. It's my small, endless movement to stop the pervasive ditch-weed ideology of the Spectacle. It's a choice.
Fear breeds faith. Faith uses fear. Reject faith, reject fear, reject religions and reject dogma. Learn to cherish yourself, appreciate intuition and instinct, learn to love your questions. Value your time. Use mortality to motivate action and a caring, compassionate and concentrated life. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge with Simon Dwyer
It's important at this juncture to talk about some of the problems with Chaos Magick. First and most annoyingly, is the terminology. Not unlike philosophy, where a plethora of words between authors mean the same thing, or the variations on a theme works as a kind of arrogant signature, Chaos Magick can work and look like a system that eats itself. I've used Peter Carroll's Liber Null, Psychonaut, The Apophenion, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge's The Psychick Bible as the core texts in both this essay and in my practice. These texts are pretty free of the language of alienation that one finds in the more esoteric texts. I would also suggest Oven-Ready Chaos by Phil Hine as a solid introduction. The systems are what you want to make, you are the power that decides that making.
I must also say, that some of the magickal texts that are out there, under the label of Chaos Magick, even some of the writer's I've culled for this text will have gender-binary problems. There is also some misogyny, sometimes bad stuff. Obviously I don't want to stand by these problematic texts, but the era in which some were written many other influential art works were often just as phallocentric and restrictive in their perspective. Ideas do have removable and switchable parts; rip it up and start again.
You just have to force the hand of chance. The childhood home where my grandmother raised me, while my father went to nursing school was torn down in early 2009. My grandfather had long vacated and remarried. We aren't sure if he ever found out, advancing age and all that. The house that held a full generation of DeBoers had received tenants that destroyed the interior: defecation, animals, children, the whole works just let loose. Apparently the stairwell to the upstairs completely collapsed.
On the flip, I have more than a few eyewitnesses that my grandfather was a difficult, perhaps even mean man. He was a house painter. There's a story where his neighbor is painting his house next door and loses control of his ladder. Grandpa was standing there with either my dad or his brother (neither could remember) as he ignored the man's cries for help. He proceeded to go in and ask what's for dinner. No flinch. I paint houses, don't steal my money right in front of me. It was the 50s, the specialization bubble before the Spectacle.
Sometime, in 2012, I went back there. I sat on the gravel that was once the living room, the spot right in front of the TV, imagining that house, those memories, that seething energy, it flowed through me, calling up all the different worlds of a family's genetic makeup. The garage was gone. The shed full of paint, tools, all left behind in weeds and saw dust. The peach tree leaned over towards the ground, heavy and willow-like. The gravel rough and chalky. I meditated there, scorched. A dark heart digging out, to be restarted.
- NICHOLAS DEBOER
Nicholas DeBoer is a poet, collagist, activist, and chaos magician living in NYC. He is the author of many chapbooks and broadsides, as well as a co-editor for Elderly with Jamie Townsend and Cheer + Hope Press with Geoffrey Olsen. He also is a member of the Potlatch Discordian Network, a magickal organization operating out of Ridgely, MD. Currently he is prepping “The Singes”, the first in his epic arc “The Slip”, for publication. He is also also most certainly alive.