The Return of the Tower of Babel, Chapter Five, Chaos Magic, Part 3
The Ascent of Chaos Magic
3. THE ASCENT OF CHAOS MAGIC
Chaos magic was magic’s own magic, or magic lost and found. Long after the hermetic cauldron had been drained and sterilized by microscopes and spectroscopes, sorcerers and witches reclaimed it, bypassing progressive physics, telekinetically pilfering its own particles and psi waves, and reintegrating traditionary sciences with post-modern philosophy, parapsychology, and synchromysticism.
The new system debuted modestly within a neo-occult mid-to-late-twentieth-century counterculture that brought avant-garde artists together with assorted taggers and other dissidents. It installed rogue interpretations of superposition, probability, synchronicity, and space-time relativism—a “fuck that!” and “I don’t give a shit!” backlash against enforced causalities of power structures, elitist laws of logic, and colonialist domain accession. QAnon was a lazy, late vandalistic variant of chaos-based agitprop.
“Punk” magic was also an offshoot of “punk music” with roots in South London. The Rolling Stones, who named a 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request, borrowed the trope. Soon after its release, band leader Mick Jagger played Moog synthesizer and performed as “Himself” beside Lucifer, Satan, and Sister and Brother of the Rainbow in Kenneth Anger’s 1969 Thelemite film Invocation of My Demon Brother, a forerunner of rock videos and DIY ceremonies.
In loosely linked overlapping orbits, folks recovered modes of divination and rituals from Rosicrucian, Enochian, and Thelemite traditions, mixing in shamanic, Druid, Gnostic, Bön, Kahuna, Wiccan, and other endorsed techniques when available.* While some chaotes acknowledged their debts to Dee, Crowley, Franz Bardon, and later English artist Austin Osman Spare, most borrowed liberally and blindly.
With pop culture and revived witchcraft in their sails, they blew past the warnings of material modernists like Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, that we would return to a “demon-infested world,” because they didn’t think that demons, spirits, and allies were bad or could be driven from the world if they were. They reinvented formulas, symbols, and procedures in post-modern contexts that included time loops, entheogens, crazy wisdom, Reiki, pop art, abstract expressionism, hip-hop, superhero comix, and anime, making up new rules for activating language, images, cartoons, and coincidences, and using them for influence at a distance.
The New Magic had many unintended sponsors too: the Freudian unconscious, string theory, deconstruction, black holes, strange attractors, uncertainty principle, existentialism, Dada, gestalt psychology, biofeedback, contact improvisation, the Yaqui nagual, and Vulcan mind meld. Avant-garde dancers, abstract expressionists, and rappers contributed to the mashup.
The word “chaos” was apparently first applied to traditionary magic by British magician Peter Carroll in his Liber Null & Psychonaut (1978). “Null” means “zero” as in both “zero sum” and “degree zero.” “Chaote” means practitioner of chaos (“kaos”), the mysterious organizing energy of the cosmos. “Chaos,” Carroll proposed, is “the 'thing' responsible for the origin and continued action of events. . . . It could as well be called 'God' or 'Tao', but the name 'Chaos' is . . . free from the anthropomorphic ideas of religion.”13 So much for accusations of Satanism, though Charles Manson and other sociopaths exploited chaos and bound others by black-magic spells. Carroll meant “ chaos magic” in a creative, imaginal sense:
Chaos . . . is the force which has caused life to evolve itself out of dust, and is currently most concentratedly manifest in the human life force, or Kia, where it is the source of consciousness. . . . To the extent that the Kia can become one with Chaos it can extend its will and perception into the universe. . . .14
That is the apothegm and activatable sword of chaos magic, in both theory and practice. The butterfly that, with a flutter of its wings in Tokyo, causes a thunderstorm in New York, has nonequilibrium dynamics and thought-activated runes working on its behalf. For the chaote, that means projections of individualized life energies and their symbols into generalized fields that transmit effects. The operator sends specified information into a chaos of charmed pinballs, algorithms, and Boolean operators to generate desired results.
Magical tool kits drew inherently on the reprogramming techniques of EST, L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, and Silva Mind Control. These and other random symbol generators, notably, Madison Avenue’s subliminal advertising, reinforced Thelemite cryptography.15
WADL (Witches’ Anti-Discrimination League) elder and publisher of Wiccan Rede magazine, Christopher Blackwell, proffered that “for an advocate of chaos magic, there would be little practical difference between, say, chanting a rune poem, repeating the Gayatri mantra, or singing a sea shanty.”16 Musicians Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Donovan Leitch and, later, Spider from Mars chaote David Bowie agreed.
Twentieth-century magician Aleister Crowley established the "meta-belief" that "belief is a tool for achieving effects":17 chaos magic’s raison d’etre. Crowley handed down a first law of magickal physics, “Every intentional act is a magical act.”18 That statement summarizing a lifetime’s investigations put a positive-thinking spin on magic.
While modern science is still trying to resolve a Big Bang of two trillion galaxies and deeps strings inside particles inside atoms, all from an implosion tinier than a seed of rye, chaotes bask in an intimate universe with its own lion’s roar. Infinity and vastness do not bother them; the cosmos can no more be contained by Stephen Hawking’s topologies or Oliver Sacks’ neurons and ganglia than it can by John Dee’s sigils or Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s charms. Hermeneutics allows infinity itself to be put at the service of individual will.
Chaote Peter Clarke, writing in the Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements, noted that modern magicians eschewed traditional rituals, rules, and correspondences, even as they borrowed “from other magical traditions, religious movements, popular culture and strands of philosophy.”19 Chaos philosophy purged extraneous elements and actions— “the symbolic, ritualistic, theological or otherwise ornamental aspects of . . . occult traditions.”20
A younger Wiccan crowd made this coup axiomatic. “My sisters and I,” said Blackfoot-Druid practitioner of witchcraft and necromancy Salicrow, “use science fiction as well as Wiccan to project magic. We don’t want to be bound by a dead rigid system.”21 Carroll and Equinox editor Ray Sherwin were similarly bored by “Golden Dawn” and “Holy Guardian Angel” scripts. They “wanted stronger stuff. They weren’t concerned with getting their pentacles correct or being at one with nature but with ‘making something happen,’ that is with magick as real power.”22
The Sephirot and other tulpas, deities, and gateways may or may not exist outside the mind. To a magician, the issue is immaterial. By conducting magical operations, he or she instigates certain results—"symbolic and linguistic constructs" manipulated to achieve certain ends.23 They blow off veridicality and proof and trust chaos under intention to deliver—and it does, whether it does or doesn’t. That’s the beauty of the system; it’s independent of thought or jurisdiction. It is ruled by synchromysticism. Boundaries and rules are as tedious as they are superfluous. If you don’t get the right result, repeat. It may not even happen in this lifetime, but you are setting your ducks in a row. Or you may have set them in a row in a previous lifetime and now is your shot.
Citing historian of magic Dave Evans, Gary Lachman added: “[T]he idea of a history of chaos magic is, aptly enough, oxymoronic, given that, like postmodernism, chaos magick affects an atemporal, ahistorical character, picking from the past, present, and, often enough, the future. And as with postmodernism, for chaos magick the idea of “truth” or “facts” is anathema . . . .”24
That is what Steve Bannon taught Donald Trump: Why worry about facts; create whatever you need.
In an overdetermined universe, all events converge around power points. What a magician does is send out his own chaos waves—matching pictures and and basins of attraction. These materialize with their own optimizations. Psychic teacher John Friedlander explained the “paraphysics” in one of his workshops:
There are always an infinite number of “causes” each of which is . . . responsible. . . . [I]f you somehow wiped out everything else, you . . . could still develop a causal explanation, “This is what caused that.” But [conversely] if you assimilate or clear any one of those infinite causes from neutrality, all the other causes will also be
So matching pictures always generates an expression of whatever is your next step. Whatever you meet in the world, wherever you have a matching picture light up, that’s your next step in clearing your matching picture. Remember, “what’s in the way is the way.”
The reason that ‘what’s in the way is the way’ works is that everything is overdetermined. You can say, “This is caused one hundred percent by this, one hundred percent by that,” because consciousness is multidirectional. Every dissatisfaction, every weakness is overdetermined. Every weakness you have can be the result of some past life, of something your parents did, of something society did to you, of something you did to yourself, of something that that jerk in front of you is doing at this moment. There are an infinite number of causes, each sufficient to generate your dissatisfaction. If you think there is only one answer that’s the real cause, you’re likely to get enmeshed and caught up in that and really be deeply stuck.25
Welcome modern physicists, biologists, and allopathic diagnosticians!
Once chaotes recognized overdetermination, they were able to reap the richness and capaciousness of reality. Everything was grist for the telekinetic mill—“the rationale being,” according to Scottish chaote Grant Morrison, “that all symbol systems are equally arbitrary, and thus equally valid—the belief invested in them being the thing that matters.”26 New Orleans Mardi Gras, Berlin Tanztheater, and MAGA rallies were temporary autonomous spell-casting zones.
Aleister Crowley used to tell his assembled students that they were going to pretend to raise Saturn (or some other deity) as practice for the real thing. They proceeded with a simulated ceremony. When a rowdy figure in robes and a crown burst into the room and began kicking over hammocks and knocking ornaments off tables, novitiates applauded their teacher’s playfulness as well as his largesse in hiring an actor; only he hadn’t. He feigned theater so that they wouldn’t censor their own power or be frightened by its implications.27
Chaos magic fed Donald Trump’s revanchist politics even as it had Jimi Hendrix’s Aquarian voodoo and Bowie’s gender-fluid Martian spiders. Trump was an eighties dabbler in twenty-first-century chaos fields. As he shifted facts in his Rubik’s cube, he turned MAGA into meme magic and helped launch QAnon. He didn’t know that’s what he was doing it; he didn’t have to; he was a natural spell-binder and narcissist, and he had Steve Bannon to guide and validate his egotism. It led straight to the Presidency, so don’t say that chaos magic doesn’t work.
Crowley’s motto "nothing is true, but everything is permitted"28 became the Trumpian game plan, though Donald probably thought that it came from Norman Vincent Peale or Roy Cohn. As his malignant narcissism came under Bannon’s direction, it generated an alt-right chaos brand, partly scripted by Bannon’a use of the cultural nostalgia of Italian conspiracist Julius Evola and French metaphysical philosopher René Guénon. The former naval officer cleverly fed Trump’s fuhrer fantasies. His boy may not have been Hitlerian in capacity, but he identified with the Third Reich’s Realpolitik, Aryan eugenics, warrior loyalty, blood lust, and reality theater. That brought the golem to life.
Transposed through the religious Right’s neo-Conservatism, Evola and Guénon’s yearning for a lost golden age became MAGA. Per Lachman, “magick works by inducing synchronicities, by somehow purposely creating meaningful chance events . . . any structured series of events designed to bring about a specific end. The paraphernalia are up for grabs. So there are instructions on how to make a talisman, an energized ritual object, out of a fridge magnet. . . . There is even a ritual in which the part of Harpocrates, the Egyptian god of silence, is played by Harpo Marx, the mute Marx brother. . . .”29
Puns count as more than puns; they are implicit meme magic. If fridge magnets and Harpo Marx work, why not babes on bikes, Proud Boys, and faux red-white-and-blue icons? Or body-snatching lizards, Rothschild cannibals, and a tot-devouring Satanic cabal? Once the barn door is opened, screech owls and mothmen fly out.
As posited in Walter Cannon’s 1942 essay “Voodoo Death,” a successful act of magic transmits a wave of psychogenic synesthesia and emotional shock, whether delivered telepathically, by body language, by voice and tone, by power relations, or by all of the above. Claude Lévi-Strauss came to a similar conclusion in “The Sorcerer and His Magic.”* Couliano wrote:
[T]he magician must be convinced of his capacity to transmit his own emotions to another subject or to perform other transitive actions of that kind, but he never ceases to be aware that the phantasmagoria he has produced function exclusively on the terrain belonging to phantasms, namely the human imagination.30
I would change that to “but he must never cease to be aware” because he must never let his own misplaced concreteness or aspirations rig a result or get in the way of his pure imaginal power. He or she is using symbols to prepare his or her unconscious mind and the activated unconsciousnesses of others as well as the cosmic field, to steer the universe towards his or her ultimate goals. He shouldn’t want to know what those goals are and rarely gets to.
This is where Magus Trump went astray; he tried to order around angels, totems, spirits, and Saturn the way he did civilian lackeys and stooges, so they turned his magic back on him in the homotopy of infinitely interlocking systems. As Bardonian magician William Mistele noted after the January 6th debacle at the Capitol, low-grade manipulation that seeks to control others only mimics magic while remaining impure and inferior (See Chapter Two, Part 8, “Trump’s 5-D Chessboard”). Too eager for results, it reverses its own energy field. John Friedlander came close to describing the cosmic machinery during his explanation of a psychic technique to a class:
Our lives are nested in things that are unimaginably big. No matter who you are or when you are, the whole universe wraps itself around you and re-wraps itself around you each moment. The whole universe changes its address to you each moment. No matter how small a change you make, the whole universe—and all universes—instantly change in a way that it wraps around you. Not just you of course; you as part of the whole universe change and wrap yourself around every other subjectivity in the universe.
How in the world does this miracle work where you’re creating your reality according to your conscious beliefs and I’m creating my reality according to my conscious beliefs and yet it’s so flexible that moment to moment it all coheres? The universe is so creative that when you change, everything immediately adjusts.
Everything that happens to you at any given moment—it’s a little more complicated than this but for starters—every single thing that happens to you is the optimal possibility given your beliefs at that moment. . . .31
That’s a magic game plan all right. But those beliefs must operate subconsciously, superconsciously, and collectively. They are not control mechanisms or lassos. Creation is the medium in which and scale at which the chaos magician works. Lachman elucidates (with the help of assorted chaotes):
The “art of making coincidence happen begins with “changing our state of mind.” Through this we can “change the patterns of events in our lives and so control our destinies.” If we think differently we will act differently and so will those around us. What is necessary is to break out of our “existing cognitive habits” and make the “creative leap beyond what is already known.” If we can free ourselves of the “tyranny of Consensus Reality” by creating an inner Temporary Autonomous Zone,” we can achieve the “deep certainty that one’s sorcery will yield the desired result.”32
That was Trump’s genius, but “temporary autonomous zones” were not only a tactic of MAGA rallies but Kurdish armies, Occupiers of Wall Street, and anarchists in Portland (Oregon) and Seattle. Their goal was to change not just the present and future but the past. Cancel culture is merely a profane time traveller’s copout; Friedlander proposed a more direct mode:
Probabilities are not just hypothetical or unconscious or available in the dream state. Any time you have an encounter in which you’re not happy with the resourcefulness you brought to it, you can actually go back and re-do that encounter and improvise until you’re happy with your behavior. When you are finally pleased, the other person can, at an unconscious level, choose, “Oh, I kinda like that one better than the one we did originally.” They can hook the circuit board up so that you were behaving resourcefully and it replaces the one where you were behaving unresourcefully. I find time after time after time when I go back and change history, the next time I see that person they respond to me more as if I had been resourceful in the initial instance. It is not because I’m forcing the other person to change but because they prefer the replacement option.33
By changing yourself, you change the universe. It isn’t always happy, but it is spiritual freedom. Cancel culture is spiritual incarceration and bondage.
Proposing that magical results are "a series of events going somewhat improbably in the desired direction,”34 Carroll assigned their outcomes to an interdimensional field in which entities—transpersonal intelligences—specify and transmit energies. As archived in Hinduism and catalogued modern theosophy, Google Reality encompasses Etheric, Astral, Causal, Buddhic, Atmic, Monadic, and other planes where nature as we know it is created. Carroll draws on this interdimensional setup: “All magical paradigms partake of some form of action at a distance, be it distance in space or time or both. . . . A mental event, perception, or an act of will occurs at the same time (synchronously) as an event in the material world. . . .” 35
Carroll’s sort of action at a distance almost always requires projections between planes of consciousness. Physical systems are overridden or supercharged by their Astral complements and by other higher dimensional “aggregates, whose radiations develop new properties.”36 They plant Etheric seeds in the Physical realm where they manifest according to hermetic principle. Even DNA is an Etheric idea transposed helically to a Physical plane. Rune Soup occultist Gordon White advised students in accord:
[It] works best when you grant agency to objects or entities beyond human consciousness, and particularly so with living systems . . . . It is more useful for the magician to consider living systems not as some unaware little eddies in a universal consciousness field, but as 'outposts' of the spirit world.37
When a First Nations shaman enters the body of an eagle or bear, he or she is shapeshifting in a universal consciousness field. When an Australian Aborigine vibrates at the Dreamtime’s frequency and receives information from hundreds of miles away, he is reordering space-time while co-creating with the near landscape in songlines. Crowley provided an invocatory shortcut: “Every Man and Every Woman is a Star,” meaning “intrinsically an independent individual with his own proper character and proper motion.”38 In magical systems, distinctions between stars and persons that valorize either evanesce, likewise distinctions between acts and thoughtforms. Friedlander proposed terms that madden materialists, skeptics, and nihilists alike: “We work with energy. Energy transcends identification or designation. If something works for you, it’s real. . . .”39
Endnotes
13. Peter Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut.
14. Peter Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut.
15. See Chaos Magic, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is run by avowed skeptics who don’t respect the paranormal so, despite the fact that “Chaos Magic” is a very astute article, the author is accused by Wiki’a overseers of relying on “fringe theories without giving appropriate weight to the mainstream view.” Ha! This is precisely the sort of self-anointing authority that chaos magic and, to a degree QAnon, seeks to override or smash.
I have listed the Wikipedia article’s sources where given, but it doesn’t supply page numbers for so-called “self-published” sources. In a different context, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote: “It’s not hard to see this becoming a trend, where history itself is deemed to violate common decency.” (“Meet the Censored Hitler. Can history itself violate community standards?” TK News, July 30, 2021.)
16. Christopher Blackwell, “Before, Chaos, and After,” Wiccan Rede.
17. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 45.
18. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. XIII.
19. Chaos Magic, Wikipedia.
20. Chaos Magic, Wikipedia.
21. Salicrow, personal communication, March 28, 2021
22. Chaos Magic, Wikipedia.
23. Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos.
24. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 44.
25. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 75.
26. Grant Morrison, Pop Magic!
27. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (editors), The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.
28. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice,
29. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 48.
30. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 124.
31. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 65
32. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 49. Internal quotes from Jaq D. Hawkins, Understanding Chaos Magic, p. 63; Gary Humphries and Julian Vayne, Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick, p. 123; and Phil Hine, Prime Chaos, pp. 15 NS 23.
33. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 107.
34. Peter Carroll, Octavo.
35. Peter Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut.
36. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 123.
37. Gordon White, Pieces of Eight.
38. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. XIV.
39. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 9.
*The Enochian script for commanding spirits was delivered angelically to Elizabethan magician John Dee and his associate Edward Kelley, while the laws of Thelemite philosophy were dictated by “Egyptian” and other spirit guides to twentieth-century English therion Aleister Crowley.
*See my discussion in Planet Medicine: Origins (pp. 169-176).
Comments
John Friedlander:
I’m am so happy you listened to and captured those channelings. Thank you.
Fascinating reading
(Me: John’s book Recentering Seth was made up of transcriptions I did from hundreds of hours of his classes. Some of the material was John’s psychic pedagogy, but a good deal of it, and probably everything in “The Ascent of Chaos Magic,” was channeled by John during class and comes from higher (deeper) planes.
