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This irreverent guide to chaos magic emphasizes experimentation and finding out what works best for you. Andrieh Vitimus presents a revolutionary hands-on course of study for the average Jane or Joe. Vitimus banishes the severe tone of other esoteric orders, offering an accessible and practical...
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And there's of course Alan Chapman's "Advanced Magick for Beginners", very good, very underrated:
A new paradigm that delivers a genuine transformation of occultism. The author assumes no previous knowledge, only a willingness to explore what magick offers, yet it is apparent to anyone with a background in the subject that Alan Chapman is drawing on a wide range of experience, from classical...
This irreverent guide to chaos magic emphasizes experimentation and finding out what works best for you. Andrieh Vitimus presents a revolutionary hands-on course of study for the average Jane or Joe. Vitimus banishes the severe tone of other esoteric orders, offering an accessible and practical...
wizardforums.com
And there's of course Alan Chapman's "Advanced Magick for Beginners", very good, very underrated:
A new paradigm that delivers a genuine transformation of occultism. The author assumes no previous knowledge, only a willingness to explore what magick offers, yet it is apparent to anyone with a background in the subject that Alan Chapman is drawing on a wide range of experience, from classical...
Many thanks! I really like Alan Chapman's books! I was looking for something like R. Kirk Packwood and his ideas on memetic magic, also Stephen Mace's "Squeezing Being - Modern approach to reality manipulation" or "Sorcery as virtual mechanics"...
Many thanks! I really like Alan Chapman's books! I was looking for something like R. Kirk Packwood and his ideas on memetic magic, also Stephen Mace's "Squeezing Being - Modern approach to reality manipulation" or "Sorcery as virtual mechanics"...
Can I please ask what might seem like a silly question here, but why would you want to deal with the forces & agents of chaos?
Even if you go to the Greek, it's not exactly anything that seems to be - what's the expression I am searching for here? - worthwhile.
There seem to be 3 definitions: I assume you are looking at the third one, but if this is so please see the first point I made. It's not a good thing! The reason we incarnate & study is to increase ourselves & our understanding - not regress to disorder & chaos.
A condition or place of great disorder or confusion.
A disorderly mass; a jumble.
"The desk was a chaos of papers and unopened letters."
The disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space supposed in some cosmogonic views to have existed before the ordered universe
Can I please ask what might seem like a silly question here, but why would you want to deal with the forces & agents of chaos?
Even if you go to the Greek, it's not exactly anything that seems to be - what's the expression I am searching for here? - worthwhile.
There seem to be 3 definitions: I assume you are looking at the third one, but if this is so please see the first point I made. It's not a good thing! The reason we incarnate & study is to increase ourselves & our understanding - not regress to disorder & chaos.
A condition or place of great disorder or confusion.
A disorderly mass; a jumble.
"The desk was a chaos of papers and unopened letters."
The disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space supposed in some cosmogonic views to have existed before the ordered universe
Chaos Magic refers to "chaos theory", the scientific theory that in a complex ("chaotic") system, a tiny change can have huge follow-on effect
The cliched example that often gets used is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Europe can cause a hurricane in South America (because weather is a very complex system of many many interacting parts)
So for magic, the idea is that a magician doesn't need to be wildly powerful, they just need to make a very tiny tiny change in the right place to get big results in their life
You can google "chaos theory" for more on this idea
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(unrelated to Chaos Magic, but some magicians, especially alchemists do often seek to work with your third definition of chaos, with the primordial raw material of the universe - not because they want to regress to that state, but because it's raw material that has the potential to become anything. It's like a stem cell that can develop into a blood cell, a muscle cell, anything.
To use a mundane example, if I want to make a marble statue, I could get an existing statue, destroy it, grind it down into gravel, then glue it all back together into a new statue
Or, I could start with raw materials, with just a big block of shapeless marble. That would be easier, and less destructive, right?
That's what working with primordial chaos means: taking raw materials and developing and progressing them into something better. It's the opposite of regression and disorder
Thanks for that - I was unaware that this was what Chaos Magic referred to - so kinda like finding the Fulcrum of a situation & giving it a slightest of pushes? It seems strange though, as Chaos Theory is not an actual Scientific Theory - in fact, it's not even a scientific hypothesis as it is a mathematical construct, nothing more nothing less & has very little to do with observable reality. Like Anthropogenic Climate Change or the LCDM model of Cosmology.
Colour me dead sceptical on this one
Thanks for that - I was unaware that this was what Chaos Magic referred to - so kinda like finding the Fulcrum of a situation & giving it a slightest of pushes? It seems strange though, as Chaos Theory is not an actual Scientific Theory - in fact, it's not even a scientific hypothesis as it is a mathematical construct, nothing more nothing less & has very little to do with observable reality. Like Anthropogenic Climate Change or the LCDM model of Cosmology.
Colour me dead sceptical on this one
It was big in the 90s, when chaos magic arose. Actually it's not really what chaos magicians are mostly about these days, but the name stuck.
But I'm not arguing whether it's a legitimate strategy or not, just saying that they're not talking about the forces of chaos in the regressive/destructive way you were thinking
(The defining feature of chaos magic is that magic is very much about your belief and strength of will, so you can borrow from lots of different systems so long as they sincerely resonate with you. Sigils are also a central part of what people think of as Chaos Magic, even though that's just a technique anyone can use.
In practice, 90% of magicians have a bit of Chaos Magic DNA in them these days. Very few people are willing to repeat rituals for years without understanding what they mean or what they're for. That's the influence of chaos magic, the belief that you need to know why you're doing something, that it's not enough just to say the right things and make the right gestures. It's become so much a part of mainstream magic that "chaos magician" doesn't mean as much as a category anymore.
Lots of groups get a name that made sense when they were formed and doesn't really make sense anymore, that's just... I dunno it's just what happens to groups all the time)
Yeah, this is the book discussion section and the thread was for book recommendations. You should have searched for a thread more directly about chaos magic theory, or started a new thread (probably in Occult Q & A).
And I shouldn't have replied and continued the off -topic discussion
OP was the one who got hit with the warning for posting a thread asking for book recommendations in the General Occult section, but it's something that everyone should follow.
we have a saying in the audio/studio music mixing game that feels appropriate here:
Just because it's newer doesn't mean it's necessarily better, yet at the same time just because it's older does not always make it better either.
I often wonder what might have been had Crowley not been brought up in the Plymouth Brethren, or if Mathers had not been so power hungry & only half the scholar he claimed he was (just look at how badly the GD handled the Dee material - entirely based on Casaubon with the exception of the 'secret' documents that were never printed in Regardie's books & the rank & file members never even knew existed (Sloane MSS 307, for example) - but I am dribbling on here so time for me to go away & keep silence
we have a saying in the audio/studio music mixing game that feels appropriate here:
Just because it's newer doesn't mean it's necessarily better, yet at the same time just because it's older does not always make it better either.
I often wonder what might have been had Crowley not been brought up in the Plymouth Brethren, or if Mathers had not been so power hungry & only half the scholar he claimed he was (just look at how badly the GD handled the Dee material - entirely based on Casaubon with the exception of the 'secret' documents that were never printed in Regardie's books & the rank & file members never even knew existed (Sloane MSS 307, for example) - but I am dribbling on here so time for me to go away & keep silence
Like @SkullTraill said, this is a thread about specif chaos magic book recommendations, not about the evolution of magic in general, however fascinating the topic may be.
Might I also recommend Lars Helvete (his treatises are in the Library)? That author was an eye-opener for me, rekindled my old passion for chaos magic.
I can recommend:
1) Stealing The Fire From Heaven by Stephen Mace, and
2) Zos - Kia: An Introductory Essay on the Art and Sorcery of Austin Osman Spare by Gavin W. Semple
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