Chaos Magicians tend to be very (you guessed it!)
chaotic people. The kind of people who would dream up things like
this Rocky Horror Picture Show Cabbala (pictured
to the right). Yep, that was designed by one of the most famous chaos
magicians out there: Phil Hine (it's scanned
from my (signed) copy of Condensed Chaos). Yes, I now have permission
(thanks Phil!).
This rather silly Tree of Life serves to illustrate
a key teaching of chaos magick. Anything you believe in and give energy
to
is real. If you want to believe in the Rocky
Horror pantheon and use it in your magickal working, it will probably work
for
you. The same is true of the cthulu mythos, the
Tiny Toons, anything you can think of. Of course, most working magicians
prefer to use something based on more historical
systems, but there's certainly no requirement. Belief and energy is the
key.
The idea is to invent, borrow, amalgamize, steal,
forge, whatever, a system you can make yourself believe in totally, at
least during your working. You can laugh about
it and think it's ridiculous after the working's done, but during the working
you damn well better believe totally, or nothing
will work right. Most magicians find it difficult to believe totally in
something
one minute, then think it's a joke later on,
so most people will end up adapting one or more systems they more or less
believe in at all times. Of course, if one could
handle switching systems left and right all the time, then that person
could be
considered the "perfect" chaos magician, which
would actually be contrary to the spirit of most chaos magicians.
So how is chaos magick actually practiced? That
varies completely depending on which magician you talk to. It's a highly
personal and variable "system" and is generally
different for each person involved with it. Some rituals that chaos magicians
have bothered to write down have ranged from
quite silly to utterly and totally terrifying. I'm going to be working
on getting
permission to reprint some of them here. Stayed
tooned for more info.
In spite of all this chaos (pun intended), there
is one technique that a great majority of chaos magicians utilize at one
time
or another. That is the technique of sigilization.
In a nutshell, this involves formulating a detailed sentence ov desire,
translating it into some sort of symbolic representation,
concentrating on it for a time, then sending it off into the void and
forgetting about it totally. It's a very effective,
simple, and practical magickal technique that can be used almost anywhere
and with very little preparation or expense in
time or materials.
A lot of creative methods have been devised for
the "translating into some sort of symbolic representation" phase. Before
this is done, most people will eliminate all
the duplicate letters from the sentence ov desire. Then, anything goes
to make it
into a symbolic representation of the original.
It should be completely unrecognizable as the original sentence ov desire.
Some people have concocted their own complete
alphabets for doing this. This is not necessary, and there are many other
methods which work just as well: arranging the
letters into a sort of pictagram, translating them into their telephone
keypad
equivalents, translating them into their ASCII
chart equivalent, it goes on and on. Some people have even used computer
graphics packages to process the text/image into
complete oblivion. You can use whatever method you feel is best, or
even think up a completely new one.
Once the sigil is drawn, it is concentrated on
for a time, until the magician feels the time is right. There is absolutely
no
way to describe how this is known. Suffice it
to say that you will know. Then the energy is fired off into the void ov
chaos
and the entire working is wiped from the memory
of the magician.
The reason for wiping the working from the memory
is a simple one, but very important none-the-less. Many chapters in
many books have been devoted to discussing the
fact that lust of results will short-circuit most magickal workings. Anyone
who has practiced magick can tell you this. If
you get too wrapped up in hoping and lusting that the working will work,
it
won't. You have to sort of detach yourself from
the working so that your lust for the results doesn't short-circuit it.
And
wiping it from your memory afterwards is just
one way of ensuring this.
If the working involves another person -- such
as love spells, or some type of defense/war magick (in which case, the
term
would be victim }:> ) -- as many of these types
of workings do, then there is usually another step involved. Some method
is devised to transmit the sigil to the intended
subject, either via psychic means, or via physical means, physical actually
being preferrable in this case. If the intended
subject actually sees the sigil, the power is definitely magnified. The
energy
absorbed by the sigil will act on the subject's
subconscious, while the very fact the he/she sees the sigil will have an
effect
on their conscious mind. When this is done, some
way is employed to connect the sigil to the subject, such as using a
picture or characiture of the person. Then the
sigil is transmitted to the subject, either via psychic means, or via physical
means. Devising ways of physically transmitting
the sigil isn't very easy. If the working is a healing, of course, this
is a moot
point -- they're usually there at the working,
so it's taken care of. When something like a love spell or some type of
defense/violence magick is being done, it's more
complicated. Pager sigils are one way. In this technique, first devised
by
Dos Kia, the sentence ov desire is translated
into telephone keypad equivalents after duplicate letters are removed.
The
subject/victim is then paged with the resulting
sigil. Email, IRC, and so on could also be employed. Even leaving the sigil
as a message on the subject's answering machine/voice
mail box (by pressing the appropriate telephone keys) could work.
The methods are limited only by the imagination
of the magician.
Anyway, this is far from a complete reference
on chaos magick -- not even close. There are many hundreds, if not
thousands of sites on the web containing information
on chaos magick and related topics. Search for chaos
magick in
any search engine and you'll find plenty of links.
.