Some background reading.

It wouldn't be fair to launch this blog without a little explanation of the reasons behind it, and some contextual background so you begin to at least vaguely understand what the fuck you're reading.  I tend to ramble when I write but I'll try and keep relatively on topic.

I'm a 24 year old bi guy living in London, spending most of my days trying not to fuck up too much, trying to contain enough of my crazy so I don't get arrested - you can read all about my crazy on my other blog here, and generally seeking out all kinds of trouble I can get myself into without it being traced back.  Also, I'm a pagan.

To be more precise, I officially class myself as a Chaos Magician.  Or a Chaote to some.  It's all the same thing. Which is to say its nothing like anything else at all.  Chaos Magic is a relatively recent development of neo-pagan thought, initially formalized in the 1970s.  It is a very very tiny subset of magic, and most people have never heard of it.  However most pagans of reasonable magical experience tend to have come to their own conclusions which are fairly similar to the core principles of chaos magic.

Chaos magic recognises that most religious thought, including the various neo-paganism branches, rather tends (and to many extents, requires one,) to ignore the views of science and developments in understanding of the universe we inhabit and its physical and metaphysical processes.  Where individuals attempt to reconcile these viewpoints, you are forced into a projection of the human psyche into a polytheistic pantheon, or else you basically recognise some monotheistic figure as having exploded the universe into existence because of a lack of anything better to do one day.  Chaos magic does not necessarily reject these viewpoints, however it does attempt to recognise that what was once called magic, we now call science, and speculates that what we now call miracles, coincidences, or sheer foolhardy belief, may one day also manifest as science.  It attempts to take pagan theory and quantify it scientifically.  Yes, my spellbooks are written in equation form.  Studying chaos magic requires a near PhD level understanding of theoretical physics as a prerequisite.

Chaos magic as its name would imply, draws heavily on elements of chaos theory, quantum mechanics, probability theory, catastrophe theory and yes, even morphic fields.  Chaotes thought they were cool way before torchwood did.  There are two major principles in chaos magic

First, that belief is a tool used to actuate things, just like your traditional athame, sword, cup, crucifix, prayer, whatever.  So long as you believe wholeheartedly in what you choose to believe in, what you actually chose doesn't matter in the slightest.  Whether you consider the god of the underworld to be Hades, Pluto, Hel, Satan, Anubis or some projection of a personal childhood trauma, they all do the same thing.  Results are what matter, results are what count, results are what actually have any effect on the world, whether you used Anubis or Hades to get there is a matter of personal preference at the time.  As such, chaos magicians tend to change their beliefs at will, they mix pantheons, they invoke silly things (I once invoked the tellytubbies for the 4 quarters during a circle casting), but it doesn't matter, they believe fully in whatever they are doing and the symbolic representations they are using to do it.

Second, magic is largely about probability when it comes down to it.  Things don't tend to happen just because we wish it so, once in a while they might, and we put that down to coincidence.  Chaos magic takes probability theory, and argues that everything is theoretically possible, just that the chance of pots of geraniums turning into whales or vice versa is infintessimaly small.  'Magic' is an attempt to exploit the quantum principles of the universe, in order to increase probabilities to cause a desired effect.  Usually something much more sensible, than whale transmogrification thankfully.  This doesn't guarantee that it will happen, but then again anybody who genuinely learnt how to actuate all their desires without fail would probably have had the sense to keep rather quiet about it, made their trillions, and retired into relative obscurity decades ago.


That's your basic theory of chaos magic, summarized in the most simplified and shortest way possible.  Chaos magic being what it is, another chaos magician will probably come along and tell you the complete opposite, but that's life.  With that out of the way, you at least have a vague concept of where I'm coming from, and we can get down to the point of this blog.

I do a lot of magical workings, I work in a lot of ways other people don't, I incorporate a lot of things other's done tend to into my workings, I read a lot on the development of magical theory, I've met some weird people, but yet I never feel like I do enough.  And so I thought I'd give myself a kick up the ass to do more magic.  That, and chaos magic being such a small subset and its practitioners by nature tending to be highly individualistic, the amount of literature or information you can find from chaos magicians and the ways they work is extremely limited.  So I figured I'd try and blog.  At least once a week, more if I can.  Some will be on rituals, projects, spells, etc that I'm trying, some will be on the background of me and how I came to class myself as a chaos magician, some will be on chaos magic theory and to what extent I agree with it, and so on and so forth.  A lot of my starting posts will probably be background on the way I work, what my influences are and such things like that, it may be a chore to get through them till I start doing some actual full blown chaos magic rituals, but then hopefully this blog will inspire me to do more of them.


P.S.  I'll explain the name of this blog in due time, for now, anyone who understands the reference can claim a free hug on demand.