What chaos magic is
Chaos magic, also spelled chaos magick, treats belief as a tool. You pick up a frame, run the job with it, and put it down when the job is done. Nobody asks you to believe first.
The first thing anybody asks is whether I believe in it. Wrong question.
I care whether the thing moved, and so should you. Everything else on this site is technique.
It is younger than the robes suggest
The roots are older than the name. In 1913 the English artist Austin Osman Spare published The Book of Pleasure, with a way to compress a desire into a mark.
Then you forget the mark. On purpose. That is the sigil method, and it still sits at the center of the practice.
The name came later, out of the seventies. In 1978 Peter Carroll published Liber Null and Ray Sherwin published The Book of Results.
Carroll gave the practice a system. Sherwin set Spare's sigil work out in plain terms. Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos, from 1995, is the short readable one, and it is still easy to find.
So the name is about fifty years old, the method is past a hundred, and all of it is in print. Anybody selling you the hidden version is selling you a book you could have bought.
The method fits on a receipt
Every honest telling runs the same five steps.
- Decide what you want, in one sentence.
- Pick a technique.
- Do it once.
- Forget it on purpose.
- Check what happened.
The techniques are few.
- A sigil compresses an intent into a mark, so the thinking part of your mind stops chewing on it.
- Shoaling hides one intent in a crowd of others until you lose track of which is which.
- A servitor is a small helper with one job, written limits and an end date.
- Gnosis is any state where the mind stops arguing for a minute. Some people get there by exhaustion. I get there by sitting still and breathing, because I like being useful the next morning.
- Paradigm shifting means wearing a belief for one working or one week, then taking it off. The Deck on this site deals them.
Belief is a tool you put back
You do not have to believe. You have to act as if it might work for the length of the working, which is a much smaller ask.
Belief is software you install for one job.
A scientific frame is good at checking. A pantheon is good for borrowing somebody's manner. A fictional system is good for play.
None of them has to be true to run. Uninstall it after, or it starts running things you never asked it to run.
The log is the only instrument
The honest test is whether the thing happened more often than it would have anyway. So you write down what you wanted and the date, and you look again later with nothing riding on it. A month is a fair wait for most small things.
Most of the time nothing will have happened. Some of the time it happened and would have regardless. Now and then it lands and you cannot account for it.
Log all three. A log with only the hits in it is a diary of your hopes.
The law on this site is three lines long: do the work, check the results, believe nothing. People argue with the last line.
They should argue harder with their own memory, which keeps the hits and drops the misses. Mine does it too.
The danger is boring
No lodge owns this. Nobody earns the right to teach you by rank, and anybody charging for a grade can keep it.
Boring is the part I learned the slow way.
You get attached to a method. You build a servitor and forget to end it. You check a working every hour until checking is the working.
If a practice ever makes your sleep or your mood worse, stop, and talk to a person.
A sigil for a good night's sleep also needs you to put the phone down. Magic runs on top of the day you already have.
Start here
Get a pen. Give it ten minutes.
Write one thing you want as if it were already true. Make a sigil from it, charge it calm, and forget it. Then put a date in your calendar a month out that says only "check the results."
The Foundry does the drawing and files a receipt with the date on it. What you type there stays in your browser.
Art: Team Zer0