Chaos Magic Is Not Anything Goes: Hine's Rules

Ask whether chaos magic means doing whatever you like. Phil Hine answered that in print, in two words.

This is Check Date, from chaosmagick.com.

In Condensed Chaos, Hine lists the core principles of the practice. He adds that they are not universal axioms, so feel free to swap them around. Three of them work like a test suite.

Principle one is avoiding dogmatism. Chaos magicians, Hine writes, feel entitled to change their minds and contradict themselves. He asks what is wrong with being wrong occasionally. Put that in your log as a rule. A result that goes against you gets written down like any other.

Principle two: personal experience is paramount. Quote: "don't take my word that such-and-such is the case, check it out for yourself." He blames lazy armchair theorists for passing along out-of-date information. His fix is to ask awkward questions and see who admits they don't know. A true adept, Hine says, will probably say so.

Principle three is technical excellence, and it is the one people skip. Hine names an early misconception. It held that chaos magic gave practitioners, quote, "carte blanche to do whatever they liked, and so become sloppy." Here are the two words: "Not so." The approach, he says, has always advocated rigorous self-assessment and analysis. It also asks for practice at the technique you are testing, until you get the results you want.

Read that as a build that has to pass. One run does not test a technique.

Peter Carroll has a record-keeping rule of his own, with a catch. In the sigil section of Liber Null he writes this. Quote: "A record should be kept of all work with sigils but not in such a way as to cause conscious deliberation over the sigilized desire." Log the working. Keep your hands off the want.

Hine also warns about the opposite failure. Models, magical or otherwise, he says, quote, "can become subtle traps." It is easy to embrace a new model and then find you have bound yourself inside it. His answer is to use the model that fits the situation, and stop stretching one model over everything.

Then the phrase everybody quotes. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Hine attributes it to Hassan i Sabbah. If nothing is true, he says, questions of proof become irrelevant, and the responsibility for your actions and beliefs is thrown back on you. That is his reading. A written log is one way to carry the weight.

The smallest working I ever ran had one job. Keep a lighter in my pocket. Small is fine. Small is easy to check.

Choose one technique. Run it ten times under the same conditions. Before each run, write the intent, the method and the check date. After each date, write what happened, including when nothing did. Change one variable at a time.

Ten runs, ten rows. Read them as written.