Some reflections on a statement

Posted by Phil Hine in Occult  |  January 10th 2022  |  About poster:

Thus far, I haven’t really brought the subject of Chaos Magic up on enfolding, as I wanted to use this blog as a space to develop other interests. But here’s a little something I wrote after I spotted the image below on Twitter.

“Chaos Magic is not about discarding all rules and restraints, but the process of discovering the most effective guidelines and disciplines which enable you to effect change in the world.”

Condensed Chaos

When I wrote that statement (probably in 1994 or thereabouts) it doubtless seemed to me to be a reasonable and accurate statement to make about Chaos Magic. Now, 28 years later, I’m not so sure.

Before I get into this, I first want to make a general point about occult texts which is that they are often prescriptive – setting out a rather idealized picture of occult practice, which frequently misses out a great deal of the ambiguities, contradictions, divergences (and arguments) that go on within practitioner communities. To give a historical example, if you’ve read the prescriptive literature of the Pasupata tradition then it’s easy to come away with the impression that this is an ascetic tradition only open to twice-born celibate men who have entirely separated themselves from their social world. But there is considerable evidence from outside the prescriptive literature indicating that there were married Pasupatas, female gurus, and Pasupatas engaging in warfare and commerce – practices which the prescriptive literature explicitly forbids. So the prescriptive literature doesn’t tell the whole story. Another example would be the way that a great deal of contemporary Pagan writing stresses that Paganism is LGBTI-friendly, and always has been. It’s an idealized projection (at least as far as the UK goes) that doesn’t admit that there was a fairly long period when non-str8 people were not welcome in Pagan spaces. Non-straight people who enter Pagan spaces assuming, on the basis of these texts, that they will be welcomed can frequently be disappointed when they discover that the situation is far more complicated than what they’ve been led to believe in the books.
So I guess the rather obvious point I’m making is that there’s often a big difference between what a book says, and the actual social practice of engaging with a practitioner community (on or offline).

Let’s take the first point – “discarding all rules and restraints”. If people want to attempt that kind of project (and there might be a conversation to be had about how far that is possible, and indeed the very desirability of doing so – but I’m not going to go into that now) and in so doing, say that they are Chaos Magicians – then I have no problem with that. The boundary disputes over what constitutes “proper” practice in a particular trajectory, or who is an authentic practitioner of a particular mode of doing – whether it be occultists or train-spotters, interest me not at all. I’ve been involved in too many of them in the past to want to engage with those conversations again.

Anyone around when Chaos Magic first erupted into occult discourse will probably recall that a lot of people took different stances towards what they found to be significant in this self-consciously new approach, and different trajectories emerged – some of which survived, mainly due to people writing books, and others not so much, partially because they were not archived, or never made it out of ‘zines. I recall Peter J. Carroll making a distinction in an article between “techno-rational” chaos magicians (his stance, obviously) and “anarcho-romantic” chaos magicians, who, I got the impression, from the article, would eventually wither away. But if I had to side with either of those labels, it would be the “anarcho-chaos” one. When Pete Carroll started to move in the direction of “the equations of magic” approach, it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in, so one might argue that in my early writings on the subject I took my approach to Chaos Magic in a very different direction to the one that Carroll was pursuing, very much influenced by my background in the Social Sciences, etc. And of course, other people have produced their own permutations. I have occasionally met people who identify as chaos magicians, but who don’t perform any of the practices associated with chaos magic, or hold much store by the propositions associated with it. That’s fine too.

The second part of that statement – “the process of discovering the most effective guidelines and disciplines which enable you to effect change in the world” is something I’ve also been thinking about a lot.

How do you go about that “process of discovering” though? That seems to me to be a key question. When it is brought up, the response I see often is that it’s done on the basis of “what works”. You try something out, it doesn’t “work” for you, so you discard it and move on to something else.

That seems simple enough, but I don’t think it is. To be honest, I don’t think that any of the major shifts in practice that I’ve made over the last 40-odd years have been on the basis of practices “not working” for me. There have, for the most part, been other factors involved.

I’m going to step back for a moment and consider some wider issues. My background is in the social sciences, so I admit to having been influenced by various analytic concepts that have come from that discipline. One of these is the notion of bricolage first presented by Thomas Luckmann in 1979. He argued that as religion increasingly becomes private, individuals develop their own eclectic modes of practice, divorced from social institutions, drawing on the ‘global archive’ of practices and concepts made available through mass media. Religiosity, it is argued by those who followed Luckmann, is becoming increasingly personal. No longer bound by institutions, individuals are free to consume and combine religious resources in unique assortments, creating their own value systems. Hence, it is frequently argued, people are “spiritual but not religious”.

(For a thorough critique of the concept of bricolage and its limitations as an analytic concept in the sociology of religion, I would recommend Véronique Altglas’ book, From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage Oxford University Press 2014). Reviewed here.)

It’s easy to see how this perspective applies to Chaos Magic – with it’s emphasis on individual choice, D.I.Y., playfulness, and the notion that the essences of practice can be divorced from their cultural context. But of course, it has wider implications. In much of postmodernist and neoliberal discourse, for example, the “I” is separate from the “we”. As Margaret Thatcher famously argued “there is no such thing as society” – there are only individuals (and families) that are responsible for their own life choices.

I’ll leave it there for now. I want to stick with thinking through this notion that we discard practices after determining that they “don’t work” for us. Statements like that seem to me to be rooted in a kind of utilitarian pragmatism which I feel can act to mask a much more complex situation.

Perhaps an easy point to come in on is how long do you “give” a practice before discarding it? Five minutes? An hour? A year? Twenty years? I recall my tantric acharya telling me, just prior to Diksha (initiation) that he thought it would take me a decade to really understand what the practice was about, and was I ready to make that kind of commitment? Of course, I said I was (but probably didn’t take that seriously). He was right, it did take a decade or more until I started to feel that I had some measure of a sense of “going somewhere” tangible – and that was very much bound up with my shift in direction from merely doing practices without much self-reflection, to actually engaging in the philosophical basis underpinning them.

It’s largely been my experience that the seeds of some practices take a long time to ‘flower’ as it were. For a while, I was very much caught up in the idea that doing lots of different – unique – rituals was a good thing (this was when I was engaged mostly with Chaos Magic practice). It was fun for a while, but eventually, it became tedious. Perhaps it’s the benefit of hindsight but I can now appreciate the “power” (and pleasure) of doing the same procedure over and over again for 30-odd years (in regard to my tantra practice). Power is not the right word at all, but again, I’m trying not to be sidetracked.

The more I reflect on my own history, the more I feel that I drifted into and out of particular practices and traditions, not because I made a conscious decision that they weren’t “working” for me, but due to other changes in my life. After all, when it comes to magical exercises, pretty much anything can “work” depending on how you frame it. So for example, I stopped doing Wiccan stuff not because it suddenly didn’t “work” for me after 5 years of involvement, but firstly because I fell out with the members of the covens I had been involved with, and secondly, I found the boundaries that determined what was acceptable practice too restrictive, and thirdly because I made a geographical move away from that particular local scene, met different people, and went along a different trajectory. There are probably other reasons too, but that’s enough to illustrate my point.

To be honest, I had no deep affinity or attraction to Wicca when I first became involved with it. I think I would have much preferred to get involved with something “darker”, but there wasn’t anything “darker” available to me. Hence, I say I drifted into Wicca, then some years later, drifted out of it. By the same token, my first brush with the generalized Western Esoteric Tradition came through doing a correspondence course with the Order of the Cubic Stone in 1979, so I did the Middle Pillar, Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, etc. on a daily basis for a year or so (and was told off for experimenting with Sigils and Cthulhu pathworking by my course supervisor). Again, an influencing factor was that I was on a college course with a couple of people who were former members of the O.C.S., so I knew I’d have someone to talk to.

I kept up with those types of practices well into 1981 but stopped the following year. Again not because they didn’t “work”, but because I wanted to take a year off and just meditate. After that break – and again, moving into a different social space – I became more interested in theatre-based practice in groups.

So how do you decide that something “doesn’t work” for you? Is it just that you find the practice difficult? I’ve met people, for example, who find it nearly impossible to even entertain the idea of “doing nothing” so for them, a practice which involves sitting still and stilling the internal dialogue, would I suppose, constitute “not working” for them. So do we accept or reject practices on the basis of how easy or hard they are? That’s one possibility, certainly, and if you’re doing magic entirely on your own, would be an option.

But if you’re doing magic with any degree of social interaction there are many more complexities that come up. If you’re in a relationship with a mentor, teacher, acharya, course leader, etc. then they may recommend, ask, or even demand that you do certain things that you might not want to do, or see as important, or even relevant if left to your own devices. They might even be hard. There might well be some degree of negotiation or no room at all. “Just get on with it.” Much depends on the particular tradition – if it has a soteriological end-goal or not, and the pedagogical dynamics within a particular relationship. Even just having good friends who aren’t afraid to criticize you can be enormously helpful. Cultivating self-reflexivity takes time. What does “working” or “not working” constitute in relation to a particular practice? Is it just about “feeling good”? Is something more involved? What (if any) are the criteria used to assess how much a particular practice is “working”? These are questions worthy of discussion, rather than continual re-assertion without exploration or clarification. But that’s where I’m going to stop. For now.

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