Eulogy

I’ve been thinking for some time on this matter and I’ve come to a sad conclusion; chaos magick is dead. Chaos magick went the way of punk rock, the movement is dead but it’s influence remains. What we are left with is a few old school punks or chaos magicians intermixed with a few lost souls drawn to a movement that’s already passed it’s prime and begun to decay. For you see, chaos magick had one fatal flaw that lead to it’s downfall, it was an individualistic movement, which contained at it’s core the pure selfish drive of transforming the individual into something of their own choosing, self-determinism of the soul. You can’t be a good chaos magician without first becoming a major disruption to those people in your life which would have you behave with propriety. The path a chaos magician must take is to adopt a stance where everything is put into question, deliberately examining every aspect of human behavior and belief. To accomplish this properly the magician must perform the greatest of society’s sins, which isn’t to rebel against society, rebellion is only the strengthening and reinforcement of ideologies, granted they are ideologies that differ from the ideologies of whoever the rebellion is against, but they are none the less ideologies.

To treat ideologies as clothing, things which can be put on and tossed off at whim is the very antithesis to how most people live their lives. Most people will only go through a few ideologies, who they are as children, who they are as teenagers, who they are as young adults, and who they are as they age. Throughout most of this, a few key beliefs will be held onto for an individual’s entire life or they might make one big change and be born again, but in almost all cases, that’s the end of the line. You live as a mostly consistent person with a more or less similar way of looking at the world for your whole life. So chaos magick says to hell with that, let’s have some fun and not take all this crap so seriously, it will all be disproved in less than a few centuries anyways. So chaos magick is naturally selfish, embracing that one can see how all truths are relative. It’s cheating life by society’s standards, society which has at it’s core the message saying you should care about BLANK. BLANK can be anything, but it cannot be nothing, and to treat caring about something, believing in causes and morality is an affront to the majority whose lives are constrained within the limits of their narrow world view.

And so the chaos magicians were the great cheaters in the game of life, free to don beliefs as they suited their lives, not the other way around as the rest of the world struggles to do each day. To treat everything that is from humanity as a comical theater and pick and choose which roles one wishes to act out is the key to chaos magick. Chaos magick represented being a deliberate actor in the game of life even though everyone around you didn’t know they were on stage playing a role. Of course this created hostility, because even though those caught up in the play couldn’t see the stage, they could still tell that chaos magicians weren’t playing by the same rules, they weren’t playing along or acting like they were supposed to. Even crazy people are consistent in their own crazy ways, but chaos magicians were not. Their lives appeared chaotic to those on stage who weren’t in on the act, and they represented a threat, after all, enough people on stage goofing around and the play changes, becomes something akin to improv, and the normal actors are oh so fond of their well rehearsed scripts.

And in the end chaos magick was killed by the community current. If you follow modern philosophy you get a very good picture of how the average person is feeling within modern society. And the modern philosophic current goes something like this… Ahem, we exist in a global community where all people are interconnected. We must embrace diversity and strive towards the good of all mankind. We must look at humankind as a community and be conscious of our actions and how they affect us and our environment. We must help those less fortunate than us because growing up hearing that we were privileged and hearing about starving orphans with malaria has left us feeling guilty if we are not contributing towards the GREATER GOOD. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and everyone belongs to everyone else… you see where this is going right?

Some of the greatest proponents of this current have been in the new age and neo-pagan movements. It was their ideology that eventually got a foothold on the magickal community of the western world and the chaos magicians got invited to less and less parties, they were social pariah after all, hell even the satanists believed in something. This is not to say that chaos magicians did not find many with curious minds, just that the winds of the prevailing belief system were against them. I suppose it was inevitable, chaos magick theory would have been a threat to just about any system of organized belief which embraces consistency.

So here we are, chaos magick was not killed because the community lovers forced them out, but rather because they were the ones to pass on their sacred principles to the next generation, something harder for chaos magicians to do what with the whole desecrating everything is good for you philosophy. The myspace/facebook/twitter generation eats up that global community shit by the mouthful. Communication majors will soon plague us like lawyers… god help us, I think I was less worried about the lawyers.

Well that’s about it for now, we live in a time of self righteous, community loving, technology obsessed, self-subjugating concerned citizens.

Welcome to my world,

I may not be much of a choas magician when it comes to sigils, I hate those damn things, but I live and breath subjectivity. Maybe that’s not enough to make me a chaos magician, but the beauty of being a chaos magician is I get to decide what makes me a chaos magician, therefore I am one.