From: simulacrarium[at]hotmail[dot]com
Newsgroups: alt.magick.chaos
Subject: A young man’s view of chaos magick in the early 90s.
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 18:07:57 GMT
1990 – 92
Back in those days someone asked me – what is my understanding of chaos magick?
Gee…there’re so many entry-points…where do I start? I guess some of the facets of Chaos Magick which attract me is it’s post-modern flavour…subject matters like Dialectics; The Society of the Spectacle, Mass Communications & Mediation, Technology, Marketing, Money and Capitalism are looked into, used and manipulated for magickal ends.
My country is now a very high-tech wealthy city-state, I grew up with it…affected by its fast transformation…many issues concerning my conditionings, myself needs to be probe into…and many times the backdrop of the environment counts. If there is any truth in the phrase “There’s no escape from the Society of the Spectacle,” to escape the Archons of the Demigurge, there is also Micheal Bertiaux’s words “I have told you that all avenues of escape are blocked, but in truth there is the doorway of becoming a monster, by becoming the beast, so that thereby you can escape by the very door they came through.” (Something when I first read still has a horrifying element about it and I’m not any closer to realizing the message of that radical statement except that these words can be something to think about.)
Magick, after all, uses the canvas of everyday life, maya as a medium for its expression. The more compact our world becomes, the more everything affect the personal (or more obviously perceived to be so!), and other way round, the gross sum of personal actions around the globe will have ever increasing implications on the scale of larger dynamics e.g..social, cultural, planetary etc.
Chaos magick is shadow-boxing with Consensus Reality? I also came across some old tantric sayings in the AMOOKOS intro book, “do not try to change the world, just make sure the world doesn’t change you” put across cheekily in obverse! (I took the view that the seed message is to pay attention to one’s mind regarding the world, staying ‘awake’ and aware at all times, when many times I have slumber into lack of awareness in everyday life dealing with the world outside perceived inside).
Over the years, some discoveries from chaos magick I encountered are really difficult to accept personally, lots of resistance and uncomfortable feeling, esp its occasional sleek monochrome ruthlessness, macho superior coldness and that brave aloneness (usually because the personalities of the chaos magick scene behind these writings exude such projections due to a certain fetish for such taste of aesthetic glamour, thus these moods colour the way they depict their ideas).
I think magick is much about de-conditioning. I guess chaos magickians take this attitude of reality hacking in the field of the occult. Chaos magick sometimes comes with a big ego to practically de-condition whatever pre-existing occult knowledge there lies. Sometimes, there are some brilliant breakthroughs, new emergence of ideas and ways, but there’re also a lot of mess-ups, blindness and assholelism from people who identify with the chaos current.
There’s much elegance in chaos magick too…the Zos Kia…exquisite…like wind unto wind…or the antinomianistic romantic flavour – the way of the ronin, the compass within the vehicle…”carrying your own utopias with no fixed coordinates, wherever you go.” When one meets the other…there manifest the TAZ…perhaps this appeals to my young starry eye vision, from the day I look into this lens about magick as a young person.
Chaos magick helps you, confuses you, gives you a wild time, wakes you up, makes you wise, inflate your self esteem, makes you critical of transcendental schools of thought, but the wisest ones of the lot actually do a lot of transcending amidst lavishing themselves with the fleshy sweet bodies of manifesting descending current. It endows you a self given license for sex, drugs and frenzy that is recognize more places than your credit card…
in chaos
a much older ‘young’ man
