Definition
Chaos Magick is not a new or different kind of Magick. It is a set of working principles - some new, some ancient, - which the individual practitioner can creatively reinterpret to suit his own needs. The practitioners of Chaos Magick are both united and distinguished from each other by their emphasis on experimentation and individual experience.
To the Chaos practitioner, Chaos is not the absence of order, but an order beyond understanding. It is similar to the Hindu's Brahman, the Buddhist's Void, the Taoist's Tao, and the Ancient Anglo Saxon's Wyrd. It is constantly changing - it can be experienced, but is beyond intellectual categorization. Order is, at best, the aspect of indescribable reality that our sensory equipment permits us to perceive - the bee sees the flower differently than a human being. At worst, Order is simply an illusionary pattern projected by our prejudices.
Beliefs
Chaos magick practicinors believe the universe is god - if one has to use such an emotionally loaded word - and He's the only thing He can ever play with. Since he believes that reality is ultimately indescribable, he renounces all dogma, taking ideas and practices from everywhere, combining them as suits the situation, dropping them when they no longer apply. In an unknowable universe no belief is valid, yet every belief is valid so long as the believer recognizes it as a tool, a necessary illusion, and so long as it continues to work for him.
Source of Power
What the Magician considers the source of his power determines the rest of his practice. Chaos practitioners agreed that as yet undiscovered energies within the human subconscious are the true source of Magick.
Initiation
Any event or the need to practice chaos magick is the initiation. There arent any rituals or guidelines for beginning practice of chaos magick. Julian Wilde takes the Shamanistic view that real initiation is a product of severe personal crisis caught in a situation from which there is no normal avenue, of escape, the Individual spontaneously summons up previously unsuspected power from his subconscious.
Divination
Most modern practitioners view divinatory devices as means to focus the conscious mind, allowing the subconscious to present its knowledge of the future. This includes any form of divination, especially scrying and tarot.
Ritual and Ceremony
This is seen as a way to attain what the practicinor desires. It is to arouse the casters emotions, to compel them to focus their energies, either by praying or to a god or performing a complicated ritual, perhaps to make them believe that by doing so, they will attain what they are after.
Influences
The entire pattern of Chaos Magick can be readily seen at a quick glance at the thoughts of the man its practitioners consider its father - Austin Osman Spare. Once a member of the Golden Dawn and an associate of Aliester Crowley's until disagreement severed their relationship, Spare ceaselessly denounced religion, science, and Ceremonial Magick. His attacks on all three were founded upon the same premise: in a universe that defies description, all systems of belief can only be false. Since man is part of the universe and therefore already God, all religion can offer him is false idols that keeps him from sensing his true divinity. From the very first, Spare saw that science is itself a form of religion, an attempt to name the unnamable, a system of categories that dismisses anything it cannot contain. Ceremonial Magick, he considered an overly complicated waste of time - perpetrated upon the gullible by greedy charlatans - that keeps man from discovering his true source of power, which is within himself. Spare preached the need for absolute simplicity in all magickal workings and, instead of prayer and ritual, he considered as the ultimate Magick technique the creation of and meditation upon the Sigil, a personal design of stylized letters expressing a desire yet concealing it from the conscious mind.
Sigilization
Sigils have traditionally been the design on Magick talismans, but Spare asserted that their power was not intrinsic to the lines and figures of the design - their power came from their effect upon the deepest layers of the unconscious mind. Therefore, one had to create one's own design, which had to be simple enough to be easily visualized and complex enough for the conscious mind to forget its original meaning.
In his work on Sigilization, we see the Eastern influence on Spare's ideas. Though the Sigil is to be created under the influence of a desperate desire, and is to be visualized and meditated upon while the obsession persists, it can have no Magical effect until one has exhausted the desire, forgotten the meaning of the Sigil, and become completely in different to the desire and the symbol that represents it. To Spare, meditation meant to hold the Sigil in the mind's eye until it gradually excluded all other thoughts and then faded from consciousness, leaving the mind vacuous - the polar opposite to fixing one's mind upon a symbol, pondering its meaning, fighting off all other ideas, and focusing all of one's concentrated will upon its realization.
Gods of Chaos
Because Chaos practitioners consider their gods as projections of their own minds, their attitude towards them is eclectic and - orthodox Magicians would say - irreverent. According to Julian Wilde, Gods can be adapted from the words of writers such as Tolkein, and further states that any God who doesn't provide a minimum of service should be forgotten. In general, Chaos practitioners prefer to concentrate on recently rediscovered or newly created deities. Among the rediscovered, some favorites are Baphomet, an androgynous horned god who, in the 12th century, the Knights Templar used as a Cabalistic symbol, was written about in the l9th century by Eliphas Levi, and is considered by Wilde as the sum total of all universal forces and the personification of active Chaos.
To simplify matters, any god who does not fulfill your purposes or does not suit you should not be included in your practices. For example, you should not include Zeus in your practices if you prefer or find Jupiter or Thor to better suit your purposes. It's best to choose deities you can relate with and gain something from.
The Universe and Dualities
Spare's concept of the universe seems like Asian ideas rephrased. The absolute, he called Kia a word that has no meaning in any Western language and resembles the Japanese word "ki," which means the vital breath behind all life. The Kia - which could just as easily be called Chaos - is beyond description, a complete whole, without divisible parts, an inconceivable zero. Yet it manifests itself in apparent dualities - male and female, light and darkness, birth and death. In Spare's formula, from nothing comes two. But the poles of each duality are not absolute unto itself; each is like an arm linked together by a torso, which in this case cannot be described. The dualities always arise together. Joy emerges with anguish, faith with doubt. Therefore, the mind cannot avoid conflict and contradiction. Spare's solution is not to choose between opposing urges but to observe them simultaneously - a state of mind which fixes its consciousness, for example, upon dawn and dusk, twilight hours that are neither day nor night. This state is known as the Neither/Neither state, whereby nothing can be said to exist or not to exist. He also urges that the ego rests in a state of selflove - which is not to be confused with narcissism - a state wherein it is happily absorbed in the joy of its own existence and does not have the need to continuously aggrandize itself by endless conquest and acquisition. As the Upanishads say: "Let the Self find refuge in the Self."
Preparatory Exercises
Most Magical traditions contain a body of exercises designed to open the novice to Magical influences, which must be mastered before he's allowed to progress to ritual work. Spare places all the emphasis on the death posture - in which one totally relaxes one's body and keeps one's mind as blank as possible for as long as possible, a practice useful in developing the neither/neither state of mind. And Wilde has created a whole new set of exercises. The most interesting of these is a meditation, based on Tibetan Tantra, in which one visualizes one's body melting down completely then rebuilding itself from nothing, and another meditation in which one visualizes the chakras - psychic centers arranged one atop the other on the spine, a yogic concept - as modern rooms connected by a spiral staircase. True to form, Wilde says that one does not have to believe in the literal existence of the chakras. The noteworthy aspect of all these exercises is that they attempt to put the practitioner in touch with his deeper self, not with external entities and planes.
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Chaos Magick is a complicated practice. It takes time to decide what principles and practices you choose to apply and accept. It is normal for beliefs to change and be tested. Afterall, its an experimental process, and thats the biggest advantage of Chaos Magick. Nothing is set in stone.
This was just a very simple guide. For further information, I recommend personal research and reading the article by clicking on the link below. Its where I obtained most of the information for this guide. I omitted many parts, including and adding to only what I sought as important.
The article above is an adaption of the following:
http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/intchaos.html
