Chaos Magic Fundamentals

The two documents most people begin with are short, and the shortest way to get something done with them is to read them as instructions rather than as literature. Chaos magic appeared in the early nineteen seventies, and the founding of the OTO in 1976, in nineteen seventy-six is the conventional starting point. The two founding texts are Liber Null and psi, by Peter Carroll, plus Liber Kaos, by John Crowley, and both make the same demand, which is that you run the experiment rather than accept the doctrine. The name itself is a piece of wordplay, combining the ordinary phrase with the Chaos enthroned motif of Crowley's Book of the Law, taken as a deliberate affiliation rather than as a joke. What has outlasted everything else about the movement is a method rather than a metaphysical, because it rendered it reasonable to test a claim rather than inherit. That contribution is the subject of this page. What follows is a first working assembled in the order that order actually requires, with the points noted where the sequence in the books differs from the sequence a beginner needs.

A first working, and the two documents it came from

The two pamphlets are collectively about a hundred and fifty pages and they are not difficult. What is difficult is that neither is written as a manual for a beginner, and both assume a context of practice that neither explains. A first working assembled from them is therefore an act of translation, and the translation is where most people give up and buy something instead.

The first practical step is to pick the aim before reading any further, because the aim determines what in the pamphlets is relevant. Someone with a writing practice and someone with a study practice will find almost nothing in common between the useful parts of the same hundred and fifty pages. Write the aim in a sentence, then read for the method and ignore the examples.

Reading the pamphlet as instructions

The exercises in both documents are short by design. That is their strength and their trap. A five-minute exercise that you do once has produced nothing, and the pamphlets give no guidance on repetition because the question of how often was not the interesting one for people who already had a practice.

The reading that works is the literal one. Where the text says to write an aim, write an aim. Where it says to charge a sigil, sit with one. Where it does not specify a duration, choose one and write it down before you start, because the unspecified duration is the thing that will otherwise expand until the practice becomes something you admire rather than something you do.

Writing the aim before you borrow anything

The aim is one sentence, in the imperative, naming a thing you do rather than a state you have. This is the sigil technique in its most compact form, and the compression is a convenience rather than the substance. The substance is the sentence underneath, which should be checkable by an observer.

The order matters and it is the reverse of what most people do. You write the aim first and derive the sigil from it afterwards. Starting with a sigil and working backwards toward an aim produces a very satisfying shape with no content behind it, and it is the most common way people end up with a drawer of beautiful glyphs and nothing happening.

Building the glyph in one sitting

Reduce the sentence to letters, drop the vowels, and draw the remaining forms in a single unbroken line. This is the classical derivation and it takes about ten minutes. Austin Osman Spare's variations on letter reduction, which produce a denser and more personal form, are a refinement rather than a correction and can come later.

The part that actually matters is the moment you stop looking at the sentence. Until you can perform the reduction from memory, the sigil is a drawing of an aim rather than a compression of one. If you can reduce it from memory, the shape becomes a handle for the sentence rather than a picture of it, and the handle is what lets you touch the aim without reciting it.

Twenty minutes of even attention, and the hour that follows

Charging is deliberate attention on the completed sigil, held flat rather than reached for. Twenty minutes is more than enough and an hour is not better. The state to aim for is a kind of even attention that does not grip, and the moment you start straining you have left it.

The hour after the charge is the stage everybody skips, and it is where a surprising amount of the value sits. Not in anything supernatural. In the fact that the hour after a charge is unusually free of the ordinary noise of deciding what to do next, because the decision has been made. Whatever that is worth, it is worth the same regardless of what you believe the sigil is.

The fortnight that carries the working

The aim is not accomplished during the charge and the fortnight is not waiting. The fortnight is where the specification attached to the sigil gets executed or does not, and the execution is ordinary behaviour. If the aim names a task, the task happens or it does not during these two weeks and the sigil is not involved in that.

This is the least mystical part of the whole procedure and it is the part that produces results. The sigil compresses a decision. The fortnight is the decision being carried out. A sigil with no fortnight is a drawing, and most people who report that sigils do not work have simply not had a fortnight.

A record that can be read by someone else

Three columns, and the third is the one that matters. The first is the aim as written. The second is a number or a yes or no about whether the specified thing happened, dated. The third is what you would have done anyway.

That third column is the whole difference between a self-assessment and a record. It is the column that stops you reading a good fortnight as proof and a bad fortnight as failure, because the fortnight you would have had without the practice is the actual comparison. Most people keep the first column alone and wonder why the practice seems to work about half the time.

Where the sequence in the books differs from the sequence you need

The pamphlets move quickly from aim to sigil to charge and then stop. What they leave implicit is everything that comes after, which is the execution, the record and the review. Their implicit assumption is a reader with an existing practice, for whom the fortnight is not a step.

For a beginner the order has to be extended rather than simplified. Aim, then a specification of how you will know whether it happened, then the sigil, then the charge, then the fortnight, then the three-column review. The specification before the sigil is the addition that matters most, and it is the one that appears in no manual because it is a methodological control rather than a technique.

The first failure, and the two causes

The first failure is almost always one of two things. Either the aim could not fail, in which case nothing was ever tested and the fortnight contained no specification. Or the specification was not executed, in which case the sigil had a fortnight to work in and the fortnight did not happen.

The two causes have different remedies and are easy to distinguish. Ask whether you could describe the evidence that would have shown you had not done it. If you cannot, the aim was the problem. If you can and you did not do it, the problem is that the specification was not attached to anything you had to do anyway, and it needs a trigger.

Keeping the working small enough to repeat

Size the first working so that repeating it twice is obviously possible. A working you would only do once, because it takes an hour and involves an unusual state of mind, is a working whose record will be a single data point. The smallest useful first working is one that takes twenty minutes to build, twenty to charge, and describes a fortnight of ordinary behaviour.

There is a second reason for keeping it small, which is that the aim will change after the first one. Almost everyone discovers within a month that the thing they wanted was not the thing they wrote, and a small working can be abandoned without ceremony. A large working that has become wrong is much harder to drop.

What the tradition asks you to give up

The demand that experiment should replace inheritance has a cost that is easy to skip because the cost is not named. You give up the right to a shared body of claims. In most traditions a beginner inherits a set of statements about what is real and works from there. In this one the beginner inherits a method for finding out, and no statements at all.

This is genuinely harder and it is also the reason the movement produced anything worth keeping. An inherited body of claims cannot be revised, because revising it means leaving. A method can be applied to anything, including to the tradition that supplied it, and that possibility is what the founders were actually aiming at.

The second working, ninety days later

Ninety days is the interval at which a first working can be read as finished rather than abandoned. At that point you should have a completed record with a three-column review, and the review is the input to the second aim rather than an assessment of the first.

Write the second aim to address whatever the first one exposed. If the fortnight was flat, the second aim is usually smaller and more specific. If the fortnight produced something you cannot explain, the second aim tests it again under a slightly different specification. The tradition's advice to build from experience rather than from a book applies here more than anywhere else in the practice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do I need to start practising chaos magic?

A sentence, a piece of paper, and about forty minutes. The first working needs an aim written in the imperative, a sigil derived from it in a single line, and twenty minutes of attention on that sigil. Everything sold as necessary for a start is optional, and buying something is the most reliable way to postpone the part that is not.

What are the founding texts of chaos magic?

Liber Null and psi, by Peter Carroll, together with Liber Kaos, by John Crowley, both came out in the late nineteen seventies, both are short, and both insist on experiment rather than doctrine. Together with the founding of the OTO in 1976, in nineteen seventy-six they establish the conventional starting point of the movement.

Why is the name 'chaos magic' a deliberate affiliation?

It combines the ordinary phrase with the Chaos enthroned motif from Crowley's Book of the Law, which was an explicit borrowing rather than a coincidence. The name therefore commits you to reading Crowley's Thelema alongside the method, whether or not you want to, and a good number of people who use the method deliberately leave the name behind.

How do I know if my sigil worked?

By the third column of the record, which is what you would have done anyway. A sigil with an aim that could not fail, and a fortnight in which the specified behaviour never happened, has produced no information either way. The comparison that matters is between the fortnight you had and the fortnight you would have expected, and that comparison is only available if you wrote down the aim and the behaviour before you started.

What is the first thing that goes wrong for beginners?

The aim is written so loosely that nothing could count as failure, so the fortnight has no specification in it and nothing is tested. Aim at a state you want to have and the fortnight can only be read subjectively. Aim at a task you will do or not do, with a number attached, and the same fortnight becomes evidence.