The Caretaker

Chaos Magic - 7/march/2025

Added 2025-03-07 18:24:40 +0000 UTC

CHAOS MAGIC

Realistically we should start with Austin Osman Spare, who himself was a student of crowleys work. He influenced Peter Caroll, and the two guys who invented discordianism. Peter Caroll was the guy who founded the illuminates of Thanateros, which is the body of Chaos Magic.

Chaos Magic itself starts with the Liber Null, which has two main pillars:

Altered states of consciousness are the key to unlocking the mind
and that these abilities can be developed without any symbolic system except reality itself.
Refer to themselves as the inheritors of the Zos Kia Cultus and the A.’. A.’.
The Illuminates of Thanateroes are named for the gods of sex and death, the two things that matter to humanity

Liber MMM

Short treatise on meditation to induce altered states
Collapses and psychologizes most traditional magical acts. Tarot cards and crystal gazing are all just methods of entering altered states, though “No divinatory system should involve too much randomness. Astrology is not recommended.”

Sigils

This is one of the things the LN is famous for
Basically when people want something, they often get in their own way psychologically speaking. The creation of a sigil is the creation of a thing to focus on, and prevent those messy conflicts from arising
The idea being that you focus on the sigil so hard it loses its meaning, like repeating a phrase to the point where it stops being a word and becomes just meaningless sound. Once you do that, the sigil is charged.
You can also use other moments of mindlessness like a moment of extreme fear or pleasure

Liber Lux / Nox

Follows a left/right division founded on the ethical intent of the magic
Initiates are free to follow either, but you gotta comit
Clearly setting up a unity of both as the ideal
Draws a division between will and perception and calls its unification Kia, (as in the ZOA)
Kia is the basis of consciousness. It is the soul and spirit.
Huh, they reject notions of god or the tao, and instead lean towards a non-anthropomorphized chaos
The churning of Chaos casts off aether, which is the cloud of all possible things Chaos could manifest as in the future. It is the kia-thought intermediary.
Magic is conceptualized as using ritual to focus the Kia, and manipulate the Aether

Gnosis

One of the five pillars of the work
Comes in the form of reducing the mind to its smallest state, and expanding it to cover all things
"There are two methods of becoming god, the upright or the averse."
Weirdly physiological. They say gnosis can be achieved by doing things like sleep deprivation and sex.
So by Gnosis they mean some completely different shit

Evocation

Little sparks of Kia can get stuck inside objects, in the sense that a beloved teddy bear kinda has a spirit
You can find them via clairvoyance, in old books, and by making them yourselves
“Increasing the complexity of a ritual is often a distraction” ehhhhhhh

Invocation

In the sense of using existing relationships between things as a focus for ritual
Like, wearing an iron crown and cutting the symbol of mars into your chest to invoke a war god

Liberation