Chaos vs. Ceremonial

AethericEngineer · Post by **AethericEngineer** » Sat Feb 12, 2011 3:10 pm

I'm continuing in a different thread because the topic is moving direction and turning into a debate. You can find the original thread here http://www.occultforum.org/forum/topic?id=30327

Thank you Fra.Accendo for starting this thread. Itâ€™s given me something to think about that I hadnâ€™t really considered before and led me in a completely different direction. I see both sides of this debate and like you, Iâ€™m irritated at the way in which the majority of Americans use, or pretend to use, the Art. I am also somewhat bothered by the popularity of fiction-based grimoires and why they are so popular in America. First off Iâ€™d like to state that as an American I reserve the right to bash us as much as I want. But Iâ€™m not really interested in bashing American occultists today but just in doing some exploration into the topic of why we need to be bashed, to what extent the bashing should go and why we decided that we didnâ€™t want to give heed to traditional occult philosophy, immediately â€œdrop trouâ€

Stukov · Post by **Stukov** » Sun Feb 13, 2011 4:53 am

I can't say that I'm horribly knowledgeable about the intricacies of these different forms of "magick", as I do not practice it, nor do I follow any sort of "tradition". Everything I do, or can do, is self taught or self learned. I don't seek answers externally; I seek them inside. It is not to say the exterior is not a valuable tool, as I use it (or others) to gain perspective. However, it appears to me that you have heavily attached yourself to this debate, almost to the point it seems to rule you. I am not stating this as fact, only as an observation.

I do understand your annoyance, as I do have a similar one with those who claim to be "light-workers" or a good majority of "new agers". It is not to say there aren't intelligent, wise, and knowledgeable people in those self-described categories, but that I find a large portion of these people to be weak minded people who have simply latched onto something for the sake of self-righteousness and zealous pride. Like a parasite unable to live on it's own, finding a host to feed upon. Even though I am annoyed, I am aware not everyone is exactly like myself. There are some who have not learned to look inward for answers and until they do, must look externally. With this in mind, I understand that while I am able to understand the raw and formless nature of truth/knowledge, others require some form to bridge this unknown.

Whether it be Chaos Magick, Christianity, Cthulhu, or Plato...there is no single form out there that one cannot find some truth in some form. You can find meaning from even the most absolute random and it doesn't mean that the random exists because of some meaning, it means you can create or find meaning in everything. Meaning is just perception. If you can find meaning in anything, you can then learn from it. It doesn't have to be religious texts, it doesn't have to be from a wise man, it doesn't even have to be from something factual. What matters is if you are able to find your own lesson and learn from it. To learn from everything and to learn from nothing.

Now to get back what you said about these people who for lack of a better word, annoy you. I have a suggestion, firstly let it go. Quit caring about it. The attachments we have may rule us and you are clearly attached to. Realize, even if they are not able to, discovering truth is not a competition. Respect their autonomy and free will to choose something that appears to you to be idiotic or to walk off the proverbial cliff. You can still say to them, watch out there is a cliff ahead, but understand if that is the path they wish to walk, let them walk it. Then, if you do "care", be there to offer a helping hand to lift them out, and perhaps some words of wisdom that may better lead them in the future.

And lastly, you are not likely to enlighten many people by simply attacking their whole paradigm of how they see the world, it is better to do everything you can to completely understand everything about said paradigm and with a level headed mind, enlighten the faults. If hypocrisy exists, point it out. If by the end they still set in their ways there is nothing you can say and it is best to pick up your bags and move on.

AethericEngineer · Post by **AethericEngineer** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 12:37 pm

I would like to apologize if I sounded a bit overzealous. Iâ€™m intense with just about everything I do or say. Itâ€™s a personality characteristic; Scorpio rising ruined my political ambitions :/ I'd also like to say that I'm not really holding on to anything but my annoyances seem to stem from the irrelevant, random posting on message boards in the Ceremonial threads stating â€œI donâ€™t see the point in using ritual, itâ€™s uselessâ€

Stukov · Post by **Stukov** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 3:11 pm

Are you asking why do people use ceremony or ritual or are you asking why do people use "fictitious" beings/gods?

AethericEngineer · Post by **AethericEngineer** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 4:03 pm

Nither, I'm more interested in what they've achieved through the use of either. I'm asking any chaos magicians if they've been able to make any progress with the Great Work. I'm wondering if they've been able to do anything other than a few enchantments, temporary aura manipulations, servitor creation, etc.

Stukov · Post by **Stukov** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 7:34 pm

And what exactly is the Great Work?

AethericEngineer · Post by **AethericEngineer** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:20 pm

The invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel or Higher Genius etc. It has several names but it is considered the primary ambition of those who practice ceremonial magick as well as many who practice other forms. One grimoire for accomplishing this is The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The reason I use this as example is because the symbolism in it is easy to understand even if the actual work is more demanding than necessary.

Stukov · Post by **Stukov** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 10:30 pm

Forgive my lack of understanding, but why do you want to invoke a "Holy Guardian Angel or Higher Genius"?

mouser9169 · Post by **mouser9169** » Wed Feb 23, 2011 6:00 am

Stukov wrote:Forgive my lack of understanding, but why do you want to invoke a "Holy Guardian Angel or Higher Genius"?

Invoke in this case is a bit misleading. Acquiring would be a better word.

Your "Holy Guardian Angel" is actually part of you, though it may appear a separate entity. It is the part of you being closest to the world of Atziluth, the divine spark in all of us, being created in the image of God. It is the "still small voice" that offers answers to your problems - often answers that appear obvious after the fact. But unlike our normal "will", which is motivated by greed and self-preservation, our higher will is always aligned with the Cosmic Law and is not self serving.

Edit: The great work is usually referred to as acquiring "The Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel". Your "higher self" or super-conscious mind is already there, it just needs to be recognized - that's the "knowledge" part. Then, you have to learn to listen to it and discern its voice from all the other chatter that your conscious and subconscious mind collects - that's the "conversation" part.

AethericEngineer · Post by **AethericEngineer** » Thu Feb 24, 2011 11:57 pm

Thank you Mouser, I donâ€™t believe I could have stated that more perfectly. The reason for the Great Work is for the attainment of this â€œselfâ€

Salivanereni · Post by **Salivanereni** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 12:46 am

Well, I did not read the former thread in its entirety, and I hope I do abide by the "Laws of Civility".

I am a zealous Ceremonialist. Still, I think many are wasting their time calling this Ceremonial or Chaos Magick.

As far as the Chaos Magicians go, I have only witnessed ceremonial acts from them. Dubbed "Chaos Magick" for the sake of its newageness. I am dismayed that I am forced and obliged to call most of what I see of Chaos Magick this term. But this is what it has come to.

The real difference I see between what the Chaos Magicians and Ceremonialists do is the tradition. The techniques are shockingly similar if not the exact same. My specialization in Ceremonial Magick lies in the middle of what I may call The Chaoceremonial Spectrum. The creation of Astral Sigils and the infusion of their powers into other entities and force currents.

This technique is one of the most common techniques known to magicians and witches and druids and Kong-Fu practitioners. Through my use of this technique the distinction between the aforementioned genres of magic has, in its best part, been duly nullified.

The Ceremonial Magician would start Invoking the God-Names and hold the power in his Chakra for the magnetic distribution into prepared metals and gems. The Chaos Magician would draw upon the forces inside his own psyche and project this energy to the astral image and make a live sigil.

The ends are the same but the methods are not. Done wrongly, the Chaos Magick method would be fairly useless. Chaos Magick offers greater freedom but needs so much skill that makes me extremely skeptical about anyone calling himself a Chaos Magician and claiming the ability to destroy the universe by masturbating on a doll.

Real Chaos Magick as I see it is the ability to discipline the thought to such high degree that the creation of the required forces for a sigil or a seal are done to the exact same effect as what could be done by a Ceremonialist. The thoughts of the Chaos Magician's mind would possess Perfect Understanding of the nature of an element that its energies can be created by said magician without need for the guided energy channels invoked and formed by a Ceremonialist.

Such power is extremely needed in face of certain situations where attackers of high grades may be able to change the thought links of a mind. Instead of your thoughts invoking and attracting the proper energy tied to them by centuries of adepts establishing and using the same links. In face of such manners of attacks the Chaos Magick is so devastating that such encounters are never thrived for by adepts in face of even the weakest of foes.

This is what I know of what I would like to call Real Chaos Magick. Instead of the usual mental masturbation and thought-form projection practiced by Newage Mods. These techniques are listed in Ceremonial Magick documents that have never seen light for many many years.

In short, what I have seen and people call "Chaos Magick" is merely the projection of unbalanced elemental energies of certain thoughts into sigil that would have better been summoned using proper signs and symbols.

NewAge Chaos Magick = Mental Masturbation without the Payoff

[As for the significance of the Randomness: This is an open subject for me, regardless of my answer that will be very short. I am also open for an elaboration on the matter of the HGA (including other negotiated terms) by interested Debaters]

Salivanereni · Post by **Salivanereni** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 1:28 am

The Sound of Silence...

cactusjack543 · Post by **cactusjack543** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 4:45 am

Mr. philospher upon the thought of will
all of china jokes about your grey chin
have a peace of pie and gain thy energy
to go upon this mission from rod chow
prepare to bend those elastic legs
to step upon the right side of each given step
beware of your back for this is the never ending journey
and their is one rule you aren't to learn along the grey path
for then the private thought came through
dismembering his suroundings
till weakness bent the legs of destiny
blind folded began the next step
will I miss a second of time
as the world passes me by
the steps go long and straightinto demensions of agony and pain make the way straight they say
for the one's that took it upon themselves
to take off their blind folds
want to follow this journey
take the needs from the surroundings
for they shall want and need
as I walk the chinnesse humble
for know the never ending journey is over

Stukov · Post by **Stukov** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 10:15 pm

You two doing that dance over form is such a cute one.

ZSD23 · Post by **ZSD23** » Sat Jun 25, 2011 3:48 pm

It's easy to diss and critique something you don't understand for the sake of polarizing yoursefl and your paradigm, isn't it? It is also easy to get sucked into the hagiography and fundamentalism of your paradigm if you can't manage to venture beyond it and look into the historical record about the development and evolution of Western occultism from the classical to medieval to modern to post-modern eras. When you have done that, then a debate about ceremonial vs chaos/post-modern magic might actually be fruitful. All meaning is provisional and has no basis in absolute reality.

Stukov · Post by **Stukov** » Sat Sep 03, 2011 2:35 am

ZSD23 wrote:It's easy to diss and critique something you don't understand for the sake of polarizing yoursefl and your paradigm, isn't it? It is also easy to get sucked into the hagiography and fundamentalism of your paradigm if you can't manage to venture beyond it and look into the historical record about the development and evolution of Western occultism from the classical to medieval to modern to post-modern eras. When you have done that, then a debate about ceremonial vs chaos/post-modern magic might actually be fruitful. All meaning is provisional and has no basis in absolute reality.

So who were you addressing?

ZSD23 · Post by **ZSD23** » Sat Sep 03, 2011 6:37 pm

Apologies, I have a thin skin about this but I reread through the posts and may have overreacted. It is not uncommon on boards and blogs for trad mages to get into rants about how misguided the Chaos magic current is. " Groundless non trad New Agey masturbators impudently substituting pop culture memes for godforms lalala"

It’s not as if I never come across stuff by Chaos mages that, to my sensibilities, seems perverse, wasteful, or stupid, but, it is certainly not as if Chaos Magick has a monopoly on weirdness in the pursuit of “causing change in accordance with will” or whatever the end goal is. Besides, historians of Western occultism will point out that much of ceremonial magick that draws from medieval sources is 1. Based on medieval garble and eclectic and misinterpreted/reconstructed mishmash of earlier material and 2. Is founded on hagiography and creative license. I'll skip posting the references but I can post ‘em. The point is, if it works for you, then good. For those who insist that their process affords particular efficacy compared with other systems—this only reinforces the idea that “Belief is tool.”

Even the treatise by Abrelin the Mage on the HGA is not exactly about achieving “enlightenment”; but self-interested supernatural powers. In reinterpreting it, Samuel MacGregor Mathers of the then incipient HOGD (in 1897) conflated this medieval idea of the HGA with that of the Neoplatonic augoiedes discussed by Plotinus, Porphyry, and Plato and then the HOGD created its own eclectic ritual formula. Crowley then created his own treatise (Liber VIII) about it.

Chaos Magick isn’t a system, anyway; it is a continually evolving trend in post-modern magick. It is sorcery, not “high magick.” There is no systematic end goal except perhaps to explore what the potential of consciousness is. Some forms of Chaos Magick rely heavily on ceremonial ritual that mimics or parodies trad ritual because the folks who first developed what became Chaos MagickTM came from trad (mostly Thelemic) backgrounds and were seeking to revitalize magic (yes, a semi-occult revival in the 1980s). They surmised that it was the template—or just ritualism itself—not the actual recipe-book ritual—that might be important to magical efficacy—a type of deconstructionism. CM “philosophy” has been applied to ceremonialism and shamanism (eg, voudoun), folk magic, and various other types of magic, and NLP and and is now at the heart of technology-based magical experimentation. Its “efficacy” is based in psychodynamic, neuropsychologic, and transpersonal components rather than thaumaturgy or the supernatural.

For this reason, and also because of the influence of Discordianism, some practitioners began to experiment with pop culture and memes—instead of, say, godforms, angels, etc (which also are memes of a kind). What would happen if you replaced one with the other? Do people get stupid or fluffy with this stuff? Of course, but people who use memes or thoughtforms instead of established godforms do get effects. Do I think it is a joke when I walk into a bookstore and see the Necromonicon in the occult book section? Yeah. But people who have worked with the Necromonicon do get effects. Do I think it is silly or questionable when a guy tells me that his magical practice consists of making a sigil-doodle on a scrap of paper and whacking off. Yeah. But people do report getting effects. Have I gotten desired effects from working with sigils, thoughtforms, and chaos-magic-type sex magic experiments. Yes. Do I look to Chaos Magic as a spiritual path in the way that many trad ceremonial magicians see their path. No. Because it is not High Magick, it is sorcery, like I said. Have I applied a chaos magick orientation to grimoire work? Yes. And I have gotten results, namely with working with the Arbatel de Magia Veterum, which is more likely the introduction to a grimoire that was never written, and the Book of Turiel, which is a counterfeit grimoire, probably written in the 19th century but claimed to be from the 16th.

As for lumping Chaos Magic in with The “New Age” scene, the New Age scene began as a redux of the early 19th century New Thought movement and is now morphing into an “Ascension spirituality” cult that involves a mishmash of stuff corrupted and adapted from Eastern spirituality, New Thought, and belief in extraterrestrial intervention. In some regards, it is another, oblique form of folk magic. So, when you get exasperated with it, remember, it is for the folks—the masses. And it is not “New,” nor is any of the attitudes or misconceptions or romanticizations or fantasies about magic or its exploitation in popular culture. This is just an aspect of human nature.

I had been involved in forms of Eastern spirituality for decades and for a long while had the same attitude about what I was seeing around me regarding people in the yoga and New Age scenes and guru cults as some of you involved in ceremonial magic see in regard to new trends in magic and also modern pedestrian magic, folk magic and the neopagan and New Age scenes: That something misguided or pathetic or corrupt is happening. It is just life going on. I don’t stress about it anymore.

magus33 · Post by **magus33** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 10:25 am

why would anyone would diss chaos magik like that...really puzzles me ...

i recolect seing similar stuff on some atheist forums ...and on some christian ones ...

ppl being very angry, argumentative, and spending a lot of energy trying to demonstrate how stupid, idiotic, and just plainly wrong are the others

this proves something to me ... people arent that sure of their own path and , accordingly, are dumping s ... on other ppls practices...

i am not a chaotes per se, but i got a lot from it .

why would anyone care enough about other ppls stuff ... why oh why

[oh] [neutral] [confused] [confused] [confused] [confused]

Nahemah · Post by **Nahemah** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 10:33 am

i am not a chaotes per se, but i got a lot from it .

why would anyone care enough about other ppls stuff ... why oh why

Like you said,lol,insecurity. [thumbup]

Paradgim bashing is the New Bicca,lol again. [geek2]

I can't get the link in the OP Topic to work anymore,I 'm going to check it now.

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