Is Chaos Magick Bad for Beginners?

[Frumens]

Hello friendly occultists,

I have an acquaintance who doesn't have any experience with the occult, and wants to try chaos magick. I myself am a neophyte hermeticist, and from the things I've read online about magick, I've gotten the idea that chaos magick is not a good place for beginners. Is my understanding correct, incorrect, or somewhere in the middle? Could somebody please explain why?

Thanks!

[Frater EUIS]

In my experience when starting out it's a good idea to explore all paths, especially those you are drawn to. Chaos magick may be a little tougher for a beginner because it relies on many different paths and systems, and most beginners simply don't have that much knowledge yet. It's all about what you believe and what will work for you.

I am a beginner myself, so I can only present you with my humble opinion. Some more experienced members may have a little more to say.

"Truth is one, paths are many."— Mahatma Ghandi

[Vashta]

Some of the techniques of chaos magick are very beginner-friendly, sigil magick is relatively easy to get into for example. Thaumaturgically speaking it's usually fairly straightforward. Theologically it's a bit harder, being able to sift through paradigms and belief systems for the nuggets of gold takes a lot of practise and experience, and I would guess that most chaotes went through a few paradigms before finding themselves at chaos magick (although I'm sure there are exceptions). Being able to control what you believe takes great amounts of discipline, which is something usually cultivated over years of practise. That said, we all start somewhere.

[66dragonfly66]

i cant say why someone is drawn to one path or another. also though, the idea that chaos is something we take up as if it is separate from action and perception, desire and ambition is silly, majik is inherent in us, in our world, etc.

chaos majik can have intense energy, but thats if you tap this energy. i tend to think ceremonial majikans prefer to put majik in a box and want to put it on a shelf. this can be good at times, but it makes majik sterile. the only real way to learn majik is do it. there is no real separation between the many paths, and if you study one school of thought or another it all builds together because the symbols become real within your own experience. the idea of chaos majik is more glamorous than the real results? or its much more eclectic when you get down to business because chaos is not kenneth grant's TOTO nor maat current, nor thelema. You can learn those things and use them, but chaos can only be real when you hodge podge it.

power is free for the taking, the interacting, the tasting and the giving.
there is no real antinomianism, only differences of experiences from the norm.

we dont live in a society where there is an orthodox majik path for me to consider ceremonial majik not eclectic nor not chaos, however, most people define chaos with liber null and liber kaos books, when thats only a way to think about it

[yyxx]

It will turn your brain into jelly.
The worms will gladly feast on your rotting flesh while thalidomide babies roll and squelch rather ambiguously in their mother's blood nearby on that their grassy hill where many a young couple hath passionately copulated. The general idea is that if you place a chicken egg in a used condom, and place that in the sun, a humie-chicken hybrid will grow. tsk tsk...
Hail Discordia!! Hail Tronkite!!! Hail Winged Spiders and Legged Snakes!!!! Hail Inside-Out Man!!!!!

[chaosmembrane]

Hopefully, your friend is not into just because of the "dark glamour" that seems to emanate from the word "chaos."

I personally don't think that chaos magick is a good beginner's practice. It was mentioned already that chaos magick depends on other practices. It is not necessarily a "path" in itself, but an approach to magick. It's about "what works" for the would-be magician. If the magician has no background whatsoever in any form of magick, how would he know what works for him in the first place?

Sigil magick is definitely a very good results-oriented signature technique of chaos magick, but for one that is yet unfamiliar with the other paths, he might think that sigil and chaos magick are the be-all and end-all of magick, and he cannot appreciate the ritualistic trappings of the other path. Not bad in itself, if his goal is simply sorcery, but I fear it might lead to plain sloppiness and laziness.

If a newbie does take chaos magick as a starting point, I would strongly suggest he try the paradigm shifting and deconditioning techniques to help broaden his perspective.

[happy2]

[reptilian]

In my experience, chaos magic is actually frighteningly good for beginners. If your friend is good at understanding things in unconventional ways, it is likely that his or her power will vastly outstrip your own in a very short span of time. The real trouble is that once someone becomes good at chaos magic, almost every other magical path becomes completely irrelevant and tepid as a result. I've been almost entirely unable to incorporate other traditional paths because my skills are so great as to eliminate the need for them.

Chaos magic, in my opinion, is bare bones magic without any unnecessary rules, practices or rituals. Its also free form, eliminating the need for memorization, incantations, collection of ingredients, etc. It's an almost purely mental exercise. As such, with a fast brain and a strong will, one can become an extremely powerful magician so quickly that it can open the door for abuse of power, negligence, arrogance and general backlash in a way that more disciplined paths can avoid.

That said, I fully support the exploration of chaos magic for beginners. The results will put most other schools to shame. =3

[talus]

Take everything at your own pace. Even if you make a mistake or fail somehow, you will be lulling around doing your laundry one day and suddenly it will make sense and you can go back. In chaos there is no such thing as permanence. That's how I see it anyway. In my opinion you aren't going to learn a damn thing if you are afraid of making mistakes.

[Moth]

I see chaos magic as a "meta-belief" system. The reason that you take from any paradigm to suit the work you are doing at the time, is because the techniques and principles of magic are independent of the belief systems you use to implement them.

You can boil the whole thing down to programming your subconscious (enchantment) or receiving from your subconscious (divination).

The reason for this, is that your experience of reality comes from deep within your mind, and when you change the universe with magic, you actually move to the place where it is changed.

From an "outside" point of view, every possibility has already "happened". Our brains can only perceive one track at a time. Imagine a huge railway shunting yard full of timelines, each timeline splitting off when there is a decision point of some kind. We are like trains going along the lines in the shunting yard, but we can choose to change tracks, either causally (normal everyday activities) or acausally (what we normally refer to as magic). To our limited vision, the universe has changed, but actually we have moved to the place where it is different.

The passage of time that we experience is a side effect of the physics of consciousness. Like the old joke goes: "Time is that thing that stops everything happening at once".

[talus]

I see chaos magic as a "meta-belief" system. The reason that you take from any paradigm to suit the work you are doing at the time, is because the techniques and principles of magic are independent of the belief systems you use to implement them.

You can boil the whole thing down to programming your subconscious (enchantment) or receiving from your subconscious (divination).

The reason for this, is that your experience of reality comes from deep within your mind, and when you change the universe with magic, you actually move to the place where it is changed.

From an "outside" point of view, every possibility has already "happened". Our brains can only perceive one track at a time. Imagine a huge railway shunting yard full of timelines, each timeline splitting off when there is a decision point of some kind. We are like trains going along the lines in the shunting yard, but we can choose to change tracks, either causally (normal everyday activities) or acausally (what we normally refer to as magic). To our limited vision, the universe has changed, but actually we have moved to the place where it is different.

The passage of time that we experience is a side effect of the physics of consciousness. Like the old joke goes: "Time is that thing that stops everything happening at once".

I love you.
I want to eat your brain.

[Moth]

You can't have it - I'm still using it!

And what's best about this is that it's actually SCIENCE! (Or it will be once the rest catch up! )

To be fair, what I posted is the summation of more than twenty years of research - and (as is usual with research) still ongoing!

[Rauðolfr]

i started in chaos magic before all other systems... but i couldn't say if it was bad or good.
i see chaos less as a system in and of itself, but as an attitude towards magic as a whole. an attitude that in my experience most others who adhere faithfully to a particular paradigm find troubling, irritating etc.
If you want to fit in, then don't go there. and there is something to be said for fitting in. I've never personally been good at it but sometimes i think it would be nice.
And the difficulty of it is is that once you understand certain truths (or lack of them) its almost impossible to un-know them.
learning CM first i believe is not like learning christianity then converting to islam. You will forever see all subsequent paradigms within CMs framework.
For the last 3 years or more i have considered myself a practicing Heathen and Taoist, I haven't read a book on chaos for nearly 10 years, or posted on a forum related to CM or fired a sigil etc. but there underneath everything, the basic ideas of CM still ring true, and will be tied to it whether i want to be or not until i die.