Sigils, Kia, and Gnosis. Are these the core practices in Chaos Magic?
Stay tuned to discover the key practical tools of a Chaos Magician.
Hello everyone, I’m Angela, and welcome to my symposium. I’m a university lecturer and a doctoral researcher, and this is your online resource for the academic study of magick and magick-practising religions and traditions.
In this video, I will cover the key practical elements of Chaos Magick. As the academic research on the topic is still limited, my source for this video’s content will mainly be chapter 3 of the doctoral dissertation on Chaos Magic in Britain by Justin Woodman (Woodman, 2003, pp. 122–162). However, it’s worth mentioning that the material contained in this video will also be in accordance with my field experience with the mentioned primary resources and the scholarship referenced in Woodman.
As mentioned in a previous video on the philosophical underpinning of Chaos Magic, this magical tradition focuses primarily on getting results and experiments with different means to achieve the intended goal through Magick. It is, hence, not surprising that we find practices borrowed and re-elaborated from different traditions and religions. This is not exclusive to Chaos Magicians; in fact, the same trend can be found across different contemporary traditions and religions practising magic, including Paganism and Shamanism. However, this mixture of practices in Chaos Magick is held together and reshaped by a relativistic, antinomian, utilitarian, and individually tailored ethos. The magical techniques employed by Chaos Magicians are ingrained within a worldview where human consciousness is the only source of meaning and yet it only exists as a phenomenological process bearing no predetermined essence nor an intrinsic ontological nature.
For Chaos Magicians there are three main sources of knowledge; books or textual material, teachings from other peers or teachers, and of course, personal experience. The textual material appears to be a significant source of inspiration, especially those authored by Aleister Crowley, Peter J Carroll, Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant, Phil Hine, and Ray Sherwin.
The “Liber Null and Psychonaut” by Peter J Carroll is possibly the most inspirational of them all. And this appears to be especially true for the Chaos Magician in relation to its first chapter called Liber MMM, which stands for Magic, Mind control, and Metamorphosis. This document is centred around the idea of overcoming mental conditioning which comes from one’s personal experience and external inputs. In order to be successful at magick, Peter Carroll deems [it] necessary to control the mind in order to bring the metamorphosis about.
The key techniques listed in the Libre MMM aimed at achieving such a goal are motionless posture, breath control, and no-mind no-thinking. These are techniques which are also found in yoga and were mentioned by Aleister Crowley too in his well-known book on magic. The idea here is to quell the mind, body, and physical sensations to get to a state where the Magician exits the conventional reality to enter a meta-reality, the matrix, whereby the fabric of the physical world is susceptible to be reshaped by the will of the magician. Once the state of full potential is reached, Caroll explains that a single, pointed focus is needed to direct the wheel toward the desired end. After all, scattered light will never burn as the sun’s rays are concentrated in one small area through a burning lens, right? Such a concentration is reached by exercising the focus on one arbitrarily chosen object, by repeating over and over a sound such as a mantra, or by visualizing one fixed image. Daily practice is also believed to be beneficial to develop the abilities that a magician needs. Keeping a journal or a magical diary can be helpful to keep track of one’s progress and to have a reference to check which practices were more successful or unsuccessful and which elements of such practices may have caused either outcome.
The most known practice in Chaos Magic, which has been influential to witches, beyond the realm of Chaos Magic, is the use of sigils. Once the magician has mastered a calmed, deconditioned mind and the single-pointed focus, he or she is ready to cement or seal their will into a physical token to bring the intended change about. This is what the sigil is and it was originally devised by Austin Osman Spare.
As Goodman highlights, while many Ceremonial Magicians treat the magical will as the teleological endpoint of the spiritual progression. Chaos Magicians tend to identify the will with Kia or chaos. In this sense, Chaos Magicians articulate a post-modern ideology in which the will does not represent the realization of one’s essential spiritual nature but rather a tool to generate the metamorphosis (Woodman, 2003, p. 150). The magical will is actualized through the gnosis – a state where the boundaries between subject and object fade and the single-pointed focus is believed to pierce through, to affect changes to one’s reality.
The role of the sigil here is to be charged by the will of the Magician, in the aforementioned state of consciousness, to seal the will and bring it to physical existence while the fabric of reality is still permeable in the state of gnosis. As a result, the sigil is believed to act as an anchor between the realm of potentiality, generated by a state of gnosis, and the physical realm of ordinary reality. As such, it will trigger the Magician’s unconscious mind to their will, with the capital W, to turn the intended potential into actual manifestation.
But now let’s see an example of how a sigil is made according to Chaos Magic.
These are a few examples of how to create a sigil according to Chaos Magic. There are actually a few more, but these are the ones reported in the referenced literature. As you can see, even in this case, we can appreciate the Chaos Magical philosophy, which is to strip things to their bare essentials.
Basically, according to Chaos Magic, you can create a sigil by spelling out the sentence that reflects the Magician’s wish and then removing all the repeating letters, and then the remaining letters will be assembled in a way that makes a graphical image – which then becomes the sigil.
The same occurs with a visual, the pictorial representation, for example. I can assume, in this case, it is a man with J as their first letter, and perhaps there’s the intent of healing or some other intent, but even in this case, the repeating lines tend to be removed, and only the bare skeleton, without all the repeating parts, are stripped, so that only the essential, visual element stays and then gets reassembled into a symbol.
Then, as the third example, we have the mantra. We have the formation of a mantra using a similar method to the first one but, in this case, not for the purpose of creating a graphical sigil but for the purpose of creating a mantra to be repeated.
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REFERENCES
Duggan, C. (2013) ‘Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos Magick and the Legitimacy of Innovation’, in Asprem, E. and Granholm, K. (eds), Contemporary Esotericism, London, New York, Routledge, pp. 91–112.
Sutcliffe, R. (1995) ‘Left-Hand Path Ritual Magick: a Historical Overview’, in Harvey, G. and Hardman, C. (eds), Paganism Today, London, Thorsons, pp. 109–137.
Woodman, J. (2003) ‘Modernity, selfhood, and the demonic: anthropological perspectives on “Chaos magick” in the United Kingdom’, Ph.D., Goldsmiths, University of London [Online]. DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.00028683 (Accessed 23 June 2020).