People not so familiar with magick hear the term chaos magick or chaos mage and think, “woah, chaos.” That’s disruptive, chaotic, problem-causing, anarchistic, and so on. Sowing chaos.
If this is you, I get it. I know how it sounds. But the idea of chaos magick and how it was coined as a term comes from back a while, and doesn’t quite mean cHaOs like we might first think today. Also, with most things related to magick, it’s best not to run on assumptions but to settle into it and research a bit; lots of nuance here.
First thing - chaos refers to the pre-state of anything, that potential field (or “not-foam”, as sci-fi luminary Marc Miller described it in his novel Agent of the Imperium) from which all things come. When you have an idea, you’re taking a bit of the chaos (the kia, mana, ether, whatever that makes up the substrate of this medium we’re existing in) and crystalizing it just a bit. Sometimes, most times, you’re not crystalizing it very well. A passing thought or fancy, and then it’s gone. Sometimes though an idea, an urge, a feeling, persists. You bang on it for a while. This crystalizes “more,” and might become an actual artifact we can perceive: something you do, say, write, build, sign, act on. Chaos here is the stuff you (likely unknowingly) shape to build anything at all, the unconstrained state space before a schema collapses it into a workable model Austin Osman Spare put this idea forth.
Magick, by the way, is the art and practice of "crystalizing it well." More on that, elsewhere in this archive.
Decades later, Peter Carroll riffed on this and used the term chaos magick as a methodology, an approach to practicing power where “nothing is true, everything is allowed,” which sounds pretty chaotic, especially to people brought up in a way to believe their point of view on how reality works is -the- way. Re-written a bit, Carroll’s assertion was that there was no “the way,” no one way. Like, your way is not -the-way, and further there is no “-the- way,” that so many ways are possible, practiced to effect throughout history. And consequently available to the chaos mage.
There’s also a useful poetic frame that emerged on the 80s among chaos magick practitioners, in a world where “chaos mathematics” was sweeping the zeitgeist. Chaos theory in mathematics holds that the smallest perturbations in a system can cause large-scale effects downstream… which is certainly in keeping with the ideas that came before and how a chaos mage sees things.
The practice of chaos magick is also “at odds” with traditional magick. Most older magical traditions enumerate very specific paths to power; specific methods, rituals, names, entities, trappings, schedules, and so on. Chaos magick practices are in tension with these individual points of view in that the chaos magical practitioner (operator) can slip into any of these traditions by adopting the mindset and practices (with dedicated study and focus, certainly) and make use of the methods that flavor grants. To the operator, it’s like slipping on an outfit, or playing a character. Further, chaos operators strip down such methodologies to their bare essentials and still get results… and as you might imagine, this causes more tension and a bit of, er, chaos.
This slides easily into the idea that chaos magick is a kind of anti-tradition, a punk to more traditional ceremonial or rigid systems’ strait-laced attitude and dogma.
For myself, I resonate a bit with all of these though hold the first and second points closest. I’m not looking to yuck anyone’s metaphysical yum, and I derive no pleasure at all at thumbing my nose at traditional practices. I do have a system of ethics and morality as I practice and learn - a set of rules I follow - but these extend from me after careful consideration and I refine them as I need to, as I learn and grow.