Miscellaneous Scribblings
The Many-Tentacled Path
Playing the game on chaos' side introduces the following variations to the workings of ritual magick:
- Role of the will:
- As mentioned in the proverbs, 'Magic only works under either of the following two conditions: (1) Total Belief, (2) Total Disbelief.' That is, one way to make a spell work is to have total certainty that it will work. Leave no doubt that you fully expect the invisible powers of the world to obey you, and they will not imagine doing otherwise. The other way to make a spell work is to cast it and not give a fuck in the slightest whether it does anything or not. This theory is based on the belief that many things in the world (e.g. inanimate objects that fall off shelves for no apparent reason) are out to thwart you, therefore if you pretend not to care, they will see no reason to interfere with you and will allow your magick to proceed. On the surface, these principles seem incompatible, but upon closer examination, one notices that total not-giving-a-shit and total confidence are similar states in that both of them entail a lack of anxiety. This then is an illustration of the first proverb, 'If you don't care, you always get what you want.'
- Purification is strictly optional:
- Purification is antithetical to chaos, so why bother? On the other hand, chaos being chaos, doing it once in awhile is probably appropriate. The point is, if you don't feel like hunting down a cloth of the right color made from the right material on the right day and leaving it on a ley line intersection in a vat of holy water on the night of the full moon, then for Satansakes, don't bother. If your will is strong enough, I whole-heartedly believe that a sigil written on the back of a sheet of printer paper is as potent as a sigil written on parchment, papyrus or whatever. (especially if you're going to burn the thing anyway!) What you imagine and how strongly and clearly you imagine it is more important than the tools you use, which are, afterall, only tools. Purification may be useful in some cases for getting one's mind in the right 'mood' for the working, but if one can achieve this ready state otherwise, I see no reason why purification is required.
- Tree-hugging is strictly optional:
- Why should one restrict oneself to all-natural products in one's magickal workings? (This is one reason why I didn't turn out Wicca/Pagan: nature makes me sneeze.) Anything from video games to street drugs may be appropriate to a ritual depending on the context. You can write your curse and burn it to send it into the air, or put "I curse so-and-so" into a cookie and have your webpage plant it on every computer that comes to visit your site. Why not?
- No justice in the system:
- I believe that a 'black' magician with total confidence in his/her doings will suffer no fall-out from cursing. The three-fold law only applies to those who believe in it, or those who curse someone while having a feeling, deep down, that they shouldn't be doing it. I say this partly from experience, because I have cursed a number of people and have never suffered any fall-out as a result, and so have a few people I know. I believe that oftentimes, people curse someone and because they have been brainwashed by a Christian-dominated society to expect retribution for their 'sins', they subsequently interpret bad things that happen to them as 'payback' when it could just as easily be interpreted as just bad luck. (It is possible, of course, that the curse victim him/herself is merely suffering from bad luck, but thinking that you yourself caused the misfortunes of someone you hate strikes me as a potentially enjoyable as conscious delusions go.)
- Magick to make something happen is more likely to work than magick to prevent something from happening:
- Chaos seethes with variety and novelty. Thus, making something 'new' happen is 'going with the flow,' whereas preventing something from happening (or ensuring that something that is already happening continues) is counter-intuitive to the Disruptor. Therefore, the former is more likely to be successful than the latter.
For more info on magick in general, look around on my Links page. Note that thoughts here are my own and not meant to be representative of any particular 'chaos magick' 'tradition'.
Last Update: October 3, 2003
