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Chaos Magic - 19/march/2025
🕑 Added 2025-03-19 21:46:07 +0000 UTCAUSTIN OSMAN SPARE
Were it not for Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare would have been the most influential occultist of the 20th century. This is both strange and impressive, as the entirety of his magical writings could be read in an afternoon. Primarily an artist, author and poet, he occupies a similar space in occult history to William Blake; less an occultist, more poet-mystic. His influence lies less in obscure iterations on masonic rites, more in poems and short screeds about the soul, paired with his sensual and grotesque art. Magic has always crossed over with art, but Spare makes this a central focus of his work. He made art about magic, and did magic about art.
For other occultists, it is a simple task to comb through their life and influences, and construct a story which explains how they arrived at their worldview. This is difficult for Osman Spare. We know he was well read, and enjoyed symbolist and Art Nouveau art, but that does not cast much light on how he arrived at his idiosyncratic worldview. We know he was friends with occultists like Aleister Crowley and Victor Nyberg, and was influenced in kind, but to call Spare’s work Thelemic would be a bit far. He was an artist with an exemplary imagination, and an interest in the ecstatic and mysterious elements of human experience.
His worldview is idiosyncratic, even among 20th century occultists. Equal parts a reaction to Nietzche, Freud, and William Blake, the hub of Austin Osman Spare is the unconscious. To him, it is the source of all mystery and magical power. Much of his work involves the magician working themselves into a magical trance that allows the conscious mind to take a back seat, which then allows ideas to flow freely from the hidden depths of the soul.
That soul is quite deep. The depth of that soul comes from a concept he calls “atavistic resurgence” a combination of evolution and reincarnation, in which the compounded souls of millions of ancestral animals exert influence upon the human. You are you, but you are also all of the monkeys, lizards, fish, and blobs of amorphous proteins that we collectively evolved from. Each human being is like one of those ice cores researchers drill into the arctic to study ancient glaciers. Ten centimeters wide, two kilometers deep.
That soul is created through the interaction of two fundamental forces, Zos and Kia. The exact meaning of these terms is deliberately obscure, and unique to Osman Spare, but nonetheless essential for a good chunk of 20th century occultism. Where Crowley’s work is rigorous metaphysics buried under poetry, Spare is metaphysics as poetry, but also normal poetry.
Zos is literally derived from the greek root for life, but Spare seems to mean something both biological and unconscious. It is the desiring part of the world-soul, the component of the universal spirit with an animal impulse to continue existing.
Its counterpart, Kia is similar to the concept of the Tao. It is always hidden, beyond comprehension, because it never actually manifests. It is a force constantly on the brink of manifestation, an eternal almost-completeness that spurs the world into being.
Accessing these fundamental forces requires death, but not literal death. A repeated theme throughout his work is Thanatos, and the death-posture. We are conscious and comprehending beings in an incomprehensible world, made manifest by even more hyper-incomprehensible forces. To truly navigate the world, we have to get out of our own way, so to speak. The ego is the enemy, to have any fun it needs to be knocked out. By death-posture, he means the moment of clarity immediately following orgasm.
What Spare offered by way of praxis, as in things a spare-ian could actually do, was methods of creating art. One of the suggested forms of practicing the death posture is automatic writing. A method of writing in which the user simply does not think about the next word coming out of their fingertips. For example, writing for twenty minutes, without stopping, no pausing or backspaces. Spare didn’t invent this practice, but he offered a simple magical explanation for how it worked.
[INCLUDE THE I WANT A FAT BOTTOMED GIRL FOR THE PURPOSES OF SOCIAL CONGRESS IMAGE from the zoetic grimoire of zos vel thanatos available on the internet archive]
The most influential concept from spare, is likely his conception of, and method for creating sigils. This method has become so popular that many today consider it to be an essential component of all magic that goes back centuries. This is not so. I will repeat it here in its entirety.
CHAOS MAGIC
Chaos magic is a magical tradition that arose in the 1970s from a combination of occultists, artist, and fiction authors. It is a magical tradition, but also an artistic movement. As for what magic meant to the Chaos Magicians, Phil Hine provides eight definitions of magic in his book “Oven Ready Chaos.” These definitions range from the Crowleyan “to bring about change in accordance with will” to “a practice to increase confidence and personal Charisma.” to “A means to disentangle yourself from the attitudes and restrictions you were brought up with and which define the limits of what you may become.”
The earliest contributors to Chaos Magic as a doctrine were Peter Caroll and Ray Sherwin, whose work provided a bare-bones outline for what would become chaos magic. Stylistically, it takes bits from Crowley and Osman Spare, plus elements from popular science fiction and fantasy literature of the time. Doctrinally, Chaos Magic does not have a doctrine per-se. It demonstrates an atheistic, eclectic iconoclasm. Which is to say, it advocates for lying for fun, and changing your beliefs so rapidly that nothing has time to take root. The goal being a state of enlightened non-belief. This, combined with a focus on sigil-based art magic borrowed from Osman Spare, developed into a system that was both highly adaptable, and highly personalize-able, which made it ideal for the volatile mass-media landscape that defined the 1970s and 80s. Anyone can do it.
In 1978, Caroll published a pair of texts which are generally considered the foundational text of Chaos Magic, Liber Null, and Psychonaut. In them, Caroll places central importance on the human imagination, and its ability to invent and disinvent gods at will. Rather than constructing a magical tradition, and dedicating oneself to its study, Caroll emphasizes rapidly switching between belief systems. Believing in say, wicca one day, Christianity the next, and atheism the next day. The purpose of this, Caroll says, is not to arrive at a single conclusion. The beliefs themselves are not actually important. The point is to discover what the mind is capable of. To explore this, he also established his own magical society, the Illuminates of Thanateros.
If you, dear reader, sat down to read the Liber Null and Psychonaut right now, you could probably finish reading before dinner. They are not long texts, nor are they particularly deep. When I sat down to read them for the purposes of writing this book, I felt as if I had only finished the introduction to a text that did not exist yet. The rest of that book is, effectively, the second generation of Chaos Magicians.
The early growth was characterized by small magazines and periodicals which discussed the concepts. In fact, It wasn’t until 1986 that another grimoire of chaos magic would be published. Julian Wilde’s Grimoire of Chaos Magic was immediately controversial. It treats Chaos Magic as yet another system of thought to be syncretized alongside the likes of yoga and shamanism. By late 1987, the Lincoln Order of Neuromancers (L.O.O.N.) declared that Chaos Magic was dead, irrevocably split by argumentation that failed to be constructive, and only resulted in petty derision. Long live chaos magic.
A SHORT OVERVIEW OF CHAOS MAGIC IN PRACTICE
Most magical traditions have an organizing principal, be it a canon of texts, or some philosophical ordering concept like the Great Chain of Being. Chaos Magic does not have this. Chaos magic is not supposed to have a structure. In practice, bits of Chaos Magic are often slotted in alongside other structures. You can be a Wiccan or a Christian and still do bits of Chaos Magic. Those bits are as follows:
Chaos Magic resists dogma. It does not have dogmas. It has catmas. These are often nonsensical, self-contradictory statements like “us discordians must stick apart!”
(oven ready chaos 14)
NOTES
Realistically we should start with Austin Osman Spare, who himself was a student of crowleys work. He influenced Peter Caroll, and the two guys who invented discordianism. Peter Caroll was the guy who founded the illuminates of Thanateros, which is the body of Chaos Magic.
PETER CAROLL
Reading the liber null. Ngl this is kinda lame. Especially compared to its influences. The occult structure it builds is workable, but barely an inch deep. Feels rushed. Very little swag. To describe what it actually is though, its Crowley + Spare + Elements pulled from popular literature like, strangely enough, Terry Pratchett. I love terry as much as the next guy, but hes a satirist. People have a tendency to mistake sharp wit for truth and nuance. I think the octavo is evidence of this. Its whole-cloth from a pratchett novel. (this is all well and good but what exactly is Carolls chaotism)
There is a distinct thread of atheism throughout Caroll’s writing. He places central importance on the human imagination’s ability to invent and disinvent gods at will. Rather than constructing something, and dedicating oneself to its study, Caroll emphasizes rapidly switching between belief systems. Believing in say, wicca one day, Christianity the next, and atheism the next day. The purpose of this, caroll says, is not to arrive at a single conclusion. The beliefs themselves are not actually important. The point, is to discover what the mind is capable of.
The result is a gleeful nihilism, playing with systems of belief like a mechanic tweaking an engine just to see what happens. But like, to what end? Its all Communist Manifesto, no Das Kapital. Whatever, I’m moving on. It seems like everyone caroll influenced also rapidly turned to Tantra anyway.
Alright lets check out the Discordians. Im gonna pull a random document from the Discordian folder and see what we get. Looks like the Book of Eris.
“And lo, there I was, decked out in my finest gothic and leather clothing, sipping a
White Russian at the bar of my favourite goth club, and contemplating the sad state
of the world. I lit up a clove and turned to watch the leatherboys, gothchicks, and
vampyre wannabees do bad Tai Chi on the dance floor. All of a sudden everything
froze, but only I and the music was still active. A beautiful woman in black leather
and rainbow colored hair appeared on the dance floor. I couldn't keep my eyes off
her. Her eyes shone like the sun Each move of her delicate arms told the story of
Creation. She walked up to me and said
"I am ERIS KALLISTI DISCORDIA. I am the Goddess of Chaos. With me all things
are possible. I have come to you to teach you many things, Verthaine. "”
Now THAT is how you start an occult text. That has some fucking swag.
Okay Ive found Phil Hine’s Oven Ready Chaos, this seems to be the most coherent writing on the subject.
The Octavo
SPARE
Key concepts:
The Unconscious - Spare is critical of both freud and Jung, but the nature of the unconscious is central to his beliefs. He constructs an unconsscious that is kind of a black box, a pond of dark water from which all spirituality arises. The unconscious is the central pivot of Spare’s work.
Atavistic Resurgence - A union of evolution and reincarnation. Spare believes that the soul is the result of the influence of the “ancestral animals” from which we evolved.
Neither-Neither - Its The One.
Zos - Literally means life but its more like complete physical and spiritual embodiment. Its like if thelemic Will had a biological and unconscious element. This is so unique to Spare its hard to really explain what he means by this. “Spare considered “Zos” to be the body as a whole, including the ordinary mind: the whole mortal, fleshly, existential entity of the person. In later life he would refer to himself as Zos. It seems to combine a sense of the biological or animal with the esoteric; animal from the related Greek roots zoe, life, and zoion, animal or beast, giving rise to words like zoo, zoological, The Zoist (the name of a Victorian periodical and a society, the Zoists, to which Spare's friend Victor Neuburg belonged), “zoetic” (‘pertaining to life’) and so on.” (London’s Lost 36)
Kia - A sort of universal consciousness like the tao or world spirit, but of a deliberately obscure and non-immanent sense. Kia is always on the verge of manifesting, but never does.
Thanatos / Death Posture - the temporary annihilation of the ego through meditation. Often sexual but not always, a no-mind.
Sigil Creation - One of the things Spare is most famous for. He developed what is perhaps the most commonly cited method of sigil creation shared on the web. The one involving cracking a sentence down into its conjugate parts and then reassembling it into a non-linguistic symbol.
https://hermetic.com/chaos/austin-osman-spare-and-his-theory-of-sigils im just gonna copy it from here
Automatic Art - A man of my own influence, spare was extremely influenced by the idea of automatic art. Allowing the body to take over, and impulses to flow unimpeded from the subconscious was a huge part of his work.
As an artist, for someone so concerned with the subconscious and the nature of experience, he trades heavily in sexuality, both sexual and otherwise. His critics and fans alike called his work grotesque, yet attractively so.
Tbh one could argue that his focus on the subconscious places a lot of weight on the power of repression. I think this is partially correct.
Zos Vel Thanatos means “Zos or death” referring to Spare’s belief that any sufficiently embodied desire could be made manifest (larger passage in London’s Lost pg 245)
For the purposes of magical genealogy, Spare is considered a student of crowley, but he doesn’t quite fit the mold. Spare is closer to whatever William Blake is to the history of the occult; a poet-mystic who inspired a generation of thinkers.
Earth Inferno is a a collection of art, along with short poems of Osman’s own design, along with excerpts from Dante and Omar Kayyam.
Micrologus is ostensibly anti-psychology. “The main premise of Religion is the demanding of complete acceptance by faith of some dogmatic thesis and conclusion.”
One of the first texts ive read that is outwardly anti-religious yet still fascinated with religion
“Therefore pray not direct to God, but to your own damned self - by sacrifice and service to man, it is the only correct manner of prayer;” WOW
“"Psychology" is now the equal of any other dogma, inasmuch as it demands the full acceptance of rigid conclusions from undefined qualities and premises.”
“The offer of such very shaky nominalism - which begins nowhere and ends in an excusing pathology - presents a worse gamble than that of any religion.” What on earth does he mean by nominalism here?
Hes clearly referring to the idea of normality. Like, anything normal is good and anything deviant from that is a pathology. Which is a legitimate criticism of psychology, but good luck excising normalization from patterns of human thought lol. That goes for religion too.
“Neither universe nor man is complete, completing, or dissolving, but only res urging and re-indulgtng existing forms reshaping to function new pleasures of flesh impacting flesh. At least, so I imagine, who loves fat women.” Up top big dog
“Reasoning and its inferences are a screever's logic, and useless to put us in contact with reality - all reality being more abstract than actual as a para-Ideal we know of, but cannot grasp” ah I see.
“The body is the puppet of the mind”
Oh hey he name drops somnambulism
“There is no Atheist, no one is free from auto-biography, there is no fearless pleasurist?” Hes making the argument that people are just replacing god with other shit
What is magic to osman spare?
Its something meditative, something done through art, or something that can be reached through art.
It involves the annihilation of the ego, as evidenced by the concept of the death-posture, in this sense it is mystical
LIBER NULL
Chaos Magic itself starts with the Liber Null, which has two main pillars:
Altered states of consciousness are the key to unlocking the mind
and that these abilities can be developed without any symbolic system except reality itself.
Refer to themselves as the inheritors of the Zos Kia Cultus and the A.’. A.’.
The Illuminates of Thanateroes are named for the gods of sex and death, the two things that matter to humanity
Liber MMM
Short treatise on meditation to induce altered states
Collapses and psychologizes most traditional magical acts. Tarot cards and crystal gazing are all just methods of entering altered states, though “No divinatory system should involve too much randomness. Astrology is not recommended.”
Sigils
This is one of the things the LN is famous for
Basically when people want something, they often get in their own way psychologically speaking. The creation of a sigil is the creation of a thing to focus on, and prevent those messy conflicts from arising
The idea being that you focus on the sigil so hard it loses its meaning, like repeating a phrase to the point where it stops being a word and becomes just meaningless sound. Once you do that, the sigil is charged.
You can also use other moments of mindlessness like a moment of extreme fear or pleasure
Liber Lux / Nox
Follows a left/right division founded on the ethical intent of the magic
Initiates are free to follow either, but you gotta comit
Clearly setting up a unity of both as the ideal
Draws a division between will and perception and calls its unification Kia, (as in the ZOA)
Kia is the basis of consciousness. It is the soul and spirit.
Huh, they reject notions of god or the tao, and instead lean towards a non-anthropomorphized chaos
The churning of Chaos casts off aether, which is the cloud of all possible things Chaos could manifest as in the future. It is the kia-thought intermediary.
Magic is conceptualized as using ritual to focus the Kia, and manipulate the Aether
Gnosis
One of the five pillars of the work
Comes in the form of reducing the mind to its smallest state, and expanding it to cover all things
"There are two methods of becoming god, the upright or the averse."
Weirdly physiological. They say gnosis can be achieved by doing things like sleep deprivation and sex.
So by Gnosis they mean some completely different shit
Evocation
Little sparks of Kia can get stuck inside objects, in the sense that a beloved teddy bear kinda has a spirit
You can find them via clairvoyance, in old books, and by making them yourselves
“Increasing the complexity of a ritual is often a distraction” ehhhhhhh
Invocation
In the sense of using existing relationships between things as a focus for ritual
Like, wearing an iron crown and cutting the symbol of mars into your chest to invoke a war god
Liberation
There is a spiritual energy generated by transgression and violence
Be sacreligious, destroy the sacred, put a brick through your TV or be gay
Explore rejected knowledge
Destroy the boundaries between the exalted and profane
Satisfy the body
Scheme against the self
Augoides
Its crowley. The Augoides is the perfect vehicle for Kia
Divination
Given that all things come from and recede to chaos, divination works by reading the wripples
Enchantment
Directly effecting events by thought alone. Like manifesting
The Liber Nox
The inverse of the previous section. Where the liber lux dealt with metaphysical topics beyond the flesh, this one deals with the flesh.
“Liber 59
It is either this nothing or the flesh, and the condition of the
flesh is dual. Eternal warfare is the price, purpose, and reward of
Existence.”
Sorcery: The construction of physical objects of power, using hair and natural magic to make things
The Double: Its a light body
Transmorgrification: This is kinda neat. Its an intentional destruction of the ego through acts to achieve union with a thought-less consciousness.
Ecstasy: This is the sex magic bit, clearly influenced by the typhonians
Random Belief
Literally perennialism by dice. Kinda fun.
Alphabet of Desire
Some sigil construction stuff
This is also where we get some Aeon of Horus type stuff about the millennium.
PSYCHONAUT
Here’s where we get the idea that the goal is to drown the confused in counter-information, to the point where they lose their grip on reality and achieve a sort-of enlightenment. Whelp.
This is very anti-psychiatry but weirdly jungian. This whole thing is like, a jungian individual using thelema to interact with an inanimate and aristotelian universe driven by chaos.
There’s a lot of like, tongue-in-cheek references to the fundamental untrustworthiness of Chaotes in general, but I have trouble squaring their anti-theism with what seem like a sincere belief in action-at-a-distance magic. Or, maybe they’re taking the psychological angle. Like, the mind can’t actually shoot beams which cause people to get run over, but the practices of chaos magic can make people feel like they can.
So what is magic to the Chaotes? It is crowleyan Will acting in a jungian “inside out” universe. Its a mechanical, psychological interpretation of thelema.
