Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 307: Chaos Magick Part 1 - Just Jerk It
Episode Date: July 13, 2025The long in the works series on Chaos Magick begins right here. Mike, Jesse and Alex deep dive into the origins of Chaos Magick, and it's influence on the world at large! LIVE SHOW TICKETS ON SALE: ht...tps://lh-st.com/shows/11-01-2025-cox-n-crendor/ MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Thank you to - ZocDoc - http://www.zocdoc.com/chill GhostBed - http://www.ghostbed.com/chill All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Sources: Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic by Phil Hine Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J. Carroll The Book of Results by Ray Sherwin The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy by Austin Osman Spare ~ANATHEMA OF ZOS~ THE SERMON TO THE HYPOCRITE~ - https://sacred-texts.com/eso/chaos/anathema.txt
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Chiluminati Podcast.
As always, I'm one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined today by the essential North and South
poles to my personal magical compass, Jesse and Alex.
Oh, we are.
I'm trying to figure out what that's even.
A classic tailspin.
A classic tailspin.
Oh, of course.
Of course. Of course.
Of course.
Of course.
Let me ask you a question.
Wait a minute, Chiluminati podcast. Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do Which yeah, and how are you gonna decide? Oh, that's easy Alex is south cuz he's cool. Oh
and I'm north because
Everyone talks about me, but no one wants to visit
Except that one like Norwegian guy that got totally screwed by the thing yeah
Everyone thinks there's a lot more going on in the North Pole than there actually is
Unless that's not so I believe in Christmas in which case you're the North Pole because you're Santa Claus
And I'm the South Pole. Oh, I'm the South Pole because I'm what's is there is there a war?
Oh, it's a big wins. Is there a wario to Santa Claus?
This no, they live in the same area
It's you're like like is there reverse Santa Claus?
It should be like, Slanta. It should be like, Slanta.
Like, you know, like something that sucks.
Yeah, but Claus is spelled C-L-A-W-S.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and he's got Claus, right.
Slanta.
Uh, anyway...
Adam next to a big-titted rat, Fossion,
was kind of over-off in our subreddit.
We love to start every episode by just clapping our hands
and at our fandom and having them create a beautiful image for us
Last week your J.O.
Fuel was me as a big titty rat
Shoutouts to that
actually coming into like I know this is the episode I know what this episode is about but
Like what a great example of chaos magic at work besides that rat appearing on the Reddit. Just as we just as
we I guess we asked directly for it. But you know what I'm
saying? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, sure. Please buy tickets to
go see us in real life in Chicago in November. It's not
that far away. It's almost sold out. You guys are gonna miss it.
It's gonna like, it's gonna sell out. I'm serious. So, you know, this is not for
Christmas. So you got to do it early. You got to get it soon.
It's already almost August. If you want to think about July,
that way. July is almost August.
It's it you know, we're gonna be just we're doing like we're
bumping Halloween to a single day. Everybody who's coming to
the show Halloween is actually on November 1 for them. Yeah.
Yeah, it's going to be super decree.
Is that what we're going to do?
I thought for sure we'd be like, Halloween's over.
We're moving on to Thanksgiving based.
Or maybe we'll ride that energy, that weird between the scary
and the weird,
we're like back in like pilgrim imagery.
Like what's the movie?
Sleepy Hollow?
Like that feels like it fits right.
It's like great, no better first.
Sure, sure.
Yeah.
Movie, film?
Not the story, but the film.
Can I just force everybody in the audience
to watch a Neil Breen movie with us?
I would rather you didn't.
I don't want to.
You're going to say fly to Illinois.
And here's what we're going to have you guys do.
Yeah, that'd be a waste of everyone's time and money.
I would go, I'd be like, you know, we screwed up.
For about five minutes, I'd be laughing really hard.
It'd be really great.
That's one of those things where the situation is funnier than the actual carrying out of the situation and we could have achieved what we wanted
To achieve just by talking about it. You know, yeah, it's a weird. Hey chaos magic, baby, which brings us to our main episode
I got you there. We got we did we're throwing out the links
This is gonna be a multi-parter because chaos magic is a very interesting and fascinating
Aspect of the occult world.
But before we dive in, do you know anything about chaos?
Chaos magic, gentlemen? In my OK, this is like other than this is really Marvel's
Wanda Maximus.
No, this is what I mean.
Or is this nonsense like we've been talking about so far?
This is like the sea, which is what to me to me. This is the most real magic.
Jesse. Sorry. Hang on. I need Jesse's clarification of what he considers.
I mean like what we've been doing so far.
We've had several episodes building up to something about magic and how we've had.
What is magic and how does magic work and da da da da da da.
But in the end, it's all just like I call it magic because I'm fun and quirky rather than it's actually like ta-da I produced
fire with my palm
Having the guts to call anything magic is chaos magic like to me
You're not wrong
Magic my understanding of it is literally that it's the secret
Chaos magic my understanding of it is literally that it's the secret
Kind of you see like so the conti nutrition of this is going to be utter bullshit
Bullshit with a very fine. It's just not a secret. Yeah, all right
So Jesse all right here. We go. We'll practice some chaos magic ready, yeah. You now know the word like what chaos magic is as an overall thing.
It's a it's bullshit magic, but you now know chaos magic.
OK, now I need you to forget about chaos magic. Go.
Did you forget?
No, I do that.
All right. Then you failed.
You didn't do the chaos magic right.
That's what it is.
Hold on. What do you mean now as we continue?
So we're going to dive in right now and don't want you to do with one.
Oh, we're talking about chaos magic and actually talk about.
Oh, why didn't you say so?
Jesse, you are a magician at the highest level.
Congratulations today, gentlemen.
And obviously everybody listening, we are embarking on a journey
we've been talking about for quite a while.
And I don't use the word lightly because there's a lot of reading that is involved
and I'm not even sure I really understand everything it wants me to understand.
I don't think that's a point.
I think you just have to decide you understand is part of it.
I think you're correct.
And yeah, so yeah, for the next couple of episodes, we're going to be dissecting
we're going to kind of be dissecting a topic that has been one of the ones that
I've been most excited to cover a subject that lives in the strange like borderlands between psychology, religion, art, and pure unadulterated what the fuckness because there's names in this that we're going to series on chaos magic. Now, uh,
take every image right now in your heads. You have of magic,
both the stage magic bullshit, Jesse, uh, also like that.
First of all, let me just say,
you mean the only real type of magic. We, we just, this is a,
this is a semantic sadness that these two very respectable things have
been linked forever by somebody deciding
they have the same word for their name.
I just want to say shout outs to all the people that have dedicated their lives to the very
not paranormal discipline of stage magic, the performance art, if you will.
It's amazing.
Nobody who's doing it is really trying to convince you that it's real, right?
Except for Chris Angel.
Well, even he, the realness of it, I think he's just like, he's like, come on.
He's like, come on, come on.
But he might be, we'll see.
We'll see what you feel about who's actual chaos magicians at the end of all of this.
But yeah, all the images of your head of your stage magic stuff of like fantasy book stuff,
pointy hats, wands, dusty tomes are in an unknowable language, rigid hierarchies of
secret societies.
Take all that shit, put them in a little box and then set it on fire.
It's pointless.
That's not what any of this is about.
Because the subject, because talking about chaos magic is not just disagreeing with those
traditions.
It kind of takes a philosophical sledgehammer to them and smashes them up into tiny little
fucking pieces, sifts through the rubble of what's valuable and shiny, grabs at what those
are and kind of like hot wires it all together to create what chaos magic is.
The central load bearing axiom of chaos magic magic a phrase that you will hear again and again as we go through this is a quote famously used by writer William s borrows who himself from what I could find likely pulled from this quote from historical accounts of Hasan is about in the order of assassins.
That's like America great again
Yeah, that's it all the way back from the the order of assassins back in the day and the phrase is simple It is nothing is true and everything is permitted
The Assassin's Creed fans out there must be losing their minds right now quite literally taken by the Assassin's Creed franchise and used obviously
It's up in it's just exactly
what you would recognize it from but it's philosophical like weight in this
is it's immeasurable what it means for the Chaos magician is that objective
capital T truth is either non-existent or completely inaccessible to us. Therefore belief is not a state of being.
It is not a destination.
Belief is a tool, a piece of software, if you will,
to run a very, and or perform a very specific function.
Pause, pause, pause.
It sounds like you're talking about philosophy and not magic. We're talking about Jesse world
they
They mesh here. Yes, this is like this is like this is absolutely the intersection of like is thinking about something
Magic like so controlling it. Yeah, like yeah, like are you playing?
Cyberpunk 2077 when you're thinking about playing cyberpunk cyberpunk 2077
So this is really really what I'm hearing is instead of this just instead of
Stage magic just happens to be named magic like this is this is just people call this magic and it's just philosophy
No, because you can still enact your will. You can still
catch your will things. Just cause you wanna.
There's a lot more to it that makes this more magic than philosophy.
If at any point in time,
I'm not seeing any discussion in the next hour and a half or whatever of
like, you can produce something magical in the definition of
magic besides like what a magical evening
like if you're not doing something interesting I would be like bullshit you're talking about
like a fireball or like getting somebody to do something you want we got rituals coming
up Jesse yeah yeah yeah okay all right so before we move on let me just lay down the
sources the main books I would point you to
that I did my research on that I would suggest as well.
If you're gonna jump into this kind of cold
and never have done any research about this before,
using the book, Condensed Chaos,
an introduction to chaos magic by Phil Hine
is where I would recommend anybody to begin their journey.
There's audio books of it, you can get it everywhere.
It's presented as like a kind of concise,
accessible introduction to the topic.
It covers the main core principles,
the history of all of chaos magic
and practical techniques that you can use
that are designed for newcomers.
But then after you got that under your belt
and you still want more,
and you just wanna have a general greater understanding
of this stuff, there's two other books I would point you to.
Libre Null and Psychonaut by Peter J. Carroll
and the Book of Results by Ray Sherwin.
The first one is-
That one's for Jesse.
Yeah, exactly.
The Book of Results.
The Book of Results is for Jesse.
Yeah.
Basically, the first one, Libre Null and Psychonaut,
is more of like a basic philosophy
and practical approaches to chaos magic,
where the second one, the one for Jesse,
is more known for lucidly explaining
an individual that we'll be talking about today,
Austin Spears' key innovation in sigil magic, particularly.
And then if you really wanna go to the grandfather of it all,
the primary source, the book of pleasure,
also subtitled The Psychology of Ecstasy
by Austin Osmond Spear, is where you would, that would that's the very very very beginning I would kind of like but I recommend that later you kind of want to get to that point later on after you have a better understanding of the concept of it feels more academic yeah feels more academic and historical of a text yeah yeah this is this is this I cannot to you how much this entire come like listening to you
You two is stressing me out like listening to Jordan Peterson talk where it's like you said nothing
You said nothing and that's what this is you two of you are like, it's like it's like it's like what are you talking about?
Here we go. We're gonna get into it. Hopefully you have an idea
So be crazy Jesse to help really get our heads around this it helps to understand a fundamental split that happened in Western occultism for a long time.
There's kind of been this weird, I'd say false dichotomy.
And as writer Phil Hine puts it, there's a difference between our split happened between high magic
quote unquote and low magic quote unquote.
High magic was seen as the respectable stuff.
The quest for spiritual enlightenment uniting with God asc the planes, all that very abstract and philosophical stuff.
It was the magic of the study in the university, essentially.
And then low magic or sorcery was, I guess, for lack of a better term, the dirty stuff.
We talked about this in our little, or I didn't talk about it, but there was an 80s informational
pamphlet about it from Shulmanati. Right right right. Yeah. Yeah, I do remember that but this is like
Yeah, this is stuff that's magic for results essentially curses love charms finding treasure influencing people to do what you want them to do
It was the mallet magic of like the village cunning man
Yeah, yeah practical folk magic as we dealt with earlier in a few
Analysis series with them kind of mashing with the messy realities of life.
It was seen as purely material base and somehow less worthy in the people who
practice the higher magic all in quotes, obviously, you know, eyes that split.
So chaos magic kind of like looked at this division and called it for what it
was a self-imposed limitation.
It sought basically to try and tear down that wall, arguing that the
techniques for achieving spiritual enlightenment and the techniques for
say finding a parking spot are fundamentally the same thing.
The only difference is the intention in the in the window dressing.
Chaos magic puts sorcery, the magic of results front and center, not as
a lesser practice,
but as the ultimate proof that magic works.
Alex, were you about to say something?
I apologize.
Yeah, I was gonna say,
if you wanna think about this.
I hope you're all lightin' up for this shit, dude.
Light up a bowl, rub yourself in your favorite oils,
let's do it, dude.
I don't even, I feel like it's pretty easy to understand.
If you could get on the level of
What I was talking about the other day about anything having the potential to be magic, right?
And you think about the Western like a cult tradition of like fucking wizards and shit. Yeah, right of antiquity, right?
Yeah, and you think about like
Shakespeare right and you think of the old stuff as like Shakespeare and how like we
still study Shakespeare and we look at Shakespeare and we like need to like understand that type
of thing. But then there's also like current writers and current like culture that creates
another type of like extremely good with English, extremely deep knowledge of that discipline, right?
And so they're both really important,
studyable, valuable parts of one discipline that almost seem unrelated because of how far apart
they end up. I feel like chaos magic is in a more broad sense, like almost like pop culture magic or something.
It's like modern rather than antiquity. It's like if you imagine...
It's older than you think, I think. I think it's older than you think.
But that's the modern, like when you talk about modern writing in English,
for example, you're talking about stuff from, you know, almost 200, you know,
100, over 100 years ago. And so like to me, it feels like instead of it being like
the King Arthur type, right?
It's just something for us now that we use in the same way
about the systems that govern our world now, you know?
Like that, that's kind of how I see it.
Jesse?
I got, I'm gonna get yelled at by strangers on Reddit
for how much I want to interrupt.
So I'm gonna be quiet and absorb.
I'm going to take it in.
But genuinely, even what Alex just said there,
this all sounds like nonsense.
However, I'm open to the attitudes
and what you're about to tell me.
Just be open to the occult and like, yeah, that mindset.
If you can be aware that there's occultists that existed,
right, you can imagine that there's different.
Oh, I'm the occult. I get in the occult.
I was a chaos magic also is a foundational layer
to another individual that will be covering and I can't wait to cover in depth
in the future.
Like if we want to go full Crowley, I'm here for that.
That's the exact name that will be coming up.
Crowley is a huge influence.
Even with that, besides the will be coming up. Crowley is a huge influence.
Even with that, besides the lore of Alistair Crowley and like what's going on there, I think most of it also is just, you know, during the time period, you
got a bunch of people, they got nothing to do.
They're all rich and they're like, we're practicing black magic and we're up to
no good. Oh Chester, am I dirty?
Yes, you are Denise. If you don't crack open the book, if you don't crack open the book, that's a great
exact like description of what the scene of magic was at the time of Aleister Crowley.
And even today, if you look at like witchy girls and stuff like that, there's like an
aesthetic, right? And then there's like in the girl group of witchy friends, there's
like the one witchy friend who like actually reads the books and like does stuff and they like go to for actual advice on how to do stuff when they really want to do a ritual.
And there is, you know, it speaks to a tradition and a structure, you know, regardless of, you know, how key it is to the scene and the people practicing it there. I believe that there is a deep and almost like, you know, almost 150 year history to this type of occultism that we're going to talk about
today.
Simply put it more simply did Alistair Crowley's, uh,
inarguable impact on history and his, uh,
name being as popular as it is even today,
not evidence of his success with magic and succeeding in what he was attempting
to do.
And if that's what chaos magic is, that's interesting, but I don't buy it as magic.
But what I do think like there's Wicca and there's also different things where you can
be like, okay, I know what that is and let's work.
But again, everything you're saying with chaos magic air quotes sounds just like the type
of what about salesmanship?
Yeah.
It sounds like the type of things like, I'm not sure exactly what the, the
phrasing is, but it's when, um, we're having a conversation and I say to you,
like, like if you say a bunch of stuff and I keep asking you why or questions
or repeat back to you, what you said in order to get you to talk more.
It's sort of like that sort of conversation splicing that it's not magic.
That's just you're messing with people's head.
I'm not here to convince anybody.
Chaos magic is real. God damn you. God damn you.
I'm not a practitioner.
It is exciting. It's real.
That it really is about deciding it's real.
We explore tons of things that I don't believe in, but it's worth exploring
because of its impact, I think, on history and also it's fucking fascinating.
All right, so it's just stressing me out.
This whole, you know, words have meaning,
and I'm like, this is meaningless.
All right, anyway, we're only on page three
of like, come on, so.
I'm aware, I'll be quiet and shut up.
Really, really, really early.
So with chaos magic, this belief as a tool approach basically means that a chaos magician can seamlessly switch between different operating systems for reality.
And in the occult, there are four major ones that have developed over time, shall we say.
And it's worth noting that this category categorization was kind of popularized by Phil Hine in condensed chaos as a way to understand just different approaches.
It's just a different look to look at this shit.
Roughly published when like the eighties?
Yeah. Oh, shit. I can't remember.
Condemned just so I can kind of place the readership of this
because I know that nobody was saying the words chaos magic like this till
around like early 90s, 94s chaos magic.
So 30 years ago, a little over
30
Wait 40 40. No 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30
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30 years ago, I scared myself. That'd be 94.
Yeah, yeah, 94, exactly.
So there we go.
95, 10.
It's less, it's less like,
think of it less as strict historical timeline
and just more of a useful framework
as to how to look at this.
So first you have the spirit model.
This is what he kind of considers the oldest,
most traditional view.
The other worlds are objectively real.
They're inhabited by the spirits, angels,
demons, gods, elementals.
And it's the magician's job is to learn to map these realms
and kind of figure out how to contact, bargain with,
or command these entities to get things done.
When you perform a ritual,
you are literally calling a non-physical being
to your location.
This is like a theme.
This is like a theme to This is like a, this is like a, like a,
like a, like a theme to your belief system, right? Like fundamentally they're all the same thing that you're describing, but you're using like different, like, like, this is a way to use
the tool. Yeah. Yeah. Shrouds. Exactly. And this is one of four different boxes of tools that people can look into.
And this one is the spirit box of tools.
God, angels, demons, or whatever religion
that you map yourself into.
It's aesthetic, yeah.
A priest is more just like a Christian magician,
essentially, you think of it like that.
And that's what the magician's job is to map the realms,
figure out how to contact, bargain with, command entities.
Then with the rise of science in the 18th century, you get the energy model.
This model talks about subtle energies like real energy, astral light, vibey,
yeah, Prana, the Wilhelm Reich's Oregon energy machine.
If you really touched on that old mage,
that old warlock,
put your annoying wife in a wooden box machine for him
back in the day is all that was.
Magic here is more about learning to sense, direct,
and manipulate these invisible forces
that permeate everything.
A spell is an act of directing a current of energy
toward a target.
So then, and then next, after the breakthroughs
of Freud and Jung came the psychological model.
This is the skeptics kind of favorite toolbox.
In this view, the other worlds become the inner worlds.
Demons are just repressed complexes in our unconscious mind.
Gods are archetypes of the higher self.
And magic is a profound form of psychotherapy for personal transformation.
A ritual isn't calling a demon, it's an elaborate psychodrama to confront a part of yourself.
And then finally the fourth box we have is current and you have
the current and up-and-coming paradigm that's happening.
Now the cybernetic model.
This one says the universe is essentially information.
A lot of this is going to sound very fucking familiar now and
this was written about 30 years ago.
Yeah, this one says the universe is essentially just information. to sound very fucking familiar now and this was written about 30 years ago.
Yeah, this one says the universe is essentially just information,
a giant cosmic computer running on probability.
Magic then is a set of techniques for trying to, for lack of a better word,
hack reality, creating a neurological glitch in your own brain that ripples outwards, manipulating probability to cause macroscopic changes in the world.
Shin Megami Tensei.
And as Alan Moore once said, we are quote, unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg.
Yeah, perfect.
Those are your four models, spirit, energy, psychological, and cybernetic.
And basically it said they all say yes.
They all say yes.
They don't choose one.
They might use the psychological model
to explain their results to a skeptic,
but then use the spirit model for a full blown
demonic evocation later that day.
They use whatever model, whatever belief is most effective
for the task at hand.
It's the ultimate in magical pragmatism.
It's literally Constantine.
Yes, in a weird way.
In a weird way, yeah.
Whatever's useful in the moment,
going through his toolbox.
Constantine, let's call him.
I mean, that's not a bad comparison
because he kind of funnels his beliefs
through the different tools.
I've seen him lose a dude inside of a computer.
I've seen him call demons.
I've seen him go to a psychiatrist.
Constantine is a fucking chaos magician.
That's fucking awesome.
I love that.
That's actually correct.
And he sprang from the vogue of it all too.
He's like an 80s guy.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But this is why pop culture becomes a valid source
of magic limiter.
The rationale is that all symbols,
all are equally valid in the chaos magic paradigm.
To the practicing chaos magician.
The symbolic power of a corporate logo or a comic book character is just as potent and
often more so in the modern mind than an ancient Egyptian God form.
One hundred percent as Phil Hine puts it in condensed chaos quote, What is important for
me is that it showed me more convincingly than any argument or book is that magic is something real.
And then that personal experience for him, the results that he got is the only truth that matters.
So where did this utterly bizarre have your cake kind of eat it to approach to the supernatural magic world come from?
Because it wasn't born in ancient Egypt or medieval Germany or any of that shit. It was born in the mind of a working class boy in London, a man who was once hailed as
the future of the British art world and died in relative poverty.
A man who brushed up against the most famous occultists in the world and walked away in
disgust, rejecting them.
So that's where we're going to begin.
We have to start with the grandfather of chaos magic, Austin Osmond Spare.
Now, Spare's life is a short is a story in itself, kind of a full of contradictions
that make for a great subject for the podcast.
He was born in 1886 in Smithfield, London, the London, though a few sources claim
1888, but 1886 seems to be the more generally accepted year.
And he was the son of a city policeman.
So he's like a contemporary to like Aleister Crowley.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Same time period. OK.
The exact same time period, you know, and for somebody who was
like going to be seen as a potential revolutionary, our
artist being just like the city, the son of a city policeman
isn't like kind of where you would expect to find
them. From his earliest days, it was clear that he was
different though, to a lot of people. He was a prodigy,
someone that they saw as a genuine artistic genius and his
talent for drawing was so immense that at age that at
the age of 17, he became the youngest person ever to exhibit
at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts. The papers in the
art critics at Edwardian London went like kind of nuts for this guy.
He was seen as Infant Terrible, the wild haired intense young man from a humble background
who could draw like an old master.
This man was just very very skilled.
They called him the next Aubrey Beardsley, who was if you curious who that was, who was
the they were the defining artist of the art nouveau and decadent movements at the time.
He was on a trajectory to become a celebrated and potentially wealthy famous artist.
This is who created Chaos Magic.
But there was also another current running through his life.
Alongside the artistic prodigy was a developing occultist.
Spare claimed that as a child, he was initiated into a form of witchcraft by an elderly woman
by the name of Mrs. Patterson, who he claimed was descended from a line of New England witches
who had escaped a Puritan prosecution in the 1600s.
For my own sake and for the sake of historical accuracy,
it's worth noting that the story is obviously disputed.
Some scholars believe Mrs.
Patterson may have been a real local fortune teller that spare
later mythologize to create a more compelling origin for his
very personal primal magic just got lit up by something cool
that happened when he was a kid.
Basically.
Yeah.
And now again, is it true?
Who fucking knows?
But what it is, is it's kind of a classic occult origin story, which might be the whole
point in the story being made up in the first place for him.
And later writers like Kenneth Grant, who became Spare's champion, certainly leaned
into this quote unquote dark sorcerer narrative.
But what's undeniable is that Spare had a lifelong obsession with the unseen,
with spirits and with accessing altered states of consciousness.
What were they doing together?
Like when they talk or hang out, were they like doing rituals or like?
Well, we'll talk. We'll get through it.
Yeah. He was one of the first artists to seriously practice what he
called automatic drawing, which was the art of the art or the
practice of letting his hand move across paper in a trance
like state.
It's the idea that your subconscious is kind of controlling
it and years before the surrealist in Paris would claim to
invented it.
He was doing it and he was in many ways, you know, years ahead of some people in terms of like paranormal practices.
And of course, in the small kind of incestuous occult world of early 20th century London, there was one name that overshadowed him and everybody else.
You've already said his name before none other than Alastair Crowley and it was inevitable that their paths would cross as he would as Spare
would remain obsessed with the cultism his whole life.
Crowley was always on the lookout for new talent and potential disciples,
and he saw Spare's work and was impressed.
So Spare was briefly brought into Crowley's magical order, the AA
or the Argentinian or the Argentium Astrum or the order of the silver star.
Cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And for a very short time in 1909, he was a probationer with Alastair Crowley.
Wait, so is Crowley like a little bit his senior?
Like are they a little bit his senior, a little older.
Yeah.
Generationally older than him a little bit?
Yeah.
He's like, I think he's like 15 to 20 years older.
I think he's right around that time.
Yeah. 1909.
He was a probationer, but it didn't last Crowley system.
Thelma, which is meaningless to you boys right now, but we'll talk about it one day.
It's it's pretty well known.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. For all its revolutionary do what thou wilt philosophy was still for spare incredibly hierarchical and dogmatic.
It was filled with complex rituals, Egyptian gods, Kabbalistic correspondences, a strict system of grades and initiations and so much sex later on.
And at the top of it all was the great beast himself, Alistair Crowley, a man with the eagle the size of a fucking planet who demanded absolute loyalty to him.
And Spare, who was this fiercely independent working class individualist at the time, wanted
nothing to do with being a servant to Crowley.
He found the whole scene to be pompous and what he called overly intellectual and frankly,
a bit silly.
This is starting to sound like a Constantine origin story, to be honest with you.
That's why I just got to go through this. It's fascinating. It's important.
He believed that he believed all that ceremony,
all that dressing up and memorizing correspondences was nothing more than a
distraction from the real source of power. Your own mind.
To him, these complex systems were just another trap,
another set of beliefs to get stuck in and Crowley for his part did not take well.
They did not take rejection.
Well, he later wrote spare off as his quote unquote black brother, which in his terminology meant a magician who had failed in their development because they couldn't surrender their personal ego to the great work.
Which for a while, which for Crowley, conveniently often meant
surrendering to him, you know, and that's just he's just mad
about it. So Spare turned his back on all of that shit. Turned
him back. Yeah, he turned his back on the established occult
scene and eventually on the fine art world that had once kind of
celebrated him. in 1925.
He published a scathing manifesto called the anathema of Zoss,
a sermon to the hypocrites, which is basically, and I'll give you the link to the,
to the actual paper.
So he wasn't like non-dramatic.
No, he was very dramatic. He was extremely dramatic. He wasn't just,
he wasn't like a stoic. He was just like, this is a week.
Like this is a lot of faffing around the magic.
Yes.
Basically this thing that he wrote, I read the whole thing.
It's not that long.
I'll give you the link to it right now.
Just so you have it sacred texts.
Com dude.
Yeah, dude.
It's a great site.
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Yeah, basically just a giant middle finger to the art establishment before
you retreat into the war. Yeah, I know. Working class boroughs of South London
where he would live for the rest of his life. Now I'm just going to give you a
couple. I'm just going to give you two prized, like two little quotes I pulled
from this thing that I want that I, that I want Jesse to read.
Great casting.
You're an angry, disillusioned, crowly, uh, student going on your own. I'll give you the first- you got two quotes. This one first.
There's one in here I'm hoping it is.
Oh my god, dude. In this rebel intoxication of hypocrisy, this monument of swindlers little nisses,
where in the mystic symposium the hierarchy of necromancers that was honest was sodom. Sodom! Your theology is a slime pit of gibberish. Become ethics in your world, where ignorance
and deceit constitute felicity. Everything ends miserably, besmirched with fratricidal
blood. Thus are ye outcasts. Ye habitate dung heaps.
Your glorious palaces are hospitals set amid
cemeteries.
Incredible, incredible insult right at the end.
I was going to have Alex take this next one, but maybe
Jesse should just read it as well.
I've played a lot of Dark Tides, so I got the voice down.
It's a little shorter, but this is another one I yanked.
The, it's exactly what you said.
Like, yeah, what he is saying is just exactly what you said.
Go watch it.
Who's taking it out? Take it, please.
Jesse, go ahead. Take it.
To cast aside not save, I come inexorably towards myself to smash the law, to make havoc of the charlatans,
the quacks, the swankers, and brawling salvationists with their world-toddry phantasmagoria, to illusion and awaken every fear of your natural
rapacious cells
Incredible reading whatever you want it whatever you saw in them that you want to read, please
It's so much in there telling me we're not gonna like this man has some bangers in here
I can't do the other I just make you read the whole thing if it was you know
He says in that ye are cannibals
What meat should I offer having eaten of your own dead selves savored with every filth?
Ye now ravine it to glutton of the mines motion this guy's
Wild this is trying to be chill. I thought he was trying to like make it
There's nothing chill about this is fantastic
No Bruce Lee you know how like Bruce Lee like no kundoed everything together other like every magician
I know and ever and studied about from Crowley to fucking Madame Blavatsky to this guy. They're all dramatic as fuck
This dude one of them this dude belongs a warhammer 40k
this guy is rock theme dude zeo zoos kirkultus the book of pleasure
guys just dude ye are good murderers only dude speaking of 40k i went on a little like
chaos magic deep dive if you go to chaos magic on w, the real Chaos Magic, not like, not 40k, the
logo of Chaos Magic literally is the logo for Chaos in whatever 40k.
And I'm like, dude.
It's also the logo for Chaos in Hades.
Let me tell you something.
It's so funny.
Let me tell you something.
Let's talk, let's go back to that John Constantine connection that I made. We're talking about the Thatcher 80s England,
which is the exact environment from which Warhammer sprung, the exact environment from which
Heavy Metal sprung. All that shit is all like chaos magic rooted. Alan Moore, all his stuff is
chaos. He's like, he made his own gods. He's crazy. He's a cast magic practitioner.
Like by by literal definition that man is like, I've learned a lot about comic book
writers and shit from just doing podcasting and not from reading the comments.
Are we going to talk about the invisibles today?
I don't think that's going to be today because I don't know.
Maybe next week.
We'll see.
Because that's one of the coolest things that I've ever seen.
Well, we'll see what we get to. It's a lot.
But yeah, this guy went from basically being a potential celebrated
artistic genius to living in abject poverty, writing these like the scathing
manifesto and at times in a dank Brixton basement is where he lived
at a lot of points in his life around this time, surrounded by apparently
a horde of cats that he looked after.
He was living in the basement of a cat lady, I think, and just cats were around him constantly.
But he still held exhibitions of his work in local pubs because the galleries had forgotten
him at this point.
There's even a famous, though likely apocryphal story from the journalist Hannan Swafer, who
claimed Speer was invited by an aide at the German Embassy to paint a portrait of Adolf Hitler in
1936 an offer that he contemptuously refused by the way, so he only didn't go and do that
So this guy's still hero material. I'm taking it. Yes. Yes
Yeah, and it was in the self-imposed occult exile that he refined his own unique
imposed a cult exile that he refined his own unique philosophy of magic laid out in his cryptic and brilliant masterpiece that the granddaddy book I referenced earlier, the
book of pleasure, self-love.
And this is where we get to the absolute core of what would become chaos magic.
Spare called this system the Zoskio cultus.
Now let's break this down. Zos was Spare's word for the body considered as a whole, the mind, soul, and flesh as one
complete unit.
This was a radical idea at the time when most Western spiritual traditions influenced by
Christianity saw the body as a crude prison for the pure soul inside.
And for Spare, the body wasn't a prison.
It was the alchemical vessel, the very vehicle of power.
Then you have Kia.
And then this is a bit harder to find, but he often describes
it as the atmospheric eye, the universal consciousness,
the kind of source consciousness, a formless spark of the absolute
that resides within everybody and everything.
Things we've talked about a little bit in that whole like what is consciousness?
Is it emergent? Is it an informational, quantum level thing?
Is it as resource that we are somehow manipulating?
Are we itself the consciousness manipulating itself?
Which is why I'm really glad that I didn't do chaos magic a few years ago
when I first really wanted to.
And I waited because this is a more fascinating angle to kind of come at this from.
And now this all might sound, oh wait, no, I skipped ahead there.
So yeah, Kya is like the source basically.
It's a concept similar to Tao and Taoism or Brahman and Hinduism.
The goal of his magic was to unite the Zos and Kya, the personal and the universal, to achieve a state of non-dual consciousness.
Now, this kind of sounds like high magic, but which is a philosophical stuff, but his
methods were kind of anything but which is where chaos mind where chaos magic kind of
gets interesting.
He developed a concept called atavistic resurgence.
Now this is some fucking truly weird shit.
Now spare believed that our bodies hold the genetic and spiritual memories of
our entire evolutionary past, not just our human ancestors, but like our pre
human ones to pre wifi version of the new sphere.
Basically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Apes, lizards, fish, single-celled organisms, all of it.
He believed a magician could regress their consciousness back through these
evolutionary stages
to tap into the raw primal power and instincts of these atavisms quote-unquote and he would enter
i'm sorry i thought jesse's hand was raised for some reason in the corner no i i no i was thinking
about uh how this definitely sounds like the plot of a movie but i literally can't think of the plot
of the movie i or what movie that is i don't know why I'll even try to think of it because I have like on
There's definitely one of those things like there's a definite story where it's like we must connect with ourselves in the past
But like everything is Assassin's Creed
Yeah, I mean that's definitely Assassin's Creed, but there's something
I can't remember what it is like what you're about to say and the idea that your entire genetic memories in your body is like literally
Foundational to Abstergo's idea. Yeah. Mm-hmm
He would later enter the he would later enter a trance and feel himself becoming a tiger a snake a bird of prey
Believing that this process released a huge amount of energy from the psyche that could be used for magic now
Is there in there?
Yeah.
Feeling himself becoming a tiger or a snake, feeling himself comma or was he feeling himself?
Oh, no, feeling himself become a tiger, comma, a snake, comma, bird.
Okay, well, that's fine.
Sorry.
I know it's not as fun, but like it's even was Crowley.
He would have been there would have been no, he wouldn't.
If it was we Crowley be feeling himself, comma, a tiger,
feeling up a tiger.
For him, this wasn't about polite seances,
this was about dissolving for him the human ego
into something that's ancient and ethereal,
I guess is a way to put it.
Cause his central thesis was that the true magic engine
is the subconscious mind.
He believed that the conscious mind with its doubts,
logic, its doubts, logic,
its socially conditioned baggage,
what he called the psychic sensor
is the biggest barrier to magic,
which is kind of funny,
just like the weird mushroom trip I had,
where just like your anxiety is like the barrier, dude.
It's blocking you from letting go.
It's like the flow state,
but like kind of like reverse interpreting the flow state.
Like you're saying like the flow state is actually you at your,
at your most attuned as opposed to your like least attuned in a way.
You know, like all the doubt,
like your mind and all that shit with its doubts and logic and shit.
Like that's a problem. That's like your presence,
your presence and perception is like burden. Yes. Yes. A huge burden. Yes.
That's exactly correct.
The universe that he reasoned anyway was is already providing everything
you could ever want.
You just have to get out.
You just have to get out of your own way and like let it happen.
The trick is to sneak your desire past the block to plant it directly
into the fertile soil of the subconscious which would then work to
manifest that was desire in reality and his method for doing this is his
most famous and enduring creation.
The sigil.
This is where we get some real practice, practiceable magics.
Now, we touched a little bit on it before, but let's do a
proper like deep dive on the mechanics here because this is
the foundational practice of how this works.
So let's just say for this example,
your desire, your will is,
you wanna get a promotion.
You wanna get a promotion at your job.
So you would say, it is my will to get this promotion.
That becomes your statement of intent.
Then, Spares Method dictates that you write that sentence
down in capital letters, then you rewrite it, but you remove all
the repeating letters.
So it is my will to get this promotion becomes is my like
W loge HPR and then some practitioners also will do
remove the vowels at the stage.
It's not not everybody does it some people do but the core idea is to break down the linguistic meaning.
You're trying to make it basically a bunch of nonsensical letters.
Now that you have the string of seemingly random letters to anybody else, but you,
your next job is to take these letters and combine them into a single.
Sigil, like an abstract glyph.
You're going to like late, you're going to overlay them on top of each other.
You can twist them around.
You simplify them until you have a strange, essentially kind of alien looking symbol.
Like an image.
Yeah, that should have no obvious connections to the letters that you started with.
So you're taking all those letters, putting them on top of each other,
twisting them around, creating a sigil that whatever, whatever works for you.
And you're like, I like that.
You know, that that's when you have your, your abstract glyph.
You, uh, this alien looking syndrome looks like nothing to anybody.
It's just a squiggle, a personal private hieroglyph of your desired will.
Um, this is where the psychological trickery has to come in. The most important step is the concept that is called deliberate forgetting.
Remember, I tried to get you to make forget chaos magic in the beginning.
This is where this comes in.
Deliberate forgetting. Exactly.
Jesse, you have to actively forget your original desire.
You have to look at this new symbol you've created and see it only as a shape completely divorced from the wish for promotion for this example.
The purpose of this is to prevent what he called lust for result.
If you're constantly thinking, did it work yet?
Where's my promotion?
Did it work yet?
Is my sigil working that conscious anxiety that attachment to the outcome will completely sabotage the entire operation.
You're re-engaging in that psychic weight, that psychic anchor, that psychic sensor.
So after you make your sigil, you got to go hide the sigil from yourself for a while.
Okay.
Then when you've sufficiently forgotten its meaning, you charge it.
And to do that, you have to enter a state of gnosis.
That is not gnosis, Jesse.
We lost that is not gnosis.
Yeah, he's been taking just to take it sleepy gummies.
He's having a hard time.
No, it's not. No, no.
I just think it's very funny that this is it's like, all right,
create a sigil that forget the sigil, then come back to it.
You have to get your. Yeah, forget your intent, then come back to it, then charge it.
Yeah, forget your intent behind the sigil.
You can't want it.
It's almost like an engram of its own meaning
that's separate from your personal desire at the time.
You've literally taken your desire and reshaped it.
Right, but instead of forget about it, come back to it and now come at it as the sigil
and empower the sigil.
Right, but you should sufficiently,
you should know you have the sigil,
but you just gotta forget what the sigil meant,
the intent behind the sigil,
only that you trust yourself
that the intent was what you wanted.
Right. Right?
Okay.
Okay, so after you do that,
now you're gonna have to enter it. now you have to get you find you got to
charge it with energy and this is no.
How do you do that?
You have to enter state of no sis.
Now no sis is a word that gets used a lot in occultism, but
in Chaos magic has a very very specific physiological meaning.
It's a state of non thought a moment where the conscious
mind is completely silence and short circuited.
Like spare outline two main pads in the book, uh, to this,
the inhibitory, the inhibitory and the excitatory
inhibitatory gnosis is achieved through methods like slow moving.
Oh no, no, no slow moving meditation, yoga, sensory deprivation, scrying or prolonged staring, basically disassociating,
quieting the mind to a dead stop.
Excitatory gnosis is the opposite.
You get there through intense emotion, pain, sensory overload, chanting, drumming, ecstatic
dancing, sexual arousal, or even a sudden shock of fright
I've heard charging only to mean in pet in the past jacking off on the second off all over the symbol that is yeah
That is what my common understanding of it was as well. That's what always sticks
That's easiest for people to do
You know if you're gonna do is like do you gonna get the chanting or you can take you like well?
I could just go jack off really hard and like not think and just come all over the fucking symbol
So really so really my initial assessment of all this is again
bored
people
just like
We're going to bang a top the central tonight. Yes, but ease like that
Are we going to bang or top the central tonight?
Yes, but he's like that. That's all this is.
This isn't Crowley.
This is the poor man living in like a basement filled with cats.
Yeah, but he wishes he was Crowley.
He wishes he's doing it.
He's like, I want to be Crowley.
No, I will stand for this guy.
He's a revisionist.
He's like he's like he's like he's like Martin Luther.
He's he's got problems.
He's trying to re contextual he's trying to strip out.
The reason he's saying forget is because he wants you to like forget your own physical
and like mental connections to the intent so that you don't get bogged down.
He's describing anxiety before understanding anxiety was existing.
Yeah, exactly.
He's trying to filter out all the hesitance and all that stuff.
It's just like we're saying, like if you look at chaos magic on the grid of four,
there's the psychological version, right?
It's the same thing as this.
Different tool set to manipulate the same thing.
To manipulate reality.
Exactly, correct Alex, you got it right.
You get there and you get a sticker on your poor card.
Only your perception of it.
Not yet.
This poor man who lived in a basement of cats is now one of the most well-known occultists in the world.
Weird how that keeps happening with these people.
He's like well known in the way that Jesse Cox is well known as a YouTuber.
Like you gotta really look for him.
That's pretty good though man.
You gotta look for him. You gotta like be 45 years old and wanna look
for him. You're gonna exist in people's by acting. This guy's like Tyler Oakley. This
guy's like Tyler Oakley. Jenna Marlowe. No, no. You're practicing cast magic through the
cybernetic tool box by implanting yourself on the internet for a time much longer than
most people will. You are correct. You will live in history in a way that other people won't because you made the
effort to put yourself out there for thousands of hours.
We'll take down the Internet years from now and there'll be no trace of me.
So like, oh, sure.
But like even for your existence now in this world, it's it's working for you.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
I'm on a podcast where I had to listen to chaos magic,
which is not a real thing and pretend that I care.
And that's exactly fine.
That's absolutely fine.
Just because you don't believe doesn't mean you don't practice it as the best
damn you got to shake.
That's like what the forgetting is about dude.
Yeah, exactly.
So yeah, basically though like it is one of them for excitatory.
That is most really what people do like a lot of like beginning chaos magicians just jerk off all over the symbol because
that is his way to break blank your brain in that peak moment of gnosis though, when
like you are in the moment of just absolute jizz center.
Dude, I can do it from playing fucking Gran Turismo though.
Like don't get it twisted.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Once you're at that point though, where your brain is like completely gone,
your inner sensor is considered offline
and you bring out the sigil
and you're supposed to stare at it.
You're supposed to like,
use that energy, move into it,
pour all that raw undifferentiated energy right into it.
You burn it shaped directly in your subconscious mind.
And then after you're done with that,
you destroy the symbol.
Get rid of it. You only do this once with the symbol, the're done with that you destroy the symbol get rid of it
You only do this once with the symbol the gnosis act you destroy it burn the paper throw it in a fucking river
Tear it up. I don't know you just throw it down the toilet
Actually, you're gonna find some don't do that. Yeah, don't do that. I never ever think about it again. You're done
It's done. The spell is done. You don't return to it. You don't do another one
it again. You're done. It's done. The spell is done. You don't return to it. You don't do another one. It's done. The seed is planted in that supposed fertile ground of your subconscious. And now you
just let that seed grow on scene. The reason I feel like this works for Jesse's like mindset on
this is that like, it's absolutely in every way trying to remove all the bullshit besides literally
doing a practical activity and getting the
result from it.
You know, the best part is in the next part of my script, I even stay, I like, I knew
Jesse, I know Jesse so well right here in the script.
I go now I can already hear Jesse saying talking about psychological priming and confirmation
bias and all this other stuff because you know, that's what it sounds like, right?
You like, you build it.
He's what it is.
It is honestly, he's not wrong. Yeah, that's what it sounds like, right? You like you build it. He's what it is. It is honestly.
He's not wrong. Yeah, that's correct.
A modern psychologist would look at this whole process and see a very clever if
rather weird and kind of strange system of self kind of hypnosis goal-setting
cognitive reframing of something but for spare and for those who followed him.
This was the real deal.
This was a technology for interfacing or interacting with reality. And he developed entire systems around this like his alphabet of desire.
His work was kind of dense idiosyncratic and deeply personal and for decades.
It was largely forgotten the domain of a few maybe dedicated collectors of really kind of obscure niche occult stuff
And he ended up dying in 1956 being nothing more than a footnote in the art world and a ghost of nothing in the world
of magic it wasn't until the
1970s that he his work would be rediscovered and
This was during the landscape of 1970s Britain not America America specifically. And it was a bit of a pressure cooker
over there. The optimism of the 60s had kind of curled up the
economy was not doing great. And a raw kind of angry energy was
starting to bubble up. This was the era that kind of gave birth
to punk rock. It was anti establishment anti tradition, do
it yourself and deeply, deeply cynical and
young boys trying out for the ballet
Wow, we're talking I'm actually over there in that time period
It was yeah, so this is the birth of like, you know
Punk and alongside this social upheaval. There was an occult explosion happening simultaneously
The witchcraft act had been repealed in 195, and what was once hidden was now kind of bubbling
back into the mainstream 20 years later.
And you had figures like Alex and Maxine Sanders, the self-proclaimed king and queen of the
witches appearing on television.
You had popular weekly magazines like Man, Myth & Magic on newsstands that detailed everything
from alchemy to zombies for a mainstream audience. And the occult was just trendy.
It was a particular group of English, uh,
occultists and psychics were traipsing around the countryside searching for a
certain verdant colored stone perhaps at this time.
Also not wrong, man.
You're absolutely correct.
Literally at the exact same time, the Greenstone shit was happening.
Yeah. And they were kind of practicing chaos magic in their own way, dude.
Like the yeah.
But while the occult was being trendy, it was also fragmenting at this time.
It was into this volatile mix of punk rock nihilism and occult revivalism
that a new and uniquely absurd ingredient was thrown in.
Discordianism.
Now, again, we can't talk about chaos magic without talking about Eris,
the Greek goddess of chaos as well.
The Discordian society, as popularized in the Illuminatus trilogy by Robert
and Non-Wilson and Robert Shea, is in its own words, quote,
a tribe of philosophers the
theologians magician scientists artists clowns and similar maniacs who were intrigued with
Eris goddess of confusion and with her doings
The founding myth of discordianism is laid out in their sacred text the principalia discordia according to its authors
Malclips the younger and Omar Omar Kaim Ravenhurst,
the goddess Eris appeared to them in a bowling alley in the late 1950s. She was upset that she'd
been misunderstood for millennia. She wasn't evil, she was just the embodiment of creative disorder
while her boring sister and Eris represented a stultifying order. Eris' most famous act, of course,
was the original Trojan War incident.
The story goes that Zeus was throwing a wedding party
on Mount Olympus and deliberately didn't invite Eris
because, well, she's a troublemaker.
And furious at the snub, Eris fashioned a golden apple
from the garden of Hesperides and scribed upon it
the word, chelisti, meaning to the prettiest one,
and rolled it into the party.
Naturally, three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite
immediately started fighting over it.
I just wanna say, I love Greek gods
and how humanly petty they are.
They're fucking amazing.
I love that just like people fighting over
who the prettiest one is,
is just such a human stupid dumb thing.
This divine cat fight eventually led to the judgment of Paris,
the abduction of Helen, and the decade long bloody Trojan War,
all because of one divinely inspired prank.
The Discordians took this and ran with it.
They declared that humor, absurdity,
and confusion were sacred acts.
They pointed out that the entire world of magic
and religion was drowning in its own self-importance.
Their holy book contains commandments like thou shalt not eat hot dog buns, the law of
fives, which states that all things happen in fives or divisible by or multiplies by
fives or are somehow related to five if you just look hard enough and the revelation that
every single man woman and child on this earth is a genuine bona fide Pope.
So if you're listening, congratulations on your promotion boys and everybody else
out there, you guys are actually all popes.
This playful kind of anti-authoritarian spirit was a perfect match for the punk
ethos and it just became a crucial element of the chaos magic paradigm.
And it was also, I want to also say just separately that this is like the, uh,
like, um, patron deity of the like, early to mid tier D&D,
like GM, like this type of this, this type of energy in general. I feel like it's the same
like sort of subversive form, like subversive for its own sake.
Yep, very much so. I love it so good. So much fun, dude.
Uh, yeah.
And it was in this environment that two young, brilliant, and deeply dissatisfied occultists,
one Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, found the dusty forgotten works of Austin Osmond
Spear.
And Carroll was a student of science, deeply interested in quantum physics and cosmology.
Sherman, uh, Sherwin rather, was an enthusiast of Crowley's Thelema.
And they met and began publishing a zine.
Sound familiar Alex?
There's only a few of them exist nowadays.
And this was at the time if you know what a zine was,
it's kind of like the classic punk rock medium of the time.
And this one was called the Equinox through its pages.
They were able to they express their utter frustration with
the state of the magical arts.
They saw the existing orders as stuffy, stagnant, obsessed with tradition over
results, and they wanted something new, something that worked, something that
was stripped bare of all the cultural and religious baggage.
And in Spare, they found their key.
They saw the raw pragmatic genius of his sigil technique and
his focus on belief as a tool.
They took Spare's foundational ideas ideas and then fuse them with 20th
century concept quantum mechanics with his observer effect and probability
waves, the cut up techniques of writers like William S.
Burroughs and Brian Gison and the holy foolery of the discordianism
that we just discussed.
They were creating a new synthesis, something that's like a postmodern
magic and in 1978, the same year they announced the formation of the IOT,
another influential figure, Genesis P.
Orridge, who had studied magic under William S.
Burroughs and Brian Gison established the temple of God, they spell it weird.
Psychic Youth, the temple of psychic youth, but spell T-H-E-E and O-V is O-V and psychic is spelled Psy-Chick
for some reason.
This group took their these kind of like nascent chaos magic ideas and began to blend them
with industrial music, performance art, and the proto cyberpunk aesthetic that was also
beginning to bubble up, further showing how the movement was branch out and cope cross pollinating with other countercultures Carol and Sherwin in a 1978 issue of the new equinox
announced the formation of their new magical order one based on these principles and they called it the Illuminati
of Thanatairos or iot the name itself is a statement of intent combining Thanatos, the Greek God of Death, and Eros,
the God of Love and Sex.
And this pointed to the two great overwhelming experiences, the ultimate inhibitory and excitatory
states that can propel a person into gnosis.
The IoT was to be a meritocracy.
You didn't get in by knowing the right people or by paying your
dues. You got in by demonstrating you could get results.
They declared themselves the spiritual heirs to the Zoskia
cultus of spare and they published the two foundational
text that I also mentioned earlier.
Sherwin the book of results that slim kind of practical handbook
for sigil magic in the Liber Null, that slim kind of practical handbook for sigil magic in the library. No.
And that is where like the other one is more like magical systems
for shamanism, ceremonial magic, et cetera.
Chaos magic simply chooses to do this kind of consciously without
getting trapped in any single system, essentially.
And it's right here as we kind of meet these two characters that
we're actually going to kind of bring ourselves to a close for this episode.
It's very much like Jeet Kune Do.
I just can't stop thinking about that.
It's like so very much the same thing as what Bruce Lee was doing with martial arts.
He was like, get rid of all the bullshit.
Let's just make it useful.
Yeah, basically it's the goal.
And it's like, this is just the first part of the story.
We've now seen the birth of the core ideas of this stuff with Austin spare.
We've seen the cultural explosion that allowed these ideas to kind of just be rediscovered
in the unique kind of mixing pot that needed it's for to kind of explode like it did.
And we've seen the information of the first Chaos Magic order by a pair of angry,
but you know anti-establishment people These ideas would continue to spread and evolve
with figures like previously mentioned Phil Hine
along with Julian Wilde and Joel Barocco
publishing influential books and zines
that were particularly important in spreading
these techniques through the early days of the internet.
And the groundwork with that,
the groundwork has just been laid.
But the theory is one thing,
the practice is something else entirely.
So next time, if you boys are interested, you only got a week.
So, you know, not a lot of time to try it.
But if you're interested in those who are listening, why don't we, if you're willing
to give it a shot, open up the chaos magicians toolkit and check it out.
Maybe practice a little bit of the glyphs thing.
See if something you want to mess with or not.
And next week, we'll be talking about creating artificial spirits
called servitors, weaponizing pop culture in the many, many ways.
One can kind of blast the doors open of perception off their own hinges
because it gets so much weirder than this.
And like I said, including magical spirit slaves
that will do what you want them to do.
It's all sex like a mining no matter what anyone says
It's all sexually related
Sexually related dude, that's it is I want to be
Do you all right? I don't what no
It's like a song. It's a cool cool song is it that's not a cool song
I want to be sexually related to you it's kind of good is it
Good spice it up. It's not good. I want to be sexually related to you. That's the chaos magic
Hmm are you boys gonna give it a shot before we go?
I'm already giving it a shot every day my goddamn life on this show
Let me tell you create a sigil. I can do the sigil practice
I yeah, I'll do a sigil. Yeah, I'll just do it if I can do it. Yeah, you should um
No, I'm good
Okay, well
What that we're off to go record a mini-sode over at patreon.com slash you know, I pod hey head over head over
yo mama
Head over to ShilluminatiPod.fm for all the links you need. Buy live tickets while you can. They're gonna be sold out very very soon. Buy a shirt while you're there.
We'll see you next week. Goodbye. for one night enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside and after a few moments, I hear my wife go,
holy shit, get out of here.
So I quickly dash back outside.
She's looking up at the sky in awe.
I look up too, and there's a perfect line
of dozen lights traveling across the sky. So So Thanks for watching!