Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 307: Chaos Magick Part 1 - Just Jerk It

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

The 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)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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.
Starting point is 00:00:44 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
Starting point is 00:01:21 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.
Starting point is 00:01:50 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
Starting point is 00:02:07 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
Starting point is 00:02:38 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.
Starting point is 00:03:06 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?
Starting point is 00:03:31 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
Starting point is 00:03:42 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.
Starting point is 00:04:01 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
Starting point is 00:04:34 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.
Starting point is 00:04:57 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
Starting point is 00:05:42 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.
Starting point is 00:06:02 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.
Starting point is 00:06:24 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,
Starting point is 00:07:05 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
Starting point is 00:07:34 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.
Starting point is 00:08:01 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.
Starting point is 00:08:25 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
Starting point is 00:09:25 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
Starting point is 00:10:09 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.
Starting point is 00:10:48 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
Starting point is 00:11:23 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.
Starting point is 00:11:42 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,
Starting point is 00:11:57 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.
Starting point is 00:12:13 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,
Starting point is 00:12:29 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
Starting point is 00:13:21 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.
Starting point is 00:13:58 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.
Starting point is 00:14:37 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,
Starting point is 00:15:05 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.
Starting point is 00:15:20 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
Starting point is 00:15:58 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,
Starting point is 00:16:40 100, 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.
Starting point is 00:17:04 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,
Starting point is 00:17:24 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.
Starting point is 00:17:44 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
Starting point is 00:18:19 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
Starting point is 00:19:04 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
Starting point is 00:19:30 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.
Starting point is 00:19:56 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
Starting point is 00:20:16 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?
Starting point is 00:20:48 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 Listen, I don't know about you but after a late night deep dive into government files and ufo subreddits
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Starting point is 00:23:47 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.
Starting point is 00:23:57 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,
Starting point is 00:24:15 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.
Starting point is 00:24:46 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.
Starting point is 00:25:04 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,
Starting point is 00:25:31 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.
Starting point is 00:25:51 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.
Starting point is 00:26:19 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.
Starting point is 00:26:46 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,
Starting point is 00:27:09 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.
Starting point is 00:27:26 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.
Starting point is 00:27:41 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.
Starting point is 00:27:53 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
Starting point is 00:28:21 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.
Starting point is 00:29:02 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.
Starting point is 00:29:33 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
Starting point is 00:29:57 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.
Starting point is 00:30:29 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,
Starting point is 00:31:07 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.
Starting point is 00:31:24 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.
Starting point is 00:31:53 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
Starting point is 00:32:16 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.
Starting point is 00:32:56 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.
Starting point is 00:33:20 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.
Starting point is 00:33:36 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,
Starting point is 00:34:22 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.
Starting point is 00:34:49 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.
Starting point is 00:35:26 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.
Starting point is 00:35:49 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. Thank you so much to Zoc Doc for sponsoring today's episode.
Starting point is 00:36:05 And hey, Chaluminauts, real talk, listen to me real quick. Remember that doctor's appointment you swore you'd book like four conspiracy rabbit holes ago? You know, the one, the dentist visit, that biannual cleaning that's now on your, the annual physical you've postponed so many times, it should be called tri-annual. And you know, my personal favorite,
Starting point is 00:36:20 the dermatologist checkup, that mystery rash you keep pretending is a birthmark. I know it's not a birthmark, Jesse. Why not book it today? ZocDoc makes it easy to find the right doctor right now all online. Honestly, you could lock in a slot before this ad read is even over. Lately, my feed's been drowning in wellness checks on my social media, by the way, like wellness hacks rather. She's like all wellness checks, wellness hacks. Apparently, cottage cheese is a complete nutrition plan. Let me give you a couple other things red light therapy cures every skin problem in the world and people are chasing olive oil shots Like it's like some sort of dawn of a new craft cocktail. So let's give the freaking AI
Starting point is 00:36:58 Algorithm a break for a minute and how about you talk to like real-life health care professionals instead? I know crazy idea crazy idea with Zoc Doc. That's as simple as a few clicks though. And look, I'm not getting younger either. These days I'm wrestling with insomnia like always. And sometimes I wake up and my shoulder hurts for no reason or my back's twitching from punching over my research notes of aliens and which taco bowl to get at my favorite restaurant. So, you know, it's just finding the right doctor can feel difficult, but it's easy with ZocDoc.
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Starting point is 00:37:43 You can filter for doctors who take your insurance, are located nearby, are a good fit for any medical need you may have and are highly rated by verified patients. And once you find the right doctor, you can see their actual appointment openings. Choose a time slot that works for you and click to instantly book a visit. Appointments made through ZocDoc also happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking. More often than not,
Starting point is 00:38:05 you can even get same day appointments. I use ZocDoc. Truly I use ZocDoc. I promise I've been using it for a long time because I hate talking to people and you should too. So stop putting off the doctor's appointments and go to ZocDoc.com slash chill to find an instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's Z O C D O C dot com slash chill. Zococdoc.com slash chill. Zocdoc.com slash chill. 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
Starting point is 00:38:43 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.
Starting point is 00:39:47 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.
Starting point is 00:40:09 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
Starting point is 00:40:55 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
Starting point is 00:41:34 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.
Starting point is 00:42:16 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
Starting point is 00:42:52 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
Starting point is 00:43:11 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
Starting point is 00:43:43 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.
Starting point is 00:44:23 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
Starting point is 00:44:53 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
Starting point is 00:45:20 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
Starting point is 00:45:53 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.
Starting point is 00:46:17 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
Starting point is 00:46:48 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?
Starting point is 00:47:25 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,
Starting point is 00:47:46 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,
Starting point is 00:48:04 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.
Starting point is 00:48:19 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.
Starting point is 00:48:44 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
Starting point is 00:49:07 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,
Starting point is 00:49:28 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
Starting point is 00:49:53 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.
Starting point is 00:50:25 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.
Starting point is 00:50:50 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.
Starting point is 00:51:29 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.
Starting point is 00:51:57 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,
Starting point is 00:52:19 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
Starting point is 00:52:48 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?
Starting point is 00:53:01 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.
Starting point is 00:53:20 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.
Starting point is 00:53:57 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
Starting point is 00:54:33 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.
Starting point is 00:54:50 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.
Starting point is 00:55:07 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.
Starting point is 00:55:32 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.
Starting point is 00:55:54 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
Starting point is 00:56:27 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.
Starting point is 00:56:46 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
Starting point is 00:57:07 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,
Starting point is 00:57:25 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,
Starting point is 00:57:43 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
Starting point is 00:58:16 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.
Starting point is 00:58:42 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.
Starting point is 00:59:14 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 point is 00:59:53 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
Starting point is 01:00:28 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.
Starting point is 01:01:00 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.
Starting point is 01:01:27 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
Starting point is 01:01:55 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
Starting point is 01:02:31 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
Starting point is 01:02:54 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.
Starting point is 01:03:13 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
Starting point is 01:03:38 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
Starting point is 01:04:14 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.
Starting point is 01:04:44 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.
Starting point is 01:05:03 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
Starting point is 01:05:29 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.
Starting point is 01:05:59 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.
Starting point is 01:06:49 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.
Starting point is 01:07:19 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.
Starting point is 01:07:46 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.
Starting point is 01:08:07 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
Starting point is 01:08:34 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
Starting point is 01:08:53 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
Starting point is 01:09:21 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
Starting point is 01:09:55 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
Starting point is 01:10:32 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!

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