Reality and Chaos Magick
2025-11-08
Yesterday, I watched the video below and felt a strong sense of narratives that I've been telling myself and letting internet culture tell me for the past decade come back in full force, so I now feel compelled to speak on it and catalog this experience not only for myself, but for any readers out there who experience or have experienced a certain degree of thought manipulation over the course of their formative years.
To briefly summarize the video, the author essentially explains the origins and practices of chaos magick, which is a school of magick founded by students in Aleister Crowley's lineage. Crowley was an influential magician in the late 19th and early 20th century. If you know the phrase 'abra cadabra,' yeah, that's him. Anyways, chaos magick is essentially a deconstruction of occult practices. In ancient times, occult practices were constrained by specific rites and ceremonies and as such, there was a significant level of perceived gatekeeping.
Chaos magick was a method of lowering the barrier to entry for magic in general. Instead of having to perform specific rituals under specific rules, an aspiring chaos magician can perform whatever rituals they please under any circumstances they please. This became a popular method of occultist practice because of the more broad deconstructionist philosophical movement that took off in the back half of the 20th century. Once occultists figured out that belief was fluid and not static, symbols and aesthetics became the principal means to assert and perpetuate whatever perceived narratives or "energies" they wished to promulgate into collective consciousness.
In the video, the author states that this practice is akin to "reality hacking" because they perceive beliefs as the backbone to reality itself and so if beliefs can be changed, then so can reality, right?
This was something that enthralled me as a younger man, especially after indulging in psychedelic substances and browsing the mongolian basket weaving forums, but as I've matured and had life kick my ass more times than I care to count, I've come to understand that belief and reality are not as deeply intertwined as the chaos magicians would like to believe.
I do believe that there is a connection between our thoughts and our reality, but I don't believe that the abstractly constructed "self" is the progenitor of any kind of base reality. Unfortunately, our minds are too limited to understand the forces responsible for our sensory input. We've tried dissecting ordinary matter to its most fundamental parts and have been met with even more uncertainty than what's outside of an electron microscope; it seems as if the more we peer into the world, the less we find. If atomic theory holds, then what we find is that most of space is, well, empty. The world itself isn't something that has any truly certain substance to it, at least not one that we can constrain into a certain system.
However, I do respect chaos magicians for attempting to map out that empty space and give it substance; it's a deeply human thing, the act of creation. But I will not prescribe reality to anything because truthfully, that's none of my business. My business exists in things that I perceive, know, and can communicate in a meaningful and lucid way. True magic comes from being able to incite action into others—this is why I write.
If I were to cast any spell onto you right now, it would be this:
Do something kind for someone today. Even if the act is small, these kind of things reverberate and resonate into places you wouldn't even know were there.