I’ve often seen people draw a distinction between ritual magick and Chaos Magick that positions them as dualistic opposites. Upon reflection, this strikes me as a counterproductive product of unclear thinking. It seems to me that the resulting mental map narrows thinking about magick in a way that holds magicians back. This entry therefore aims to provide some food for thought re: how we think and talk about these concepts.

Introduction

Of course the Internet is full of stupid arguments about all manner of topics, and magick is no exception. The simplification of complexities into memeable sound-bytes causes the same kinds of problems here as elsewhere. So contra that tendency, what this entry aims to do re: ritual magick vs. Chaos Magick is to:

• Clarify what we actually mean when we speak of each of these concepts.
• Observe that, once definitions are clarified, many lazy generalized contrasts between ritual and Chaos magick cease to seem justifiable.

I do think that some stereotypes of practitioners of ritual magick vs. Chaos Magick are not entirely without a basis in reality. It is, however, ignorant for ritual magicians to assume that all Chaos Magicians are “like that” – and also vice versa.

There’s also a fundamental misconception that such clashes propagate: that ritual and Chaos are mutually-exclusive categories. This has long irritated me, as it aggravates confusion regarding how I understand and label myself as a magician. The contents of this post thus have a bearing on what being a Tenebrous witch or sorcerer means to me.

Stylistic note: there is a reason why I intentionally capitalize “Chaos Magick” and not “ritual magick”. I’ll explain below.

Defining ritual magick and Chaos Magick

Ritual magick

Ritual magick is a style of magick traceable through Neoplatonic theurgy, medieval grimoires, Renaissance Hermeticism, and so on. Traditionally it entails the following sorts of presuppositions:

1. Magick is efficacious within a specific context (the sacred) that is separated from mundane day-to-day life (the profane). Ritual is the method by which  this distinction is established. Practices such as purifying oneself beforehand, casting a circle, etc., are all aimed at establishing that the magician has indeed shifted from the normal “profane” state to the efficacious “sacred” one.
2. Correspondences are an important part of what makes magick work. i.e., rituals must be performed using the right words, at the right time, with the right accompanying materials and gestures. At least some of this has an objective component to it. Meaning, it may be passed down in books, or from master to student, or learned via divination. But you cannot just “make up whatever” and expect the same results as those who engage with the system.
3. Communing with spiritual entities external to oneself is a large part of the point of traditional ritual magick. Specific applications can of course vary, from the vulgar pursuit of wealth to elevated goals of self-insight. Regardless, an implicit premise of such practices seems to be that contact with angels/demons/etc. is a worthy pursuit in and of itself.

“Ceremonial magick” has often been used as a synonym for the kind of practices I am describing here.

Negative assumptions surrounding ritual magicians

From the above points stem three negative assumptions I’ve often seen folks harbor about ritual magicians:

1. Ritual magicians’ “need” for ritual implies a degree of alienation from magickal forces. One might contrast this with witches/shamans/psychics/ etc. who are “naturally receptive”. Pedantic elitism of ritual magicians is plausibly interpreted as a compensatory manifestation of insecurity re: this issue. One might compare it to, in the Dungeons and Dragons setting, a learned wizard resenting the existence of sorcerers with a natural talent for magick.
2. They are fussy / stuffy / anal retentive / etc., hung up on conforming to a “correct” way of connecting with the powers they work with. It’s not unusual for this to in turn lead to gate-keepy behavior, e.g., talking as if other magicians can’t possibly be good at magick because “you’re not initiated” or “you haven’t read this pretentious book” or “you haven’t obtained this rare ingredient and treated it in the proper way,” etc.
3. Ritual magicians are theists, or at minimum, believe that something outside of themselves is involved in magick. This tends to aggravate a certain kind of modern atheistic magician, because “eww, religion.”

Chaos Magick

Chaos Magick is a specific esoteric current that emerges in post-Aleister-Crowley modernity. While associated with such names as Spare, Grant, Carroll, Hine, etc., I increasingly meet Chaos Magicians who have read none of these authors yet intuitively operate by the identifying principles. Such principles being:

1. Magick is efficacious so long as the magician is in a state of gnosis. (note: this is what Tenebrous Satanism refers to as naos.) Gnosis is achievable via various means, e.g., single-pointed focus on drawing a sigil, physical or emotional exertion, entheogen usage, etc. Typically though, Chaos Magicians have methods of achieving gnosis that are much more informal than a traditional ritual.
2. Will, including such dimensions as clarity of intent and self-honesty, is far more important than correspondences. The Chaos Magician therefore can “make up whatever,” and get valid magickal results so long as their investment is total. One hears of Chaos Magicians incorporating technology into workings rather than insisting on “natural” ingredients, for example. Chaos Magick also tends to draw more openly and unapologetically upon popular culture (e.g. science fiction or fantasy franchises) than other currents of magick do.
3. Will is first and foremost a dimension of one’s personal power. This positions Chaos Magick as inherently leaning toward the left-hand path. At the same time though, Chaos Magick centrally revolves around doing magick that works. Sure, some Chaos Magicians will use magick for self-insight and personal evolution. But others will use it for finding money and parking spaces – and there is nothing built into the path that says you can’t just do that. Chaos Magick thus tends to frame the workings of magick in a LHP-friendly way, without necessarily taking on board the full self-deification goals associated with, say, Satanism or Luciferianism.

Negative assumptions surrounding Chaos Magicians

As above with ritual magick, here are some negative assumptions that readily flow from each of the principles just-enumerated:

1. Chaos Magicians are quick to assume that “elaborate ritual” automatically means “that magician is a pretentious wanker.” “You don’t need all that: I just threw together this garbage and it still worked!” -style bragging often accompanies this. Relatedly, the more “punk” or “minimalist” the Chaos Magician is in their self-styling, the more likely it is that, if you just happen to like having a strong material-aesthetic component to your magick, they will not only dismiss you as a “fashion witch” but probably also preach against capitalism in your presence.
2. Chaos Magicians are allergic to people who are “too serious about magick” and “must take them down a notch.” They therefore can’t interact more traditional practitioners without a certain level of passive-aggressive low-key disrespect. They will present this as “just” talking about their own practice, but it will sound an awful lot as though they think they are “better” than others on account of grasping some “big picture” view of magick that others presumably lack – with a healthy topping of snark added liberally on top. They bristle defensively in anticipation of others not being open-minded about their path, yet themselves seem rather closed-minded toward anything “traditional.”
3. They come across as the hipsters of the esoteric world. That is, they are not ignorant of tradition, but must maintain ironic distance from it at all times. Often this comes with an undertone of “heaven forbid ever I let myself be taken in by something and be made a fool of – I’d be like all those silly religious people, oh noes!” A cutesy enthusiasm for using magick for trivial things masks a complacent cynicism opposed to the thought of transcendent forces that magick might be just the surface manifestation of.

Unproductive conflict between ritual magick and Chaos Magick

On the basis of having some acquaintance with things I’ve described above, many Internet occultists seem to go around with the following mental map of how ritual magick and Chaos Magick contrast with one another:

1. Ritual magick means you do formal rituals, vs. Chaos Magick means that you approach magick much more informally.
2. Ritual magicians are more detail-oriented and judgemental, vs. Chaos Magicians are more laid-back and free-form.
3. Insofar as ritual magick entails communing with entities outside of yourself, ritual magick seems more right-hand-path-ish, vs. insofar as Chaos Magick reduces entities to psychological archetypes / focuses just on the magician’s will instead of entities / etc., Chaos Magick seems more left-hand-path-ish.

Now, while I don’t want to collapse magick and politics into one another, a political lens reveals something interesting here. At a glance, ritual magick appears to be aligned with stereotypically-right-wing values, such as discipline, hierarchy and tradition. Chaos Magick seems “liberal” or “progressive” in contrast, rejecting all of these things. One perhaps sees then what is really being said when someone opines that ritual magick is “outdated,” vs. Chaos Magick is “cutting edge.” Perhaps they should just say what they actually mean: that ritual magick is “bad” and Chaos Magick is “good.”

Regardless, the problem here is that ritual magick and Chaos Magick are not actually two opposed streams of magickal practice. And insofar as that’s so, none of the contrasts I alluded to are all that useful upon deeper examination.

Clarifying the distinction between ritual magick and Chaos Magick

It’s here that I’ll explain why I capitalize “Chaos Magick” but not “ritual magick”:

Ritual magick is a technique found in a variety of different esoteric contexts. For example, Kabbalistic theurgy, Goetia and LaVeyan Satanism all have their own forms of ritual magick. One doesn’t typically capitalize forms of practice such as “divination” or “meditation”. Therefore, “ritual magick” isn’t capitalized either.

Chaos Magick, by contrast, is an esoteric current, just as one could say that the Golden Dawn or the Order of Nine Angles (ONA/O9A) are esoteric currents. The term “esoteric current” suggests a collection of ideas and discourses that outline an aesthetically-cohesive ethos of magickal praxis. Such collections are associated with religions/ideologies/movements whose names we capitalize. Hence, “Chaos Magick” is also capitalized. It identifies something distinct and cohesive that people can “belong to” in a way that “ritual magick” does not.

It’s here that some will pipe up: “But doesn’t the Chaos in Chaos Magick mean that they don’t really believe in anything, or that they worship Chaos, or something like that?”

I cannot emphasize strongly enough in answer: no, it does not mean that. 

It means, rather, that Chaos Magicians choose not to align themselves with a singular worldview. It’s not that they believe in only one thing (Chaos) or in nothing, but rather, that they believe in many things alternatingly / simultaneously. A skilled Chaos Magician trains themselves to shift at will between, say, a scientific frame, a shamanistic frame, a fantasy-fiction frame, a religious frame, etc. Looking at magick from all such angles, they derive general principles that enable them to construct their own “unified field theory” of “how magick works”. They then experiment with practices from various traditions, keep what works for them and discard what doesn’t.

Implications of the distinction between ritual magick and Chaos Magick

We thus arrive at a key insight: absolutely nothing forbids a Chaos Magician from being a ritual magician! I myself am an example of this. Yes, my primary investment is in the worldview of Tenebrous Satanism. But I am quite capable of the kind of shifting I just described, and my approach to magick has always been eclectic along such lines.

Here’s then how I bridge the ritual vs. Chaos contrasts I outlined above:

Against “formal vs. informal”

Some people can enter gnosis at the snap of a finger, but I cannot. I also think there’s much to be said sanity-wise for a solid dividing line between the mundane and magickal. Accordingly, ritual magick has always felt more efficacious to me than other kinds of magick. The departure-initiation-return structure inherent in it triggers a suspension of disbelief that more informal kinds of magick cannot. (again, speaking for myself)

Attendant generalization: while ritual magick is generally more formal than many things Chaos Magicians do, Chaos Magick does not exclude ritual. 

Ritual magicians shouldn’t assume that Chaos Magick is just masturbating over sigils – i.e. maybe meet more Chaos Magicians and find out what they actually practice instead of assuming.

And Chaos Magicians shouldn’t limit the tools in their magickal toolbox by seeing ritual as something antithetical to Chaos Magick. My own experience has been that it is the most effective form of magick – and I suspect others might find likewise if they would quit bitching about the kind of people they think practice it and actually just try it themselves.

Against “fussy vs. free-form”

I have no use for the stereotypical pretentious gatekeeping that many associate with traditional esotericism. Neither fixating on “how it must be done” nor equating iniatiatory status with magickal skill strike me as productive. The thing is though, I meet plenty of ritual practitioners who agree with me! It’s perfectly possible to do ritual and take it seriously without being the kind of pedantic nitpicker who quarrels with other peoples’ practices. And I’ve crossed paths with Goetic practitioners in particular who are not so different from Chaos Magicians in their willingness to “update” old rites – ceasing to boss demons around via the name of Jesus being an obvious example.

On the other side of things, I do think discipline is very important to occult success. This includes things like keeping a journal for introspective purposes, tracking magickal success, etc. The thing is though, every serious Chaos Magician I have met is also like this! Nothing about invoking fictional entities and informal magickal practices entails an automatic lack of rigor or reflection. If anything, many Chaos Magicians strike me as more disciplined in this regard than people I have met from other paths.

Attendant generalization: “ritual magicians are anal” and “Chaos Magicians are sloppy” are both stereotypes. Are those people out there? Sure. But maybe don’t assume the worst of other practitioners before getting to know how that individual actually practices. As per one of my older entries, “if you haven’t actually read the book, you shouldn’t have such a strong opinion on it.”

Against “religious vs. secular”

While Chaos Magicians may commonly frame magickal forces as internal rather than external, I don’t think this defines the path. Rather, what defines it is flexibility – i.e., ideally, a Chaos Magician should be capable of conceiving of forces they are working with according to multiple models, internal and external. Personally, my favored mode is theistic, because I find I get better magickal results that way. But my maintaining the ability to shift frameworks (e.g. could one view the Nekalah as archetypes instead of Dark Gods?) is what makes me a Chaos Magician regardless.

But now, why might a person find that theism – i.e., belief in acausal entities – is more magickally efficacious? I think a large part of this comes down to human psychology. Like it or not, the idea of tapping into something ancient and external is more compelling to many than “I just made up a thing.” And insofar as that’s so, one may surmise that the more consistently one acts as if one’s gods are real, the better the results one will get. A Chaos Magician who realizes this may wind up adopting magickal practices that deviate widely from “typical” Chaos Magick practices. Choosing to commune with entities via a ritual protocol familiar to them to ease communication, for example.

Attendant generalization: while ritual magick has a stronger traditional association with theism, nothing says Chaos Magicians can’t be theists. Probably they will be less consistently theistic than a traditional theist would be. And I’d agree without hesitation that this is rarer than Chaos Magicians being non-theists of some kind. But still.

Likewise, sure, ritual magick probably leans a little more RHP and Chaos Magick a little more LHP. But one should beware of assuming that theism is inherently RHP – see this entry for detailed discussion on that issue.

Concluding thoughts

While I first and foremost consider myself a Tenebrous sorcerer, this never meant that I stopped being a Chaos Magician. Even prior to “becoming Othaos,” though, ritual magick was always a huge part of my practice as a Chaos Magician. It’s possible to make sense of this by realizing that I do not do ritual because of any external obligation – e.g., to gods, tradition, etc. I do it because I find it’s the magickal technique that works best, for me. As Chaos Magicians do.

This being my experience, I strongly feel that Chaos Magicians and ritual magicians should not feel threatened by one another. If an individual ritual magician is an irritating by-the-book stickler, then don’t deal with that person. Likewise, if an individual Chaos Magician is an abrasive, smarter-than-thou cynic, I’d prefer they get lost. But we gain nothing by negatively writing off a whole category of fellow magicians. All it does is take useful tools off the table for oneself. Why not instead aim for less interpersonal bullshit and more actual engagement with magickal theory and praxis?

Thoughts? Let me know in the comments.