kaos

naturally been leading. I felt it would “save” the Chaos current. I still believe that the
156 current is where it’s at. But it was pretty much ignored at the time, it was just a bit
too powerful for the iot and other chaos groups. Yet they have never even mentioned it
as being part of the Chaos current and that to me is a disgraceful failure on their part,
showing territorial ambitions rather than a dedication to the Great Work. They just
carried on doing the same old stupid stuff they had always been doing and are still
doing. They have made no progress. It is moribund fiddling around. I suspect it will
pretty much carry on like this, that’s why I regard it as a dead current. BUT, within that
dead current, that “nostalgia current”, is a doorway into kaos-babalon. But at the time
it was like we set off some kind of occult H-bomb and to be honest I still sense the
shock waves from it. But it exploded what was. It sent me in a different direction. It
changed a lot of things. There was a sense of disappointment, but that was only illusion,
if powerful illusion. When I met up again with Stephen and Louise a year later I agreed
with him that he was right, the Chaos current was dead.
I regard the 156 current as an essentially underground current of frontline occultism
and the true successor to what was the 93 current of Thelema (now another nostalgia
current) and also the Chaos current, both outmoded by kaos-babalon yet foreshadowed
in both. It was either an idea before its time, or something that is practised away from
the crowd. Maybe people practice something like it and don’t yet realise it is the 156
current and what its great significance is. Occult education seems generally quite poor
these days, people know very little about anything and lack even the most basic occult
experience. Though I guess that’s always been the same, only a few of the many who
pass through the occult make real progress. But I laid down everything about kaosbabalon
in KAOS 13. I didn’t kill the Chaos current, actually I saved it for the future.
Now that work is not easily available and my inclination is to let sleeping dogs lie. I’m
doing other stuff now, although I guess something drew me here [alt.magick newsgroup]
to tell you these things, to fill you in on “your chaos heritage”. Many “chaos magicians”
think the origins of the current don’t matter and think being ahistorical is cool and
iconoclastic, but it just means they are doomed to run on the spot, never swelling a
progress.
Magick is about progress. As Ellic Howe once said to me when I asked him about
his motivation for writing The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: “If you don’t know where
something has come from you know very little about it.” He was right.
I still don’t think people are ready for kaos-babalon. It will probably be resurrected
by some occult historian in 20 years time (perhaps sooner) and then maybe some practical
occultists will come across it and feel that shiver go up their spines, the dynamic tug of
a genuine current, and then it will spread like wildfire and initiate the true occult
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