kaos

Yes, that’s true about compressing workings. But it’s also about understanding what
you are actually doing when you ritualize rather than simply using elements just because
they’ve been used before. I have done lbrp just once in my life, I immediately realised
that it was not at all necessary (for me), yet someone like the late Gerald Suster considered
that if you didn’t do the lbrp practically every day you were no occultist. Many
Thelemites living in the past believe the same. Such that for them it becomes the
equivalent of occult aerobics with no meaning or purpose, just a slavish devotion to
technique without understanding.
When Austin Spare ridiculed ritual and ceremonial magicians in The Book of Pleasure
it was this kind of falsity and “dressing up” but not knowing why that he was actually
seeking to discard. To someone who knows what they are doing a simple mudra or
movement of the hand or posture will accomplish what a beginner might seek to achieve
(but may not actually achieve) by following a ridiculous Watchtower ritual stepwise
like a recipe from an Israel Regardie book. The essence of true magick is confident
extemporisation and the ability to scale spontaneity in “dynamic moves”. This comes
not only from years of practice but also from understanding of the forces one is dealing
with—it is not simply compression of a working but transcendence of its merely
mechanistic aspects.
Many ceremonial magicians have a habit of ceremony they cannot see beyond and as
a result their workings are depleted of actual magick. To me, chaos magick was about
going beyond this, but as you realise there are few who associate themselves with chaos
magick who understand anything of its deeper principles. Most “chaos magicians” latched
onto chaos magick as a way to avoid training and hierarchy, but ended up in a nonprogressive
state because they hadn’t realised that chaos magick is actually an advance
on traditional magick, not simply another choice of system, but for it to be an advance
practically it actually demands far more of you than traditional magick. That was the
error they made and they show little sign of being able to recover from it.
I spent a good deal of time in the 80s pointing this out to them here in KAOS, and
do so again now because the resurgence of the true Chaos current onto the Outer again
is imminent after 12 years of apparently being in the doldrums. Chaos magick has
always attracted more than its fair share of complete no-hopers, and I have likened this
to a kind of disguise and necessary façade, the attracting beacon of the massing crowd
through which those more serious about their occult work may weave their way to the
centre and discover there some totally unexpected real occultists. There are people who
understand the principles of magick as I expound them, but they will always be the few.
JOEL
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