Late-modern revisions
Chaos magic
A postmodern current that treats belief as a technique, strips ritual systems for working methods and tests results without demanding one permanent cosmology.
- Dates
- emerging in Britain from 1976 – continuing
- Dating
- tradition or corpus
The life
Chaos magic emerged around Ray Sherwin, Peter J. Carroll and the circle that formed the Illuminates of Thanateros in the late 1970s. It drew on Spare's sigils, Thelemic magical training, science fiction and the do-it-yourself energy of zines and punk culture. Later writers and online communities made it far less organisationally bounded.
Place in the tradition
It made switching models into a method: a practitioner could use a spirit, a psychological complex or an information pattern without claiming that any one explanation was finally true.
a note on the record
History and later legend
Chaos magic has no single founder. Carroll and Sherwin were central to its first organisations and publications, while Spare was adopted as an ancestor later. The end mark closes its formative period, not the current itself.
the written record
Principal works
-
1978
The Book of Results
Ray Sherwin's early practical account of sigils and results-oriented magic.