A short history of chaos magic

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Chaos magic did not appear from nowhere in 1978. Its founders were people. They built their new approach from pieces they found in older books. Those pieces were an eccentric London artist’s theory of belief, an Edwardian magician’s call for scientific method, a joke religion from California, a novelist’s tools for breaking habits of thought, and a London writer’s essay on magic as a way of thinking. This page introduces each of these roots in turn. None of these people called themselves chaos magicians. All of them shaped what chaos magic became.

What the founders were reacting against

Historical It helps to know what chaos magic was pushing away from. In the 1970s, most serious Western magic in Britain descended from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, and from Crowley’s adaptations of it. That tradition offered a vast system: Hebrew letters and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, planetary and elemental correspondences, graded initiations, robes, and long memorized rituals. A student might spend years learning tables of correspondences before being considered ready for serious work. Groups were often secretive and hierarchical, with authority flowing from higher grades to lower.

Movement tradition The founders of chaos magic respected some of this tradition and used parts of it. But they disliked its heaviness, its claim that one symbolic system mapped the universe, and the way grades could turn into power over other people. They wanted a magic that a person could begin on a Tuesday afternoon with a pen. The roots in this page gave them the pieces to build one.

Austin Osman Spare: Zos Kia, belief, and sigils

Historical Austin Osman Spare (1886 to 1956) was a London artist, born the son of a policeman, who showed early promise as a draftsman and exhibited at the Royal Academy while still a teenager. He was briefly a member of Aleister Crowley’s magical order, the A∴A∴, from 1907, but the two men drifted apart, and Spare spent most of his life working alone, increasingly poor and out of fashion, in south London.

Historical In 1913 Spare published, at his own expense, The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy. It sold poorly. Decades later it became one of the most influential books in modern magic.

Three of Spare’s ideas matter most for chaos magic.

Aleister Crowley and scientific illuminism

Aleister Crowley (1875 to 1947) is the most famous and most controversial occultist of the twentieth century. Chaos magic owes him less than it owes Spare, but it owes him one important idea.

Historical In 1909 Crowley launched a large twice-yearly journal called The Equinox, subtitled “The Review of Scientific Illuminism.” Its motto was “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion.” Crowley meant that the experiences religions promise, such as union with the divine or illumination, could be pursued with the methods of science: careful record-keeping, repeatable procedures, skepticism about claims, and testing against results.

Discordianism and the Principia Discordia

If Spare gave chaos magic its techniques and Crowley gave it its experimental attitude, Discordianism gave it its sense of humor.

Movement tradition Discordianism began as a joke between two young Californians, Greg Hill (1941 to 2000) and Kerry Thornley (1938 to 1998). According to the movement’s own account, the two had a shared vision around 1958 or 1959 in a bowling alley in Whittier, California, in which the Greek goddess of discord, Eris, revealed herself. Whether the vision was real, a prank, or both is exactly the kind of question Discordians enjoy leaving open.

Robert Anton Wilson and reality tunnels

Historical Robert Anton Wilson (1932 to 2007) carried Discordianism to a mass audience. With Robert Shea, he wrote the Illuminatus! trilogy, a sprawling comic conspiracy novel whose first volume appeared in 1975. Discordian ideas, invented secret societies, and the nonsense word “fnord,” which Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley coined in the Principia Discordia in the mid-1960s, run through it.

Historical Wilson’s nonfiction was even more important for chaos magic. In books such as Prometheus Rising (1983), he developed the idea of the reality tunnel. Each of us experiences the world through a filter shaped by our biology, upbringing, language, and beliefs, and we tend to mistake our own tunnel for reality itself. The phrase is associated with the psychologist Timothy Leary and was popularized by Wilson; who used it first is not fully settled. Wilson encouraged people to try on other reality tunnels deliberately, for example by spending a week acting as if a belief they found absurd were true, and noticing what changed.

William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and the cut-up

Historical The American writer William S. Burroughs (1914 to 1997) and his friend, the painter and poet Brion Gysin (1916 to 1986), are best known in occult circles for the cut-up technique. Around 1959, in a cheap Paris hotel later nicknamed the Beat Hotel, Gysin rediscovered an old avant-garde trick: cutting printed texts into pieces and rearranging them at random to make new sentences. Burroughs took it up with enthusiasm.

Britain in the 1970s

Historical The British occult scene of the 1970s was small, lively, and mostly invisible to the wider world. The counterculture of the 1960s had brought renewed interest in magic, witchcraft, astrology, and Eastern religion. Crowley’s books were back in print. Spare had been rediscovered, largely through Kenneth Grant’s writings. Small presses printed pamphlets and booklets in runs of a few hundred copies, sold through a handful of specialist bookshops and by mail order.

Historical One of these small publications was a magazine called The New Equinox, its title a deliberate nod to Crowley’s journal. Founded by Carroll and Sherwin and edited by Sherwin from East Morton in Yorkshire, it ran under his editorship from 1976 to 1979; James Lees later took it over as publisher, with issues until 1982. It was in its pages, between 1976 and 1978, that the first announcements of a new kind of magical order appeared. Ray Sherwin’s small Morton Press, based in the village of East Morton in West Yorkshire, published his own The Book of Results in 1978.

Peter J. Carroll and Liber Null (1978)

Historical Peter James Carroll was born in 1953. He had a scientific education, and his interest in physics, mathematics, and cosmology shaped his magic for the rest of his life.

Historical In 1978 Carroll published Liber Null, a short, dense manual, first in a small white-covered edition and then in a red-covered edition of around 400 copies, according to his own later account. The book set out a program of training: exercises in concentration and stillness, techniques for reaching gnosis, methods for sigils, divination, evocation, and invocation, and ideas about belief, laughter, and the magical diary. Its tone was austere and demanding. It was also short, cheap, and free of the elaborate correspondences that filled older manuals.

Historical In the early 1980s Carroll wrote Psychonaut, a companion text with a more philosophical, shamanic emphasis. In 1987 the American publisher Samuel Weiser issued the two together as Liber Null and Psychonaut, the edition most people know. Scholars have begun to compare the early printings with the later combined edition; one such study, by Meletiadis, appeared in the journal Aries in 2023, though this page has not been able to consult it directly.

Ray Sherwin and The Book of Results (1978)

Historical Ray Sherwin is the less famous of the two founders, but his role was central. His The Book of Results, published in 1978 by his own Morton Press, is a short book on sigil magic that drew directly on Spare. Its title announced the movement’s emphasis: magic should be judged by what it does, not by how impressive it looks. He followed it with The Theatre of Magick in 1982.

Historical Sherwin’s essays show a writer deeply suspicious of authority. He wrote that both he and Carroll held guruship and hierarchy as anathema, and that they felt uneasy when they found themselves expected not only to teach but to lead.

The Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) and the Pact

Historical The best-known chaos magic order is the Illuminates of Thanateros, usually shortened to IOT. Its formal name is the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros. “Thanateros” joins Thanatos, the Greek personification of death, and Eros, the god of love and desire.

Movement tradition In the order’s own explanation, sex and death stand for the two opposite routes to magical consciousness.

When was the IOT founded? It depends on what you mean by founded, and the sources disagree.

Legend The movement’s own story. Carroll later told a vivid founding story set in an abandoned ammunition store in the Rhineland in 1976. The anthropologist Jason Woodman, in his 2003 doctoral study based on fieldwork among British chaos magicians, describes this version as “seemingly mythologised.”

Historical The announcements. What we can document is that Carroll and Sherwin announced a new order in The New Equinox between 1976 and 1978. Sherwin later wrote that the IOT was an order that he and Pete Carroll “initiated in 1978.” Another early account places its formation in south London in 1978.

The “Ice Magick” split of the 1990s

Historical In the early 1990s the IOT went through a serious internal conflict, sometimes called the Ice Magick war. It concerned the direction and teachings of the order, and it ended with a substantial group of members, largely from German-speaking countries, leaving. The details are disputed, the published accounts are thin, and several of the people involved are living. This page records only that the schism happened and that it divided the order.

Phil Hine and Condensed Chaos

Historical If Carroll gave chaos magic its founding text, the British writer Phil Hine gave it its most approachable one. Hine was active in the British occult scene from the mid-1980s, and his most influential period ran roughly from 1986 to 1996.

Historical His early publications were booklets and pamphlets, including Walking Between the Worlds (Pagan News Publications, 1986) and Chaos Servitors: A User Guide (Chaos International, 1991). Condensed Chaos first appeared as a pamphlet in 1992 and was expanded into a book published by New Falcon in 1995; a revised edition followed from Original Falcon in 2009 or 2010. Prime Chaos appeared in 1993 and was later reissued by New Falcon. The Pseudonomicon, on working with the fictional mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, first circulated in the 1990s and was published by New Falcon in 2004. Hine has continued to write, including Hine’s Varieties (2019).

Frater U∴D∴, Jan Fries, and the German scene

Chaos magic took root quickly in German-speaking Europe, where it met an older tradition of magical publishing and a lively alternative culture.

Historical Ralph Tegtmeier, born in 1952, writes on magic under the name Frater U∴D∴. His book on sigils, published in German in the 1980s and in English in 1990, became one of the standard texts on the subject. In a 1991 essay, “Models of Magic,” he set out a way of classifying theories of how magic works: the spirit model, the energy model, the psychological model, the information model, and a meta-model for choosing among them.

Grant Morrison, comics, and pop magic

Historical The Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison did more than anyone else to carry chaos magic into popular culture. Morrison, who uses they/them pronouns, wrote openly about practicing magic and wove chaos ideas into comics for a wide audience.

Historical Their series The Invisibles, published in the 1990s, follows a cell of anarchist magicians fighting a hidden conspiracy. Morrison has described the series as a hypersigil, a long work of art made and sustained as a single extended act of magic, and has said that events in their own life echoed events in the story. In a talk at a 1999 conference organized by the publisher Disinformation, and in an essay called “Pop Magic!”, Morrison presented chaos magic as cheap, playful, and open to anyone. The essay appeared in the anthology Book of Lies, edited by Richard Metzger and published in 2003. It is short, energetic, and full of practical encouragement. It also argued that advertising logos work like sigils, which helped spread the idea that magic is everywhere in modern media.

The internet age: forums, podcasts, and “post-chaos”

Historical From the mid-1990s, chaos magic moved online. Mailing lists, newsgroups, websites, and later forums allowed practitioners to share techniques, publish essays, and argue across continents. Older texts, some of them reproduced without permission, circulated widely. The movement’s emphasis on experiment and open-source methods suited the internet well: a sigil method or a servitor design could be posted, tried, and discussed within days.

Historical By the 2000s, some writers felt that chaos magic had become too comfortable. Alan Chapman’s Advanced Magick for Beginners (2008) praised chaos magic for clearing away dogma but criticized what he saw as its neglect of deeper, initiatory and mystical goals. The loose label “post-chaos magic” is sometimes used for this period, in which many practitioners kept chaos magic’s experimental tools but returned to older traditions, spirits, and ancestral or animist frameworks with a new seriousness.

When it goes wrong: meme magic and extremist borrowing

Any set of tools can be picked up by anyone. Chaos magic’s tools have been.

Historical During the 2016 United States presidential election, some anonymous online communities associated with the far right began talking about “meme magic”: the idea that spreading images and slogans with enough collective focus could influence real events. They built a joking, half-serious mythology around a cartoon frog and an ancient Egyptian deity whose name happened to match a slang word they used. Some participants borrowed chaos magic vocabulary, including sigils and egregores, the idea of a group thought-form. In early 2017, after the inauguration, some practitioners on the opposite side organized public mass “binding spells” against the new president, beginning on February 24, 2017.

Historical The scholar of religion Egil Asprem studied this episode in a 2020 article in the journal Nova Religio, titled “The Magical Theory of Politics.” He describes an emerging online esoteric culture on the alt-right and analyzes it in terms of collective emotion and networks of shared feeling, rather than as evidence that magic changed an election. That is the right way to read it. Large numbers of people repeating images together can create a powerful sense of shared purpose, and that sense can shape behavior. It does not show that the images themselves changed events.

What this history means for you

Chaos magic grew out of a small, argumentative British scene and spread through books, comics and the internet. Knowing where its ideas came from helps you tell its useful tools apart from its risky habits. Before you try any of it, please read my chaos magic safety page.