Theos-Talk Archives (December 1993 Message tl00002)

The Nine Laws of Chaos Magic, as I have outlined them in my essay
(see Library) have many important ramifications as well as
curious implications. For one thing, they imply that order rises
up out of chaos and then drops back into it at some point in
time, much like light is said to rise up out of darkness. The
rising of order/light is creation, Brahma. Their re-submergence
is destruction, Siva. Their play together is manifestation,
Vishnu.

     This implies that chaos is as *real* as order. One of the
gods of chaos was the ancient Egyptian god Set. He sported the
head of an unknown animal, possibly a hyeana, but no-one is
really sure today. He was called the Opposer, largely because he
opposed the creative energies of his chief rival, Horus. In
ancient Egypt, Horus ruled the North while Set ruled the South.
Set was the god of the desert - the red land, while Horus ruled
the fertile lands around the Nile - the black land. As an
interesting aside, people born with red hair were said to be in
the service of Set and were largely shunned by polite society.
The god Set later became the Satan of Christianity, but in the
early days of the Egyptian empire (a 6,000 year plus reign) he
was considered a good god, and was the brother of Osiris. For
example, he helps in the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, and in
other Book of the Dead chapters. But by the middle kingdom Horus
was considered good and Set was the evil Opposer. I think that
this was heightened during the reign of Amenhotep IV, the king
who tried to sell the people on one god, Aten, at the expense of
all of the others. Aten, the solar disk or Light itself, was
opposed by Darkness in the same way that Horus was traditionally
opposed by Set. In fact, another name for Aten was Ra-Hor-Khuit
(Re-Heru-Khuti) meaning Horus of the Two Horizons (or the Horus
of Duality). All of this implies that the Egyptians were very
aware that the dualistic manifestation of our universe is opposed
by Chaos, just as light is opposed by darkness, consciousness by
the unconscious, and so on. Our universe is not all light,
goodness, perfection, and happiness. In fact, Buddha taught that
the very core of our material universe was suffering.

What does all of this mean to us today as we plod through life in
the twilight years of the 20th century?  It means that we cannot
ignore Chaos, or what I have called the Chaos Factor. Chaos
exists. Darkness exists. They are as real, at least, as their
polar opposites. So no matter how much spiritual understanding
we have, no matter how well we practice magic, and no matter how
much we try to control our lives, chaos in one form or another is
apt to jump up and bite us when we least expect it. This
explains why stupid little things happen to us every day. We
lose things. We hit our finger with a hammer. We fall down. We
have accidents. We forget things. Etc, etc. Chaos, in its
attempt to let us know of its existence and power, is ever
nipping at our heels while we continue to pay all of our
conscious attention to Order pretended (or possibly really
believing) that chaos doesn't really exist (How could a loving
God let evil exist in the world? is a very old question that has
yet to be answered).

My thesis about Chaos Magic is that we should not ignore Chaos,
but rather accept it and use it. The point where Chaos strikes
us during our everday life is an incident that I have called a
Magic Point - a point in our lives where magic can help guide us
in one direction or another. Many times it is not what happens
to us that counts in our development, but how we react to an
incident or event. We can learn to control our reactions. Chaos
Magic suggests that by iteration (ie continuous concentration) on
a thought, we can bring that thought into our experience. This
is very much in line with the Japa and Mantra techniques of
Eastern occultism. We can learn to recognise Magic Points, and
use them to our advantage. This has nothing to do with sitting
within a magic circle and waving a rod around, or burning
incense, or speaking arcane languages. It is, I think, more like
plain common sense, once you understand how Magic Points work and
how Chaos can be iterated/bifercated through repetition or
concentration. It is a case of "tipping the scales" in the right
direction just at the proper time to allow us to achieve a
desired result at some point in the future. A Magic Point is
like a point in time where our future can branch off in two or
more directions. By using techniques of Chaos Magic, we can help
direct these flow of events in our favor.

                            Jerry S.