Chaos magic
[3] Emerging in England in the 1970s as part of the wider neo-pagan and esoteric subculture,[4] it drew heavily from the occult beliefs of artist Austin Osman Spare, expressed several decades earlier.
[7] They attempted to strip away the symbolic, ritualistic, theological or otherwise ornamental aspects of these occult traditions, to leave behind a set of basic techniques that they believed to be the basis of magic.
"[10] Scholar Hugh Urban has described chaos magic as a union of traditional occult techniques and applied postmodernism[11] – particularly a postmodernist skepticism concerning the existence or knowability of objective truth.
[16] Working during much the same period as Spare, Aleister Crowley's publications also provided a marginal yet early and ongoing influence, particularly for his syncretic approach to magic and his emphasis on experimentation and deconditioning.
[18] In the 1960s and the decade that followed, Discordianism, the punk movement, postmodernism and the writings of Robert Anton Wilson emerged, and they were to become significant influences on the form that chaos magic would take.
"[23] Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin are considered to be the founders of chaos magic,[10] although Phil Hine points out that there were others "lurking in the background, such as the Stoke Newington Sorcerors".
[32] Ralph Tegtmeier (Frater U∴D∴), who ran a bookshop in Germany and was already practicing his own brand of "ice magick", translated Liber Null into German.
Phil Hine, along with Julian Wilde and Joel Biroco, published a number of books on the subject that were particularly influential in spreading chaos magic techniques via the internet.
[34] P-Orridge had studied magic under William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the 1970s, and was also influenced by Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, as well as the psychedelic movement.
Religious scholar Hugh Urban notes that chaos magic's "rejection of all fixed models of reality" reflects one of its central tenets: "nothing is true everything is permitted".
[citation needed] Otto has argued that chaos magic "filed away the whole issue of truth, thus liberating and instrumentalising individual belief as a mere tool of ritual practice.
"[47] Peter J. Carroll suggested assigning different worldviews to the sides of a die, and then inhabiting a particular random paradigm for a set length of time (a week, a month, a year, etc.
[12] Phil Hine has stated that the primary task here is "to thoroughly decondition" the aspiring magician from "the mesh of beliefs, attitudes and fictions about self, society, and the world" that his or her ego associates with: Our ego is a fiction of stable self-hood which maintains itself by perpetuating the distinctions of "what I am/what I am not, what I like/what I don't like", beliefs about ones politics, religion, gender preference, degree of free will, race, subculture etc all help maintain a stable sense of self.
[52] Genesis P-Orridge, who studied under Burroughs[citation needed] described it as a way to "identify and short circuit control, life being a stream of cut-ups on every level.
