The Master Works of Chaos Magick: Practical Techniques For Directing Your Reality - Adam Blackthorne 2016

Making New Magick

In your career as a Magician of Chaos, you don’t have to make magick up. But knowing how it’s done can give you clues that help you see the real energy behind magick, which can improve all of your magick. You may never invent anything, but knowing that a combination of essential symbols, a history of belief and a simplified system can lead to success, might open you up when working magick.

Making up magick can be simple, but if it’s too simple, it’s not much better than crossing your fingers or making a wish. Get confident, and know that you can throw away most of the rules and regulations. But know that there comes a point when something is too simple, and that it’s not really magick anymore.

When developing a system of Olympic Chaos Magick, I could have simplified it even more. The most basic sigil for Arathron looks like this:

There’s no circle, no magick words, and I could have said that you stare at the sigil and call out, ’Arathron, help me to…’ That’s it. That’s classic Chaos Magick.

It might work, but I think it feels too trivial, too loose, too slapdash, and it’s like too much of the original system has been tossed out. If you repeated it every night for a month it might work. But why not put the time into developing a system that takes the essence of an ancient system, the flavor and the color, without the rules and regulations?

Here’s how Olympic Chaos Magick was developed (with the help of my friends). This sort of borders on being theoretical, so I’m going to make this a very short explanation. Arbatel: Of the Magic of the Ancients was my starting point. You can find the Olympic Spirits in other books, like The Grimoire of Turiel, but Arbatel has the detail you need to get the ideas behind the magick.

With Arbatel in hand, I hunted down the essence of the magick. What’s it actually about? At first glance, you might think it’s about being pure of spirit, facing a particular direction at a particular time, and calling to a spirit. Although it’s not as complex as some bizarre systems, it’s still got lots of rules and lots of things you supposedly have to do. Follow Arbatel as it’s written and you’ve got a load of work to do. But, when you cut away the dross, you find the spirit names, a hint of their powers, knowledge of their associated planet, their sigils, and a sense that you will need divine authority to connect to them.

I threw out the rest, and used the basic ritual structure that I described earlier in the book. I also added a dash of emotional transmutation. If you read Arbatel, you can see that emotional transmutation fits right in. You need to read between the lines.

The sigils were redrawn from the originals, in my own hand. I added the circle and the square, because the full magickal method in Arbatel describes a longwinded process where you draw a circle within a square. I kept the feeling of that circle-squareness and put it into the sigil. The sigil also looks a bit like one you find in The Grimoire of Turiel, which is used for contacting Olympic spirits. I wasn’t just making something new, but blending magick from many sources. The words around the edge are Adonai, Shaddai and the Tetragrammaton. I chose these because they were used in The Grimoire of Turiel; although, in that grimoire, they were written in English, with a fairly crappy transliteration. I changed that to Hebrew; t looks more magickal and feels more authentic.

But that’s it. I threw out the complications, and worked with the names, sigils and powers. I made the list of powers intuitively by meditating on the names of the spirits. I trusted those lists and stuck with them. I took the bits that I liked, made it feel magickal, added emotional transmutation, and there was my homemade magick system. If you try it, you will find that it works, more or less. It wasn’t made up, but it isn’t traditional ceremonial magick as described in Arbatel. It’s Chaos Magick.

There is a catch. The more your system is used, the better it gets… which means that the newer your system is, the less power it has. You’re tapping into real power, with sigils and names that have been known for centuries. That’s good. Your system may work a little bit right away, but the more it’s used, the easier it becomes to get results.

There’s no predicting how long this might take, because you could adjust your system — adding some things back in, taking others out. It can take weeks or years to get your system really firing on all cylinders. That homemade Olympic Magick System has been around for over six years, used frequently by me and a few others, which makes it more workable than if I came up with it yesterday. But, don’t let this put you off trying when the time comes, because you can never underestimate the power of emotional transmutation. It can bring all magick to life.

Take any old crappy spell off the internet and add emotional transmutation, and guess what… it will probably work. Burn a candle, and let your emotions change as the wax burns away (like your problem), and you might get reality to wobble the way you want. It might not work as well as an established system, but it can work. And that gives you a real feeling of power, connection, and, let’s face it, awe.

What you can take away from all this is that you can break the rules. If you follow Arbatel as it is written, you’re in for a hell of a time. It’s complicated, longwinded and you’re going to need a really good compass to work out which direction to face. But here’s the secret — those rules mostly don’t matter. If you read a wiccan spell, and it says you need to collect rosehips from a south-facing hillside, you know that spell’s going to feel half-baked if you just buy a jar of rosehips. But, what Chaos Magick tells you is that you don’t even need the rosehips. You can just pretend the rosehips are there, or use something else and believe it’s as good.

The structures of magick are often put there just to help get you in the mood, to build your faith, or to make things feel magickal. When you craft a ritual, make it feel magickal — keep the sounds, names and sigils that feel essential to you, and use emotional transmutation. It will work.

I doubt that you’re about to dash out and buy lots of ancient grimoires and build your own system. But, I bet there will be times when you want to modify a system, and now you know how. When you see how many rules can be chucked out with the magick still being effective, it makes you a bold occultist. You stop fretting about the details and focus on the spirits you’re calling. They listen. They react. They work for you.

And, as you experiment, you find that some words of power are better than others, some entities are easier to contact than others, and sometimes you do need exactly the right equipment and timing. But, most of the time you don’t. You only need the essential magickal symbols and the energy of emotional transmutation.

If you missed it, here’s what you do:

Clear a space for magick.

(Banish, confess or let go of troubles.)

Take on magickal authority.

(Do it like you mean it.)

Get the spirit to listen.

(Use names, sigils and words of power.)

Say what you want.

(But say it with feelings. Feel what you want to feel when it all works out.)

Make an offering.

(Offer gratitude, emotion or something else.)

Get back to normal.

(Work on your problem as though the magick won’t work, but believe the magick will work. And the magick will work.)

That’s what you do.

But only when you need to.

Or only when it’s worth your while.

We made Olympic Chaos Magick because the classical approach to those particular spirits was too dreary. We really wanted to work with those qualities of the Planetary Powers in an exciting way, so we built a magick that sounded like it would work, and adjusted it until it did.

In Chaos Magick you’re encouraged to experiment, make things up. Yep, good, but I want to hammer home this big time-saver: If there’s a system that works in a simple way already, don’t waste your time building a new one. If you own a car, don’t hitchhike.

Inventing magick is cool, but not vital, even though some folks will swear this is the definition of Chaos Magick. I think invention is optional. Right now, if you want a result, I’d say use the Olympic system. It’s probably going to work way better than a new system that you invent. But, when you feel the urge to invent, you’ve got all the clues you need.

Never be afraid to draw on traditional magick; there’s so much power in what has gone before. Don’t strand yourself in the details, though. Get to the essence of the magick and fill it with emotion, and simplify, but don’t simplify to the point where it’s too dumb or abstract to work. It may take some experimentation to find out what works, but you can simplify magick and get results. Break the rules without breaking the magick.

And if you’re wondering about the magick circle, I didn’t bother with one. Magick circles cannot be neglected, according to many great authorities. If you believe the great authorities, you can look up some way of drawing a circle on the floor, or in your mind, and protect yourself there, or bring the spirits to the circle, or near the circle... I get confused. I don’t bother with magick circles. They take time and space and make no difference to the magick. If that makes me a heretic, so be it. This is Chaos Magick.