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

Instant Alchemy

We’re going to do some magick. And the key to magick is not faith, belief, a good collection of herbs, or anything like that. It’s emotion. There are a lot of other tools that we can use such as special words, archetypal images and various states of mind, but the engine of magick is emotion.

A lot of folks get their magick to work, and never know that it worked because their emotions shifted in a particularly magickal way. They might do another ritual and get no results, not realizing that it’s all because the emotional component was missing. When you know about the role of emotion in magick, you really have found a hack that can make just about any magick work.

Messing about with your emotions like this is really easy, and it changes the world. It doesn't just change you; it makes actual physical things happen. All those things you read about on the back of magick books. Money, love, influence, power. When you put emotion into your magick, it can do all these things.

This is even true with more traditional magick. If you call to an angel, and ask for help, guess how you direct the angel. With emotion. Guess what makes the angel respond best to your needs. Emotion. Whether you’re using traditional magick to contact real entities that you believe in or just going through the magickal motions because you want a result, it’s the emotions that you change during the ritual that create your result.

This is alchemy. You take one feeling and turn it into another. Reality then gets modified to meet your emotions.

I could just end the book here, because you know it all now, but I’ll add some details as we go. But, keep this in mind for the rest of your career in Chaos.

We’ll start with the easiest magick of all. It’s called sigil magick; you’ve probably heard about it before, and maybe even been bored to death by reading the same old dull descriptions. Here we go. This is traditional sigil magick. You write down your request, turn that sentence into a bunch of squiggles and then fire that squiggle off into the universe using some sort of altered consciousness.

There are thousands of websites describing the process, but let me have a go at showing you how to do it better than most people. Sigil magick has such great potential, but is usually disappointing. Let’s turn that around. This is Sigil Magick Remastered.

The traditional Chaos Magick approach starts out by having you write down your desire as a positive statement. Instead of saying, ’I don’t want to be poor’, you say, ’I want to be rich’, and then you shift that to the present tense. ’I am rich.’ The trouble with this is that it doesn’t sound at all convincing. You know you’re not rich, and it just feels wrong to pretend that you are. It’s like those affirmations that people use in an attempt to change their personality. ’I am a confident and loving person.’ It sounds so fake. I detest affirmations because I think they stimulate and generate the opposite emotion, and then they make that unpleasant emotion grow. Even if you are a fairly confident person, repeating the affirmation ’I am confident’ can lead you to feel more insecure, no matter how often you repeat that mantra to yourself. And that’s one big problem with the traditional approach to sigil magick.

It feels weird to talk about traditional Chaos Magick because it’s meant to be radical and new, but the truth is it’s become a bit traditional. And I think that the traditional approach to sigilisation is dead in the water. Yeah, it can work, it has worked, and it’s not all bad, but let’s try something new and better.

The Gallery of Magick developed an approach to sigil magick that’s a bit more inventive. This wasn’t my idea, so I feel ok about going on about how great it is. I love this technique. All you do is phrase the result as a question about something that once happened. This ever-so-subtle shift transforms the magick.

If you want to find the money to buy a new piano, you’d write, ’How did I come to own this beautiful piano?’

It’s a question that you never attempt to answer.

It’s a question that assumes the result has already come about.

It’s a question that acknowledges the sense of wonder and appreciation you feel at having this result.

The universe will answer the question by changing reality to match the emotion of the question.

You are sort of pretending that, in this very moment, you’ve achieved your goal, and you’re pondering the wonder of the result with a pleasant appreciation. You’re not trying to answer the question.

Have you ever found yourself in some amazing city, or with an amazing person, and you go, ’How the hell did I end up here?’ The feeling is something along the lines of, ’This is so wonderful. Wow.’ That’s a good place to be, feeling wonderful and looking back with pleasant incredulity. You’re not for a moment trying to answer the question. You ask the question just to express joy. Put that in your magick and your magick will work.

In the next chapter we’ll look at how to create and refine this question. The chapter might take a few minutes to read, but the technique itself only takes a few seconds once you get the hang of it.