Tradition
Chaos Magick
A late-twentieth-century approach to magical practice that treats belief itself as a tool, drops the requirement that practitioners commit to any particular cosmology, and freely mixes symbol systems on the basis of what produces results.
Chaos magick is an approach to magical practice that emerged publicly in the late 1970s, principally in northern England. Its defining move is to treat the cosmologies and symbol systems of the various magical traditions — Hermetic, Thelemic, Wiccan, Vodou, Tantric, fictional — as interchangeable working tools rather than as competing claims about the structure of reality.
The practitioner adopts a belief system temporarily, works within it to obtain a result, and discards or switches it as needed. The doctrine that “nothing is true; everything is permitted” (a slogan with a longer literary history) is treated as the operating premise. Chaos magick is therefore less a tradition than a meta-tradition, and is structurally hostile to lineage and orthodoxy.
