Controversies

The current’s principal long-running internal dispute concerns whether its instrumentalist treatment of belief is itself a metaphysical position (a soft idealism in which only consciousness is real) or whether it is genuinely cosmologically neutral. The disagreement has surfaced repeatedly in the journal and book literature without resolution.

The Illuminates of Thanateros, the order most strongly associated with the current, has experienced periodic schisms typical of small magical bodies; none has produced a stable orthodoxy, which is consistent with the current’s stated values.

Critics within the wider magical community argue that the absence of a sustained cosmological commitment makes serious initiatory progression impossible; chaos-magic practitioners reply that progression is measurable by results rather than by adherence to a fixed framework.