How To Begin by Scarlett Kat

[Dept of PMM Artists & things]

The power of magic cannot be found in a recipe book. If it were only that easy! Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that one will stumble upon the hidden grimoire or mystic amulet that will instantly grant one "magical powers". The ability to perform real magic is attained only through diligent practice, hard work and, well, "divine inspiration".

When one surveys all of the traditions of magic over the centuries, one notices that certain forms and procedures appear again and again. So if one strips away the outer symbolism and only retains that which is repeated across many systems, one is identifying the "strange attractors" which point to an underlying principle. It's reasonable to assume that these procedures arise for the same reason that any intelligent being who uses geometry will stumble across the value of pi sooner or later. It's something integral to the nature of the human mind/body and the reality we find ourselves in.

Here lies Chaos Magic's nod to tradition. But the Chaote must be extremely picky about which traditional techniques s/he adopts, and examine them dispassionately to determine what is useful technique and what is artifice.

Gnosis

One concept is absolutely indispensable to magic of any kind. The key to making magic work is the ability to achieve an altered state of consciousness. But not just any old altered state will do, or drunks and stoners would be the most powerful mages on the planet. The staggering inability of 500,000 acid-stoned hippies to stop a rainstorm at the Woodstock festival no matter how hard they chanted is poignant testimony to this fact.

The required mental shift has been called many names in history: samadhi by the yogis, jnara by the Tantrists, "awake" by the Sufi Moslems. It has been referred to as the Naugul, the Abyss, the crack between worlds. In a nod to the traditions of the old Gnostic sects, this state has come to be called by most Chaotes (and shall be referred to in this book) as gnosis.

Gnosis is the direct perception of the Void. It is the state when the discursive mind shuts down, and there is unfiltered access to the subconscious.

The most common experience of gnosis to the average person is the sexual orgasm. At the peak of orgasm, the mind essentially stops thinking, and the consciousness is focused on a single point in space-time. Once this concept was grasped and it's psychic usefulness realized, several mystic-magical sects developed the technique to various high levels. Among these are the Tantrists of Asia, the Mediterranean Gnostics, the Roman cults of Dyonious and modern offshoots such as the Fraternus Saturni and the Ordo Templi Orentis (OTO). Aleister Crowley became obsessed with sexual magic and nearly all of his writings and techniques have a strong sexual element.

However, sexual climax is not the only path to the gnostic state (although it is probably the most fun.) The subject of sex magic gets it's own chapter later on in the book, so we won't dwell on it yet. It serves the purposes of a magician to be able to have other methods of achieving gnosis at their command besides sex, and the development of other techniques has the side effect of also making sexual gnosis easier to attain and control.