The Night-Thinned Veil, Part 3

Thoughts about Chaos Magic, and some practical recommendations.

This is the third and final installment in my series on hyperobjects, participatory consciousness, and the need for re-enchantment.

Part 1 laid out some ideas about the need for human interaction with hyperobjects, via participatory consciousness.

Part 2 applied that theory to the American celebration of Halloween, showing how our rituals around Death have been surrendered to competing religious frameworks and left us without a robust symbolic interface.

Part 3 will tie up some loose ends and offer some suggestions about how to go about re-working Halloween for yourself, if you feel the need.

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The first two parts of this series focused on how metaphysical conservatism limits cultural development. We’ve covered the dangers of disenchantment, when symbolic interfaces no longer resonate with the hyperobjects to which they’re coded, and the serious consequences of our inability to restore that resonance. That critique overlaps with another system of applied metaphysics—Chaos Magic—and so warrants a quick exploration of its possibilities and limitations.

Chaos Magic¹ separates the pure functionality of symbolic interfaces from the ornamentation of tradition, orthodoxy, and dogma, just like I’ve been describing here. It’s a system that emerged in the late twentieth century, rose to prominence in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and was developed by practitioners like Peter J. Carrol, Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P-Orridge, Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore.

As a cultural movement, Chaos Magic was absolutely vital for reclaiming the art of applied metaphysics in modern Western society. It was a carnival sideshow of illicit possibilities, with a wild, libidinal, performance-art ethos. Its taproots dipped into the subcultures of hackers, ravers, UFOlogists and conspiracy theorists—the spaces where people were already taking a DIY approach to reality. Many of its early pioneers were cranks, hustlers, addicts, opportunists, and outright lunatics. This represented a major improvement over the wooden figureheads of the religious establishment.

Most importantly—after centuries of somber intonations from mainstream religion, and the aristocratic pretenses of lodge magic—Chaos Magicians championed the metaphysical power of grungy, howling, street-level Fun.

From a technical perspective, Chaos Magic’s major innovation was the inversion of belief. It opposed the traditional forms of religion as a patronage system, in which belief in a particular god (and their earthly representatives) was mandatory. Belief was not a spiritual tithe offered up to some distant ruler. Instead, Chaos Magicians deconstructed the whole concept of belief, and centered it as the generative force behind reality. Gods don’t create belief; beliefs create gods, along with everything else, and there are no theoretical limits to how far that causality can be expanded.

If belief is a currency, then it all spends the same, no matter where you choose to exert its influence; if it’s a current, then it should power whatever you plug into it.

Chaos Magic applied that theory to a model in which reality worked like a mechanical slot machine: if randomness in the system could be reduced—if the right kind of nudge could moderate the speed of the spinning wheels—then the chances of hitting a jackpot for any desired outcome would necessarily increase². This could be accomplished through something as simple as sigil-drawing; the more complicated forms stretch into creating servitors, visualization, psychodrama, psychogeography, and active imagination. From the simplest to the most involved, these techniques all maintain the principle that the operator is creating meaning through an artificial symbolic interface—actively generating belief, rather than passively accepting it as a condition of a fixed reality.

This anarchic approach tore down the traditional barriers for everyday spiritual seekers. Chaos Magic is untrammeled postmodernism: if everything is equally (un)real, in a kind of memetic superposition, then everything is fair game. It offered a means of tunneling under the walls built by competing cultural authorities. Metaphysical conservatism was jettisoned. The spoils went to those who could borrow freely from any culture and assemble the best rig of magical “tech,” a symbolic interface that would get the job done. Chaos Magicians invoked Ganesh and Saint Expedite alongside Baphomet, Glycon and Superman. No passports stamped, no licenses required. Plastered Grant Morrison would cheerfully unlock the secrets of the universe to any punter with a scrap of paper and a box of crayons.

The counterculture of the 1960s urged its followers to turn their backs on the materialist mainstream, but underestimated just how far they would have to run in order to escape completely. When the acid wore off and the tour bus ran out of gas, the Evil Empire was still standing, beastly careless and unperturbed. Erstwhile revolutionaries could get a haircut and a real job or continue to live in self-imposed exile.

Chaos Magic, by contrast, gave its devotees a way to renegotiate power within the present world. It urged people to sift through the trash stratum of mainstream culture, to find their own symbols of the Divine—to remix or remake anything that wasn’t nailed down, to inject their own handwritten code into the program, to break the rules on a cosmic scale, to commit metaphysical piracy. No cruel gods, no feckless masters. No More Secrets.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, and the cultural space opened up by those early pioneers—along with all their lasting contributions—people are recognizing the limitations of the original formula.

Chaos Magic was, naturally, a product of its time. The name alone sounds like something embroidered on a chain wallet at Hot Topic. Its initial aim was unavoidably reactionary, geared to defy cultural adversaries that have either faded away or mutated into something entirely different.

Peter J. Carrol famously wrote that “Magick will not free itself from occultism until we have strangled the last astrologer with the guts of the last spiritual master.” While that probably sounded fucking metal at the time it was written—these days, several decades after the fact, it’s unclear what he was so mad about. Astrologers and spiritual masters seem vanishingly low on the list of people whose grisly deaths would improve the world in any meaningful way³.

More importantly—the postmodern hacker ethos that propelled Chaos Magic beyond cultural conformity also hid some fundamental weaknesses. The reality it described still rested comfortable alongside modernity’s ontological framing: the human operator as the most intelligent agent in a world of exploitable systems, a subject in a universe of objects.

While it’s true that humans have more agency than the forces of modernity permit, we might still have less power than we’d like to believe.

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The radical approach to creativity that the Chaos Magicians conjured up has spread far beyond the occult spaces they originally occupied. However—if we take Chaos Magic’s principles to their logical conclusion, we can’t say with certainty that these events are entirely driven by humans.

Looking at the sequential nature of linear time, we can describe Chaos Magic as a cultural evolution: X to Y to Z, a series of contingent origins gradually cohering into something recognizable. From a materialist perspective, this is the product of a logical progression, a multitude of human impulses finding a focal point and arriving at a consensus. Something old turns into something new; the new becomes the old, and the cycle begins again.

But if the underlying theory of Chaos Magic is correct, then the permeability of reality is a two-way street: if humans can change reality without an intermediary—if the code is truly open-source—then, theoretically, other entities could do the same to us.

These entities aren’t necessarily conscious or intelligent⁴. But even materialist science has sufficient explanations for how these more-than-human intentions can slip in and alter reality: memes, in the original sense of the term; Jungian archetypes; egregores. These are all thoughtforms that begin to accumulate their own existence, independent from the human vectors through which they spread. They adapt and evolve over time, and—apart from lacking a physical body—get uncomfortably close to meeting the criteria for living things, in the way that viruses do.

If we’re not operating safely within the air-gapped server of our brains, then there’s no telling what other influences might be creeping in. What happens when the hackers get hacked? What if (to use a tired cliché) the call is occasionally coming from inside the house?

Chaos Magic is all about whispering into the subconscious of the cosmos. In restoring human agency to the unfolding of reality—a necessary corrective to the Church’s metaphysics of subjugation—Chaos Magicians diminished or eliminated the agency of the Others who show up repeatedly in myths and folklore throughout history. While Chaos Magic puts humans at the controls, guiding the program toward their desired outcomes, what might have been whispering into their subconscious?

If the Mind of reality can be persuaded or tricked into changing, how can we tell the difference between our own thoughts and something alien?

Again—what is human creativity, really?

Elder cultures caution us against these whispers. Protective magic is a fixture of metaphysical praxes from around the world. From their perspective, spiritually speaking, modern people are running around in a dangerous neighborhood after dark, completely naked.

But materialist culture regards this as quaint superstition; unfortunately, in spite of its otherwise progressive approach, Chaos Magic didn’t do much better.

The dualistic monotheism of Christianity sees the world divided neatly into Good and Evil. People only need one tool and one shelter against the forces of darkness: the Hammer of Faith, the castle of the Church. Chaos Magic declared this to be bullshit and set about tearing down the old ramparts. It gave people a fully-stocked toolbox for building something new on empty ground, whatever and wherever they wanted.

But neither philosophy fully preserved an awareness of the world described by the elder cultures. Neither framework was built to accommodate a teeming metaphysical ecosystem, a jungle of incorporeal beings jostling for position, a cosmos where humans are variously seen as precocious children, useful idiots, clever animals, or nourishing prey.

Modern people stopped paying attention to those interior whispers because they saw themselves as the only ones capable of whispering. From a phasmatopian perspective, this describes a kind of psychospiritual body horror: we could be riddled with spiritual parasites, minds shot through with eldritch cordyceps, still imagining ourselves to be in control while jerking at the end of invisible strings.

Elder cultures see this as a nightmare beyond what Lovecraft could have imagined. To them, modern people are possessed. We’re the cultists, the pale thralls controlled by dark powers beyond our understanding—taking over the world, piling everything on the bloodstained altar of a god whose true name we can’t pronounce, setting it all ablaze.

Materialism describes the cultural manifestation of Chaos Magic as a progression of human invention. But it might also be the ripples made by some metaphysical Leviathan, gliding through the depths of the imaginal, displacing waves of thought up here on the surface—the first contractions of something bigger, trying to birth itself into our world, beyond the scope of our small ambitions and limited imaginations⁵.

This brings us right back to hyperobjects: gargantuan, elastic, cosmic forces with their own impossible gravity; compelling humans to manage their local effects and make peace with inevitability; demanding a set of cultural protocols to interface with forces outside the limits of physical control.

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I’m not really breaking new ground here. Many of the thinkers and practitioners I admire are already working in a post-Chaos space (to the extent that those cultural/historical signposts are any kind of useful). This is all just by way of saying that—if you feel the need to re-enchant your world, and don’t know where to start—you’re not the first. Plenty of people have been fighting these battles behind the scenes, as a kind of paramilitary force in the Culture Wars, to win back our permission to do this work. Many of them already risked their reputations and their bodies up on stage, in public, to provide some cover for the rest of us.

Feel free to get weird.

With that in mind, here are my own personal recommendations for re-enchanting Halloween:

1. Consecrate the holiday for yourself.

There’s serious confusion around the idea of “sacred” in the modern world—especially in the United States, with its lingering miasma of Puritanism. Sacred doesn’t necessarily mean something roped off for the most pious. Sacred times and places are a refuge from the mundane, to help everyone turn away from the daily demands of life and back toward the deeper reality of the numinous.

Modern culture has inverted that function. We’ve turned the holidays into hyper-mundanity, accelerated commerce, a time when we buy and consume even more than we normally do⁶. Halloween has suffered especially from this corruption: as described in Part 2, thanks to the turf wars of metaphysical conservatism, it’s in danger of becoming a purely commercial celebration of candy, cosplay, and pop culture.

Consecrating the holiday doesn’t mean being precious about it. You don’t have to swear off the popular parts of Halloween and look down on those who don’t. Enjoy your candy and your horror movies and your Sexy Traffic Cone costume, if that’s what you want. But if you start with the understanding that Halloween has another purpose, and really make time for it, then you might find yourself making different choices.

And don’t feel like you need to be modest. Why limit yourself to one day, when the whole month of October can be a time for sidestepping everyday reality? You don’t need anybody’s permission. It all belongs to you anyway.

2. Do some ontological yoga.

Once you’ve set aside a different kind of time, allow yourself to stretch beyond your ordinary assumptions about reality. Again—you don’t need anybody’s permission. Don’t need to make a formal Declaration of Belief. Use the holiday to practice two things we’ve let languish in modern culture: indeterminacy—the space between certainty and doubt—and privacy. Don’t tell anybody what you’re thinking. Don’t rush off to post about it on social media. This will give you the freedom to experiment, without preparing a complete Unified Field Theory for public criticism. You’re allowed to do this.

This is an extended exercise in “acting as if,” for the duration of the holiday: how would you handle your daily life if spirits were actually real? What if the dying time of year, when the cold comes and the last breath of summer fades, is the time when the Dead are most present? What if all the taboos dismissed as “superstition” are there for good reason? What if offerings, remembrance, guising and magic lanterns aren’t “just doing stuff,” but have a real impact on your spiritual wellbeing?

If you’ve already chosen to observe the holiday as a break from the mundane world, then you have the time and space to play with this stuff. Just for a few days or a few weeks out of the whole year, without having to adopt a whole new identity. You can go back to being normal in November.

2½. Indulge in a better class of ghost story.

Here’s the MadLibs version of every modern ghost story from a materialist perspective, used for drumming up tourist business or selling books of plagiarized folklore: “[Name] died from [something tragic], and some folks say they still see a shadowy figure dressed in [identifiable article of clothing] and hear [laughter/ crying/ creaking/ musical instrument] in the [room of a house or business, nearest the gift shop], conveniently confined to this one very specific location. Spoooky!”

Here’s the kind of ghost story you get to enjoy for grown-up Halloween: the whole world is a graveyard. We don’t escape from the events of the past by running up the staircase of linear time. We can’t hide under the bedsheets of our own individual consciousness. Every life and every tragedy is layered beneath us, just below our feet. Sometimes these things poke up into the air of the present, like finger bones in a flood-washed cemetery. When we encounter a ghost, the lights and sounds—if any appear—are just the exposed forensic evidence on the surface, a small piece of a larger sunken body. The rest of it is buried in our minds, in the place where time collapses and physical distance evaporates. Where we can’t get away. Every past-century murder and untimely death in your town is, in a sense, still always happening, even when you can’t see or hear them. Some are just louder than others, psychically speaking.

(Bonus points: watch The Sixth Sense as a dramatization of universal human capabilities, and not just a made-up story about one singular kid. You think you’re safe just because you’re not Haley Joel Osment?)

3. Get some toys and go on an adventure.

Get a pack of Tarot cards. Dust off the Ouija board. Draw some sigils. Make yourself a magic wand and cast some spells. (Just do not read the Latin.) Spend a bit of cash and get the gear for trying out the Estes Method (either the approache for beginners or the professionals). Attend a séance. Go on one of those goofy haunted history tours. Do some occult psychogeography, guided by divination⁷.

But—but—while you’re doing it, treat the protocols of respecting helpful spirits and defending against dangerous ones as serious business. “Act as if.” Basic offerings and banishings are simple enough to work out for yourself, if you take them seriously and really put your back into it. Just for the holiday. Just for fun, if you like.

4. Search for somatic resonance.

This is a whole different topic for another essay. If you’re using a properly-functioning symbolic interface—if you’re well and truly in The Zone, with the right combination of mythic narrative, folklore, symbolism and applied metaphysics—it should feel like you’re bumping into something substantial. This isn’t an intellectual exercise: if you’re getting the right feedback, it should hit your body and your heart at least as hard as it hits your brain. In the case of Death and the Dead, if it’s the real deal, you should feel afraid.

Not the imminent fear of a physical threat. Not slasher-movie terror. You should be inviting the amorphous dread of something huge and invisible nearby—spiritual thalassophobia—the possibility that you are surrounded by invisible ghosts, that the room you’re sitting in is crowded with them, and they’re not entirely happy with you. That’s how you know that you’re not just enjoying an idle fantasy. That feeling informs how you re-establish participatory consciousness, and guides you toward a symbolic interface for working with a hyperobject instead of hiding from it.

5. Set up an ancestor altar.

Otherwise known as “a nice table with pictures and candles.” This is how I made my first foray into applied metaphysics: at the beginning of the Covid outbreak, I had a feeling that we might urgently need some more robust rituals for grieving. (Turned out to be a tragically accurate premonition for my family, and damn, did it ever end up being useful.) When I first started out, I felt like I needed a recipe, or some specific instructions, or a permit and membership card from a particular religion in order to set something up “the right way.”

Nope.

This is the easiest thing you can do for Halloween. It’s not bound by a certain set of beliefs or traditions. These people are your family. You are their caretaker. It’s a universal human practice, and any way you choose to do it—as long as it feels real, if you followed the steps above—you’re doing it right.

Don’t treat it like an authentic ritual that makes you a bona fide member of Culture X, unless you already are. Just put out some pictures of your dead loved ones. Light some candles. Give them a glass of water and maybe a bit of wine. Spend some time thinking about them, wishing them well—and recalling that your picture will be on the table someday. Done. Easy. You don’t have to be Catholic or Spiritist or Shinto, or anything other than human.

You’re allowed to do this.

And if it doesn’t feel quite right, you can just go back to being normal in November, and try again next year.

1. To continue making the case for “applied metaphysics” as an improved term over “religion,” which seems more and more like an empty signifier: the Wikipedia article refers to Chaos Magic as an “invented religion,” which… god, where to even start. There is neither a prescribed ritual framework nor an object of worship in Chaos Magic, so calling it a “religion” is obviously the work of some muggle on a deadline throwing their hands up and saying “fuck it, close enough, let’s move on.” Moreover—doesn’t the implied hierarchy between “invented” and “established” religions betray exactly the kind of metaphysical conservatism described in Parts 1 and 2, despite being a supposedly neutral academic analysis? And aren’t all religions “invented,” if you want to be a dick about it? If so—which parts? Are the entities within the religion invented, or just the symbolic interfaces? If the symbolic interface is artificial, but the entities are real, what makes religion distinct from regular old magic? And how much does “invented” rely on a particular theory of mind, privileging monophasic consciousness over any other cognitive models? How much of our consensus reality is backstopped by these ontological dodges that somebody airplane-glued together because they didn’t feel like thinking too hard?

2. The actual mechanics are a bit beyond the scope of this essay, but briefly, according to my own limited understanding: if the actual substrate of reality isn’t matter, but information, then thoughts can shape reality without a physical intermediary. (This accounts for otherwise-confounding phenomena like quantum entanglement, the observer effect, precognition, and psi abilities.) It’s like seeing the code in The Matrix: living things are programs, packets of memory and intention. Humans are programs; so are spirits, gods, demons, and everything else. We can interact with them directly through the space of the operating system—but within all of it, everything is fundamentally just different configurations of ones and zeroes. You can ask a program to perform a task for you, or—if you can access the source code directly—you can produce the result yourself. Many Chaos Magic techniques bypass the need to engage with another program (via something like a ritual conjuration) in favor of tweaking the source code, producing a cumulative effect to nudge the probability of events toward a desired outcome. One additional layer of complexity is that the programming language doesn’t use the ones and zeroes of computer binary; it’s more fluid and organic, translating into something like metaphor from a human perspective. Consequently, invoking Superman as a metaphor for power and goodness is no different than praying to Jesus Christ.

3. On a completely unrelated note—Forbes keeps a running list of the world’s billionaires, updated in real time.

4. Although if you start to ride the train of logic, you’ll have a hard time proving the animists wrong, and definitively stating that there are no non-human, non-corporeal intelligences. This remains hidden in the blind spot of the “hard problem of consciousness”: if we can’t adequately explain how consciousness arises in a single human mind, how are we supposed to cleanly divide a theoretical “outside” from an “inside”? Scientists will claim they’ve never encountered a non-human intelligence; the responses to this are, one, maybe they have, and just didn’t realize it, and two—maybe the Others just don’t talk to boring people in lab coats.

5. Speaking of Alan Moore, he does a brilliant cosmic-horror treatment of exactly this scenario in Providence. We can afford to be slightly more optimistic about the outcome, though.

6. Cue smokey dorm-room philosophizing: “Wait but like… does that mean capitalism is, like, our religion?” [Bong rip.]

7. Even if you don’t know how to use divinatory tools “correctly,” don’t worry about it. There’s nothing special about the physical tools until you’ve developed a symbolic language with them through repeated use. On the surface, they’re just (“just”) a way to short-circuit your rational Left brain and open up your intuition, where the real magic happens. You need something non-binary: a single coin flip will force you into a definitive yes/no response, which is the Left brain’s domain. Anything else—playing cards or a handful of household objects thrown on a map, four coins tossed together, pigeon entrails, whatever “random” words came through during your Estes Method session—will provide enough room for creative interpretation and intuition. (The old trope about “the magic was inside you all along” is both half-true and extremely oversimplified.)