Chaos

Chaos, as a word, conjures different images for different people. To many, the word suggests absolute randomness. Others immediately think of a thing, or non-thing, from which all things manifest. This reminds me of a stanza from the Tao Te Ching: “Tao gives birth to…10,000 things.” Ten thousand, in the old Taoist texts, represents a sufficiently large number to encompass everything. But science associates chaos not with randomness but with unpredictability. Peter Carroll, one of the founders of the Chaos Magick movement, came from a science background. Readers of his books will notice his penchant for including math-like formulae in his presentation of magical ideas.

Unpredictability

Unpredictability means the actual probability, or odds, of one thing happening proves difficult or impossible to determine. Difficult to predict doesn’t mean random. In this sense, Chaos Magick takes advantage of an unpredictable universe.

Relatively speaking, magick exerts little force on the universe. We magicians can’t reduce mountains to rubble with our will alone. No, as magicians, we need to stack the odds in our favor, even when, particularly when, we do impossible things. One can view all the preparation and ritual of magick as precisely placing that first domino that when knocked over starts the wholly unpredictable chain of events that ultimately leads to our desired outcome.

We can’t plan or foresee the path our magickal Rube Goldberg machine will take; we should allow as many different paths as possible. Specifying an exact chain of events your magick should take almost certainly results in failure. One tiny change in circumstance might leave no room for you magick to navigate around it.

Divine Short, Enchant Long

The axiom divine short, enchant long derives from this idea. When divining for a distant future, too many unpredictable things will happen which renders divinations vague and probably not useful. Relying on them too much can even make for some poor decisions. By divining short, we increase clarity by reducing unpredictability.

Enchanting short doesn’t allow enough time for our magick to find the proper path to our desired result. Trying to make rain clouds appear on a sunny summer afternoon will prove too great a challenge for the will of most. Enchanting for rain week after next will stand a greater chance of success because it provides time for the weather to organize itself to your will, even if it means the proverbial butterfly across the globe needs to flap its wings to make it happen.

The more challenging our desire, the more precisely we must apply ourselves and our efforts. By working with the Chaotic nature our Universe, magicians effectively stack the deck in their favor.