Decolonising Chaos Magick
Initial Thoughts
“In Palmares, in keeping with the cosmologies of Congolese and Angolan societies, magicians had been banned as inimical to the king’s authority. Among those people it was most often the case that legitimacy of authority and the very existence of social order were concomitants to the eradication of sorcery and witchcraft.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism
It is true that without Aleister Crowley & Madame Blavatsky we would not have been able to access the secrets of Tibet, and without that — most importantly — we would never have been gifted Twin Peaks. It is true, that at a time when the British Empire was at its highest pinnacle of evil, that these freakish Thelemites (to use the parlance of Crowley himself) & Theosophists pushed into ‘The Orient’ to advance the Western mind ensnared by the belief only the white man could provide the answers to the cosmos. However, as Phil Hine[1] expressed in What Theosophy Did For Us the relationship between Western occulture and Eastern philosophy is not merely that of an olive branch, and neither is it one of purely Aryan fascist tendency — it is a complex intermingling of ideologies resulting in “there [being] no actual Tibetans in the Theosophical Society” leading inexorably to an “increasing tendency to psychologize Buddhism”, where these ideas were rooted in linguistic traps, this-ing & that-ing something inherently immutable. The West had to organise and cosmologise the nature of these ‘foreign’ philosophies, and although (and we’ll never know for sure) the intentions of Blavatsky &co. were of sound, kind purpose to advance the human intellect, it is entrenched in the British ideologies of the time. We travelled out there. We took the knowledge we thought appropriate. We cut out the bits that did not match our higher, Westernised intellects, and we ignored the rest. This was purely an act of colonialism.
This practice still continues today. Mindfulness and Zen Buddhist practices have a lot in common, and I find when I read of certain Jainist/Buddhist texts they speak of the same mindfulness meditations but with influential forces from ‘demonic’ realms. Mindfulness teachers cannot capitalise on selling demons to Starbucks drinking sociopaths working at HarperCollins (a subsidiary of Murdoch et al no less[2]), but they can sell a little book of calm to the masses. The deep spirituality, the truth of the matter, has been removed to make it a palatable advert. In the same regard as Crowley pushed magickal practices into his own personal toy box, so do we now translate mythologies at best into TikTok videos and at worst into fascist tattoos.
This, in and of itself, is not colonialism. It would be foolish for the chaote (the chaos magician, the witch, any magickal practitioner) to tarnish with the same brush teenagers exploring their sense of identity in a social media infused realm with neo-fascism. A mistake when trying to express oneself is not the same as targeted, ongoing practices of intellectual reimagining. But if we are to be magicians — if we are to utilise the powers of magick for the benefit not just of the community, but the self — we must take responsibility for how we interact with these practices, spells, magicks, and mythopoeia. Even at the start of this article I wrote of Tibetan secrets; they were not secrets. They were not something hidden from Western eyes to be revealed to us at a later date. The human race already knew them. It just took time to get around the world and back again.
The phantasy of Oriental Magics — the exoticism of foreign beliefs — is a core tenet of the colonial magician. Magick, as Alan Moore describes in his series for Arte[3], is the unification of various intellectual fields; from this we ascertain that, on some level, magick is language. For many cultures, language was not merely a method of categorising the world, as the white man utilised his verbs & nouns, but was a method of empathising with ones fellow man, with the environment they lived within, and a vessel for cultures, memories, ancestral rites, and the spirit to be transported. When we use words like astral, akashic, anekantavada, obeah, voodoo, et cetera, we are connecting with a network of histories, each drawn up by different minds, different frequencies of humanity, but humanity no less — these are not just words for us to play with, although play is a keen aspect of the magickal arsenal; they are vessels for entire populations that white people have stamped into the earth for generations, generations still growing old the very moment you are reading this.
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” (often with the final fragment, “love is the law, love under will” removed) and “nothing is true, everything is permitted” are the linguistic weapons of the colonial magician. This is not to say everyone who uses these terms is a colonialist, or a ‘bad person’ — these ‘laws’ of magick possess in them great potential for kindness, empathy, and power of manifestation. However, when the love is removed, as I often see, the phrases gain new meanings. Rather than being about understanding that the world is comprised of constructs that we can dismantle for the benefit of our brothers, sisters, and kin, they become excuses for poor behaviour (at least) and outright fascism (at worst). The liberal will teach that racism does not exist, because they do not see race. This is because they are blind. Just because racism, transphobia, borders, and genocide are constructs of the human intellect, manifested through human behaviour, does not mean they are not real. We know nothing is true, because we can build any world we like (see: David Graeber). But men before us have been building the world long before you were even dreamt of; white men have been using these untrue constructions for generations to oppress & control. To be so foolish as to think that you can do anything you like because nothing is true, that you can always do what thou wilt for your own egotistical gains — that is the mark of the colonist. As we borrowed/stole from the Tibetan monks, from the dugpa, from red hats & black, so do we continue that legacy by believing it was always meant for us. So do we continue that legacy by believing we can do no wrong, because wrong is imaginary.
On the most basic level we can manifest decolonisation by respecting the boundaries of closed practices. It is beyond me why white magicians would want to evoke, for example, Baron Samedi, a spirit born from religions meeting on a colonial battleground, where culture had to find new ways of protecting itself. Is it not more prudent to look at your own history, and swell your power from there? Not because we need more borders between us and them, but because to feel that connection with your hometown, the soil beneath your feet, is in and of itself a power? There are however more complex manifestations of decoloniality, which are currently harder to grasp. We live in a world where our media, our governments, and even our friends & family, are indebted & invested in a mediocre game of falling empires. Capitalism. Voting records. Mortgages. These are foundational principles of the colonial society, and as an Englishman it is hard to see where we magicians can go to avoid becoming indebted to the same principles. As Blavatsky and Crowley were colonialists even in their attempts to bridge the divide, so is the modern-day occultist threatened in becoming the same breed of coloniser.
As magicians acutely aware of the constructed nature of reality — of omniversal lineages of experience, of the power of Yesod, the imagination, over what we see via our biologic sensors — we have to be mature enough to know our limitations. Just because we can “do what thou wilt” does not mean we can do whatever we like. In fact, the knowledge that most of experienced reality is some construct hand-me-down from colonial battlegrounds, and indigenous societies, gives us a greater clarity of what falls into the linguistic & systemic traps of colonialism, of what we should toy with and what we shouldn’t. “Love is the law” Crowley teaches. Although I am not a fan of Crowley and his practices — which seem entrenched in a patriarchal mode which modern occultists keep trying to reframe (a rant for another time)— it is this tenet we must never forget. If love is the law, then respect and sincerity come soon after.
With the power of our imaginations, or magickal intellect, and our awareness of the constructed nature of reality, we are prepared to open our eyes & ears to what is entrenched in these systems of coloniality. The school still using the ringing bell of the workhouse. Landlordism continuing the practice of stealing land from the indigenous population. Democracy as distraction. It is impossible in this short article to illustrate where coloniality exists in the modern occulture, but as magicians & witches it is our duty to untether ourselves from these systems of oppression. Magick, as language, as narrative, is how we propel the new, kinder beliefs of our time. Let us not leave the symbology of the occult to the fascists, to the colonisers. We must reclaim our oldest traditions, our newest methodologies of manifestation, so that we can begin, like the obeah, to fight against those who wish us to see nothing but fact, rather than truth.
