In his final published work, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, the late Richard Rorty coined the term “pan-relationalism,” laying it out as the position of anyone who would accept the following propositions:
“A property is simply a hypothesized predicate, so there are no properties which are incapable of being captured in language. Predication is a way of relating things to other things, a way of hooking up bits of the universe with other bits of the universe, or if you like, a way of spot lighting certain webs of relationships rather than other webs.
All properties are the hypothestatizations of webs of relationships. Whether you think these webs exist realistically as somehow there before the invention of predicates or whether you think of them anti-realistically as coming into existence along with such inventions is a matter of complete indifference. That is a paradigm of the kind of question which pragmatists dismiss as making no difference to practice, and therefore making no difference tout court“
While a particularly wordy and linguistic claim, we also see it defined in a simpler way, though more apt to misinterpretation, as, “thinking of things as being as they are in virtue of their relation to other things…”
Those in the know will notice a similarity to certain Buddhist ideas, such as “emptiness,” the idea that there is no self-sufficient essence or identity among phenomena; “dependent origination”, that all things originate, arise and have their identity by virtue of impermanent and contingent relations; and “sankhara”, translated as “formations” or “determinations,” being conditioned phenomena. Guy Newland, Buddhist scholar known best for his work on the philosophy of Tsongkhapa and the Gelukpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, writes,
“We are correct to intuit that there cannot be relationships without some related entities. Relationships do not exist apart from that which is related. However, we are profoundly wrong to believe that there must be ultimately real things- unrelated and independent things- that just happen to be there on their own, and then later relate to one another. Through meditating on how things are empty because they are dependent arisings, we strain our mind to see that things exist only insofar as they are related to other things- none of which is ultimately real. Since nothing has its own way to set itself up, each and every thing is the expression of vast networks of relationship with and among other things.”
While there is much room for philosophical analysis and debate around the similarities and differences among these two positions, if you can get a taste for one, I’m sure you can stomach the other. For our purposes, we can see them as differences in vocabulary, saying the same thing in different registers despite any metaphysical differences and fringe arguments like “Does Emptiness exist ultimately?” or “Are our statements about reality conventionally true or are they useful ways of communicating inexpressible things?”
As a Chaos Magician, you may find you have already adopted a position in line with this label as well. In the groundbreaking work of Chaos Magick that is Liber Null, Peter Carroll speaks of the universe as being of five distinct (at least distinct enough to name) pieces. Kia, Chaos, Mind, Matter and Aether. While there are distinctions, there is notable crossover. Chaos is said to be “most concentratedly manifest in the human life force, or Kia, where it is the source of consciousness.” Chaos and Matter are given an oppositional, mediated relationship, as are Kia and Mind, with Aether being in between these oppositions. Aether is described by Carroll as “half-formed substance” and “dualistic matter but of a very tenuous and probabilistic nature.” Its relation to Chaos, is also noted.
“It is from the bizarre and indeterminate nature of the aetheric plane that Chaos gets its name, for Chaos cannot be known directly.”
While Carroll can not be called a pan-relationalist exactly, there is again a familial resemblance between what he says about these concepts, particularly when he speaks about Chaos and Kia.
“Kia cannot be experienced directly because it is the basis of consciousness (or experience), and it has no fixed qualities which the mind can latch on to.”
“Space, time, mass, and energy originate from Chaos, have their being in Chaos, and through the agency of the aether are moved by Chaos into the multiple forms of existence.”
Consider the world of apparent dualisms we inhabit. The mind views a picture of this world in which everything is double. A thing is said to exist and exert certain properties. Being and Doing.”
All things appear as “dualistic” for Carroll (or rather, for US according TO Carroll), always already in relation to other things, in order to be made intelligible.
“Duality describes humanity’s usual condition. Happiness exists only because of misery, pain because of comfort, good because of evil, yang because of yin, black because of white, birth because of death, and existence because of non-existence. All phenomena must be paired, as the senses are only equipped to perceive differences. The thinking mind has the property of splitting everything it encounters into two, as it is a dualistic thing itself.”
Carroll presents all things as, in appearance at least, only intelligible in terms of difference and therefore, in terms of relations to its opposite. We can see that all possible opposites can be contrasted with more and varied opposites( “High magic recognizes the dualistic condition but does not care whether life is bittersweet or sweet and sour;). Carroll seems to be giving us an out to consider all possible things as only knowable in terms of their relationship to other things on a phenomenal or experiential level, as far as language and everyday consciousness is concerned. While the idea that “there are no properties which are incapable of being captured in language.” may not jive with Carroll (In addition to our previous quotes of the inexpressible nature of Carroll’s entities, Carroll’s original version of Liber Null used the term Tao in place of Chaos and we are all reminded that “the Tao which can be named is not the true Tao”, expressly denying language can capture it.), it’s possible that we may skirt these issues by agreement that this pan-relationalist position refers to the world of phenomena available to typical human existence and anything beyond that verges into the realm of “unverified personal gnosis” and metaphysical speculation. I much prefer what Carroll has to say in his “second book”, Psychonaut, which I feel shows a better understanding of the relativity of any particular paradigm or vocabulary,
“EVERY SYSTEM of thought and understanding stems from a number of basic postulates about the universe and man’s relationship to it. These ideas and assumptions go to make up the paradigm or dominant worldview through which a culture or an individual interacts with its universe. Aeons are marked by the passage of various great metaphysical thought paradigms rather than by the passage of set periods of historical time. Within each great paradigm there will be lesser paradigms which contribute to the whole. For example, in the dominant White-AngloSaxon-Protestant culture of Europe and America, the main paradigms are Protestant-Atheism, with its dependent paradigms of liberal humanistic individualism and the work ethic, and science with its dependent paradigms of causality and materialism. Other cultures have had, and still do have, completely different worldviews which it is difficult for an outsider to enter. The Universe (being the accommodating creature that she is) will tend to provide confirmation of any paradigm one chooses to live in.”
Robert Anton Wilson’s famous, “what the thinkers thinks, the prover proves” may come to mind as we read this, and I submit, is another way of showing the way we understand the world around us and it’s properties is by, as Rorty said, “…spot lighting certain webs of relationships rather than other webs.” I would also like to place an emphasis on the last part of our opening Rorty quote, “That is a paradigmn of the kind of question which pragmatists dismiss as making no difference to practice, and therefore making no difference tout court”. Compare such a notion to Carroll’s own ending statements of this section of Liber Null;
“the very mutability of the aetheric which has given rise to such a bewildering variety of magical activity and supportive thought forms all over the universe. When stripped of local symbolism and terminology, all systems show a remarkable uniformity of method.”
These ideas, I find, are the far more influential and interesting, and amount to what I see as the predominant pragmatist influence on Chaos Magick. In contemporary Chaos Magick it is not a controversial statement to say that all things are merely the sum of their relationships to each other, and relationships can be, for lack of a better term, discovered or constructed mentally, physically, socially, and so on. The axiom “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” makes the aspects of belief, both private and public, central to the claims of “Truth” or “reality” for the Chaos magician. The arbitrary nature of beliefs, or more accurately, the models we use to make sense of phenomena, is given the same ground that the Pragmatists have made use of in determining the validity of such models; utility. If such beliefs and models have no effect on the practice, they can be ignored, discarded, and forgotten. When they do, they must be judged on the basis of their usefulness for any given individual or group.
I bring all of this to the attention of occultists to highlight what I see as a predominant sentiment in Chaos Magick, and given Chaos magick’s privileged position as the dominant paradigm within contemporary occultism, magick in general. There is a mistaken sentiment that ANY position is as good as any other, and there are no grounds to criticize the models and positions of other occultists. We are simply to accept that if someone says they are getting results from their models and methods, we should keep silent. While it may be true that we cannot know how and to what extent any individual is getting results, short of the sort of access and monitoring of the individual that many magicians aren’t capable of doing for themselves, let alone others, to fall into a sort of quietism about magical practice that, in my estimation, feels entirely contrary to the principles of Scientific Illuminism and results-based practices that are the foundation for Chaos Magick as a methodology. The failure to grasp that utility can extend beyond the individual and into a community of like minds seems to be lost on many practitioners. Why the prohibition of discussing ideas, models, and techniques with any seriousness? While discussions of magic are common, the Chaos Magick community has a common refrain when asked a question about a particular technique, practice, or model: Try it out yourself. Admirable in a certain sense, but it betrays the situation. Many practitioners are of the position that occultism is entirely the field of subjective experience, and therefore, there is no reasonable response to anyone asking about any practice they engage in or could engage with. I think many practitioners see such a position as “no position,” i.e., a position that doesn’t have any presuppositions or makes claims. It’s particularly troublesome and shows the way in which our background understanding of ourselves and our shared practices are inseparable from HOW things appear to us in the world. To steal more from Buddhism, they are milk and water, finding where one starts and the other ends leads to nothing but what we have already spoken of: an utter lack of characteristics that are not relational or referential. In a much earlier work, Rorty spoke of a disposition he saw as being necessary for political and social participation of philosophers. He called this position Ironism. He described it in a way that touches what we’ve already spoken on;
“1. She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;
2. She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;
3. Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.”
The position of Ironism is, at our best, I believe, the chaote perspective. One that denies the final word on any particular model or way of describing reality and is always open to other possibilities. Such a position could be, in theory, what I see as quietism (“Test it yourself”) and nihilism (“Nothing means anything outside of your subjective experience”), but if our goal is to be capable of discourse that can bring benefits to ourselves and others, then such positions are destitute in the worst possible ways.
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s work All Things Shining discusses what I see as the necessary skill to be an Ironist, or a Chaos Magician. That is a nurturing and cultivating of “being” called poesis.
“That nurturing practice was called poiesis. Until about a hundred years ago, the cultivating and nurturing practices of poiesis organized a central way things mattered. The poietic style manifested itself, among other places, in the craftsman’s skills for bringing things out at their best.”
This is one of three understandings of “the sacred”, which for our purposes we can view as ways of understanding relations, of understanding being.
“The hidden history of the West—the history of the ways the practices have gathered to reveal the possibility of sacred, shining things—has bequeathed to us not one form of the sacred, but a variety of different and incompatible types. Physis, poiesis, and technology show us, respectively, a wild, ecstatic sacred that lifts us up like a wave; a gentle, nurturing style that brings things out at their sacred best; and an autonomous and self-sufficient way of life that laughs at everything of sacred worth.”
These three views, for Dreyfus and Kelly’s project, are analyzed and contrasted in order to find an escape to the contemporary issues of nihilism(expressed in technological understanding of the world), and combated with the other two in a combined sense.
“To recognize when it’s appropriate to let oneself be swept up and when it’s appropriate to walk away is a higher-order skill that is crucial for us in the contemporary world. To acquire this skill, like any skill, requires taking risks as we shall see later. For the moment, however, it is sufficient to note that such a skill allows us to cultivate one prominent form of the sacred available in the culture today. Meta-poiesis, as one might call it, steers between the twin dangers of the secular age: it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form. Living well in our secular, nihilistic age, therefore, requires the higher-order skill of recognizing when to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when to turn heel and walk rapidly away.”
The term meta-poesis can be seen, from the Chaos magick perspective, as the ability to allow ourselves to find new and better meanings, experiences and practices, and engage in the wonder of existence, without becoming either totalitarian or dogmatic in our view while still pursuing utility for our aims and an appreciation of the spiritual, the beautiful, the transcendent in multiple forms. The development of a skill, a magical “discernment,” the ability to know when and how to allow ourselves to be pulled into the whooshing, ecstatic experiences and when to maintain our composure and, if necessary, our detachment from the world, seems not only necessary, but the ideal one for Chaos Magick. Of course, this is also the genesis of the issue we have now: chaotes ARE capable of remaining detached and holding an ironic sense of aloofness to magic and the experiences we have of it. How are we to know when these experiences warrant an attitude of seriousness or involvement, then, if our ability to detach from them can no longer be overcome, only intentionally allowed to withdraw? More so, how do we approach such an issue from a perspective of community, with community as a dialog amongst not just its individual members, but with the entirety of such a community and the way of life such a community allows?
Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla presented an analysis of what he saw as a purely Mexican phenomenon, one that was particular to the Geist (the spirit) of the Mexican people. Relajo, a Spanish word translated variously as relaxation or calm, is the designation Portilla gives for a response to a value, a negation on the basis of refusal to “take the value seriously.” Not a negation on the basis of a differing value or negation on the basis of presenting an alternative view, but negation on the basis of refusal to realize the value, and one that is not a personal negation but one meant to incite others, to bring them together in their abdication of the value presented. Making a fart noise at the quiet part of the very serious and heartfelt address at your college graduation, suddenly duck walking during the parade of solemn military faces, or, to use a magic example I’ve stolen from Stephen Skinner, saying “Alice Bailey” at the peak of a ritual to upend the whole of the operation. Such a move is what I’ve noticed in the world of occult discourse. Whether by making a joke of anyone who would ask a question or mockery for their attempts to “gatekeep” (more on that later). While this quietism and nihilism may appear on its face as an attempt to remain in an “acceptable” view within the Chaos Magick perspective, I would suggest that they are more insidious attempts at negating any attempt to seriously discuss magic as a shared human practice. Furthermore, my own pragmatist view falters in this regard as well. Much as Dreyfus called the technological worldview one that “laughs at everything of sacred worth”, this view can hold “the sacred” for individual purposes, but by necessity is unable to address the way in which it historically appears; not as a position of a person they might hope to convince you of, but shared just as the world is shared.
Is this a problem? Particularly for the pragmatist or choate, who is willing to take all positions as equally valid and only discriminates on the basis of utility? As with all magicians, we must ask what our intention is. Is our goal to break down discourse about magickal or occult practices and leave everyone in a state of feeling out their own subjective experience? Or is our goal to facilitate conversations about magick that may be illuminating, open new ways of understanding our practices, or improve existing techniques and technologies? I would submit that the reason is possibly a more subtle undercurrent, one that also touches on Pragmatism and its ethical implications. Perhaps one of the most misunderstood areas of this is motivated, in theory, by an anti-authoritarian sentiment. No one wants to be responsible for denying someone or standing as an authority over other practitioners if the presuppositions of Chaos magick are correct. Again, Ironism would be the position that could allow for such strong stances to be had, as all Ironist positions are neither final nor exclusionary, but such a sentiment is not popular amongst Chaotes simply because the goal is not inquiry or analysis, but negation of the value of honest inquiry. As long as attempts to discuss magic are confined to personal subjectivity and individual experimentation, there can be no authority that lords itself over other practitioners for not doing things right. The term “Gatekeeping” is often used for anyone who would seek to tell you what you are and what you aren’t allowed to practice (typically, these amount to “closed traditions,” cultural practices that are viewed as prohibited for both social and metaphysical reasons, but occasionally refer to hard-nosed traditional types who may simply disapprove of individuals not following prescribed rules and such.), but this derogatory term can and will be leveled against anyone who would do the very things I’m attempting to say we need: earnestly discuss opinions, theories, and practices on the basis of expertise.
The appeal to expertise is something not often talked about in magic, as it’s fairly easy to deny the reality of anyone who would claim to be an expert. While in more stratified religious traditions we DO have particular standards and methods of education, and several traditions have their own initiatory and educational programs, such as the Golden Dawn, A.’.A.’., Voodoo, and Indigenous esoteric practices, the contemporary age of internet research and the “folk chaote” view has made any attempt at claiming expertise without a standard. (Folk chaote is a term coined by my Cohost to refer to the way in which ideas of Chaos Magick have not only proliferated but have also become integrated into other forms of occultism and even become a general attitude towards esoteric practice). This is where we find the current era of occult youtube lessons, online courses, and Patreon programs. Instead of directing people on the basis of cultural, institutional understandings of expertise, we are left with the standards of advertisement and reputation. I will not mince words with you all; writing a lot about magic is not the same as having any skill in it. Talking a lot about magic is not the same as having occult knowledge. The ability to list all the names of God from the Shempamphorash, or the cosmology of the Orphic cult, are academic concerns if they do not translate into practical applications, and for the purposes of learning, they should be practical applications of quality. This is partly why I am discussing the subcultural discourse of occultism and not advocating for my own position as an expert of magic. The situation, it seems, is that those who carry social capital, those that have marketing and networking skills, and those who have the material means to construct “education products” for public consumption are regarded as experts. Maybe such a position is not particularly far off from other experts; surely doctors are experts because they have the necessary material means to receive such an education, the necessary marketing skills to build a practice or gain a respectable position in a medical institution, and all of this amounts to social capital. The rub is, as we said earlier, that there are no socially accepted programs or institutions for the study of magic, whether in society at large or the community of Chaos magicians. Perhaps there should or shouldn’t be, and they must all start somewhere, but at the time of this writing, if you got an academic degree in the study of magic (or a fancier term that means essentially that), you would probably be looked at the same way someone with a degree in homeopathic medicine is, even if it was from some prestigious organization like Harvard, and if you’ve written a book on magick you’re one of a million voices competing with not just other occultists, but virtually any fringe niche of 18-40 year olds with expendable income who needs to fill the void.
I am perhaps being too harsh. There are a number of voices in contemporary occultism (and chaos magick in particular) that are neither quietism, nihilism nor authoritarian. While working on this article, I shared an earlier draft with a friend, Soror Vulpecula ,who gave a rather insightful response even if I disagree with it.
“I think my main thought coming out of your essay can be summed up as this: I think the nihilism is a convenient projection of most chaotes, and not inherent to the methodology. I always tack on a classifier when I say belief is a tool, I say something to the effect of “belief is a tool in service of gnosis” and go on to explain what gnosis is. I think some of the most poignant innovations in the past few decades of CM have come from us deconditioning ourselves from the chains of consensus reality, only to find something deeper underneath to bond and network over. This, I think, is why egregores, godforms, and servitors have flourished as the tech of choice in modern CM spheres, its easiest to talk about gnostic experiences in relation to an incorporeal entity who is born of an incomprehensible feedback loop with human society than basically anything else we have to talk about in the modern age. I don’t think CM is doomed and needs some overhaul to keep it from destroying meaning, just like postmodernism didn’t need that either. We just need to be more explicit about what our methods are in service of, why we treat belief as a tool. We need to accept that we are the pragmatic school of Western perrenialism and embrace it.”
While my response to this was metaphysical nitpicking, ultimately, she is talking my language; if we are to move forward, it will require a course correction.
There are, despite my complaints, several voices in contemporary occultism that are immune to these criticisms. Tommie Kelly from “Adventures in Woo Woo” seems to exemplify the Ironist position quite well, Alley Wurds who has been working on various works ranging from constructed languages, Butoh and expanding upon Robert Anton Wilson’s Eight Circuit Model of consciousness in ways we would call “pan-relational”, just to name two that I consider friends doing their part for the culture. Even some popular writers of the last few decades, people like Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford in their “Baptist Head” works in particular, and Aiden Watcher, while possibly not what we would call “good pan-relationalists”, are all figures who despite having strong thoughts on occultism, seem to be more than willing to concede this is in their particular way of discussing magic and is not exhaustive. Wachter is perhaps the best example, as even the title of his most read work, “Six Ways: Approaches & Entries for Practical Magic” reads like the kind of way to discuss magic I am presenting. Despite his own clear opinions on the centrality of animism, Wachter provides very pragmatic and utilitarian instruction anyone can use. The issue is, as always, the masses of occultists in the community who may be reading these figures but not taking to heart the positions they take. Even so, the popularity of these figures amongst them are dubious for the above reasons, even if I think there may be merit in what these occultists are doing. Perhaps it is telling that despite literal decades of growth from the beginnings of Chaos Magick presented by Carroll, we have only become more concerned with magick as a subjective experience of individuals and less with the development of the methodology and practical applications that could serve ourselves and others, and this attitude has increasingly infected how occultism is seen as a whole. Then again, it’s possible that the seed of this was here from the start. In Null, Peter Carroll repeats the often invoked definition of magick given by Aleister Crowley(“‘magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will”), but in earlier versions of it Carroll had an interesting reformation; “Magic maybe defined as the science and art of willed change in perception”. This limitation of magick to perception is more than just relegating magic to the realm of sensory alteration (Carroll in older and current revisions of Liber Null states his belief that will and perception are a dualism of Kia/Mind) but it does show a bias, if not a privileging, of subjectivity and private mental states, and more broadly the pervasive world view they spawn from and the community who accepts that view as their own most days. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the cosmology of Carroll in Liber Null and should take the advice of Psychonaut‘s Carroll and view his own system of Chaos and Aether as a simply his vocabulary and not one seeking the final word on this conversation. At the very least, Carroll’s view is his own and his “pursuit of a nameless hidden thing” is, in its own way, as admirable as the mistaken philosophers and scientists for the good it has brought us, and as damnable as the consequences it’s unleashed. A community of people who cannot engage in serious inquiry and cannot find a metric with which to judge it’s fellow practitioners is one of the latter. This is the two-pronged issue we face. A culture that sits in judgment of anyone who would dare stand as an authority (even if this is the authority of skill and ability that can still account for itself as one possible way of understanding things), while also having no standards by which we could judge those who do give such opinions that aren’t “well, they’re popular.”
What is to be done with this? I’m uncertain; I have only suspicions and suggestions. My first is an honest reflection upon the possibility of you and others are carrying around sentiments that are purely negations of communal values. While it may be admirable in certain senses to attempt to remove ourselves and others from the authority of the human and non-human, the negation of values has lead to both nihility in our magical lives, and the inability to properly discuss aspects of it even preliminarily. My second suggestion is a pragmatic position, an ironist position, with the full honesty of that position. Stand firm in your work as a magician and your views; just don’t remain attached to them as a “final vocabulary.” Be willing to discuss this as if it has implications for a human community, because it does.
My suspicion is that this is a problem that in the occult world because we are in similar situations elsewhere. Individualism is what we are conditioned to see in the anarchistic and libertine world of contemporary occultism, but a equally valid way to describe it would be atomized, alienated, removed. Our world now has swollen to potentially include every person that has ever uttered the word “abracadabra” and more via networks of communication and media never before seen in the history of mankind, and yet more and more often is reduced, flattened and deflated by our both algorithmic processes meant to corral our attention for profit and our own active curration of these networks to avoid unpleasantries. This isn’t a moralizing “you need to have conversations with Nazis” moment, I’m simply pointing out that we increasingly have singular and particular worldviews curating our experiences and then reinforcing that view, and that view increasingly has the illusion of impartiality if it can account for all other views. In contemporary politics, it seems an awful lot like liberalism, which rests on assumptions about how individuals act and are entitled to in the world that, at one time, were radically forward thinking, and now are of service to repressive ideologies and social practices of production and control. In the occult, this is Chaos magick, whose radical redescription and pragmatic reduction of many different practices on the basis of utility and application through the lens of a kind of metaphysics of experience and subjectivity was at one time the cutting edge of occultism, now is holding back further development by a pervasive undercurrent that is losing itself in the same bog of nihilism philosophy has been digging through the long 19th century. We don’t need to keep digging. While nothing I have suggested will solve the issues that brought us here, to be able to find a new way to talk about magic as a practice that gets beyond the conventional, flawed subjectivity discourse of belief and individually projected meaning seems to be something that might, at the very least, pat back down some dirt.