A Gnostic View of Hakim Bey's Chaos Influence

This article first appeared in Konton Magazine Volume 2, Issue 3 (Autumnal Equinox) and was reprinted in the anthology The Best of Konton Magazine.

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has brought the mystery of the Gnostic religion out of the shadows of contemporary spiritual and occult thought, and into a limelight that it would have never imagined centuries ago. But despite its current state as a pop culture, water cooler discussion point, Gnosticism itself has quietly influenced many of the underground movements of today's occulture and counterculture societies, including Chaos magick, and one of Chaos magick's current gems: Hakim Bey.

In T.A.Z.'s Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism, Hakim Bey begins with the proclamation that "CHAOS NEVER DIED" (1991). He speaks of the primordial, the undifferentiated oneness-of-being. In Gnosticism, this is viewed as the Pleroma, or "empty fullness," a state of infinite possibilities and nothingness all rolled into one singular state/non-state. This is the primal source of all in Gnostic dogma, and with Gnosticism feeling broad strokes of influence from the Greek philosophers, it isn't hard to speculate that the Gnostic "Pleroma" is synonymous with the Greek "Chaos" from which the world sprang forth.

Reading many of the passages that follow the aforementioned evangelical rant (especially when pulled out of the general context into more minute bite-sized morsels), one notices that the pen strokes of Bey's writing spew forth with plenty of Gnostic influence, including an anarchic finger point towards the "establishment:"

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions. (1991)

In Aimless Wandering, Hakim Bey uses scientific chaos theory and Taoist philosophical rhetoric to analyze the problems of language – a language that was given to you by "them" – as it was critiqued in ancient times by Taoist legend Chuang-Tzu. Bey offered up "chaos linguistics" because of this, which in turn gave rise to "anarchist poetics." Chuang-Tzu, of course, proposed a critique of language, which became highly influential in the modern counterculture's distrust of words, much as Hakim Bey's anarchism influences the counterculture's revolutionary ideology.

But when you blur the antagonist of the finger points – the "them" – by making no assumptions of the real progenitor, it becomes rather clear that Bey's "establishment" is not necessarily government. Instead, this "establishment" resembles order in its most corrupted sense. The governmental body of paper pushing lawmakers is just one manifestation of this attempt at order gone awry. The original source of such negligent, power hungry ant farmers lies in the Gnostic concept of the Archons.

In the Gnostic tradition, the Pleroma birthed Sophia, who, in turn, begat the Archons - rulers jealous of their mother's ability to create. Out of spite, these Archons created an entire universe over which they set themselves up as gods. However, these imperfect gods' universe (the one in which we live) is cruel and flawed. Much of Gnostic history and literature refers to the injustices of this cruel world.

These Archons have created a false order – a veil of injustice and suffering that at first glance seems like a democratic, orderly society. In truth though, it is just eye candy meant to distract us from the cruelty and lies that make up our imperfect world. It keeps our actions passive, imaginary even, while these slave driving Archons suck the life from our very marrow.

In Sorcery, Hakim Bey broaches the subject of real action versus this imaginary action by attempting to peal the veil of ignorance from the eyes of a counterculture that swears the veil only belongs to the mainstream:

The universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity--those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes. (p. 332)

Bey rightly attacks those theoreticians whose sole drive in life is to read and read and read, but whom never act. He takes shots at everybody and anybody who fails to integrate their "spiritual" enlightenment into the mundane world that represents current reality, even going so far as to critique magick as smoke and mirrors unless properly utilized:

No, not the spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass--if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science--not that weak blavatskian crap. (p. 332)

Bey wishes to awaken the sleepers of civilization. He wants to overturn their thinly veiled fantasies and stomp on their dogmatism. He promotes actions and experience in the real world.

Similarly, Gnosticism promotes its own awakening, called gnosis, a subjective experience of the knowing relationship with divinity. Gnostics hold tightly to the belief that one must personally experience said relationship, and not rely on some third-party intervention or instruction, in order to break the veil and see the world in its proper light.

This gnosis, this enlightenment, is the God state of mind. It is the same gnosis referred to in Chaos magick as the state in which magick occurs.

Hakim Bey's influence on Chaos magick and the current countercultural awakening is undeniable; but despite his highly Islamic and Arabic literary ancestry, Bey has a distinct Gnostic tone to his work that is on par with even someone such as a Philip K. Dick.

It took Grant Morrison's comic books to bring Chaos magick into pop culture and pop culture into the chaos; but now if Chaos magickians want to further grow their roots beyond the face value counterculture of the fad upstart movement, they must look towards the influences of such writers as Morrison, Bey, Pete Carroll, and Austin Osman Spare, and Gnosticism (considering its powerful influence on The Matrix, Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, etc.) seems as good a place as any to start.