That Old Rebel Yell

This article first appeared in Konton Magazine Volume 2, Issue 4 (Winter Solstice) and was reprinted in the anthology The Best of Konton Magazine.

Long before Jason Louv was ever collecting a paycheck from the Disinformation Company, he had it of the mind to occasionally drop a line or two (through submissions) on their news portal to help whet the palette of those readers thirsty for some occult gossip. It was in his article Current 156: KAOS/BABALON that Louv threw out the sentence: "KAOS-BABALON seems to be a re-uniting of the rebel yell of Chaos magic with the tried and true structure of Golden Dawn/Crowley style ceremonial magick" (2003). It wasn't long after that Jason Louv was chided by Current 156's purveyor Joel Biroco over Louv's lack of knowledge about Kaos-Babalon - an honor that I shared thanks to Biroco's response to an article I had written roughly a year later, of which Jason and I smirked about over Yuengling beers one cold Autumn day, during he and his roommates' barbecue in New York.

Chiding and occult knowledge aside, Louv's "rebel yell" statement stuck in the back of my head for quite some time as I wrapped up the tail end of my collection of new wave chaos magick reading material. Why did there seem to be a rebel yell throughout the hallowed halls of chaos magick's finest astral temples?

In an earlier article for Konton Magazine, I touch upon the Gnostic connotation of Hakim Bey's body of work - a work that has decidedly influenced the philosophies of many occultists in the chaos community (2005). This connection is more than just a passing correlation between Bey's chaos-like writings and Gnosticism. This connection exists deep-rooted in the very fabric of malleable reality that chaos magick calls home.

Gnosticism - recently getting "good" press thanks to Dan Brown's piecemeal investigative fiction The Da Vinci Code - were some of the first kids on the proverbial block to act out against that gray-bearded pappy in the sky; call daddy an idiot god; and insist on "rising up" against the falsely ordered monotony of daily living. The world is broken! Reject the archons and battle your way towards gnosis!

For those unfamiliar with the concept of the archons (and no, the weird bug thingies from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles don't count), they are the conceptual children of Sophia (wisdom); but having come directly from Sophia and not containing the divine spark, these archons were imperfect and especially jealous. They created the known world out of spite and continue to rule over it with an iron "ordered" fist.

Magick itself is retaliation against the ordered structure of what society and science tell us is reality. Magick bends and shapes reality to its will, all the while giving the archons of yesteryear the middle finger.

Occasionally, however, there comes a time, when those attempting to beat the system, become the system. Ceremonial magick became less an individual institution, and more just an institution, as different occult groups began to proliferate, prophesizing their future roles and bragging about their past lineage. As structures began to form inside of these occult groups, hierarchies and grade systems began imposing their own order on the tenderfoot occult seeker. Politics soon set in and you've now replaced one broken reality with another.

If various occult-astrological-religiosocietal mumbo-jumbo is to be believed (in terms of the ever-dawning "new age" that is always just around the corner), chaos magick stepped in as the birth of a new "aeon" began. From the outset it seemed that chaos magick was destined to rebel against stationary, ordered structure. It revitalized magick as a whole, even though some would-be chaotes still have no clue of the "what" and "how" of chaos magick's essence. It became the fringe of the fringe, frowned upon by many traditional occultists, but embraced by those that felt that even "magick" was becoming nothing more than commercialized fantasy governance.

It wasn't long before chaos magick infected the pop culture. In graphic novels, Grant Morrison brought the "too-cool-for-order" attitude to the Vertigo masses, while Alan Moore dug a little deeper and weaved the essence of chaos' Gnostic disregard for rulership throughout his many works. Chaos magick spread throughout the populace at such a fast rate, not necessarily because of its perceived endorsement of the "easy button" syndrome, but because of its underlying connection with the adolescent tendency to rebel against the ordered structure that their parents and culture imposed upon them.

To use the witty retort and defining mastery (you can't hear it, but there's sarcasm in my voice) of U.S. president George W. Bush (who infamously defined tribal sovereignty in much the same manner as I will use), chaos magick is just that: its magick that's chaotic. Structure has its place in any occult operation, but when we bring the same idea of "order" that has been ground into us from society and education, we ultimately resubmit ourselves to the mercy of the archonic figures that have plague culture since the beginning.

That old rebel yell that you hear, that's your natural inclination to reject the illusions that surround you in this broken world, and no occultural movement has represented that proclivity more than chaos magick. So just remember to listen to that voice (or voices) in the back of your head, when it's telling you that something just isn't right. Because when the "man" is keeping you down, that old rebel yell lights off a hell of spark to get the party going - and that's just what this world needs.