The Pact

Pete Carroll

Most occult traditions have complex and highly ordered otherworld cosmologies and metaphysical theories. Yet their accompanying techniques are frequently a shambles. In contradiction to all this, one of the fundamental insights of Chaos Magic is that if magical technique is sharply delineated it will work because the universe itself is more of a shambles than it appears. Or perhaps I should more respectfully say that it has the magical property of confirming most of the interpretations placed upon it. Thus a wide variety of metaphysical paradigms can be made to fit, even if mutually exclusive.

So when selecting from the Supermarket of Belief, the critical question for the Chaoist is: how effective are the accompanying magical techniques? Hence Chaoist magic is characterized by its cavalier attitude to metaphysics and its puritanical devotion to empirical techniques.

For some time Chaoist orthodoxy has had it that cavalier metaphysics and mythology are incompatible with the formal structure of a magical teaching order. However, this need not be so if it is only technique that is being taught and practiced. Experience has shown that people can come together and engage in highly productive exchanges of practical expertise, and that a formal structure and a division of labor encourage this.

The Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros, or the Pact for short, is an organizational structure for those wishing to perform Chaos type magic in company with others of like mind. The Pact exploits the device of a graded hierarchy, with certain checks and balances, and is delighted to admit candidates with the drive and initiative to rise rapidly through its structure.

Every occult revival begets a magical child or two and Chaoist Magic is the major synthesis to emerge from the occult renaissance of the last twenty years. The Pact is amongst the prime vehicles designed to develop and carry forward that synthesis well into the next millennium. It is likely that the Pact will be to the end of this century and to the beginning of the next, rather more than what the G.D. was in its time, a century ago.

In practice a number of the formal devices of the Pact are treated somewhat more lightly than the written conventions might lead one to suppose, with members styling themselves with such oddities as Frater Vacuity or Soror Impropriety and so on, in deliberate parody of tradition. The prime functions of the grade structure are to provide a mechanism for the exclusion of certain psychotic misanthropes and neurotic creeps who are sometimes attracted to such enterprises and to ensure that that which needs organization is duly attended to.

Persons who, having read and carefully considered the accompanying information and conventions of the Pact, are interested in contributing to its activities may submit an extensive letter of application to: OBLIVION, PO Box 18514, Encino, CA 91416-8514, USA