The current is changing. Again.

Magic is no longer the exclusive province of grey-beard occultists, tree hugging crystal mongers and blue-haired old lady fortune-tellers.

Once again the world is seeing a magical "revival". In fact, this time it's a revival within a revival. Ever since the 1960's, the magical world-view has been rising in popularity, although most of this current was siezed upon by the New Age bunny-foo-foo-white-light-feel-goodys, and we get to squirm at the spectacle of yuppies with more money than sense dropping thousands of bucks to participate in seminars teaching cheap tricks like fire-pit walking and spending simililar amounts on "crystal healing vibration generators" consisting of a cheap plastic box, six square inches of velvet polyester and a rock.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the grand exalted pooh-bahs belonging to "mystical Orders" with pretentious names like The Ancient and Accepted Brotherhood of Magickal Adeptus Majors . Occasional variants include the Tai Chi Masters of the Secret Hidden Tanrta or the Followers of the Great Magus What's-His-Nameus . These types will be notable for their ability to rattle off long lists of enlightned authors of sacred tomes, usually only acceptable if their sources are (supposedly) over one thousand years old, are unpublished outside their "circle", and/or are written in Latin, Mandarin or Sanskrit. If you really think it's your true purpose in life to spend a couple of decades practicing your "kerazzas" or "middle pillar" exercises under the tutalage of some old guy with a stick who must be addressed as "master" and then only with your head on the floor and your butt in the air, then please drop this book now and go find them. You'll be happier, trust me.

Be aware that due to the pressure of political correctness these days, only the occasional "avatar" of the Sacred Seunzikiko Whoopie will be so boorish as to insist that theirs is the "only" way to enlightenment/power/nirvana/cosmic truth. With a condscending smile they will inform you that, yes, there are many paths to the "truth", but theirs however is the only one that any person with sense/strength/seriousness/dedication/the right stuff/in their right mind could possibly choose unless they were a total idiot. And since you're not on their path, this means you, you upstart little Chaos Mage.

This by no means implies that old-school occultists are all like that. I have many friends in such organizations and they are very pleasent companions; they appreciate the rush of fresh air that Chaos Magic has brought to the occult world - it keeps them from taking themselves too seriously.

However, there are some people who are taking up the study of magic with a clear head, and trying to integrate the theories of modern science into a magical paradigm that can function without the need of being sanctioned by a "higher power"; to take the advancements of philosophy and apply them to something other than sarcasm and cosmic one-ups-manship. Religion has held the rights to mystical experience for far too long; it's time for a new way of thought that transcends transcendentalism.

Nor is it the first time this has happened in the long history of the mystical arts. The priests of Horus overthrew the followers of Set in ancient Egypt. A millenium later Moses out-magicked the heirs of that priesthood to set his people free. And their entrenched hierarchy was in turn overthrown a millenium later by a precocious young carpenter and magician extraordinare from the small town of Bethlehem.

And so it goes.

It seems like spiritual revolutions are a requirement of history. Only now they come, like everything else, fast and furious. The unpretentious carpenter's pretentious heirs did their level best to stamp out all competition, but along the time that we now call the Rennesience came another revolution in mysticism. However, getting there was not much fun, as many, many thousands of people were put to death in Europe alone for worshipping the wrong god.

In the 19th century some people tried to unearth the old occult knowledge, and succeeded to some degree; the period saw the emergence of the Rosicrucians (whose desendants still run those cute ads in the backs of comic books) and a particularly successful offshoot called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. One of their notable alumni was an eccentric Englishman from a well-to-do family named Alexander (aka Aleister) Edward Crowley. He was considered quite the wet-behind-the-ears radical in his time. He got called "The Wickedest Man Alive" by the English press and spent most of his life trying to live up to the label. He produced what might have been the forerunner of modern "performance art" as well: a series of magical ceremonies conducted for a paying audience in London. The fact that many of the scenes featured nudity was probably what annoyed the Victorians so much.

Then he really annoyed the occult establishment by publishing a lot of the Golden Dawn's and other "secret" occult societies "secrets" for consumption by the general public, and proclaimed himself the "Magus of the New Aeon".

He's had a lot of company since then.

New Aeons and Magi to accompany them come, as I said, fast and furious these days. The life expectancy of a Magical Aeon is about five years as of this writing. Why is it all coming to a head now?

We are lucky (or unlucky) enough to be incarnate at the dawn of a new millenium. If one happens to have a propensity for dabbling in the occult arts, then the lesson of history should be heeded. The last time a millenium change rolled around, most of Europe was caught up in a raging case of "Millenium Fever". The appearence of the Black Death did nothing to assuage the creeping feeling that the world was coming to an end. Doomsayers filled every public square. People cast off their worldly goods in a frenzy, scourged themselves bloody, went off on impossible pilgramages of hundreds of miles on foot and generally went stark raving mad, all because a particular calendar date loomed in the near future. It didn't matter that the date itself was completely arbitrary - in fact, as near as modern historians can figure, the carpenter-magician's year of birth was probably what we would call 4 BC, so one thousand years hence would have been 996 AD!

As we well know, both that date and 1000 AD came and went and the Second Coming didn't come. So Chrisendom celebrated their reprieve by throwing the Dark Ages and spent the next couple of hundred years roasting alive a few million heretics. Those people sure knew how to party.

Now the town squares are filling with raving doomsayers once again, and mass graveyards are filling with the bodies of the poor saps who didn't have enough sense to just say no to the kool-aid. The strange thing about "End Of The World" cults is that when the end of the world is, as usual, a no-show, the followers don't do the sensible thing and rip the arms and legs off of the leaders that deceived them. No, instead the leaders manage to transfer the blame for their lack of divinitory talent onto those who didn't believe them in the first place and their sheep, being sheep, go along with it! It happened one thousand years ago ("...it was those filthy heretical Moslems who controlled Jeruselem and made it an unfit place for Christ to return to - yeah, that's it...") and believe me, my magical brothers and sisters, it's likely to happen again!

And the stakes are even higher this time around. The Cold War may be "over", but there's still more than enough megatonnage scattered around to turn the planet into a radioactive slag heap. And sooner or later, some group of religious fanatics is going to get their hands on a nuclear device and decide to do little cleansing of the heretics somewhere. It's bound to happen.

What's a magician to do?

Even among the occult cognesetti, a whole lot of time and energy is wasted lambasting each other, either as groups or individuals, that would be better spent doing just about anything else. There are easily dozens of magical "systems" and most of them have the same nasty habit as the religionists: thinking that theirs is The One And Only True Way .

The Chaos Magicians are here to announce: there is no One And Only True Way . All systems are equally right, and all of them are equally wrong. The evidence is clear, if one bothers to take off the blinders and look at it.

First one must assume that magic exists in the first place. All systems of magic throughout history have proceeded from this basic assumption. Remember that the scientific method itself must always proceed from basic assumptions before it goes about testing them. The logical error that has invariably crept into magical thinking is that when a certain system's techniques yield positive results, it is some sort of proof that said techniques are the only ones that yield positive results. It's like saying that because one catches a fish with one kind of bait, then that is the only kind of bait that can catch a fish!

So we end up with dozens of magical systems, each one claiming, due to their limited successes, that theirs is the The One And Only True Way of magic.

The challange of the current generation of mages is to jolt the putrifying corpse of the occult back to life and then drag it kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The subject of this book is the answer to that challange:

Chaos Magic.

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