Christopher: I know that it was the magic part that attracted to me even into Wicca. Danger is one of the excuses used not to teach teenagers magic, because of their constant roller coaster emotional ride makes for poor choices and decisions. Then there is unexpected consequences. We get results but in some other way than we expected. In Wicca we have a few people afraid of using magic at all for fear it might even accidentally cause unexpected harm to someone.
How much of this fear is overblown from your experience? Have you run into any areas where you felt yourself to be in danger in your magical practice?
Phil: I think in part, it relates to control - and the inherent unpredictability of magic. As you say, results come “in some other way than we expected”. Despite much gassing about magic being a science it still doesn’t have that 1-to-1 repeatability - do ritual x and you will have result y - has it?
I actually think it’s okay to be have concerns about it. Many years ago, whilst I was training to be a therapist, I had an experience which comes to mind on this subject. I was working in a psychiatric dept and my boss and I were doing this “guided visualization” - walking a group of clients into a forest. Fairly innocuous stuff you might think. Suddenly there’s a bang and this old geezer is out of his chair, out of the room and down the corridor.
So I checked up on him and he said that last time he’d been in a forest (in similar circumstances to the journey scenario) was in 1940, listening to the rest of his platoon being machine-gunned by Germans. Neither me or my boss were expecting anyone to react in the way this guy did to what we thought was a “safe” exercise.
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Christopher: I know in my own magical experience, there comes a question of how much of what I am doing is necessary, and how much is merely decoration? Usually when we think of magic, we think of ceremony, tools, movement and chants and what have you? It is certainly good theater, but is all of it necessary? What about magic in day to day life, where it might not be possible to do full ceremony?
Phil: All you really need is to remember that you have a body. Yes, it’s nice to do “big ritual” occasionally in the way you describe, but I really think we need to break down this distinction between ritual space and day-to-day-life space.
Much of the tantra practice I do is oriented towards “day-to-day life” and “big ritual” doesn’t necessarily translate into heightened intensities. I’ve had some really intense experiences as by-products of really simple rituals, with not much in the way of props and limited space for flouncing around.
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Christopher: What was different about Chaos Magic from other systems of magic that drew you to it for awhile?
Phil: I first encountered what came later to be described as “Chaos Magic” through two texts - Peter J. Carroll’s “Liber Null” and Ray Sherwin’s “The Book of Results” - in the late 1970s, and engaged with the latter text first.
This was because I’d come Austin Osman Spare a few years earlier and found it quite easy to get into the practice of casting sigils. In fact it was Spare’s work which got me interested in magic in the first place. Between 1979-80 I was doing a correspondence course in Qabalah, and was getting ticked off by my mentor because I told him I was doing sigils.
I didn’t really start doing anything with Liber Null until 1981, by which time I was in a Wiccan coven and the High Priestess encouraged me to “find out more about this chaos stuff”. I think what initially attracted me to Liber Null was the idea that all magical “techniques” were essentially similar, regardless of the context they appeared in - and also the idea that you could take material from outside of what’s considered to be the “occult corpus” - such as fiction. I’d already made some moves in this direction - having done some rituals inspired by Lovecraft’s fiction between 1979-80.
I think Chaos Magic was, for me, an arena for experimentation, although it didn’t really become dominant in my strands of practices until the late 1980’s.
Just to give some more background - I first became interested in Tantra in 1982, following a series of recurring dreams in which the goddess Kali loomed large, but again, this didn’t become a dominant theme for me until the late 1980s.
I read Robert Anton Wilson’s & Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy in 1985, and began to work with the discordian goddess Eris around that time - but I was approaching Eris very much through a Wiccan framework, being still in contact with the coven I’d joined in 1981.
In fact I didn’t really begin to focus heavily on what was then becoming known as Chaos Magic until around 1986, after I’d left the coven and started to strike out on my own.
I’d moved to Leeds by then, which was a kind of melting pot for experimental magic, and got involved with the Chaos scene there - as well as hooking up with people who were experimenting with Lovecraftian magic, Tantra, and politically-oriented Pagan activism.
The “urban shamanism trilogy” of chapbooks (you can find them on www.philhine.org.uk as pdfs) were written in this period, and, together with a few friends, I started publishing a monthly pagan ‘zine - Pagan News (again, there’s some pdf-ed issues on the website).
This was a very vibrant time for me - I was doing a hell of a lot of magical experimentation in different directions - and involved with several groups simultaneously.
In 1991 I moved to London, and because a high proportion of the people I knew were involved in the chaos magic scene down there, Chaos Magic came to dominate my approach to magic. I’d already written two short chapbooks on Chaos Magic - “Condensed Chaos” and “Chaos Servitors” - both based on stuff I’d been doing in Leeds, but these didn’t get released until I hit London - to be followed (in
1993) by the first edition of Prime Chaos - which I’d been working on since 1988. I did quite a few workshops, lectures, etc., both in the UK and in Europe/America - latterly through being a member of the IOT.
It was through the American head of the IOT - the late Bob Williams, that I managed to get a deal with what was then New Falcon Publications, who went on to publish “Condensed Chaos,” a heavily revised “Prime Chaos,” and my little chapbook on Lovecraftian magic - “The Pseudonomicon,” which remains my favourite of the three.
All the way through this heavily chaos magic-oriented period, I was still pursuing my interests in tantra, and by 1995 was running, with my partner, a tantrically-oriented group - and were in contact with other tantrically-inclined folk in the UK (AMOOKOS). We were also regular participants in a kind of free-form, dance-oriented pagan group called “the Mad Shamans”
Christopher: At what point did you come to the conclusion it was time to move on to something else?
Phil: It wasn’t that simple. One of the reasons I’ve answered the previous question with so much “biographical” info is to highlight that I’ve always - until fairly recently - had several irons in the fire at once, and these irons were often related to the different networks of friends I was moving in.
I’ve friends for example, from my period of being Wiccan-dominant who still invite me to gatherings and I’m sometimes amazed how easily I can slide back into that framework for ritual work - it’s like “coming home” in a way.
But, to answer your question, I think I’d hit a point where I’d become dissatisfied with some of the patterns I’d let myself become habituated to. Firstly, I came to realise that a lot of my own practice had become workshop-orientated - by which I mean that I was doing stuff with a view to turning it into a workshop session, rather than for its own sake. So that had to stop.
Secondly, I left the IOT in 1996 (or thereabouts) and in so doing, lost contact with that particular network of chaos people. Thirdly, my tantric practice, which had become increasingly dominant for me, was what I wanted to concentrate on (don’t forget I’d been pursuing this on and off since 1982). This latter point might help understand one of my problems with Chaos Magic as an approach.
One of CM’s primary assertions is that magic can be formulated in terms of “techniques” and that the theoretical underpinnings or cultural-historical context in which those “techniques” appear isn’t really important. A good example would be the idea of “mantras”.
The term mantra is now used fairly widely in books on modern magic to denote any iterative repetition of a word or phrase - so something you’ll sometimes see advocates of CM asserting is that singing rune charms and repeating Hindu mantras are essentially the same procedure - the forcus being on the repetition of a word or phrase - in order to enter an altered state of consciousness. So mantras are something that gets chanted - and the chanting (i.e. the iteration) is what’s important - not the content or the context.
This, to me, is a kind of reductionism. It predicates a universal explanation - that the “technique” of iterative speech is enacted in order to establish an altered state of consciousness in the practitioner - and subordinates all instances which apparently look as though that’s what’s going on - to it. So for an advocate of CM, there would be little practical difference between, say, chanting a rune poem, repeating the Gayatri mantra, or singing a sea shanty.
As International Infictive Month begins winding down we present you with the last of our installment of podcast and a thought: Infictive is not an adjective (despite what it’s etymology may lead you to believe) it is a subspace. It is not limited to the county baring it’s namesake, but is instead an encompassing state of ultra-real. It is nothing which you can posses nor is it a quality which can be attributed to any person or object. Things simply either occupy the space and play with the circuit or else fail to engage it, ’nuff said. Consider occupying such a space more often or be careful not to invoke it. You could easily wind up eaten by the harsh cruel game like so many others. Walk free ’til dead, brothers and sisters. 81! 
