The Beliefs You Wear
A Chaos Magic Issue
“Nothing is real. Everything is permitted.”
In this issue:
🫠 How Chaos Magick Helped Me Stop Judging the Belief Systems of Other People
🫨🕳 RABBIT HOLE: Making Friends with Your Demons
🧐 Shoaling Sigils into Reality Structures
Chaos magic isn’t taken seriously because many of the people who are associated with chaos magic publicly are a bunch of LARPing egoists in need of attention.
They can’t help it, though. Most of them think they control the egregores they created, but oops! It’s the other way ‘round, my friends. But I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to tell you about chaos magic and my experience, not theirs.
Let’s fuckin’ gooooo…
CUE THE BEST DAMN NEWSLETTER THEME SONG EVER!
🫠 How Chaos Magick Helped Me Stop Judging the Belief Systems of Other People
I spent a decade treating belief like a costume.
Put on Christianity for six months. Operate as if Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, pray the prayers, feel the feelings, watch what happens. Take it off. Put on strict materialism. Nothing exists but matter and energy, consciousness is an illusion, free will is a story the meat tells itself. Wear that for a while. See how reality responds.
This is the core technology of chaos magick. Belief as tool, not truth. You adopt a paradigm, work within it, get results or don’t, then shift to something else. The system doesn’t care if you “really” believe. The universe doesn’t check your sincerity papers. You commit fully, then release completely, and somewhere in that process you learn something uncomfortable about the nature of belief itself.
I learned I’d been an asshole for most of my life.
Before chaos magick, I judged people by their beliefs like I was getting paid for it. Christians were deluded. Atheists were arrogant. New Age people were vapid. Conspiracy theorists were paranoid. I sorted humans into categories based on the ideas they held, and I treated those categories as if they were the whole person. As if the belief WAS the human being.
Then I started switching operating systems on purpose.
When you’ve genuinely inhabited a belief structure, when you’ve felt it from the inside and watched it shape your perception and behavior, you realize something. The belief is running on the person. It’s not the person themselves. It’s software.
And most people didn’t choose their software any more than you chose your native language or your accent. They were born into a family, raised in a culture, handed a set of programs, and those programs booted up before they were old enough to question them.
The fundamentalist Christian didn’t sit down at age 25 and carefully evaluate all world religions before selecting evangelical Protestantism.
She was four years old and her parents told her Jesus loved her and hell was real and that information got written directly to the hard drive before her critical thinking functions came online.
The atheist didn’t arrive at materialism through rigorous philosophical inquiry.
He grew up in an academic household where religious belief was treated as embarrassing, and he absorbed that orientation like he absorbed his preference for coffee over tea.
That’s not true of every single person, of course, and this isn’t criticism.
This is just how human consciousness works. We’re born into belief environments. We absorb them. They become invisible to us precisely because we can’t see outside them. The fish doesn’t know it’s wet.
Chaos magick made me a scuba diver. I could step outside belief systems and look at them from the waterline. And what I saw changed everything.
I saw that underneath the Christian was a human being trying to make sense of suffering and death.
Underneath the atheist was a human being trying to make sense of suffering and death.
Underneath the conspiracy theorist was a human being trying to make sense of why the world felt wrong and the official explanations never quite added up.
Different programs, same basic human needs. Same fear. Same longing. Same confusion dressed up in different vocabularies.
The belief system is a user interface. It’s how the person interacts with the overwhelming complexity of existence. Some interfaces are more elegant than others. Some have more bugs. Some crash more often. But the user is not the interface. The human is not the belief.
This didn’t make me a relativist. I still think some beliefs are more useful than others. Some are more accurate. Some cause more harm.
Flat earth is wrong.
Young earth creationism is wrong.
QAnon is a memetic parasite that destroys families.
I can hold those positions without hating the people running that software, because I understand they didn’t choose it freely. They got infected. The program is doing what programs do.
My beliefs aren’t different in kind.
They’re just different in content. I’m also running software I didn’t fully choose. I’m also operating within paradigms I absorbed before I could evaluate them. The difference isn’t that I escaped programming and they didn’t. The difference is that I spent ten years deliberately fucking with my own code, so I know it’s code. Most people never get that view.
That’s not superiority. That’s luck. Right book at the right time. Right combination of desperation and curiosity that led me to chaos magick instead of Crossfit or Scientology or day trading.
When you’ve worn a belief and taken it off, you know something that true believers can’t know.
You know the belief feels absolutely real from the inside. It feels like truth. It feels like the way things are. And you know that feeling is the same regardless of the content. The Christian feeling certain about Christ and the Marxist feeling certain about dialectical materialism are having the same neurological experience.
Certainty is a feeling, not a fact.
This broke something in me. In a good way.
I stopped arguing with people about their beliefs.
Not because I think all beliefs are equal, but because I realized the argument almost never touches the actual person. You’re arguing with software. You’re trying to debug someone else’s operating system while they’re still running it. It doesn’t work.
It just generates heat.
What works is connecting with the human underneath. Finding the shared needs, the common fears, the universal confusions. Meeting them there, where the programs haven’t reached, where the human still exists unmediated by ideology.
I still have beliefs. I still act on them. I still think some shit is true and other shit is false. But I hold it all more loosely now.
I know I could be wrong. I know the certainty feeling lies. I know that the person across from me, no matter how batshit their worldview seems, is running on the same hardware I am, trying to solve the same impossible problems with whatever tools their environment gave them.
The program isn’t the person.
I wish someone had told me that before I wasted all those years in judgment.
3 Cool Things:
GZS Dark Chill Out. (Just relax but moody.)
Small Town Autoposy (Amanda’s Dead Mother)
🫨🕳 RABBIT HOLE: Making Friends with Your Demons
The first time I met my shadow, I wanted to kill it.
Not metaphorically. I was deep in a meditation practice, doing the Jungian exercise where you visualize descending stairs into darkness and see what waits at the bottom.
What waited for me was a version of myself I’d spent thirty years pretending didn’t exist. The one who enjoyed violence. The one who didn’t care about other people’s pain. The one who could watch the world burn and feel nothing but mild curiosity.
My first instinct was to destroy it. Exorcise it. Kill the monster and return to the surface cleansed.
That instinct is exactly wrong.
Jung’s insight, the one that took me years to actually understand, is that the shadow isn’t a demon that possessed you.
It’s you. It’s the parts of yourself you rejected because they didn’t fit the story you wanted to tell about who you are. The rage you weren’t allowed to express. The selfishness you were shamed for. The cruelty you pretended you didn’t feel. You didn’t eliminate those parts.
You just shoved them into the basement and locked the door.
They’ve been down there the whole time. Growing. Fermenting. Running your life from underneath while you pretend you’re steering.
This is why shadow work matters for anyone fucking with consciousness, magick, belief systems, any of it. You cannot manipulate reality while lying to yourself about who you are. The unconscious material doesn’t disappear because you ignore it. It leaks out sideways. It sabotages your workings. It creates exactly what you’re trying to avoid because that’s what repressed material does. It demands acknowledgment.
The work isn’t killing the shadow → The work is integration
You go down those stairs. You meet the monster. And instead of fighting, you ask it what it wants. You listen. You find out that the rage exists because something actually hurt you and you weren’t allowed to respond.
The selfishness exists because your needs went unmet for years and something in you decided to never let that happen again. The cruelty exists because you were cruel to yourself first and the blade cuts both directions.
The shadow isn’t evil. It’s wounded. It’s the parts of you that adapted to survive and then got exiled for being ugly.
Integration means bringing those parts home. Not acting on every dark impulse, but acknowledging they exist. Owning your full capacity. Admitting you contain multitudes and some of them aren’t pretty.
Combat taught me this faster than any meditation.
When you’ve seen what you’re capable of under pressure, the shadow stops being theoretical. You know the monster is real because you’ve let it out. The only question is whether you integrate that knowledge or spend the rest of your life running from yourself.
I stopped running.
The monster and I have an understanding now. It’s still there. Still dark. Still capable of terrible things. But it’s not in the basement anymore, rattling the door, leaking poison into everything I do.
It’s sitting next to me. Watching. Waiting.
Part of the team.
📰 Articles I Enjoyed This Week:
🧐 Shoaling Sigils into Reality Structures
A single sigil is a bullet. A shoal is an artillery barrage.
Shoaling is the chaos magick technique of launching multiple sigils simultaneously, each targeting a different angle of the same goal. You don’t fire one sigil for “get a better job.”
You fire a cluster.
One for noticing opportunities.
One for confidence in interviews.
One for the right person seeing your resume.
One for releasing whatever bullshit is blocking you.
One for being in the right place at the right time.
They work together, covering each other’s blind spots, creating a network effect.
This is memetic engineering at the operational and tactical level.
Ideas don’t travel alone in nature.
They move in memeplexes, clusters of concepts that reinforce and protect each other.
A religion isn’t one idea. It’s sin requiring salvation requiring messiah requiring faith requiring discouraged questioning, or variations of suffering. Each piece supports the others. The structure is the strength. Remove one element and the others compensate. Attack the whole system and it defends itself from every angle.
Shoaling sigils replicates this architecture deliberately.
Instead of hoping one intention punches through consensus reality, you’re building a self-reinforcing structure. The sigils interlock. They create their own gravity. A single meme might fail to take root. A memeplex digs in and defends itself.
Traditional magick is known to fail because its execution is too linear.
One desire, one working, one result or failure.
But reality is a system, not a straight line. Systems respond to pressure by redistributing it. You push one place, something else moves. The single sigil can’t account for the ripple effects, the unexpected resistances, the sideways movements of a complex system trying to maintain equilibrium.
Shoaling creates a net instead of a spear.
The practical application: Before any major working, map the territory.
What does success actually require? Not the end goal. The components. The prerequisites. The environmental factors. The internal blockages. The external gatekeepers. The timing. The resources. Each one gets its own sigil.
You fire them together or in sequence, building a memeplex of intention around your desired outcome.
Some practitioners launch the whole shoal at once. Others stagger them, letting each sigil prepare the ground for the next.
Both approaches work. The key is understanding you’re not casting isolated spells. You’re constructing a belief architecture that surrounds the target, that approaches from multiple vectors, that has redundancy built into its bones.
You’re not just casting a spell. You’re engineering a reality structure that reinforces itself, that adapts to resistance, that keeps working even when individual components fail.
This is why chaos magicians who understand shoaling get better results than those firing single shots.
They’ve stopped thinking like snipers and started thinking like systems engineers. They’ve stopped hoping for one lucky hit and started building probability structures that make success nearly inevitable.
One idea is fragile. A memeplex is antifragile.
Build the structure. Launch the shoal. Let them work together.
Reality doesn’t stand a chance against coordinated fire.
🧠 ON MY MIND
It’s fucking frigid where I live and I love it.
Who has a favorite television show or movie? I don’t think I have one.
That’s it for this week. Don’t break the space/time continuum. Until next time…
~ J.D.
Please note some links may lead to affiliate offers and if you purchase from these links I may receive a small amount of compensation at no extra cost to you.
Can you please give a definition of chaos magick and how it can help you reconcile with your dark side?
I don't understand it, but in a whim I asked Chat GPT if there was a correlation between chaos magick and the classic hardboiled detective, which is my personal icon.
Thank you for the shout-out!🤜🏾🤛🏾
In the part about shooting a sigil shoal, do you give focus to each component of the shoal and then leave it to give your focus to the next component?
Such a multi leveled post. You hit on do many things here.
It's freezing where I am too, and spring can't get here fast enough.
A series of sigils is something I hadn't thought of, but it makes sense. It's the solution to constantly changing your mind about what you want.
The shadow side is pervasive, and mist don't know it's there, and go out of our way to ignore it. It's what's compelled me to write that we gave the answers to what troubles us, but they're in a place we're afraid to look.
Thank you for the shout out 🤜🏾🤛🏾