The End of the World is a popular topic right now. Then again, it always has been. Millennialist tracts and cults have abounded for millennia. We all want to believe that we are special, living until the very last days when the big story finishes.
However, in this more enlightened age, we know those people were all wrong, because of course we are the special generation; we shall guide our world onto a course so different from the past, that future generations shall call it heaven! Embracing this elitist philosophical attitude wholeheartedly, a few years ago some chaos magicians at Arcanorium College decided to do something interesting with their summer holiday break, and set out to destroy the world.
Or rather, to destroy the obstacles to those different ways of living we so desperately require if we want to grow; a world for our children to inhabit that contains more than ruins and a ransacked environment.
Those of us who took on the campaign dressed ourselves in knightly apparel, took oaths of fealty to our cause, and played our roles as saviours. We identified and discussed targets, some enemy & some friendly to our cause; sent out our monstrous regiment of servitors to hurt and heal as appropriate, and it was all v jolly fun. Since that time, each summer we have repeated our forays. We have seen a few parts of our society alter; financial institutions, exploiters of resources, the rich who benefit from the poverty of many, do not have such peace of mind as they once did. Grass roots organisations such as credit unions and local food producing collectives, craft workers & small business entrepreneurs with holistic views now don’t seem like the freaky hippies they once did. The Occupy movement got everyone thinking about the how & why of our status quo, as well as the what do we want instead? Not that we claim sole responsibility for any of these of course, magick doesn’t work like that. It nudges the zeitgeist when it might otherwise look the other way, and may precipitate the likelihood of information coming to light, that kind of thing.
I reproduce here a short section from the KoC grimoire:
“The chances of advanced human civilisation surviving the twenty first century now seem to diminish with every passing year. As a species we stand in dire need of creative shocks and surprising innovations to our ways of thinking. In some ways Magicians got humanity into its current impasse by stimulating scientific enquiry in the first place and this has led to unsustainable forms of hyper-industrialisation. Now we must search for new and alternative futures.
The Illuminati now call upon The Knights of Chaos in response to this situation. Occasionally The Knights will need to amplify minor apocalypses by arrangement to steer humanity away from the global meltdown of civilisation. Occasionally they will need to debate the case for conjuring for what now seems impossible.
The Knight’s Star consists of the following symbol that we use for mutual recognition:
This star of five lines and eight points symbolises the Magical and Chaoist affinities of The Knights and their quest to Avert Apocalypse.
The Knights consist those capable of phenomenising events and ideas of absurd improbability in the cause of the Silver Star, the Argentum Astrum, the AA, now restructured for The Aversion of Apocalypse.
Some have this erratic ability naturally; some can learn to occasionally manifest it. The requirement exists for a substantial host in place by the end of the first quartile of this forbidding century.
The neo-absurdist title of The Knights of Chaos provides a convenient cultural camouflage. Any number of fantasy-gaming and role playing societies now use the same honorific, having borrowed extensively, from a mythos that Chaos Magic developed, for purely entertainment purposes.”
This summer, we mount a push towards the turning point of the battle, these last days, the summer when we anticipate the imminent global shift in consciousness (as foretold by people reading Mayan hieroglyphs for the last few decades), the latest episode in the ongoing saga that is the End of the World. Not the same type of end game which those weirdo Rapture fanatics would wish for though! More, a shift to ways of doing, ways of constructing our realities, that move us inevitably to behaviours and attitudes which enhance Life, that allow the cultural sides of Baphomet to flourish for a few billion years.
I finish here with the Call to Arms of the 2012 campaign, from our Sergeant At Arms, Tadhg.
NW
Knights of Chaos 2012 – Apocalypse Then?
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.” T.S. Elliot
Despite the seeming lack of prophecy in the Mayan records of impending doom, we approach the winter solstice of 2012CE, and our planet seems in dire crisis.
Depending on how we measure, an Apocalypse will occur imminently; has gotten underway; or might have already happened!
Our seas have risen, our ice melts and we cling perilously close to a global high tide. More than one billion people live on the equivalent of less than 1USD per day, and another 2billion + of us, on less than the equivalent of 2USD per day. Behind each number a mother, father, child.
Our disastrous doings come at great cost to all non-human people; as well, the geosphere and biosphere, suffer great strain. Our increasing demand for mineral resources to empower living that trashes the planet for unhealthy gains. Many of our resource deposits already got expended, or sit at peak.
From the precipice, we may see the expanse of a scorched earth and a future that seems catastrophic. Our anthropomorphic doings over the last centuries have not delivered us a manifest golden age of enlightenment, but seem to offer naught but the quickening decay of human accelerated entropy.
Our stories and legends fill us with tales of cataclysm, stories that tell of, or forewarn of, great disaster. Religious thinking, diffused and penetrated our doings, from church to board room and they preach dissonant creeds that seem to serve planetary destruction, leading us beyond the grasp of limitation, not to godhead, but to the inferno of strife. Escatology driven by ignorance and fear.
Seeking to avert further disaster and focus the great work of magic towards enlightened action and result; Wizards and Sorcerers band together to illuminate a path forward. Over six years, our group of diverse and talented mages’ collectively take to the fight head on. Bringing to bear the might of psi attack, to take on, and best, political, corporate and religious targets; accessing the panpsychosphere to simultaneously rearrange and retool the meme sphere to create a world fit for holistic purpose.
The Marshalls, Dames, and Knights of Chaos extend a warm and welcome hand of sororal & fraternal greetings and invite anyone who shares concern, to join us in our next campaign. Equipped with bleeding edge techniques, technology and tools, and indeed distilled from our world wide traditions of sorcery via Chaos Magic. We will again campaign, change and build a reality labyrinth that we can all value and find place in.
Our rallying point and meeting place sits within the halls of the Manifest yet Unseen University of Arcanorium College. From where we will dedicate six weeks of militarized magical practice, strategy and active conjuration. We seek to divine, enchant, invoke, evoke and illuminate.
We welcome all adept in the arts, and encourage those that feel that they might realise their innate potential to create realities and futures anew.
The campaign will certainly test and tire, we offer no comfortable quarter, for the creation of a new world proves strenuous work of the highest order. We offer instruction, mutual support and camaraderie. The prize? A glorious future!
SAAT
The Blog of Baphomet 