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The prolific Steve Dee has written a third book! Chaos Monk offers an unexpected fusion of New Monasticism and Chaos Magic, demonstrating that it is possible to simultaneously be devout and fully embedded in the everyday world…

Steve writes: This book is an invitation to spiritual intensity. In the face of life’s brevity, it seeks to offer a challenge to consider what truly matters and how we might find skilful means for exploring such a question. As the pace and pressures of daily living seek to crowd out our ability to find space and silence, I believe that those traditions and techniques associated with monasticism provide vital keys for regaining our balance. While some may view such paths as ones of restriction or severity, as we travel together I hope to demonstrate the profound value of what simplicity, faithfulness and accountability might bring us when viewed through dynamic and responsive lens of Chaos magical practice.

This book is a deeply personal one, and unapologetically so. The impulse to engage with the monastic current runs strongly in my veins and it continues to be a deep personal obsession. When I started my spiritual journey at age 10, I was captivated by images of orange clad ascetics from both Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Now, as an adult, I ask: Why do I continue to be drawn to a path that emphasizes asceticism and discipline? What draws so many people to the form of stark spirituality that monastic traditions represent? How might contemporary explorers distil its essential components? This book seeks to explore such questions and describes how my own journey into contemporary magical practice continues to include monastic dimensions within it.

Sitting still is where it all starts. Only by ceasing to move can we gain access to the state of mind necessary to begin moving. Both in our psyches, and in our lives, we carve out a space which is our own to pause, to take stock, to commune with our higher Self. And then, with our feet in the right place, we take the steps necessary towards our goals, in fellowship with our communities. The modern monk constructs their cell within the everyday world.
This book helps to model some of these processes for you. It contains personal examples, historical reviews of Monasticism through the ages, gentle prods to keep things moving, and reflections upon what such a pilgrimage might mean. The alchemy of transmutation applied to the soul takes time, but gives us gold.

“A profoundly beautiful exploration of spirituality, magic and self that I consider to be one of the most important books I have read on the subject in many years. Particularly relevant to this era, Chaos Monk is intellectually satisfying whilst presenting an eminently practical approach. This book examines internal and external realities and the tensions they generate; acknowledging wider relationships that impact upon magical and spiritual development. Referencing Tantra, Thelema, Monastic Traditions, Chaos Magic and psychology, ‘Chaos Monk’ structures a template for the development of a long term, pertinent, spiritual approach to the self and the times, and as such should be an essential component of every committed practitioner and seeker’s library.” Charlotte Rodgers, creator of sculptural art works, writer of books which include P is for Prostitution: A Modern Primer, The Sky is A Gateway Not A Ceiling, and The Bloody Sacrifice.

“An exhilarating journey through chaos monasticism, a mystical practice informed by chaos magic. Accessible and clearly written, yet informed by a deep knowledge of the history of spiritual movements in both East and West, decades of magical practice, psychotherapy and art, this is a book for anyone with mystical leanings who wants to put them into practice. The first part describes the theoretical basis of chaos monasticism, and the second part shows how to put it into practice. Steve offers genuinely original spiritual exercises to help you develop your practice and introduces an element of play into the inner work. He also taps into the important mystical streams of apophatic theology and the dark night of the soul, and offers an exploration of one of my favourite spiritual practices, lectio divina. Other practices offered here include pilgrimage, psychogeography, and pathworking, all of which are great ways of engaging with sacred space and time.” Yvonne Aburrow, author of All Acts of Love and Pleasure: Inclusive Wicca; Dark Mirror: The Inner Work of Witchcraft; and The Night Journey: Witchcraft as Transformation.

“Chaos Monk is a book I’ve been looking for for quite some time as it helps fill an often neglected area in the Chaos Magick approach—Mysticism! Steve Dee has an in-depth look at what a modern day monastic approach to Chaos Magick might look like. He draws from the past and other approaches but ultimately supplies the reader with some practical and useful ways of actually going out and doing it in a modern world setting. His thoughts on Chaos Mysticism, and his approach, ideas, and insights really resonated with me. I can only imagine that there will be a large number of people in the Chaos Magic community who will be well served by this book.” Tommie Kelly, Irish artist. musician, and writer, best known for his oracle deck The Forty Servants.

An Invitation
This is a call to come to the Quiet,
Those spacious places of the deep self.
This is a desert place found by the few
And others may laugh and call your journey madness.
Darkness is here
And only the brave can see that it holds the most brilliant of lights
Come, come my friends,
Come sit with those who are seeking the other side of silence.

The Night Journey: Witchcraft as Transformation (second edition)
by Yvonne Aburrow

Most of the books that I have read on Witchcraft in the last five years have tended to be either focused on history (e.g. Ronald Hutton’s The Witch) or the spookier reimagining of its Traditional, non-Wiccan manifestations. In contrast The Night Journey offers something different in its radical re-visioning of initiatory Wicca as a path of personal and political liberation.

I first encountered Yvonne’s writing in their excellent All Acts of Love and Pleasure: Inclusive Wicca which I experienced as a vivid attempt at bringing inclusive and Queer perspectives to forms of Paganism that may have become stuck in our ableist and heteronormative views of human expression. This new work feels like an expansion of Inclusive Wicca; a conscious fleshing-out that provides a deeper, more theological appreciation of what Witchcraft has to offer as a contemporary religious path.

Yvonne has been an initiate of Gardnerian Wicca for almost 30 years and this work represents a distillation of their thinking regarding how Wicca can speak to the challenges of the 21^st century. The structure of the book covers a range of themes regarding the validity of Wicca as a religious path and the way in which its initiatory structure helps manage issues such as ego-inflation and spiritual burn out.

The first section of the book, “Between the Worlds”, moves beyond a simple “how to” book and provides a rich theological reflection on how Wicca provides a living process of shared ritual work via which a relationship with divinity can be evolved. They provide a nuanced engagement with how Pagan magical paths can address our deepest psychological need for contrast and polarity, whether these are between darkness and light or silence and sound. Yvonne has a background in academic religious studies and this feels very present in her deep description of how her own spirituality and beliefs have evolved within the framework that Wicca has provided.

For Aburrow, Witchcraft is an innately Queer path. The Witch is one who inhabits “a liminal zone between the worlds”. This path offers us a shimmering multiplicity of sexual and gender expressions and the Witch by their very definition bends, shapes and adapts. Their theology is unapologetically one of immanence and this is one of the unique features that they believe Wicca (and Paganism more widely) has to offer in the spiritual marketplace.

In many ways Yvonne’s writing has many parallels with that of Starhawk in very consciously seeing the Witch as an adversarial figure that “endangers the status quo”. Aburrow explores the more Left-Hand Path adversarial dimensions of the Witch path, not as a preoccupation with Gothic aesthetics, but as the outlaw-tricksters who are “the eternal outsiders, the eternal critics”. The Night as the realm of dreams and the Sabbatic journey represents a need to work with ecstasy, wildness and even our own madness as a means of empowering our activism.

The second section, “Bringing it all back home”, provides us with an engaging set of reflections on Yvonne’s experience of running a coven, and these insights regarding ritual forms and working with power in leadership hold relevance across many spiritual paths. How do we seek to work towards more flattened hierarchies while retaining our awareness of the power that we hold via experience and time within a tradition?

Yvonne explores the differing ways that people learn and how we support people in plugging into an egregore while also allowing them to retain the rich individuality that will ultimately add to a tradition and allow it to evolve. For Aburrow, the ability to co-create and change is at the heart of their magic and their self-description as “a relational polytheist” evokes for me the image of a shared cauldron into which people bring their own unique contributions towards a common goal.

Toward the book’s conclusion, Yvonne returns to the theme of liberation in the longest essay “Challenging Oppression” in which they ask us to consider the implications of our Paganism:

“I became a Witch, a Pagan a Polytheist because I believe all life is interconnected, interwoven, interpermeable.”

If such connection is central to our religious identity, then it has to have implications for our ethics and how we pursue liberty at both a personal and collective level. Yvonne’s work is unapologetically anti-oppressive and anti-racist. Well-meaning inaction is no longer viable. In order to move forward we have to face the implications of racism and colonialism and it is inevitable that such unlearning will be deeply uncomfortable. The chapter also provides some really helpful reflections of the complexities of cultural appropriation and how we might integrate wider traditions in a slow, respectful syncretism.

The Night Journey never promises to be an easy one! As you would expect it can be both disturbing and challenging. At times I felt almost overwhelmed by the concentrated punch of Aburrow’s insights and I consciously chose to slow down to allow a more healthy process of digestion! Thankfully Yvonne provides a series of helpful reflective questions and exercises at the end of each chapter to allow us to consider the implications of these issues in our lives. The brew in this cauldron is a potent one and I could imagine myself spending a year and a day working with these chapters so as to allow the type of reflection, soul searching and deep change that Yvonne’s work is promoting.

Highly recommended.

Buy the second edition of The Night Journey: Witchcraft as transformation here at http://www.shop.doreenvaliente.org/

The Biscuit Volume 1, Issue 1

For me there are few things more Punk Rock than a zine (short for magazine or fanzine). Although having their origin with 1940s sci-fi, for me they really took off as an art form during the heady, DIY culture of Punk and the myriad subcultures that it spawned. Zines at their best are a dynamic cut and paste that juxtaposes art, poetry and philosophy in a way that allow the reader a truly multifaceted take on the topic at hand.

This first edition of The Biscuit produced by Three Bones Society (www.threebonessociety.com) captures brilliantly the joyous chaos of a true zine. The contributors to this maiden edition are drawn from a rich intersect of visual artists, esoteric practitioners, psychotherapists and hedge-philosophers so there is little risk of boredom!

The Biscuit is the brainchild of Eric K Lerner, who is obviously a person of bold ambitions as this first edition is nothing less than a Queer-Feral reclamation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. The whole zine is an attempt to pull back Nietzsche’s work from the hands of fragile egotists and to place his powerful vision back within the current of the post-Christian esoteric tradition. Thus Spake… is the necessary antidote for our materialism and safe complacency:

“He strives to penetrate the reader’s very being like a virus that takes over the host’s physical essence. His language may bloom within the reader on a subconscious level as a trigger to reinvent him/herself as a higher being.”

David Rankine kicks things off with a concise but unsurprisingly erudite reflection on how Zarathustra has impacted upon Crowley and the evolution of Thelema. Rankine rightly argues that an appreciation of Zarathustra’s message is key to illuminating the Thelemic ideal that “every man and woman is a star”. Sean Woodward’s striking poetry and artwork similarly brings a vivid magical voice to the party.

The Biscuit is full of dynamic and iconoclastic visual art: Tightrope by Charlotte Rodgers provides us with a dancing bone creature whose toppled cruciform calls us to boldly embrace spiritual autonomy: “Thou has made danger thy calling: Therein there is nothing contemptible….” The woodcuts of Thomas van der Krogt, the collage of Vanessa Sinclair and the Gnostic icons of Dolorosa de la Cruz all provide visual sustenance that is both provocative and playful.

A good zine never promises linearity, and The Biscuit unapologetically shunts us between Ron Athey’s gritty performance art cut-ups and Eric K Lerner’s reflection on the challenges of translating Nietzsche from the German: “Gott Todi Ist” is as likely to be rendered “God death is” as it is the iconic “God is Dead!”

Given my own bent as a Queer therapist I greatly enjoyed Vanessa Sinclair’s psychoanalytic reflection on the parallels between compulsion to repeat and Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return i.e. through repeating patterns we often create the space for deeper, more subtle reflection. This edition ends on a bang as Paul Bee Hampshire provides us with a joyful “Zarathustra-the Sequel” and without spoiling the ending we get to see Zee grappling with the complexities of Queer theory ☺

Zines are rarely for the fainted hearted, but this is one of those really great ones that manages to convey more in 45 pages than many a dusty tome.

Highly recommended.

Steve Dee

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