Chaos Magik

Esotericism, through the lens of the Chaos Magick “zine scene,” is unfamiliar territory. Here, the term esotericism designates a hybrid subculture, which integrated queer sexuality and the anarchist tradition into the DNA of magickal theory and practice. Insofar as Chaos Magick was exclusively developed in the homemade magazine subculture known as the “zine scene,” the category of esotericism, when used here, also denotes an underground material culture that has not received any scholarly attention. Notable characteristics of the Chaos Magick zine scene, then, include its status as an anti-establishment/anarchist underground and its members’ self-affirmed identity as cultural “marginals,” the embrace of homemade D.I.Y. (“Do It Yourself”) media, and its self-understanding as being the forefront of cutting-edge science, namely, at the intersection of psychedelic consciousness and chaos theory.

Unfortunately, scholars writing on Chaos Magick have yet to realize that the book editions of Chaos Magick literature that flooded the occult book market in the late 1980s and 90s were redacted anthologies of material previously published in zines. The effect is that scholars ignorant of its primary sources have offered facile typologies that only distort and confuse the study of Chaos Magick and the milieu in which it blossomed.

Using one issue of Joel Biroco’s renowned Chaos Magick zine Kaos as an example, this paper elucidates the ways in which the Chaos Magick zine scene constitutes a novel iteration of familiar esoteric practices, which, subsequently, marks a transition in the nature of esotericism itself. The D.I.Y. process of the zine’s creation, its function as a vehicle for the dissemination of esoteric materials, and its ritual encoding with magical significance (“sigilization”) are three ways in which the zine scene comprises esoteric practice in a new context. In regards to this new context, the zine scene evidences the transition from the era of professional esoteric journals produced by organizations seeking respectability to one dominated by irreverent, and cheap, self-made periodicals. Far from seeking a wider acceptance by the reading public, these self-produced zines were distributed through an underground network of contacts maintained as much by secrecy as it was by a sense of elitism. This shift to D.I.Y. amateurism marks not only a shift in media technology, but the sociological nature of esoteric discourses as a whole. Analysis of the zine scene raises important questions around how scholars address the social location of esoteric practice, knowledge, and material culture in the late 20th century.