Prime Chaos

PRIME CHAOS - Phil Hine (New Falcon Books, 1999)

FOREWORD by Grant Morrison

The initiate in the Tibetan Chöd ritual is required to undergo a visionary experience in which the physical body is dismembered and devoured by demons while the "higher self" watches, unmoved by the gruesome destruction of its flesh. This type of experience, common to the shamanic tradition, demonstrates the sometimes violent and uncompromising nature of "spiritual" or "paradigm" change.

Emerging from the eerie lunar zones between the polar fires of punk rock and the Thatcher rave years, Chaos Magic has grown and multiplied and diversified, evolving out through the minds of its practitioners; it has no shape, it breeds like a fractal and mutates as it goes. "It" currently embraces aspects of the Crowley cult, shamanism, NLP, Reichian bodywork, Eastern thought, voodoo, Situationist theory, H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, Walt Disney and anything else you might care to add to that list. Shattering and binding simultaneously, always up for a laugh, Chaos provides one useful model for the next stage in the collective upgrading of human consciousness.

Early signs may indicate that human society is entering a time in which the creative synthesis of apparently contradictory positions will become fundamental to our thinking. In the current magical subculture, no one sythesizes with the encyclopaedic range and creativity of Phil Hine.

Phil is, in my opinion, the foremost interpreter of the chaos paradigm. His researches, in territories fraught with confusion and glamour, are not only innovative and imaginative, not only free from selfaggrandizement and dogma, but are also immensely lucid and readable. Phil offers practical, detailed information on how magic operates and suggests experiments which can (and should) be duplicated and verified. He never obscures or overelaborates but still manages to astound with the depth of his experience and the scope of his speculations. Prime Chaos pulls back the moth-eaten curtains to expose and dismiss much of the pseudo-goth theatricality which still hampers the understanding of magic, but at the same time, never loses sight of the wonder, the terror and the awe of true gnosis.

Phil brings humanity, sanity, insanity and wit to a subject which will, I believe, penetrate more deeply into the fabric of our lives, as science adapts its boundaries to accommodate some of the conclusions magicians have already reached, and as magic lets go of the "occult" aspects which once protected its practitioners from the power of a totalitarian church but which serve now only to obscure.

Direct confrontation with Chaos is unmistakable and available to anyone who is prepared to simply do the work and open the doors. This book represents the cutting edge of magic theory and practice; it will provide as many keys as you need but, as ever, the theory may fire the imagination but cannot in the end substitute for personal experience. Read then DO.

The penis of the President of the USA is the subject of media debate; a British football star announces to newspapers that five separate demons are occupying his body; a fairytale princess is killed by cameras. If ever the time was ripe for the wider emergence of the Chaos current, that time is surely now.

Charles Fort made the gnomic observation that it steam engines when it's steam engine time.

Well ... it's steam engine time and the chöd ritual has already begun for global culture. The world that was, is now in the process of watching its own disintegration with horror and exhilaration. What possible transformations lie ahead when, finally, we let the old corpse go?

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

As the roller-coaster ride into the future gathers speed, Prime Chaos is a survival manual for the 21st century.

Grant Morrison

July 1998