Review: Dave Lee – Primordial Chaos
Dave Lee is one of the elders of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT), and he has also worked with the Northern Mysteries c/o the Rune Guild. Much magical water has run underneath the Dave Lee bridge over the decades, and I’ve always found his writing to be super concise and inspiring – which is true for many authors stemming from the enigmatic ”Chaos” soil.
Dave’s new book, Primordial Chaos (The Universe Machine, 2023), is part anthology of essays, and part magical memoir, as almost each essay is preceded by explanatory and contextualizing notes. This is great. Not only for me as someone slightly younger (but still there from the mid 1980s and onwards), but perhaps especially for new generations of magicians interested in the Chaosphere and how it has evolved. Dave’s signal is embedded in clarifying as well as entertaining tidbits from his own history, and this is something I find works really well.
Roaming through topics like ritual magic, psychedelia, the runes, discordia, healing and much more, Dave emits useful insights and contextualizations from his long career. Permeating everything is a rare mix of pragmatic approaches and common sense. Tradition isn’t discarded for the sake of it, but the individual magician’s prerogative to interpret and create always rules supreme:
”Early on in my magical career, I came across the words of William Blake: ”I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.” I was groping towards a scheme of magic that didn’t yet exist for me, something that felt like it was grounded in my own weird experiences, a synthesis of magical identity with remembered embodied energy-events from my psychedelic days, overlaid with the ideas of Wilhelm Reich I’d read about back then.” (P 15)
”Magic has its own inertias and institutions. We must build by using what went before, but in our present position we have the pick of the aeons. We can learn from, and use, any magics of the past. Hopefully, we can discard the dross, assimilate the essentials, and rework them along lines that will nourish and vitalize ourselves and the world. We are creating the new, or suffocating under the weight of the old, with a speed and fluidity unique in history. In this Kali Yuga, our systems are disposable: if you can’t make it fit, don’t wear it.” (P 27)
According to me, this attitude is probably the wisest you can ever integrate, whether as anxious beginner or jaded elder. Specifically the Western mind-frame’s tendencies to over-cogitate and over-structure magical ”systems” can only be counter-productive in the long run. Although their main constructive use is simply to be transcended/transgressed, it is of course true that there is some degree of useable truth everywhere. Dave’s attitude of creative pragmatism is in every sense something that should be paid much attention to.
Whereas I was mainly active in Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth in the mid to late 1980s, I greatly enjoyed the material emanating from the IOT – and perhaps specifically their magazine Chaos International. This has now come ”full circle,” in that Pete Carroll, the IOT’s grand old man, recently invited me to write for an anthology of Chaos Magic material (to be published by Weiser in 2025). This I did, specifically focusing on the importance of Chaos International in my own formatting process.
Dave Lee’s anthology also takes me right back to the same delightful attitude of Devil May Care-ism and fanciful conceptualizations that existed in Chaos International. And on the whole I think the material still reads very well indeed.
The most (in)famous member of the IOT was of course William Burroughs, and Dave integrates some inspired concepts and ideas from the old man of the Kansas plains, meshed in with the signature potpourri of sigil magic, NLP, cut-ups, and anarchism light.
”The pursuit of magic involves the decoding of your trigger memes, the word viruses that have real power (negative or positive) for you. Automatic responses are the chinks in the magician’s armor. Investigate all your most loaded concepts. Observe the tunes to which your behavior dances, the drumbeat you march to. Adopt word viruses that are novel for you, in the form of statements, and feel what it is like to invest them with belief. Eventually you should reach a level where the remaining memes are extremely powerful and lodged firmly in your behavior.” (P 67)
In this approach of merging paranoid worldviews stemming from literary giants with contemporary psychological-scientific curiosity abides much youthful enthusiasm, and this is something that permeates almost each and every essay of this very readable book. From this perspective, its title is very well chosen. ”Primordial Chaos” is not only where we all come from (and perhaps will return to), but also signifies a really handy primer of crystallized Chaos Magic and its inherently unruly, rebellious spirit.
Get your own copy of the book HERE.
Dave Lee recently wrote about conspiracy theories in The Fenris Wolf 12. Get your own copy HERE.