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Chaos Magick starts with a good premise: That magick lives in the unconscious of the mage, not in the ritual that mage is doing.
“Your unconscious will change the world according to your beliefs and expectations.” This is the beginning and the end of chaos magick. Mages learn to adopt temporary beliefs about how the world works and invent sigils to signal their intent to the unconscious. It’s a rabbit hole.
They never ask “What is that unconscious process, and how does it alter reality?”
“Reality is what you believe” is to magick what “It is that way because God wills it so” is to science. It keeps you forever in a cul-de-sac, fumbling with a view of reality that was never useful in the first place.
Reality does have rules. They aren’t the correspondances used by ritual mages. They aren’t the denial of magick used by scientists. But they aren’t the simplified “Believe it and they will come” used by chaos magick, either.
Direct magick is about understanding those rules. Understanding how the body generates energy lets us heal injuries. Understanding how thoughts in the mind alter signatures lets us communicate telepathically. Understanding how our unconscious minds do magick lets us improve our abilities by magickally altering our minds.
Human capability advances by questioning the world. It starts with rejecting simple explanations like “Belief makes it so.”
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