Where occult traditions typically anchor themselves firmly to the metaphysical, chaos magick has historically been open to more materialist interpretations, although inconsistently so. I do not claim that metaphysical understandings of magic are necessarily wholly invalid, but I would like to suggest that most if not all of the major practices associated with chaos magick do not require or benefit from appeals to ideas outside the scientific mainstream. In other words, the practices of ritual (particularly sacrifice) and sigilcraft (including hypersigils, etc) are fully compatible with a conventional scientific, secular, materialist worldview.
The cornerstone of my argument is the idea of subtle communication with oneself and others as a means of influence.
By subtle communication, I mean: communication that bypasses conscious, verbal modes of understanding. This is not to say that such forms of communication have no verbal component; only that the most important aspects of these communications are not, to the target, immediately understood in terms of the most obvious and direct interpretation. Subtle…