Chaote

A practitioner of chaos magick. Also known as “chaos magicians” or “chaos mages”. Chaotes are known in the magickal community for their freewheeling, highly experimental style, their apparent refusal to believe anything (except possibly when it suits them), their cynicism and apparent disdain for anyone else’s beliefs, and their general “bad-boy” image (see next paragraph). Some segments of the chaos magick community, apparently influenced by the Temple ov Psychick Youth, also seem to enjoy spelling everything lk std orthography wuz going out ov style & thei wanted 2b thee first majikians on thr block 2 get in on thee new paradigm.

Though there’s nothing in the basic system of chaos magick that says they need to, Chaotes generally seem to spend a lot of their time wearing black, engaging in rituals that relate to darkness, dealing with Lovecraftian entities, and so on. Additionally, while they probably don’t actually use any more drugs than most other occultists, they seem to either make more noise about doing so, or be less willing to pretend that they don’t use them.

It’s uncertain whether Chaotes do this sort of thing deliberately to foster an image of Chaos Magick as the juvenile delinquency of occultism, or simply because they honestly enjoy it. Either way, this activity is probably a self-supporting cycle by now, as people who aren’t interested in Cthulhu, rituals of Outer Darkness and so forth are now likely to avoid Chaos Magick specifically because of Chaotes’ apparent obsession with such things.

Chaotes generally wear the chaos symbol as a signifier of their practice. They don’t usually refer to themselves simply as “Chaotes”, but rather tend to prefer longer, more eclectic terms tailored to their highly individualistic beliefs or practices, such as “I’m a Celtic-shamanistic Chaos mage” or “I work in a mostly Golden Dawn system, with some Chaos leanings”.