chaos magick made a mistake. namely, it gave itself a vague name featuring one of the coolest abstract concepts. now a lot of people call themselves some variation of chaos witch because they assume (reasonably) that, like a night witch is just a witch that does stuff at nighttime and a lightworker is just someone that works with light energy that a chaos magician is just a magician who is tied to chaos.
when in reality the term is more akin to Golden Dawn or Thelema or Heathenry in that it represents a magical approach with like a history and cant be understood by reading the dictionary definitions of the words.
this is exacerbated by the fact that Chaos Magicians are philosophically aligned with being chill and letting people do things however they want so theyre the LEAST likely to be like "actually you should pick a different word."
this bothers me because im a pedant but affects literally nothing about my life, practice, or community so the most ill do is post about it but thank you reading my strongly worded letter
THIS!!! Omg this.
It’s a source of never ending frustration for me that the terms “chaos” and “gnosis” got new definitions tacked on which deviate so significantly from the widely understood meanings those words already have. I don’t really want to be the person constantly “well, actually”-ing people left and right, but it’s super hard sometimes to let the misconceptions slide.
