MItch in NYC. Photo by Larry Busacca.

Anarchic Magick

An unholy manifesto

Mitch Horowitz
11 min readJan 18, 2020

--

The greatest danger to magickal practice is orthodoxy. Orthodoxy can assert itself in surprising ways and at unexpected moments. This is a cri de coeur against orthodoxy. I call my personal system anarchic magick. And if you like my approach, I invite you to honor it by throwing away my term and using your own.

Here’s the rub: Our alternative spiritual culture is rife with systems, many of which I honor and practice. They go under names like sex magick, ceremonial magick, chaos magick, New Thought, spell work of varying sorts, and so on. All are focused on the same goal. Which is tapping the powers of psychical causation, of locating a medium between oneself and creative forces.

If you take a spiritual approach to life, as I do, you share my conviction that we participate in some process of mental and emotion selection (a term I prefer to manifestation). I have written previously about the process of how metaphysical and magical systems may work. Those I mention above have aesthetic and sometimes intellectual differences, as well as different lineages — but all are geared toward tapping and directing one’s causative spiritual power. By spiritual I mean extra-physical.

My problem with all these approaches, including the least conformist of them all, chaos magick, is that each assumes a set of psychological…

--

--

Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China