Bootlickers and Punks - Order and Chaos
11 Sep 2025(Sorry I haven’t posted lately. This isn’t as well-formed as I would have liked, but I’m trying to increase my “Babble” and Just F’in Post instead of sitting on several unfinished posts.)
One of the more appealing aspects of Indo-European myth is the tenuous balance between Order and Chaos. Chaos is both the Nothing existence spawns out of, yet also the primordial forces of nature. Much of European descendent myth has a motif of Good Gods Conquer The Chaos Ones And Some Of The Chaos Ones Get Into The Pantheon Too. As is the beauty of Myth, there are differing layers of interpretation honeyed together in the baklava of Truth. One common theory is that Titans/Vanir/Fomorians are indigenous European gods that were conquered by the PIE. Yet even in this pastry layer still those gods represent a Chaotic Nature, of the Other.
In these ancient tales, the Chaos gods are primarily an evil that must be vanquished. To me that is reflective of how powerful the forces of nature were at the time, rather than an objectively true statement. Many favored gods of ancient and modern pagans are of this Chaos – Lugh, Freyr, Skadi, Prometheus – and not for edgy reasons like Loki. There is good Chaos. There is bad Chaos. This is obvious to anyone who enjoys a drink every now and again.
So while PIE myths are Order-leaning, they are not Order-exclusive. Contrast this with Abrahamic philosophy.
What led me to this post is a deeper study of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I am obviously into occultism, and anyone who knows anything about occultism knows the Golden Dawn and Crowley is the Second Coming of Sliced Bread. I have tried to read Crowley and Golden Dawn works several times. I have used and memorized John Michael Greer’s Celtic Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram (because I find Abrahamic words so odious). I have tried to study the *bbala(h). Not just recently, but for years I kept returning to it trying to figure out why I was too stupid and unenlightened to Get It.
Well, this I finally Got It! …Well, actually I got why I don’t Get It.
There’s too much damn Order.
I know, I know, it’s baffling to look at the maverick Crowley as an agent of pure Order. That’s why it took me so long to see it. But the Golden Dawn is inextricably tied to deep Hebrew mysticism, and the Hebrew world is linear. The Tree of Life is an ascension from Low to High. The goal is to go from Low to the High. You want to go from the Earth to the Heavens. Gnostics determined they wanted to escape reality, because the framework they built their gnosis upon was hierarchal. Ordered.
Crowley may have written “My adepts stand upright; their head above the heavens, their feet below the hells” but Golden Dawn philosophy is determined to abandon hell and earth. Gnostic philosophy is determined to abandon all except heaven. Christian*, Islamic, Jewish, even Buddhist – all about escaping the world. Escaping Chaos. Moving to Perfect Order.
That’s not the paradigm my brain works in.
I do not think Order is Bad or Chaos is Good. I think that balance is needed, and this is one of many ways the Abrahamic worldview is unbalanced. The ancient world was chaotic and so the gods were ordered. Abrahamic ones the most ordered, the best at vainquishing chaos. It has created a world that is extremely ordered, and so…an ordered philosophy isn’t as useful. Even harmful.
The utility of an Ordered spirituality is (I stress that I say this without admonishment) the Red Lobster of intellectual traits. Order is a floor and a ceiling. The more a mind adheres to Order, the less destructive it is. In a world filled with chaos, ensuring the average citizen cannot sink below a certain level of order is a good thing! But an Ordered mind can never think far outside of the Order to achieve great things.
This could be interpreted as saying that Christians cannot achieve great things, which I am not, because that is factually incorrect. All of the great works of the West in the past two millennia have been by Christians. I aruge instead that to an extremely, naturally Chaotic mind, a societal adherence to Order can achieve great and wonderful things. But now in modern day, the adherents to Christianity are, as a D&D player would put it, Lawful Stupid.
The Lawful Stupids bicker and bicker over how to interpret an over-translated book. They do not have the Chaotic minds to see the layered beauty of the Bible, or any great work of art. Order is Authoritarian. Order is Bootlicking. Order is following whoever wears the hat of the chosen identity to the grave.
One can be Chaotic and Christian (or any Abrahamic religion, but Christianity is particularly well suited for the breakout), but Christianity does not naturally lead to that. It gravitates, eventually, into the deep well of Lawful Stupid and remains.
Similarly, it is possible to be Lawful Stupid and non-Christian. And it is not merely a product of post-Christian Western society, although the gestalt Abrahamicness of modernity contributes. Lawful Stupid will be the natural ends of any spirituality overly fixated on Order. Such as…a Celestial Bureaucracy.
On the other hand, there is the modern worship of Chaos. Not simply trying to regain balance - a worship of raw Chaos. The anti-Christianity. The cult that sustains itself off being an opposite to Order rather than anything of substance. The modern Lokean cult is a pagan example of that. As is the ever-present succubus summoning thread on /x/ and other Slaaneshi pornographic subreddits. Complaining about the modern Chaos Cult is beating a dead horse – you can browse reddit logged out and experience the hedonistic trainwreck in livetime.
I’m hopeful that in time Western society will find a balance. Perhaps that’s paganism, perhaps a more esoteric Christianity like the Rosicrucians. I choose to be hopeful because the alternative is to wallow in the despair that the Lawful Stupids will outbreed us all (Order is very fertile).