One of the ways I understand chaos magick, inspired by something I read but don’t remember what, is this: the world is chaotic by nature, and order or disorder is the result of how you look at it. Everything simply is however it is, and doesn’t mean anything in itself. It is our interpretation of it that gives it meaning. A student may have an insanely messy room, but he knows exactly where everything is, so to him it is ordered (not to get too autobiographical). This is why belief shifting works. We can literally change how ordered things are by changing our interpretation of them. Why is a raven like a writing desk? Well, the answer’s up to you.

Most methods of divination produce essentially random results. You can’t really try to pick a certain tarot card, or roll normal dice in a certain way, with any degree of accuracy. But reality itself is just as chaotic. By forcing ourselves to interpret a fairly random set of symbols and make sense of them, the diviner is mimicking the process of experiencing reality itself. This is both how and why divination works.

So when someone says, “how can you know anything about reality by looking at a deck of cards? Isn’t it all just up to chance?” you smile and say, “exactly.”