Ritual · “Repetition Rewires”
The Chaos Protocol
Enchant toward a practical (usually material/financial) goal by firing a ‘shoal’ of multiple sigils at once — including trivial decoy intents — to overwhelm the psychic censor and defeat ‘lust of result’, then act in the world to ‘jump the gap’.
Chaos Protocol enchantment: Fix a concrete goal. Make a shoal of sigils — your main intent plus extras, including a trivial “robofish” decoy. Fire the whole shoal at once in an altered state, overwhelming the censor, and let the decoy soak up your watching mind so you don’t stew over the real result. Then jump the gap — go act in the world so the enchantment has events to attach to. Read honestly: anxiety-managed intention-setting plus a hard push to take action.
What it is
Gordon White’s The Chaos Protocols (2016) applies chaos magick to practical, this-worldly goals — especially money and economic survival.
Its signature is not sigil-making (covered under sigil magic) but White’s distinctive enchantment workflow and his framing of two perennial chaos-magick problems: the psychic censor and “lust of result.” Where classic practice fires a single sigil and tries to forget it, White advocates sigil shoaling — firing a cluster of sigils at once, including a deliberate trivial “robofish” decoy — and then “jumping the gap”: taking concrete action so the enchantment has real-world events to attach to.
Read honestly, his protocol is a way to manage the anxiety that sabotages intention-setting, and a built-in insistence on acting.
The Method
A representative Chaos-Protocol enchantment session:
- Fix a clear practical goal — usually concrete and material (income, a contract, an opportunity).
- Make several sigils, not one — a “shoal.” Encode the main intent plus a set of related and even unrelated desires, so no single one carries all the pressure.
- Include a “robofish” decoy. Add at least one sigil for a trivial, highly probable event unrelated to the main aim. When the easy one obviously “works,” it (a) builds confidence and (b) distracts the conscious mind from fixating on the important outcome — White’s mechanism for defeating lust of result.
- Fire the whole shoal in one altered/gnostic session — overwhelming the “psychic censor” with volume rather than sniping a single intent past it (“cluster bomb” vs “sniper”).
- Release and divert attention. Drop conscious craving for any one result; let the decoy soak up the watching mind.
- Jump the gap — act. White is emphatic: enchant, then move in the world. The enchantment biases the odds; you must put yourself in the situations where the result can actually materialise (apply, pitch, show up, network). Magic “jumps the gap” between your effort and the opportunity — it does not replace the effort.
- Repeat as a campaign, re-enchanting periodically while pursuing the goal practically. (Sourcing note: a faithful summary of White’s shoaling, “robofish”/decoy, “psychic censor,” “lust of result,” and “jump the gap” framing from The Chaos Protocols; these are his/the tradition’s terms.)
Source & Lineage
Gordon White (the writer behind Rune Soup) is a contemporary chaos magician and author of The Chaos Protocols (2016) and Star. Ships (2016).
His work popularised sigil shoaling and the “robofish” decoy and recast enchantment as a hard-nosed, results-oriented complement to practical action in difficult economic times. He stands in the lineage of Spare/Carroll/Hine but is distinctive for his anxiety-management framing and his insistence on “jumping the gap.” → suggested node; builds on.
Common refinements
Skipping “jump the gap.” The single biggest error: enchanting and then waiting. White’s whole point is that you must act to give the result somewhere to land.
- No decoy / one sigil only. Without the shoal-and-robofish structure you’re back to sniping a single intent and stewing over it — the lust-of-result trap White is solving.
- Over-enchanting / obsessive re-firing. Compulsively re-doing the working signals anxious craving — the opposite of the intended state.
- Grandiose or vague goals. Concrete, plausible, near-term aims shoal better than fantasies.
- Treating it as a substitute for competence. Enchantment biases odds at the margin; it doesn’t replace skill, savings, or sound decisions.