Bored with the same old rituals? Coven or grove stuck in a rut? Think you know everything? Then grab this book and get ready for a shake-up; your magickal life may never be the same. Things to check at the door: stereotypes about chaos magic(k), politikal korrectness, and fear. Things to bring along: imagination and a sense of humor. You will find loads of inspiration here for creating new and exciting rituals, from one to mess with time (stretch it out so you can finish that grant proposal? compress it so sitting on the freeway with your foot on the clutch for hours seems to pass in seconds?), to a Buffy Vampire-Slaying Rite for the graveyard on Halloween Night, as well as exercises designed to get in touch with your own creativity.

Humphries and Vayne, both artists outside the magickal world, prove in this slim volume that they're top-notch ritual artists as well. They present chaos magic(k) as descended from both the Western magical tradition and the more linear, scientific ideas of Marx, Freud and (ultimately) the post-modernists, who argue that all reality is culturally constructed. Thus the thread behind all the rituals ane exercises in this book is the paradox that nothing is objectively true, but at the same time, reality is ultimately a subjective experience. If that's the case, then magicians can have at it at will, changing consciousness and maybe the very fabric of reality as well.

In keeping with their po-mo theoretical orientation, the authors present accounts of the rituals from a first-person perspective, often including a great deal of subjective reflection and soul-gazing. I personally like this style, but some may find it distracting or self-indulgent. What it does do is make perfectly clear that rituals are what we make of them. These aren't recipes to duplicate, down to the smallest ingredient; they're meant to inspire us to create our own variations, according to our own needs and desires.

Needless to say, this isn't a book for beginners. I would also recommend working most of these rituals in a group, preferably one that's already been working comfortably together for some time. That's because the results from these kinds of free-form artistic rituals can be unpredictable; if there are already conflicts in your group, you can be sure that this kind of work will bring them to the fore. With these caveats aside, I highly recommend this book. There's a dearth of good magical material out there for those beyond the "Wicca 101" level, and this book fills that niche.