Contemporary theorists have hypothesized that individuals seek to maximize feelings of ontological security against a modern background of increasing risk, fragmentation, and uncertainty. For some, modernity has become an epoch of death denial consciously divorced from nature through the legacy of the Enlightenment project. Conversely, celebrations of mortality are central to contemporary paganism, particularly where linked to the honoring of the regenerative cycles of nature. For pagans, mortality is often linked to carnivalesque celebration taking place in ambivalent spaces, termed heterotopia, where symbols of life and death meet. In these spaces death is sublimated into a nurturing, rather than life-denying force, strengthening pagan identity and solidarity. Effectively, death becomes interiorized by pagans. Ritualization around “death” becomes not merely a way of assuaging fears about one's own mortality, but an opportunity for insight and self-transformation.
Chaos magic, alternatively known as chaoism, is a radical, libertarian form of magick which appears to have the most overt scientific content in terms of cosmological understanding and magickal practice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.