I'm a ceremonial practitioner, with some chaos leanings... but mostly ceremonial through traditional paths.
Right off the bat, I need to inform you, deities are not egregores or constructs of aggregate group consciousness. This notion is a big mistake and honestly kind of dangerous. If you treat a deity as a figment of human conjuring they will know it and not work with you. If it's the wrong spirit they will punish you. They are individual beings each with their own unique history. This is not a faith-based assertion but an experience based one. So I suggest you nip that one in the butt right away.
There's a lot to unpack here. It's hard to say what the true source of your trauma is without considering the following:
- do you have the guidance of an experienced mentor/teacher or have you been flying solo, using book/internet/community based knowledge only?
- the spirits you work with, how you approach them, and the procedures you employed, are all important to what you receive
- how much magic you do on a regular basis, the length of time you work with a spirit before making more complex requests or inviting different other spirits to work with, the difficulty/grade level of the ceremonial rituals you attempt (whether within your pay grade or too much above), can all determine the intensity level of what happens to you on every level of life
- when you make a request for your life to change, you may be inviting trials and initiations to get you to the next level, and sometimes these can be perceived as trauma ("be careful what you wish for"); also, the path you choose will determine how the magic changes you, and sometimes a path will break you to remake you
- if you have any pre-existing and unresolved psychoemotional imbalances, traumas or disturbances, it's usually recommended that you resolve these before getting involved in magical paths. The reason is that simply performing magic warps reality in ways that can be challenging regardless of the end result (which is also a warping factor), and psychoemotional disturbance is already reality-warping, so you would be entering the magical world with a perceptual handicap. The one exception is working one's ancestors or one single guardian spirit you trust, while you recover. If you invite too much when you are still fucked up then psychological stress can increase exponentially and this will not be good for your development.
This begs the question... what is the point of magic? For me, it is to make life better, to experience personal/spiritual progress, and to self-actualize. What is your goal? If you don't have an answer to this, you may want to meditate on that, and then choose magical practices that hone this goal. A lot of magicians are armchair. They like to dabble for entertainment purposes, curiosity, or to flirt with the idea of whether or not magic is real. These people are the ones in the most danger because when shit gets real they will be less capable of dealing with the fallout. That's why it's good to figure out what you really want from the process. Also, as a general rule, if you're seeking material things (money, love, power, whatever), you have to be actively doing those things in the world first. If you just turn to magic all the time but don't provide a pathway, then you're wasting a lot of potential. The spirits help those who help themselves.
To answer your questions about chaos vs. ceremonial magic. In traditional systems, belief and intention are irrelevant. Of course, intention really focuses the practitioner so that they can feel a sense of momentum and optimism. However, it has no relationship to whether or not the magic yields results. The results come from proper procedures, ingredients, timing, etc. as determined by the many generations of people who came before us. I prefer traditional systems for this reason because I don't much feel like reinventing the wheel. There are hundreds if not thousands of years of literary material to draw on that tell us what works and what doesn't.
However, after many years of doing traditional magic, I am more apt to improvise because I have a better sense of what tends to work and what doesn't. If you don't have this sense, then it's better not to improvise, and ESPECIALLY don't mix different systems together. Usually you just won't get good results, but sometimes you get fucked up.
Magicians are born, not made, usually. The most powerful chaos magicians I've met just seem to have a natural knack for it. They've read many traditional texts and they can just slap stuff together on the go. They seem to have been born with an innate sense of how to create magic out of nothing. However, these people are rare. The lion's share of chaos magicians I've met don't have grounding in any traditional or ceremonial systems. In my opinion (and this may seem harsh), they are mostly lazy people who want to do magic but lack the discipline to learn anything real, which takes a lot of time and dedication. So they slap together rituals that barely work or don't work at all and then call themselves magicians. Presto. Like I said, I've met some powerful ones, but raw talent is not enough... they are very disciplined and do a lot of ground work.
I think the dichotomy between the chaos and traditional paths is kind of artificial. Traditional people improvise once they get good, and chaos people do a lot of historical research to fuel their creative process. It's not black and white.
Hope that helps.
