Chaos magic took shape in England in the late 1970s, and it is best understood by what it deliberately discarded.
The ceremonial tradition it grew out of ran on inherited structure: grades of initiation, oaths, elaborate tables of correspondence linking planets to metals to plants to angels, and the authority of an order to say what was correct. Chaos magic dropped all of it. The founding argument was that none of that apparatus was doing any work, that the effective ingredient was the practitioner's own conviction, and that a symbol system was therefore a tool to be picked up for a purpose and put down afterwards.
What it kept was a technique. Austin Osman Spare, working in the early twentieth century, had developed a method of condensing a statement of intent into a compressed glyph and then forgetting the original wording, so that the desire operates without the interference of conscious wanting. That method became the movement's characteristic practice, and it is the part that has spread furthest beyond it.
The consequence of treating belief as an instrument is that anything can serve as a source, and later practitioners have worked with figures drawn from fiction, from advertising and from the internet on exactly that basis. Critics inside the wider occult world have called this incoherent; practitioners answer that incoherence was the point.
It remains the most explicitly modern of the practices in this atlas, with a documented founding and named founders still writing.