The 1987 edition of Stormbringer was published jointly by Chaosium in the U.S. It then turned up quite naturally in Chaosium's Stormbringer RPG (one edition of which was published as Elric!). Copyright problems led to its omission from later editions. The symbol's first appearance in a commercial role-playing game (RPG) was in TSR's Dungeons & Dragons supplement, Deities & Demigods which included the gods, monsters, and heroes from Moorcock's Elric books as one of 17 mythological and fictional 'pantheons'. As far as I know the symbol, drawn by Jim Cawthorn, first appeared on an Elric cover of Science Fantasy in 1962, then later appeared in his first comic version of Stormbringer done by Savoy ISBN 0-7045-0226-7.Īn even-more-chaotic asymmetrical representation was by Walter Simonson in the Michael Moorcock's Multiverse comic (and subsequent graphic novel: ISBN 1-56389-516-1).

I have since been told that it is an 'ancient symbol of Chaos' and if it is then it confirms a lot of theories about the race mind. I drew a straightforward geographical quadrant (which often has arrows, too!) – N, S, E, W – and then added another four directions and that was that – eight arrows representing all possibilities, one arrow representing the single, certain road of Law. The origin of the Chaos Symbol was me doodling sitting at the kitchen table and wondering what to tell Jim Cawthorn the arms of Chaos looked like. Crowley described the card as representing 'energy' scattering at 'high velocity' that had managed to create the depicted eight-pointed figure. The Eight of Wands in Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot deck features prominently an eight-pointed star with arrows at the ends. There are a number of traditional symbols that have the same geometrical pattern as Moorcock's symbol of Chaos, such as any of various eight-pointed stars, the Star of Ishtar, the Indian Dharmacakra and the Wheel of the Year, but none of these were symbols of chaos and their limbs are not arrows. It was subsequently adopted into the pop-cultural mainstream, turning up in such places as modern occult traditions and role-playing games.

Moorcock has stated that he conceived this symbol while writing the first Elric of Melniboné stories in the early 1960s. The stylized Symbol of Chaos is official logo of Russian political movement Eurasian Youth Union

Binding of isaac chaos