Question about the Arrows of Chaos

[Anonymous]

I have been searching the net to find the origin of the symbel "arrows of chaos".
I know it's been used by Games Workshop for their chaos banners, but i wondered if it's an older symbol.
Than somewhere i read that Mister Moorcock designed this symbol (8 outwardly going arrows from a core).

Is this indeed the case?
I see this symbol used all over the net (in logos, pendants, drawings) and wondered what's the case with copyright and all.

Thanks in advance to anybody who can answer this question for me!

Pascalle van de Watering

[Michael Moorcock]

Yes, it's the case. I drew it at my kitchen table while thinking up suitable symbols for Law (a single arrow) and Chaos (eight arrows representing
all possible choices). Games Workshop couldn't exist without the things they've ripped off from me and Tolkien. If they'd made more of the material, I wouldn't mind. But they've dumbed it down, too. Sometimes I get weary of this crap. Other times, people remind me, that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. A more sincere form of flattery than that, of course, is when they ask you first. As I've often said -- they can say it's flattery, but that's the flattery of the guy you catch in your apartment when you come home at night and he's just heading for the fire escape with your new TV. 'Great taste in TVs, man,' he says....

[Anonymous]

games workshop plagurism

I imagine the folks at the games workshop thought you were dead, they understand nothing, particularly the runes (their use of the nazi fabricated varients, ill-informed at best, and very very bad taste).

one thing I have always wondered about is this quote

"Every man is a spark in the darkness.آ  By the time he is perceived, he is gone:آ  a fading retinal after-image obscured by newer and brighter lights."

everything on the net says the games workshop made it up, but I'm sure I've heard it before, maybe in a slighly different wording, I'm sure they've nicked it from somewhere.

Is it a quote you're familiar with?

[MissDreamy]

Good grief, I wonder exactly who they nicked it from!? 8O

[Anonymous]

Than i want to thank you.

Dear mister Moorcock,

First of, thanks for answering my question so quickly.
I had also mailed Games Workshop with this same question a week ago and i still haven't gotten a reply.

I want to compliment you on the symbol. I absolutely love it. For me it indeed represents everything chaos stands for.

I even have it tatood on my back.

But here my question.
I would love to put that symbol on some t-shirts and embroid it (partially) on baggy pants.
I hope you will give me permission to use the lovely symbol you designed. I will of course make sure that everybody knows that it was you who designed this symbol.

Regards,
Pascalle van de Watering
The Netherlands

[PsychicWarVeteran]

I would love to put that symbol on some t-shirts and embroid it (partially) on baggy pants.
I hope you will give me permission to use the lovely symbol you designed. I will of course make sure that everybody knows that it was you who designed this symbol.

I actually posed a similar question to Mike a few months back. His feeling is that as long as you don't go making money off it or making gobs of them for everyone you know, you can use it.

Here is his answer to me:
[broken link]

[Anonymous]

Beauty of it is, Blizzard in turn ripped off Warhammer and Warhammer 40k in making Warcraft and Starcraft, and ending up making far better product (unless you'd rather spend $2000 to field an army of miniatures, rather than $39.99 for a computer game).

DLackey

[Michael Moorcock]

It never occured to me to trademark the Chaos sign any more than Tolkien trademarked Orcs. It's nice of you to ask, and yes, of course
you can put it on a T-shirt!

[Theocrat]

Hi guys! I'm back... Been moving to a new apartment... Had to get away from sandvikens (my town) more ghettotized region. I hate it when goverment officials 're-adress' the problem of troublesome individuals.
They need help! Not being moved around just 'cause their is a shortage of money. When infact the upper echelon in the communal government is stuffing their pockets. I'm not a communist, but i know greed when i see it! :x

About the chaos symbol. People use it frequently. I wonder whats so estetically pleasing about that symbol more than just what it represents. 'cause most of the time people don't know what it is in the first place. Maybe it's the mystery about it, but we MM fans know otherwise. It's really a simple image, i really like it.. :D

[PsychicWarVeteran]

Look at this screen-capture from the recent film Without a Paddle:



Evidently, even toothless backwoods hicks have been recruited by Chaos!

[McTalbayne]

Im planning on getting 2 Tattoos on my back. One of Law, and one of Chaos. Would i need to send you any royalties mike? Or would i need to get a little Tattoo of your avatar inbetween them? :lol:

[Michael Moorcock]

No royalties required. But when you've finished with the skin, send it to my children... :)
See what you mean about that symbol getting around. Isn't that
'Arry 'Awk with the sawn-off ?
My favourite representation is Walter Simonson's, which he first did inthe Multiverse comic. It's an assymetrical version.
You could argue it's just the points of the compass, too... :)

[Jerico]

Without the wheel of chaos,
intellectually challenged people might
not know how to operate a video game joystick!!

:o

[Anonymous]

What a coincidence! I was going to ask about whether Mr. Moorcock was aware of Games Workshop taking the Chaos Symbol, though I feel it is perhaps slightly harsh on Games Workshop, after all, if it hadn't been for GW and a long round about cycle of reading and maturing, I would never have arrived at Mike's work, and that would have been a great loss to me. Could you actually trademark the symbol for Chaos if you so desired Mike?

[Michael Moorcock]

I could have trademarked it at some point, I suppose, but I wouldn't want to. Games Workshop's lifting from me and Tolkien might have introduced new readers, but it's still irritating! However, there's a certain satisfaction of having added a few bits and pieces to the common culture to the extent that people actually don't know the origins of stuff and ideas they now use casually. None of that bothers me. The intellectual property I'm interested in protecting is my actual fiction, characters, backgrounds and so on. There's a lot to be written about the processes which develop a genre and then make it a popular genre and I, of course, was part of a group, including Tolkien and Leiber, who wrote
individual books which then helped create and then became absorbed into a popular genre. It's a very strange feeling to have ideas which you regard as your individual ideas become part of the common culture.
Not unflattering, of course, but sometimes highly confusing. I tend to cite something like Warlord of the Air, which was a deliberate intervention into Edwardian fiction of a certain kind and which then spawned hundreds of books and other media which simply took the imagery ('cool airships') and left the substance behind. It means that a personal set of symbols, metaphores, allegory and so on is constantly being presented back to you in what is to you at least a debased, corrupted and somehow empty form. I find this with the multiverse idea, too -- where it's just used to rationalise a cross-over comic story or something of the sort. It tends to force you to examine and perhaps make more coherent those ideas, so it might not be altogether bad, but it also keeps you engaged with something you might be better moving on from. That's one of the reasons I'm drawing a line under the EC stories with this final Elric book. I've tried to take back my own material, if you like, and done my best with it, but I can't spend the rest of my life doing that.