"Life + Significance = Magic!"

Once upon a time, by which I really mean right now, there was a man named Grant Morrison. He was involved in film, in music, in theater and video games. But the first time I heard of Grant Morrison, it was in the context of comics: he wrote, among many, many, many things, The Invisibles, a brilliant comic book series as well as what Morrison describes as a hypersigil. He also wrote Pop Magic!, which is not a comic book at all. As it turns out, in addition to being a comics writer, an artist, a journalist, and a mad bald Scotsman with a fantastic accent to match, Grant Morrison is a practicing chaos magician, and has been since ’79.

"I got into magic to see if it was real," Morrison said in this interview with A. David Lewis of Publishers Weekly. "...I had to revise my vision of what the world was and how it worked. Again, that’s another element of magic for me, trying to figure out, why do these things happen—what are we doing to our nervous systems to make us believe a demon has entered the room? It became to me about the actual 'nuts and bolts' of it, not the fantastic thing or the mystic thing or the names of angels. I became interested in what’s actually going on."

So what is going on? According to his response to Publishers Weekly this past August,

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in. The same way that your cell is you until it’s just a dead, dry thing, going back to death, I don’t think that there’s an afterlife at all. When the giant organism grows up and becomes an adult, that’s the afterlife. I think we’re part of a larval entity; it lives in the planet Earth, it consumes the planet Earth as another part of its development in the same way a caterpillar eats leaves. If you watch the caterpillar, it looks like it’s destroying its environment, but it’s not. It’s actually just feeding to change into a butterfly. And I think that’s what’s going on with our planet right now.

When you get down to it, this isn't a particularly bizarre or unique idea; it is a common enough theme in Buddhism and Hermeticism, in Wicca and Bahai'i, even in the Japanese anime Serial Experiments Lain: No matter where you go, everyone is connected. But there isn't much about this larval Earth theory in Pop Magic!, a quick-and-easy guide to becoming a chaos magician yourself. This 12-page essay, originally printed in The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (and currently available at Scribd), opens thusly:

POP MAGIC! is Magic! for the People. Pop Magic! is Naked Magic! Pop Magic! lifts the 7 veils and shows you the tits of the Infinite.

And so we begin. The veils rise to reveal a practical “How to be a Magician” segment, followed by sections on protection, sigils, divine possession, and suggested experiments with all of the above. “Magic is easy to do,” Morrison reassures us, and so it appears in this fairly simple how-to manual. The exercises Morrison describes -- perhaps especially the "WANK technique" to charge sigils -- are easily accomplished by anyone regardless of prior magical know-how. Written with humor and personality, Pop Magic! reads like a close, casual dialog with a friend, rather than a stuffy treatise that deigns to edify the unwashed and idiotic masses. Morrison does not delve too deeply into philosophy, but then, his intention is to pare back the metaphysical acrobatics some say one needs to master in theory before even attempting any in practice: "The point is not to BELIEVE in magic, the point is to DO it and see how it works."

Morrison even gave audiences at DisinfoCon 2000 a quick workshop on how to perform sigil magic:


But Morrison is quick to reject any claims of exclusive access to the hallowed halls of early enlightenment: "I just want to talk about it with people who know what I mean," he told Jay Babcock in this incredible interview for Arthur Magazine. "All I’ve got to offer is my experience as a human being in the world. I’m not a guru."

And watch out for those who insist they are, he seems to say in this magnificent 8-part interview conducted by Jonathan Ellis at Pop Image:

It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. 'Life' plus 'significance' = magic.

Linkages!

• Morrison's website
  
• the full lecture Morrison gave at DisinfoCon 2000. That crazed scream he lets loose as he approaches the podium really sets the stage for the next 45 minutes!
  
• a neat Suicide Girls interview in which Morrison discusses, among other things, how his magic intertwines with his comics
• Grant Morrison on Wiki

And simply because I think it's adorable, here's a rare shot of Grant Morrison with hair, reading Batman with?TO? a kitty. Is it all right to call men "adorable"? Is it considered emasculating or some such bullshit? Whatever. I'M DOING IT.

Happy solstice, kids. Stay warm--some of us ought to.


Photos courtesy of various people on the Intarwebz, all of whom seem to have ganked them from Morrison's own site.

What IS magic?

I've already given ye dictionaryDOTcom's definition of magic, as well as Alan Moore's description thereof. But like almost everything in this weird wide world of ours, there's tons more where that came from. So here's the first batch of what I fancy will be an ongoing series: what various folks have to say about what they think magic actually is.


“[Magic] is the study in which natural forces, energies, and gods can be compelled or induced to help us.”

-- Christine Wicker

“I define magic as the art of affecting the manifest through the Unmanifest. The manifest is all that can be seen, touched, perceived, manipulated, imagined, or understood. The Unmanifest is none of these things. It is the place, or rather the non-place, from which everything issues…. It follows that every magical act is a communication with God, however the deity may be conceived or defined by the individual. In fact it is not necessary to talk about God in connection with magic, which is a technique for causing real change in a world that has little to do with common religious sensibility.”

-- Donald Tyson, The Truth about Ritual Magic

“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”

-- Aleister Crowley

"Magic, sometimes known as sorcery, is a conceptual system that asserts human ability to control or predict the natural world (including events, objects, people, and physical phenomena) through mystical, paranormal or supernatural means. The term can also refer to the practices employed by a person asserting this ability, and to beliefs that explain various events and phenomena in such terms."

-- Wikipedia

"Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible."

-- Neil Gaiman

Magic is a precision science! It is also:

• The science of deliberate creation.
• The science of effective prayer.
• The science of manifesting Higher Will (God's Will) on the energetic and material planes.
• The science of heightened awareness, selective perception, and dynamic, harmonious relationships.
• The study of intention (as per Aleister Crowley, one of the greatest magicians).
• The system of creation, not coercion.

--Shamanschool.com

"...the essential energy which circulates in the Universe of the Gods, as well as in that of humans." -- Christian Jaq

“Religion and magical thinking are so intertwined that scholars still argue over where the dividing line is…. Religion tends toward supplication, whereas magic sets forced into operation, commands, and demands. It relies on the power of objects, of symbols, of words, and of human will. It empowers human experience over doctrine. Religious people wait on God; magical people push. Magic cuts out the clergy, dispensing with their role, usurping their power. And instead of telling people that they should not want what they do want, magic tries to help them get it.”

– Christine Wicker, Not in Kansas Anymore:
A Curious Tale of How Magic is Transforming America

"...magic is: the dawning understanding of how things all fit together. And how it works, and how frightening and intricate and gigantic it all is and yet how bloody simple, based on a simple binary iteration of ones and zeroes." -- Grant Morrison

"He has one thing you haven't got: a great big bushy beard!"

Alan Moore: most people know him as the comics writer who gave the world the likes of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell, some of the most popular and influential titles in the medium. He is the mind behind the character John Constantine, a working class magician and power junkie who is worlds more interesting on the page than Keanu Reeves could possibly make him on the big screen, of Swamp Thing and Hellblazer fame. Few are also aware, though, that Moore himself is intimately familiar with the workings of magic.

Luckily for all, YouTube has yielded this fascinating if brief interview conducted by comedian Stewart Lee:



Alan Moore also provides this great, very sensible explanation of how he perceives magic, as well as the difference between magic and the sort of unrefined madness that could land you with a full-time membership at the Rubber Room Club, in this interview:

Another way of looking at this is to say that every human being has their window onto the world, the window of their senses. You've got your mind and your senses. Your perceptions. That is your window onto the world. Now just as we look out the windows of our rooms and houses and Yeah we can't see the whole of reality outside. We can see the houses across the street, a bit of sky above them, whatever. We understand that there is a much wider world out there, but we can only see this little bit of it. Now, using this metaphorical window, a magician is trying to, perhaps, change the angle of elevation of the window. Or widen it. But change what that window can look at. At will. He's trying to tilt the window so it'll see higher realms, or lower ones. That's a magician. What's happened to a lunatic is that their window has been kicked in. So: they've both got the same flood of perceptions rushing in, but the magician has got a framework into which to fit those perceptions. The magician has got a little filing system called "Magic," in which he can put these various things into the drawers of it, and not be overwhelmed by them. The schizophrenic has just got cats with human faces talking to him, and strange shapes floating around the room, and voices in their heads and no idea where they’re coming from. That’s the difference between madness and magic.

Now to some degree, by its very definition, magic has to be kind of transrational. You have to go beyond the rational to take your first step in magic. So, they're both talking about the same territory. You have to be mad to be a magician, but you have to be mad in a controlled way. You have to be...deliberately mad. It's no good going crazy by accident! By then it'll be too late. Go crazy on purpose, in a controlled way, and you might find that you're getting somewhere.

And just for kicks, have a Something Positive comic featuring Moore.


Photos courtesy of Comic Vine.

“Let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

Hello, world! I’m Tamburlaine*, and I am on a quest for modern magic.

When I talk about magic I don’t mean prestidigitation, the stuff you see on stage. Bunnies-out-of-hats and hankies-into-doves are all very entertaining, but not what this blog will be about. When I say magic, this is the definition I have in mind: “the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature” (dictionaryDOTcom). I’m looking for what’s behind the curtain even when the lights are out.

I’ll be blogging about different magic systems in use today, about methods and theory and people’s experiences, about wonder and belief and sometimes, simply what works.

So come along! I suspect this will be a hell of a ride.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.

Is it all real?

Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

– Francis Pharcellus

* Well, not really, but it’s the only name any of you lot need.