Comics legend Grant Morrison on "The Invisibles" for TV, Wonder Woman, Robert Anton Wilson, and magick

In a new Mondo2000.com interview, the great Grant Morrison talks about the Brave New World television series, The Invisibles future on the the small screen, Robert Anton Wilson, and how to get better at making magick. From Mondo2000.com:

Let's talk about Magick. How does one get better at it?

GM: By doing it on a regular basis! It's like a martial art or a musical talent. If you dedicate yourself to learning and practice, if you read other magician's accounts, if you pay attention, then you start to notice details that the less engaged will miss and this allows you to do things that other people may regard as magical or even supernatural. Just like a stage conjurer, or a great guitarist, or a gifted actor or artist can do. It's just about really paying attention and doing the work to see what happens. It's just a way of looking at things in a fresh light and then working with this augmented version of reality in ways that can appear supernatural. One of magic's main attractions involves bringing things into being, from the conception or thought all the way to solid materiality. Making the insubstantial tangible.

But there's also a whole other thing. Magic is about deliberately inducing unusual states of consciousness. Some of these states of consciousness have been called gods because they feel super organized and positive, and some of them can be called demons because they feel chaotic, violent, hateful and perverted or whatever. That's part of magic. It's as simple as how can you create different states of consciousness? Magic uses spells or rituals, some developed over many centuries, to stimulate specific focused states of consciousness, whether demonic or angelic or god like. Psychedelics and hallucinogens have been used by shamans for the same purpose[…]

What advice do you have for the magicians out there who have a story to tell and want to storm the reality studio?

GM: Tell a different story. Tell a fresh story that speaks to its times and the people around you. A story that offers possibilities, exit strategies, rather than apocalypse and ruin. I can't see that there's anything else…

In the Wonder Woman book I'm doing, for instance, I've actively avoided writing the boy hero story that's so ubiquitous as to seem inescapable —  the familiar story of the One, the champion, the Joseph Campbell monomyth thing that drives so many Hollywood movies and YA stories. We've seen it. The Lion King. The callow youth loses mom or dad, or his comfortable place in the tribe, and he has to fight his way back to save the kingdom from its corrupt old leader, before claiming the captive princess and becoming the new king and… ad infinitum. The Circle of Life if it only applied to boys. I thought, where is the mythic heroine's story? In Ishtar Rising, [Robert Anton] Wilson talks about the myth of Inanna, and how she goes down into Hell and has to give up everything of herself to gain the wisdom and experience she can bring back to her tribe. Privileging the network rather than the sovereign individual.

And so, as I thought about the differences between the hero's and the heroine's journey, it gave me a bunch of different modes to work in. Finding ways to avoid telling the boy hero story again was quite liberating. It just gave me a bunch of new ideas, an interesting new way of telling stories that didn't rely on the framework of the hero's journey that Campbell talks about.

"Grant Morrison Surveys the Situation In 'The Age of Horus'" (Mondo2000.com)

altered image based on original photo: "Morrison smiling" by PDH (CC BY 2.0)