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The Following Interview Comes from Part of a Much Longer One The following interview comes from part of a much longer one, conducted over several days in 2009, primarily at Grant Morrison's home in LA., as part of a forthcoming documentary film on Morrison's life, philosophy, and work. The Morrisons were extremely kind, opening up their home to us, showing us his notebooks, and letting us film him doing various activities, from meditating to walking around outside. Besides Morrison and myself, a film crew was also present, consisting of Amber Yoder and Jordan Rennert, who also got involved and asked a few questions. The film, also through Sequart, is expected to be completed in 2010 - just two years before the theoretical apocalypse of The Invisibles. PATRICK MEANEY: How old were you when you got into magic? GRANT MORRISON: The first time I tried a magic ritual, I was 19. I'd been given a book by my uncle Billy, who was interested in Crowley, and he was the same guy who sort of gave me my first comic books, so he was a big formative influence. He'd given me the Crowley tarot deck and Crowley's Book of Thoth. I think I'd found some — it was like one of these, the ritual of the Bornless One or something like that. I can't even remember the first one `cause I didn't even write it down. And I just did this thing to see what would happen, because I'd read this, and I was kind of a disempowered kid, so I felt I wanted something that would give me some agency in the world, and magic seemed like a pretty cool thing to try out. Grant Morrison Interview 287 So I thought, do this ritual. I was really cynical. I don't believe any of this stuff, I'd never seen ghosts, I'd never seen anything. In fact, my mother was quite witchy. She read tea leaves, but nothing of that seemed to have come through in me. I was just a totally down-to-earth kid, but with an imagination, I guess. I tried this ritual. I did the whole thing: I got the candles out, I did the magic words, I did the circle, I did the banishings and all that stuff. And it didn't happen then. I stopped, and I went to bed. And then this thing happened while I was lying down. It was a sense of weird overwhelming evil, it seemed at the time, and right in front of me there was a kind of gravitational point in the air, in the room, which was drawing all the perspectives towards it, as if there was a hole there or a crack. And there was the sense of black oil filling up the folds between the brain, and something bubbling through the oil as a voice that was quite disturbing and announcing strange things. And I just freaked out and called in the gods of my mom and dad — y'know, "Jesus, get me out of this one." And the whole experience ended after a little bit, and then there was this vision of a lion's face, which started to announce stuff So it seemed pretty convincingly Crowleyian to me that I'd actually somehow activated whatever it was he was talking about, and that it was some way of changing your consciousness by performing these ritual actions and deliberately placing your head in a different kind of space, and it worked. I'm not suggesting that an actual demon appeared in the room, but certainly the ritual was specific enough to trigger the desired effect. And that's what I was interested in, the nuts and bolts of it, not whether it was an angel or a 288 Our Sentence is Up: Seeing Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles demon because I don't believe in angels or demons, to tell the truth. I believe there are things that we can manifest as angels and demons or project on to. So something had happened, and that was my lifelong interest. I kept trying it out and doing things, and then it got to be the cool stuff, like being able to predict where peoples' lost guitars were with exact accuracy, just weird stuff you can't explain. But you look back at it and say okay, something happens when you start on that path, and you start thinking that way, and you start doing these things, and the world seems to adapt a little bit around it. PM: How do you adapt your world to that kind of view? GM: The rituals themselves are a way of adapting your brain. They train you to speak in a certain way. Once you start to create your own types of rituals, it's deliberately to put yourself in certain states. So for you, for instance, there might be a certain posture you could adopt that takes you into a particular state, of either pride and / or servility and / or creepy, whatever you want to do. You make the conditions. It's like programming a machine. You decide. Surround yourself with images of John Lennon, for instance, as I did at the start of The Invisibles, and play "Tomorrow Never Knows" on a loop and have Beatles albums around you and wear your Beatle clothes and have a Richenbacher guitar and John Lennon will appear. What you're doing is creating an environment where there is nothing but Lennon-ness. And out of that comes a way of aligning your head with Lennon-ness, which we all have. He was just a human being, after all. We can all conjure music we can all hear. He was really good at it because he focused at it, but he was one of us, so it became, for me, about that, about actually programming specific, entire environments. That's what I saw magic as doing: if you have this certain incense, well, they give you a certain incense because certain incenses conjure certain memories, and that memory will add to the creation of a ghost that is a god or an angel or a demon and allow it to actually be physically present, to the exclusion of all other things in the room. If that makes sense to you, y'know. That's the basis of these things for me: these ritual actions are to program specific states in the human organism. If you can exclude everything but love in your nervous system for even a little while, you will feel the condition of eternal love, which is the condition of being a god. The love Grant Morrison Interview 289 that is always present is something we can all share, for little bits of time. We don't have it all the time. We don't have it 24 hours a day, but love is present 24 hours a day — that's the god. Communication is present 24 hours a day, but sometimes we can't be bothered talking, sometimes we're really good at it, sometimes we're letting it all flow. That is the god; the eternal quality of communication is the god. It's not supernatural, it's not in the abstract — it's about how humans are and how they interact with the world. PM: So what you're saying is kind of like the Greek myth view of the world, where certain qualities are made manifest in specific figures, so communication would have a god represent it. So pop magic is to come up with god figures more relevant for our times, or your personal experience? GM: Yeah, pop magic — the idea is to create your own pantheon of personal deities. For me, I loved Patrick McGoohan, growing up watching The Prisoner. So if I want to have a god of rebellion, then I can give it the face of Patrick McGoohan and the number 6 badge and imagine his voice fighting back and summon these kinds of qualities of resistance into myself. The longer I think of his beetle brow and his march down the stairs against authority, the more I will get into that mood. In the good old days, when James Bond was cool, you would go to see a James Bond movie and walk out strutting, because the qualities of Bond would be pervading the way you were thinking, and it would be altering your programming as a human being. So magic would be specific like that, if you were to go out in your tuxedo one night and evoke Bond deliberately. PM: With Lennon, what was your perception, was it a physical perception or a feeling? GM: No, it was the head of Lennon made out of colored music, as I tried to represent it in The Invisibles. That's how I saw this whole John Lennon apparition appear, after deliberately doing a magic ritual to summon John Lennon. It had a physical, visual dimension, and it gave me a song, which was really quite convincingly like a John Lennon song. So yeah, it seemed like an absolute contact with that idea, and he found his way into The Invisibles as well, as a psychedelic god. So somewhere, it's hard to know where to draw the line: is he now a true psychedelic god or was that just an absolute projection? PM: Are there other specific magic rituals in the comics, like the Lennon one? 290 Our Sentence is Up: Seeing Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles GM: The Lennon ritual was specific to The Invisibles #1, but some of the comics themselves are the ritual.
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