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"Study the various maps of consciousness created by Mag!cians [magicians / magickians] who have in times past made careful study of the interior domain and left us with charts of human conscious states - often personified by various, gods, devils, demons, angels and symbolic beings - that show increasingly more subtle detail.

Familiarise yourself with the basic shamanic three worlds model, the four-quarter elemental model (which shows up everywhere – from the four archangels and the four evangelists in the Bible, to the Four Worlds of Qabalah, the Four Quadrants and the Transactional Analysis personality grid), the various 8-stage models of Buddhist consciousness (which are even more finely-grained upon closer inspection), Timothy Leary’s “Circuits”, Spiral Dynamics and Chaos. Study the ten spheres of the Qabalistic Tree of Life (this can become the work of a lifetime but it’s well worth it), the 30 Aethyrs of the Enochian system, the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching divination system, the 78 cards of the Tarot deck etc.

Cultivate a working knowledge of the many gods, demons and angels of the world’s religious and mythic traditions. Read up on the various forms of Mag!c practised by shamans, witches and sorcerers over the centuries and even millennia; Australian Aboriginal dreamtime ideas, Hindu cosmology, pre-Buddhist Bon Po sorcery, Gnosticism, Wicca, Enochian Angelic Mag!c, Goetia, Voudon, Crowley’s Thelema, Spare’s Zos Kia, Satanism and the dark side Typhonian schools, the Chaos curent of Carroll, Sherwin, Hine. You must be willing to absorb and synthesize of all this contradictory information into your own personal prismatic worldview.

Subscribe to New Scientist or Scientific American and maintain a good working knowledge of cutting edge developments in science. String theory, multiverse theory; all the frontier disciplines are fertile ground for Mag!cal metaphors, speculation and practise." —Grant Morrison, Xanaduum, "Beyond the Word and the Fool Part 3" (2022)

"Mag!c [magick] has many practical and non-practical uses. Here are some of them, from the most mundane to the most outlandish.

1) Mag!c offers a tried-and-tested self-help discipline which allows all of us to make specific beneficial changes to our personalities and motivations: its practice confers a powerful sense of self-determination and agency which can counter the powerlessness we often feel in the face of the world’s hurricane motion. Given that the “spiritual”, transcendent impulse appears hard-wired in the human organism and shows up in every human culture, why not indulge it with a practice that doesn’t require you to believe in any god or devil but elevates lovely, daft you, to the centre of all creation?

2) Mag!c gives us an excuse us to create something from nothing. Again, this is not a supernatural or occult feat; writers, artists, mothers and fathers, architects and filmmakers, among many others, do this every day and some of them spend lifetimes perfecting the trick. Grab NOTHING in your greedy, ugly physical fists and make magnificent SOMETHING from it!

. . .

3) Mag!c connects us to generally unremarked upon, usually ignored but undeniably higher dimensional aspects of our being.

Our skulls are made of bone – our brains are grey intricate sponges that never feel the sun’s heat and yet we can imagine how our bodies look from outside! We can imagine our own deaths. We can imagine how the room where I write looks, as seen from “above”, or the shape of our country as seen from space, and the blue radiant Earth as it looks from the moon. We can picture our galactic location, our local cluster, the voids and filaments of the cosmos, the limits of physical, eternal creation. It all fits into these tiny white-bone skulls of ours. If we wish to, we can pull back and look down upon a staggering 4-Dimensional jewel that is all of existence adrift in its 5-D liquid supercontext. We can imagine and contain vast gem-universes drifting in the 5-D amnion. And beyond. Our tiny compact bone skulls never break, even when contemplating infinities, eternities." —Grant Morrison, Xanaduum, "Beyond the Word and the Fool Part 2" (2022)

"Mag!c [magick] = Meaning. Or to put it another way, Life + Significance = Mag!c.

. . .

Mind confers Meaning upon Matter.

Mind is nourished and sustained by the Meaning it assigns to Matter.

Matter is elevated and ennobled to Mag!c by the Meaning Mind attributes to it.

It's a winning transaction, an erotic snakedance, a slinky menage-a-trois that makes the world go round and around and up and down.

. . .

Feel free to think whatever makes you comfortable but be aware that there’s very little benefit to be gained from [a] dismissive approach and it could result in your missing out on something that might change your life for the better.

The simple and terrible first truth Mag!c teaches is this: you’re much more IN CHARGE of your own life than you may have been led to believe. If you truly grasp the implications, this simple statement will return to haunt and delight you in the years that lie ahead.

Mag!c, as it is discussed here, has little room for the supernatural. Nor do we see any virtue in the stereotypically “New Age’, somewhat heroic tendency to privilege all things bright and beautiful while electing not to acknowledge the ugly, cruel, dark and hateful aspects of existence.

Mag!c is a pragmatic, albeit heightened and focused, engagement with things as they are – the Buddhist condition of sunyata. If some results of this specialized attention to ordinary obvious shit give the powerful impression of supernatural events, this is a misunderstanding which further immersion in the disciplines of Mag!c will clarify and resolve in ways guaranteed to surprise and charm you.

The feats of an Olympic gymnast, conjuror, martial arts master, or talented artist can often seem like “magic”, but they are the results of years of training, focus and attention.

What may seem supernatural is predictably a natural side effect of paying more attention." —Grant Morrison, Xanaduum, "Beyond the World and the Fool Part 1" ( 2022)

"There is speculation of course that the Moon was once a part of Earth before separation (cosmologists hypothesize we may have been struck by Mars or some other planetary body in the early snooker-inspired years of the solar system) and the notion that there can and will come some kind of conceptual reconciliation brings us to the idea of the Qabalistic apocalypse known as the ‘collapse’ or the ‘descent’ of the 32nd Path.

On the Tree of Life structure, the 32nd path connects the lowest material sphere of MALKUTH with the 'astral plane' - or imagination as you and I know it - represented by YESOD, the Moon.

In our own real world, this collapse expressed itself in the material world when the twin towers of the WTC were reduced to dust by determined extremists.

When this event occurred, reality and fiction began their slow collapse into one another, exactly as predicted by the occultists a century before. After the fall of the towers, 'reality' became more fictional and 'fiction' became more 'realistic' – think ‘plausible’ superhero movies, Fake News, Deep Fakes, VR, AR, the rise of magical thinking etc. " —Grant Morrison, Xanaduum #18 (part of instructions to Rian Hughes on how to draw The Moon tarot card), 2022

Images from Nameless #6 (Grant Morrison, Chris Burnham, & Nathan Fairbairn, 2015). 

(via Mephisto-Empire)

Tarot cards from Nameless #4 (Grant Morrison, Chris Burnham, & Nathan Fairbairn, 2015).

(via disCONTINUITY)

Film stills of Grant Morrison writing a magickal sigil using a variation of the Austin Osman Spare method—from the documentary Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods (directed by Patrick Meaney, cinematography by Jordan Rennert, 2010).

(via KAT)

The Map of the Multiverse (Grant Morrison & Rian Hughes, 2014).

(via DC Comics, Deep Space Transmissions, & The Hypercrisis Blog)

Cover to Grant Morrison's The Invisibles Volume 3 #12 (Brian Bolland, 2000).

(via Robert J. Petersen)

Cover to Grant Morrison's The Invisibles Volume 3 #8 (Brian Bolland, 2000).

(via Robert J. Petersen)

Cover to Grant Morrison's The Invisibles Volume 3 #5 (Brian Bolland, 2000).

(via Robert J. Petersen)

Panels from Flex Mentallo (Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, 1996).