Grant Morrison & Chaos Magick (E296)
Guest writers Ben Clarkson and Matt Bors, the creators behind the graphic novel series “Justice Warriors”, take Julian and Jake on a twisted journey into the ideology of Grant Morrison. Morrison is responsible for the Invisibles and a seven year Batman run considered by fans to be some of the best Batman comics written to date. He also claims that he’s been abducted by aliens in Kathmandu, and that we’re all giant centipedes weaving through time and space.
Thanks for subscribing to QAA on patreon.
Matt Bors: https://x.com/MattBors / mattbors.com/books
Ben Clarkson: https://x.com/benclarkson / https://thebenclarkson.com
Justice Warriors: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Justice-Warriors-Vol-2/Matt-Bors/JUSTICE-WARRIORS/9781952090325
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Comments (113)
Did anyone else catch that Grant Morrison was brought on to Vox’s recent “Today Explained” episode to talk about Superman?
Love my Jakey and I love his love of Weezer. But I have not been able to listen to anything new from Weezer in the last 20 years.
I worked on 2 seasons of the Doom Patrol tv show adaptation and had no idea about his belief structure. Wow. Kinda makes it all make more sense lol
Gnosis just sounds like repackaged Buddhism lol.
By far one of the most clear and thorough explanation of modern occult magick I’ve ever heard. Wow.
A Gorilla Dracula …. Oh man. The possibilities are endless…..Godzilla Zombie? Dormouse Werewolf ? Alice in sigiland? The Mad Hatter Phoenix? Hmmm…( ok I’m officially down the rabbit hole)
"During covid, obviously" Folks, Covid is now. The pandemic isn't over. Can't you say "during the lockdowns"? Also N95, N99 respirators are still used now by people who know about the links between mild Covid infection and elevated risk heart attacks, strokes and much more, plus that's only the horror that is known. Later down the line? Noone knows. We are only a few years in with this pandemic and what is known about this virus already is bad news. Could you do us a favour and watch science communicator Lola Germs' video: Why Is Everyone More Sick Now?
sorry but based on this i think morrison might be the world's greatest comics understander
I’m gonna need a link to that Rogan clip with the spaceman and n95 imagery ty plz
I'm sorry, and I love you guys, but I had to turn this off about 30 minutes in. There are a ton of very egregious mischaracterizations of western occultism here. As soon as I heard "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" interpreted as "do whatever you want even if it's bad," I was done. I'm not even going to explain it because a brief internet search would have given you that information.
Ope... I hesitated on listening and now I'm probably not going to. Preconceived ideas or inaccuracy here and there are one thing. Getting that wrong will just annoy me because it's so easy. Ritual magick, chaos, etc belongs much more in a Spectral Voyager setting
Long time Grant Morrison fan which subconsciously lead me to this podcast becase it knew you'll make an episode on him one day P.s. The Filth is his best work in my opinion, Flexy Mentalo second place, also only after takin' shrooms did I fully understand his work
This is making me wish I was into comics!
Due to what I can only assume is an error on Jake's part, I did not receive my lentil of hash to accompany this episode and am looking forward to this situation being corrected.
Jake needs to have a segment where he can go off about Weezer in the next Jake's Takes (This episode is great btw)
Hail Discordia! Hail Eris!
Just a note on Crowley and magik, wasn’t just a subversion of Victorian morals but a rejection of the categorising logical aestheticism of high modernism as a gilded extension of neoclassicism. Basically Crowleys larp was a continuation of the reactionary esotericism of the romantic/gothic movements only with an even more thinly veiled quest for pussy.
One of my pals used to work in a magic/esoteric/crystals type shop (typically serving tourists) as a weekend job and they sold Crowley books but they said nobody bought them really except this one family which was mum dad and two kids who came in occasionally, always wearing all black I think, always in complete silence, bought the Crowley books and left without saying a word. Always creeped out my pal!
I never thought that a facet of one of my current hyper-fixations (the entire chronology of Batman) would overlap with QAA. Really cool.
I knew in my heart it would happen eventually, and am shocked it took this long, frankly
This episode was awesome my only wish was that the guests brought up how Grant Morrison believes he put himself in the hospital by writing his self insert character in the Invisibles into the hospital and believes he only got better because he wrote the character getting out of
This rules, i’m already drawing up wishes and sigils.
Post the sigils I need to see the Jake Weezer gorilla
A good ep! I think some of the characterizations of CRŌW-ley and the GD are a bit simplistic and kind of condescending. That said, the public facing aficianados get pretty kooky and QAA is good for, if nothing else, shining light on the kooks. Keep up the good work!
Yeah they didn't even bring up Crowley's maddening bussy, or the tragic tail of Noidberg. You'd think Julian would be more aware of historic power bottoms.
I want to read Morrison run now.
Incredible episode
Calm down boy, it’s just a Scottish accent.
Yeah, Scottish subscriber here. It's a noticeable accent but not really near the strong end of the scale.
I would love to see the sigils
Fun episode but sadly tainted because Grant Morrison officially came out as non-binary in 2020 and you misgender them the entire time.
One of the guests does use they/them pronouns to refer to Grant, and Grant's said that they do prefer they/them but doesn't mind if people don't use it.
This is so fucking melted. So, therefore, I love it.
This might be too new but I just watched James Janis’ two parter on meme stocks and it’s so fucked up. That Gamestop short squeeze created a Q-like situation among very online retail investors. Had no idea bad it’s gotten, the paranoia, and conspiracies are very Qanon.
Yeah a lot of us were posting about it in the discord at the time. While also buying some AMC I'm still stuck with...
Iirc isn’t his description of time just how it was depicted in Interstellar? Like all of time and all of existence are slices in a matrix and all of time is situated within?
Can we not speculate about a person's diagnosis as if schizophrenia is necessary for being this out of touch with reality?
I think the uses of the term “schizophrenic” were intended to convey an interplay between inconsistent or contradictory topics. Just like how “bipolar” is sometimes used literally to mean oscillating between two poles or extremities in ideas or behaviour; not as an attempt to diagnose them with anything. Though I may have missed an instance of that
I wanna hear Julian pronounce "Deleuze" and "Guattari"
Dude mentions reading Terence McKenna and then describes seeing, during his hash experience, "self-dribbling basketballs," describing them almost in exactly the same way as TM did. The DMT "machine elves" are a very interesting phenomenon though, it really does feel like one is in the presence of alien intelligence.
Wasn't there a QAA episode that featured chaos Magick a while back?
Regarding pepe the frog and the Egyptian god?
I need that sentient cloud article. Now!
Saaaaaame. Was hoping maybe someone in the comments already found it, heh. A very brief Googling led me down a short trail to this neat undergrad video of imaging plasma tubes though: https://youtu.be/ymZEOihlIdU?si=NQWznsCEM63S6uLI Many ridiculous comments from folks who likely haven't used calculus in the last 5 years or more. I dunno what I expected. =V
My favorite thing about being a batman fan is how fucking weird all the writers are: Alan Moore and Grant Morrison both being chaos magicians, Frank Miller is somehow both a fascist and believes Ronald Regan was the devil and Tom King was in the freaking CIA.
Frank Miller became a liberal after getting cancer, not joking he became more left wing and even talked about it https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/frank-miller-xerxes-cursed-sin-city-the-dark-knight-returns
We really need to be able to see these sigils somewhere. Also, I'm surprised that I'm the first person to point out that it's pronounced CROW-ley, like the black bird. The song 'Mr. Crowley' really set us all up for failure, but it's a good reminder not to look to Ozzy for help with pronunciation.
We can turn to Last Podcast on the Left for our Notorious Power Bottom Aleister Crowley needs.
Cant believe you got guests on to tangentially talk about schizoanalysis and didn't even make liv witness
It probably made her legit angry to listen to Morrison co-opt D&G to produce mid concepts and defend the comics industry against labor.
I want my lentil
Yeah! Make with the lentils!
Duncan Trussel sucks.
This was a real barger charger of an ep
I hope u guys are aware of the theory that Pepe the frog is a sigil + is the symbol of an ancient Egyptian god which 4channers used to get trump elected in 2016 (also I did a project in eleventh grade about morrison’s speech where he talks about getting abducted by aliens and got a C)
Yeah, this! Wasn't there an episode a while back about this!
This is one of my favourite episodes.
Got melted to a fuselage and went into politics? Damn, she's just like John McCain
I want to see the sigils!
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZWIxMzMzZWItNTg5Ni00NTBlLWExMDUtNTE0MDk3NDAwZjY3XkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_QL75_UX444_.jpg
I know something even more gen x, I bought the invisibles when it came out and never read it
A boy fae Glesga! Brilliant!!
Just emailed my local comic shop to see if I can pick these up. This sounds awesome
Scottish tend to have more of a reason to be anti-nuke considering the UK government stores trident (parliament's cutesy nuclear weapon name) in their coastal backyard. I don't think the anti-nuke sentiment has gone away, it's just the media doesn't listen to or platform them anymore now the permission structure of prole representation tightened over time, as well as general apathy and hopelessness toward daily UK politics can drain anyone of life. ----(Enjoyed first comic of Justice Warriors so defo getting the high-budget star-studded kinetic sequel!👌)
Came here to say the same. It's a long standing popular movement here against trident. Particularly became prominent again during the 2014 referendum as one of the points for the Yes campaign
so this is the basis for the heretics in warhammer right?
Like Matrix Trench coats a lot of those ideas were just in the air during the late 80s UK.
So where can we view the Jake Sigil?
I get such a cringe reaction when I hear a Scottish voice, cos I know all the Americans present are gna go “wowwww I wasn’t prepared for that, ok unmm, ok uhhh what did he say dude??? Do we got subtitles? I can’t, man”
Like a chaaarecter out of traaaainspotting, Jake says
I’m not new to these topics but I did learn a valuable lesson: I enjoy having a subject matter expert summarize seven years of a story arc I’m probably never going to get to. Time travel Batman?! Wild stuff!
So Grant Morrison lies in the weird/weird quadrant of the "author vs comic" chart. Huh. Close to Alan Moore. 🤔
Alan Moore would not appreciate being close to Grant Morrison.
REALIZING IM HEARING GRANT MORRISON SPEAK FOR THE FIRST TIME AND WHAT. DEEP DIVING JAMES MCAVOY INTERVIEWS HAS PREPPED ME FOR THIS
Seriously, I just watched Filth and I think it helped https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1450321/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Despite wanting to fact check the fuck out of this episode (I refrain!), I am stoked that QAA entered this rabbit hole. But since I can't resist this one item: To address the question that was brought up of where this very particular variety of sigil magick originates (i.e., statement of will to consonants to imagery) -- it began with Austin Osman Spare, a brilliant artist, compulsive autoeroticist and crazy cat man. His primary methodology did not involve drugs but masturbation *to exhaustion*, in order to reach a condition called "vacuity." The practitioner is *not supposed to remember the sigil* but completely forget it in order for it to be effective. (See The Book of Pleasure (Self Love) Psychology of Ecstasy, 1913.) Spare was completely mad and not particularly rulebound (his breed of magick was a response to the dogmatism of ceremonial or "High Magick") so I don't think he would have cared if anyone ever complied with his particular magickal technology or methodology. Except for the self pleasure being omitted. I think that might really set him on a rant. Thanks for the pleasure of this listen. I appreciate you guys, always.
You are telling us the origin of chaos magik is an intellectualised form of gooning?
Oh hell yea
I went a little mad over The Eleventh Hour one Christmas
This was delightful. I am in the middle of a reread of The Invisibles and this happens. Throwing some salt over my shoulder...
ALAN MOORE KNOWS THE SCORE! Sorry, but it had to be said.
I can dig it!
Grant is from my hometown, I really want to know how Americans got on with that accent!
Great! thanks to my accent philias
Premium episode 296: wherein Jakey learns about how gutters work by reading more graphic novels.
The Kathmandu link is outdoor wear?
I bought a jacket, QAA should have a promo code
Handsoap Hoverboard was my grunge band before we cleaned up our act
Sloan mentioned 🇨🇦
Release the Jake Prophecies. The public has a right to know
I’m having the devil’s own time trying to understand his accent.
Lol. It's my original accent. (I've calmed it down because I teach English. And want people to understand me lol)
Grants run on Animal was amazing.
That Animal Man run is one of the greatest comic runs ever. It’s rare a writer gets to have a character-defining run, the fact Grant was writing that AND the best Doom Patrol run AT THE SAME TIME, isn’t talked about enough. A true artist.
I wonder if Morrison lifted the centipedes thing from Slaughterhouse Five...
Grant Morrison is non-binary
also i'm relistening to the episode but the Invisibles comic is was first published in 1994 so when they said that the matrix ripped them off, it's more legit considering the movie took scenes like the jumping from a tall building to "wake up" and king mob who's basically white Morpheus being questioned by the agents of the villains before he gets rescued by the other main characters flying a helicopter shooting a minigun on a office building
I feel like it should be insisted that while Grant Morrison doesn’t MIND “he” pronouns apparently, they are nonbinary and are most certainly not a guy or a man.
I’m also non-binary but present as male so I use both he and they. That’s quite common.
So glad Matt Bors & Ben Clarkson are becoming regulars
Guys, Grant Morrison is non-binary
While true, he’s fine with he/him pronouns and prefers no label at all
Ah, just when I needed another hit! Thanks
Everyone should listen to the full video they excerpt that starts with Morrison screaming. It’s on YouTube and it’s truly incredible.
Holy shit, I didn't think this would ever be a subject you guys would talk about. I figured Last Podcast on the Left would tackle this one since they've referenced Grant Morrision and his work with Chaos Magic so much.
I admin a chaos magick facebook group and my favorite podcast has made a CM ep everything is aligned
I'd love a chaos magick Facebook group, without the Facebook.
Let’s go
my favs on my fav!!! i did not foresee this coming. i feel like i’m tripping
This one is going to be good! Grant Morrison is a hell of a writer. So I can’t wait to listen.
I love Grant’s comics. Excited for this. Though, doesn’t Grant use they/them?
And yeah, the Morrison Batman run is fantastic.
As a Grant Morrison fan I hope I like this