esoHumor from Botch, who sadly didn’t make it this year =(
TagComic Books
Wes Unruh explores Timothy Leary’s Neurocomics (torrent here) and Alan Moore’s Promethea (torrent here):
As I was reading this work, I was struck by how similar the work is to that of Alan Moore, specifically Promethea. Not simply the psychedelic nature of the work, but the way in which both of these works were about the underlying philosophical and metaphysical beliefs of the authors, and both presented in the most holistic way possible. They’re more like modern alchemical texts, grimoires for the psychonaut, without the layers of metaphor that Mike Carey might throw in or the allegories Chris Claremont developed to spread occultic ideas through more mainstream comics. (Granted, Grant Morrison does this in his own way as well, but not everyone is fully armed to read The Filth and his politics have raised more than a few eyebrows… )
Arthur: Of course the other aspect of magic that separates it from most religions is that it’s not based on faith, is it?
Oh, no. No. Faith is for sissies who daren’t go and look for themselves. That’s my basic position. Magic is based upon gnosis. Direct knowledge. It’s a kind of ‘I’m from Missouri. Show me’ approach, if you like. [laughter] I think that gnosis it’s probably the original form of spirituality in mankind. If you look back at the old Gnostic religions that proceeded Christianity, what they depended on was direct knowledge of the Mysteries, or the ideas being talked about. If you look at the early Christians, the people that were allegedly around Jesus, then you can’t get much gnostic than St. Thomas. [chuckles] He has to stick his hand in the wound before he was convinced! Or you’ve got the Essenes, with John the Baptist-they were certainly gnostics. Back then, everybody formed their own relationship to the godhead, which was seen as being inside them, as much as anything.
This is true of the old shamanic religions, that were the forebears of all kind of spiritual and religious thinking. The shaman didn’t so much act as a middleman between people and the gods; he showed them how to get there. He told them how to make their own journeys into the Underworld. I get the impression that the shaman in an ancient tribe would have had the same sort of position as a plumber or an electrician. [chuckles] A plumber is a guy who just knows about plumbing and doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty when he’s unblocking your S-bend or whatever. A shaman is a guy who knows about traveling to the spirit world and doesn’t mind vomiting because he’s taking poisonous drugs, or getting the horrors of going to hell. It’s a community thing.
The later idea of magic, which probably sprung up when people started burning witches and magicians, when it became dangerous to be a magician. Which would probably have been around the ooo, what, the 3rd century, 4th century? When Christian mobs started putting Gnostics in hermetic scholars to death, Around that time there were Christian mobs that were putting to death hermetic scholars like Hypatea. We mention her in the first issue of Promethea. She was real. She was, I think, skinned alive by Christians. And so at that point, this is where you start to get the thing of secrecy and magic, which carries on from that point up to the present day. ‘If you’re a magician, don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell them and don’t tell them any of the visions you’ve had or give them any of the information that you struggled so long to accrue. Keep it to yourself.’ And that seems very elitist to me. I’d rather disseminate any information I’m getting by one of the means that are open to me. And I’m lucky in that I have several quite excellent means [chuckles] to disseminate information that are open to me. Comic books, CDs, things like that.
Arthur Magazine has posted their now classic interview with Grant Morrison on their web site:
And The Filth came out of that, trying to understand that every cherished thought and belief had an equally valid counterpoint. Once I realized I had to think about this stuff and I had to deal with it, I decided to treat it as an Abyss experience, based on the ideas of kabbalistic magic. Because that at least gave me a context to deal with the experience. According to Kabbalah, or to Enochian magic, the Abyss is a kind of Ring-Pass-Not for consciousness, which means that beyond that, the typical self-aware 11-bit consciousness you use to get through the day, doesn’t operate. The kabbalistic idea of the Abyss is manifold. There’s a kind of crack in Being and the crack is the moment of the Breath before the Big Bang. It’s also the crack of dead time where we do nothing when we’d like to do something, the crack between the thought of doing and actually doing. That gulf can become immense and daunting. We might decide to be President and do nothing, leading to a life of reproach and regret. [chuckle] Then you’re in the Abyss. So I felt this confrontation with difficult material coming, and I chose to frame it as a trip into the Abyss, I took the Oath of the Abyss, from the Thelemic version of Kabbalah, the Aleister Crowley version, and…again all this stuff really is to me ways of contextualizing states of consciousness. Crowley also talks about the demon Choronzon who’s the guardian of the Abyss, and Choronzon is a demon who takes any thought and amplifies until it becomes a completely disorienting storm of disconnected gibberish.
Nagi Noda has directed this Coca-Cola ad, which I believe is airing in the U.K. and Australia. We witness a girl drinking cola then progressing in iterative static poses down through the house and out into the garden. Here other people are encountered in similar sequential mode, providing a dizzying display of colour based on the Coke branding. The characters interact and the static scenes are seamlessly intercut with live action throughout the continuous long shot.
For anyone familiar with The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison, Noda’s commercial struck me as extremely reminiscent of the issues in which Ragged Robin gets stuck in and outside of time. Interesting to watch if you’re a fan of the comic or the concept in general.
Watch an embedded video via the jump.
Wes Unruh defines and further explains hyperglyphics:
I use this term to describe a media that is capable of generating tulpas, thoughtforms, egregores, and eventually autonomous mathematical personalities. It was with some amusement I found after completing the rough draft of this article the following translation from Isidore Isou, the artist-poet responsible for the foundation of the Lettrist Movement, using the phrase metagraphic: ‘Metagraphics or post-writing, encompassing all the means of ideographic, lexical and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible and escapes oral labelling…’ It seems we have achieved something of this dream in the icons and notations with which virtual worlds are created and populated. Metagraphics and Hyperglyphics then, are the High Art of the new media.
The sexual symbolism of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wendy, and the Wizard of Oz de-coded.
(not safe for work).
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