I have been trying to write this article for years. Itâs always the same. I stop after about ten thousand words and realize that I have yet to actually address the comic and just delete the entire fiasco. But this time Iâm throwing caution to the wind and going for it. Word-count, be damned! Letâs talk about Grant Morrisonâs arch-90âs comic book, The Invisibles.
If youâre reading this, then it is entirely likely that youâre at least aware, in some capacity of the The Invisibles. My writing tends to attract fellow dorks and itâs so thickly steeped in pop cultural references that youâre likely coming from a place of awareness. The Invisibles is also the flashpoint for a lot of peopleâs occult studies being that itâs basically a manual of magical operation wrapped up in a tidy conspiracy theory, drugs, and sex package. If youâre not already in the know, then let me break it down for you.
Comic books in the late 1980âs experienced a wild shift in creative. Before this time, the Atlantic Ocean was a physical and metaphorical gap between American pop culture and British pop culture. PBS would broadcast 70âs Doctor Who episodes, Fawlty Towers, and All Creatures Great and Small and some IPs were strong enough to break through to broader venues like Monty Python, but comic books werenât subject to either of these circumstances. They were still very much considered low-culture by the broader public. England had its own comic book heroes and magazines separate from the sphere of Marvel and DC. A bit of our stuff crossed the ocean, but very little of theirs made it our way. Americans could catch a glimpse every now and then of famous UK publications like 2000 AD and Warrior but the UK comic book industry was largely a mystery to most of us in the States. But then DC Comics took a weird chance when they doubled down on their investment in Alan Moore, who had been writing for DC since the early 80âs, and brought Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison into the mix. Each one was given the chance to pitch the publisher on some lower tier characters and then do whatever the hell they wanted with them. The result was a series of undisputed heavyweight champions. Mooreâs pitch, based on a request to use newly acquired Charlton comics characters, resulted in Watchmen, ostensibly the first comic book deconstruction of the comic book hero cycle. Gaimanâs pitch centered on the Golden Age detective The Sandman, shifted focus, entirely, and used the character in name only. Morrisonâs start was a little less dramatic but no less quality. They pitched Animal Man and followed that run up with a positively weird riff on Doom Patrol, DCâs less-than-successful version of The X-Men. Their true breakthrough moment didnât come, however, until the publication of a prestige-format Batman one-shot called Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, an absolutely nightmarish hardcover with art by Sandman cover artist, Dave McKean.
These writers gave wings to an imprint of DC called Vertigo, a label for more mature comics with weirder ideas and darker themes. Vertigo floated almost entirely on the critical success of Gaimanâs Sandman while publishing a collage of significantly less successful titles. And when Gaiman closed the book on The Endless, DC was hurting to find something that would keep the label alive. They filled the gap with two titles: Preacher, Garth Ennisâs hyper-violent western-noir, a book desperately trying to be American and failing spectacularly to shake off how positively Scottish it is, and a book by Grant Morrison that left just about everyone reading it scratching their heads: The Invisibles.
The eponymous Invisibles are a cell of a larger body of ontological terrorists called The Invisible College. The Invisibles oppose a fiendish cosmic organization called The Outer Church, hideous alien beings from beyond spacetime that enslaved the Human Race thousands of years ago without us ever having known. The Outer Church are the classic Archons of gnostic philosophy with the insidious Rex Mundi leading them. Their agents range from Lovecraftian monstrosities to heads of State and military.
I should just let Grant explain The Invisibles so I can get to the meat of this story before you click away.
Grant intended for The Invisibles to serve a larger function. Popularized by Chaos Magick, sigils hardly need any introduction: Statements of Will abstracted and encoded into little doodles that are then injected into the source code of the universe. Grant introduced the idea of the Hypersigil with The Invisibles, a larger body of work carrying a complex of memes meant to manifest across a broader area than a single subject. Being that The Invisibles was being published only a few years from the year 2000, Morrison intended the Will behind the hypersigil meme to launch global culture in a new, more positive direction. It was meant to coincide with Crowleyâs idea of the Aeon of Horus. As well as this altruism, there was still plenty of room in the meme to manifest some changes in Morrisonâs own life. But Iâll get to that.
Timewave Zero
Morrison, being an acolyte of Terence McKenna, was big into the concept of Millennialism. McKenna was known as much for his mathematical theory of Timewave Zero as he was his psychedelic advocacy. Timewave Zero is a concept that I donât fully grokk but, in a sense, it is an eschatological concept of the end of time and it coincides with the Mayan calendar or, more specifically, December 21, 2012.
Maybe you remember it, maybe not but everyone was joking endlessly that the world was supposed to end then and when it didnât come to a screeching halt and we all woke up to more of less the same world we went to sleep in the night before, everyone declared checkmate on those Mayan savages. But Iâve never been fully convinced that the world didnât end. Incredibly bonkers conspiracy theories gained a major foothold at this time. Sanity and reason vacated society. Billionaires became untouchable holy relics to extremely online weirdos. Conservatism blossomed into an evolving philosophy of madness among the less informed, more easily fooled and frightened elements of the world. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president. The entire Republican philosophy shifted fully into this neo-nazi, know-nothing death cult. In 2017 a 4chan larp which should have faded into obscurity as quickly as it surfaced gave birth to Qanon. Qanon hinged entirely on the supposition that Donald Trump was in charge of a military operation to uproot a satanic cabal of pedophile cannibals in the government and that heâs only been pretending to be a moron since the 1980âs. No one must know about it. Secrecy is crucial. And yet, every dumbshit yokel in America claims to know all about it because of some misspelled Trump tweets with weird capitalization. In 2021 this movement had enough juice to drive literally thousands of people into a blood-thirsty rage at the Capitol Building, which left several people dead.
The universe died and weâre all living in its Jacobâs Ladder deathdream.
The Invisibles was meant to nudge society in a more pleasant direction as TWZ approached. It failed in this regard but in other qualities of the hypersigilâs meme, it succeeded in really crazy ways.
King Mob
By design, there isnât really a central character in The Invisibles. Itâs a rotating cast. But if one character was far more fleshed out than the others, it was King Mob. KM is the current leader of the cell. Heâs an evolution of a previous Morrison character, Gideon Stargrave from Zenith. Stargrave, in Philip K. Dick fashion ends up showing up in the comic along with King Mob later on. King Mob, however, is the comicâs stand-in for Morrison. Much as Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons performed elaborate ritual workings to draw women into their lives and transform themselves, Morrison intended The Invisibles hypersigil to do the same thing for them.
Mob is everything that they wanted to be at the time. Heâs cool, sexy, fashionable, has a fine lady, his life is exciting. Morrison had a full head of hair when they began writing the book but as their embodiment of King Mob came into focus, they shaved their head and began dressing and behaving like the character. As a result, their life began to reflect the life of King Mob and as the book rolled on, Morrisonâs own life and philosophy began to evolve and inform the life of his character.
This isnât the first time Morrison put themself in their own comic. To my knowledge, the first time they ran this experiment was in the incredible one shot they did with Chris Bachalo, Kill Your Boyfriend. But Iâm probably wrong about that.
This is, however, the first time that their creation began to fold back into their own life. Morrison remarked in interviews about how, just as Marjorie Cameron came into the life of Parsons following his Babalon Working, women just like the comicâs Ragged Robin entered theirs. But it wasnât pussy all the way down for Grant.
Iâve written a bit about my own experimentations with the Chaos current in the earliest days of my occult practice. Perform it as documented and it works as promised. But what no one ever really talks about is the process of equilibrium as the universe struggles to regain its static state. Chaos Magick works but itâs performing magic with a blunt instrument. Itâs a sledgehammer where more sophisticated forms of magic with ritual and ceremony are finely honed surgical instruments. For Grant, all the exciting aspects of King Mobâs life came with a price.
In issue #17, King Mob is captured by the seriesâs ongoing villain, Sir Miles, and in the course of his captivity, he is subjected to savage torture. As the issue came to shelves and eyes fell upon the fate of King Mob, a pretty significant health crisis fell upon Grant. King Mob suffers a collapsed lung and an attack by flesh-eating bacteria. Out here in the real world, Grant is stricken with a vicious staph infection resulting in boils and abscesses. The infection is incredibly severe and they also end up suffering from a collapsed lung. Grantâs health is driven to the brink but they recover and learn a powerful lesson in magic from this.
Hermeticism
The world of The Invisibles is eventually fleshed out in Hermetic concepts. To one side is the Pillar of Severity, The Outer Church. To the other side is the Pillar of Mercy, The Invisible College. The two meet in the middle and cross over slightly. This is the Middle Pillar, the universe as we inhabit it. Surrounding all of this is God. God is every bit as alien and unknowable there as it is out here. The Outer Church struggles for total dominance. The Invisible College celebrates total freedom. Human structures of authority flock to the Outer Church and act as their agents on Earth. A living human in the presence of the Outer Church becomes stricken suddenly with cancerous tumors and dies a horrible death. They are the influence over the worldâs suffering and cruelty. The entire world would be The Outer Church were it not for the pull of The Invisible College, equally strange cosmic forces, whose actors on Earth use magic, time travel, and spectacular weapons to hold The Outer Church in a stalemate. But in the second volume of the comic something happens. It is revealed that during the atomic bomb test at Trinity, at the moment of the explosion, Robert Oppenheimer invoked Vishnu when he uttered the phrase, âNow I am become death, destroyer of worldsâ. In the cosmology of The Invisibles, this was a deliberate act by a cultist of the Lovecraftian chaos god, Azathoth (and boy, do I have thoughts on Azathoth). The result of the working was the crash at Roswell a couple of years later. It was not a UFO but a piece of God, impossible yet made manifest in our reality by way of a pulsating glob of mirror material.
Iâve never been sure about Lovecraftâs views on spirituality. I suspect that heâs the trailblazing proto-Reddit Atheist. Heâs known as a man of raw science and rational thought. The core of his horror is mankind at the center of an uncaring universe. In spite of our thoughts about ourselves, one day the sun will swell and consume the Earth and no trace of us will remain. Every single thing that mankind ever did will be vaporized. Itâs some dark shit but itâs not wrong. But at the same time, he wrote about Azathoth in the same terms that Hermes Trismegistus wrote about God. In the Hermetic philosophy we all live within God, as fallen pieces of God, and God created God. We live within the creator which created itself and in a way each one of us is the Magic Mirror from Roswell. We are Godâs dream. A lot of Lovecraftâs writing was quite Gnostic. In a lot of ways, it reflects the writing of Aleister Crowley but in a cold, nihilistic sense. Peter Levenda wrote a pretty good book about it and how Kenneth Grantâs Typhonian Order connected a lot of the same dots that end up in The Invisibles, whether or not Grant Morrison realized it.
Itâs not just the cosmology that is informed by Hermeticism in The Invisibles. Though, King Mob represents Morrison, one of the other Invisibles, Lord Fanny, a trans woman and brujah also represents Morrison. She is, without a doubt, the star of the book and her issues are by the most interesting. Being that she is a stand-in for Morrisonâs hermetic-feminine qualities (and an awful lot like King Mobâs personality) it makes a lot of sense that Morrison recently opened up to the world that theyâre enbie. Youâll notice my use of they/them when referring to Grant. Itâs nerve-wracking, I tell you.
Though, Fanny is biologically a man, she is a woman through and through. Non-binary gender expression is inherently hermetic and Lord Fanny is the woman in Morrison. Suck it, TERFs.
By the way, here are my hermetic halves.
Lastly, bringing it all home in the Hermetic sense, are the Harlequinade. When introduced, these bizarre beings are representatives of The Invisible College. They seem to be guides but itâs never clear exactly where they land in the comicâs moral spectrum. Then again, itâs hermeticism. What is morality, anyway? Later in the run, they appear again, this time as agents of The Outer Church, wearing the pallid mask of The King In Yellow. Each faction in the struggle pulls the same rope, under the same umbrella, inside the same sphere of Godâs being and each player in the game is a piece of the divine unity. And I have to step carefully on this next point, but the revelation about the dimensions which the Outer Church and Invisible College occupy also follow this logic, as does the ultimate nature of both organizations. But this revelation falls in the final stretch of the comic and, well, I have thoughts on the third volume.
Iâm not saying itâs aliens, but itâs aliens
My favorite part of The Invisibles is the stated inspiration of the book. Itâs a ball of crazy shit right from the start, but itâs clear that in its infancy, Grant was running in place, trying to figure out where this was all going. Itâs a great book but it also struggled in its early issues to keep on keeping on. It wasnât until Grant admonished their readers to charge a sigil for success by beating off at the same time.
And it worked.
The comic lived to tell the further adventures of The Invisibles. Popularly known as Volume 2, this section of the story goes absolutely bananas and contains most of the truly mystical points that Iâm hitting on in this article.
In time, after the book recovered and found its audience, Grant started telling a story about being abducted in Kathmandu by aliens in a shiny, mirror-faced UFO. For what itâs worth, in some of my earliest experimentations with reaching out to alien intelligences, I was visited in dreams by a shiny, mirror-faced UFO, as well. Make of that what you will.
Early Invisibles issues include certain concepts from this abduction but the vast bulk of the apocalypse these aliens afforded our quite-mad author were mostly worked out and included in the Dulce/Magic Mirror arc of volume 2.
Early on in the first half dozen issues, weâre introduced to the concept of Barbelith which is said to be the placenta of humanity. I struggled with this for the longest time. I had no idea what was meant by this. Barbelith, as told by Morrisonâs cosmic captors, is a satellite fixed in orbit around the Earth on the far-side of the moon and that its function is a lot like Philip K Dickâs VALIS. The placenta is the biological interface between mother and child. Itâs the organ which transmits vital nutrients to the developing fetus. Therefore, Barbelith is the organ through which God fosters the human race as we develop toward our ultimate goal. Gnosis comes to those that know itâs there. Itâs the gnostic awakening in a sweet sci-fi package.
It was the 90âs!
Itâs my personal opinion that in the third and final volume of the series, the book starts to run out of gas. Morrison primes the pump in the first volume which prominently features a character that I havenât even mentioned: Dane MacGowan, aka Jack Frost. The Jack arc is strong and promises us that Jack, a street kid from Liverpool, is a new messiah for the world. Though, Jack does blossom into a fun character that Morrison evidently likes quite a bit due to the amount of attention heâs given, volume 2 roars into focus and turns into the Fanny and King Mob show and by the end of the arc, Morrison left it all on the dance floor, practically forgetting all about the destiny of Jack Frost. The second volume in the arc is equal parts exciting and exhausting and is easily the best of the batch. Unfortunately, the third arc, meant to close out the show, feels very scattered and doesnât quite stick the landing, as far as Iâm concerned. An interesting development does occur, though, as King Mob throws away his guns and declares himself a pacifist, obviously now a reflection of Morrisonâs evolved attitudes toward violence and the hero archetype.
Volume 3 drops in a mad dash to wrap up all the loose ends by the year 2000 and as will be seen, the end of the book is intended to coincide with the new millennium. Grant stuffs absolutely everything they can into these final issues and none of it seems to connect. The Matrix is released into theaters around this time, as well, which leaves most of the comic reading world scratching their heads as to how no one was taken to court over the story (though, Iâm told there were plagiarism cases). Though, make no mistake. We all loved the shit out of that movie. But when was the last time you watched it? It aged about as well as The Invisibles has. Though, I hold The Invisibles up as one of the greatest comic book and occult works ever published, I freely admit that it is very much a relic of the 1990âs. Cool guy Gen-X culture was all about the one bad ass dude with the sunglasses, tattoos, and piercings. He throws his middle finger up in the face of the prison that our grandparents built and our parents perpetuated out of purely venal self-interest. We took MDMA (which I honestly thought was a shit drug even when I was still using) and spent our nights evenly divided into tribes occupying dance clubs and punk rock venues. And now, looking back on it all, it all seems a bit ridiculous upon reflection. The Invisibles is a document of all of it, locked on the page for all time, disconnected from the culture that came after the dawn of the new millennium, 9/11, and Timewave Zero. Looking back, itâs all very quaint, how edgy everyone thought it was.
By the way, the comic book publishing world being what it is, the final issue of the book that was supposed to be released in December of 1999 wasnât released until April of 2000, making the big explosive millennialist ending a missed opportunity of mystical symbolism. Sad Christmas.
Other books have come in its wake, attempting to describe magic and usurp its crown as the peak achievement of post-modern pop occulture. Alan Mooreâs Promethea is a good example of this. Itâs a fun book with a great story and unbelievable, mind-bending art by JH Williams III. But it also has the dour undertones of Alan Mooreâs writing and has none of the bonkers cultural zeitgeist that makes The Invisibles more than just a treatise on magic in the modern world. Itâs a grand unification theory of conspiracy theory and the occult. The Invisibles is the spiritual successor to Robert Anton Wilsonâs Illuminatus! Trilogy, tuned up and updated for the expectations of 90âs comic book readers. Itâs a sprawling story that set a thousand ships sailing on the occult seas and it pays homage to all the British pop culture that was positively exotic to Americans. We honestly had no idea what any of it was beyond the vaguest notions of spy movies, PBS, and police procedurals featuring chain smoking men in turtlenecks.
If youâve never read The Invisibles and are even the tiniest bit interested in magic, gnosticism, and/or conspiracy theory, then I cannot recommend any more strongly that you seek out the omnibus and read it. Take the ride.
I've only read two of your articles so far but I've been grinning at specific things that I've seen. Definitely feels like the universe has been pushing it to me!
I really enjoyed this article and had no idea why I was drawn to a headline featuring Grant Morrison, just a vague feeling. Of course the penny dropped soon enough, I really enjoyed Zenith back in the day and I'll be looking out for The Invisibles for sure. I like your style and honesty so I'll be checking out the other articles.
Still smiling about the fact you mentioned Jacob's Ladder, the idea that the world did really end in 2012 and invoking UFOs. The Fountain is also in my top 3 movies. Topics close to my heart :)