FANTAZIA #8, January 1991

WORDS WITH THE SHAMAN

An interview with Grant Morrison

By Brian Duguid


"It is pronounced Crowly, to remind you that I'm holy. But my enemies say Crouly, in wish to treat me foully." - Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast.

The 1990 Edinburgh festival fringe saw the public premiere of Grant Morrison's second play. Depravity. In 1989 the theatre company Oxygen House performed his first, Red King Rising, a fantasy about the Reverend Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. It received two awards and considerable critical praise.

Depravity was another biographical play, although in this case about a considerably more controversial figure – Aleister Crowley, "wickedest man in the world", according to John Bull in the 1920s, which also declared him "The King of Depravity", "A Human Beast" and "A Man We'd Like to Hang". At one point the magazine even accused Crowley of cannibalism!

Despite these outlandish stories, and despite his reputation as a dangerous and thoroughly unpleasant satanist, Crowley's influence has been remarkable. During his life he wrote volumes of occult theory, fiction, poetry and numerous diaries. As well as being an accomplished mountaineer, he was a skilled chess player, and well versed in mathematics and science. His willingness to publish previously secret occult knowledge in an affordable form eventually led to the occult revival of the sixties and present day. The occult groups which he set up or was involved in - the Golden Dawn, the Silver Star, the Ordo Templi Orientis -survive in various forms to this day. He delighted in shocking the middle-classes, having a free and active sex life, and also imbibed large quantities of drugs throughout the course of his life, all of which made him superb headline material for magazines like John Bull.

The play itself failed to win the awards that Red King Rising earned. Reviewers were unable to see far beyond its superficial presentation of Crowley as vicious, and egotistic. Grant feels that his main problem in writing it was that he found himself boxed in by the sheer weight of factual material available regarding Crowley's life.

"There was no space to move, no kind of dramatic space at all, because everything was there and I was so worried about making sure that every viewpoint was represented. I was just absolutely hemmed in by the sheer volume of words that had already been written about him. Whereas, with Lewis Carroll I felt free more to just invent a character, because what he was, was an alter ego anyway, or a persona of a real man. Whereas Crowley was a real person that I was trying to deal with."

Grant claims to have had no plans to deliberately stoke up controversy, which is fortunate because, despite the play's portrayal of the occult theme, there was no controversy.
"I could have made it worse. The original intention was to actually have a ritual, and perform it on stage, but then I relented, thinking about the mental health of the actors. So I didn't really think there'd be any particular controversy, but then I never do think that, and there's always somebody who turns up some kind of objection. Fortunately not this time, I think they all just slept through it or whatever."

Although the play in some ways failed to portray Crowley as relevant to the modem era, and neglected to bring across his mischievous sense of humour (Grant blames Oxygen House's editing of his original script), it reproduced the ritualistic atmosphere very well. A central theme regarded Crowley's claim that the Age of Osiris has ended and we now live in the Age of Horus. The former was the Christian age, characterised by Crowley as servile, obedient and restrictive, and linked in the play to Crowley's neurotic and masochistic acolyte Victor Neuburg, a rather uncomplimentary Christ figure. The Age of Horus symbolises freedom and individuality, and is of course personified by "the wickedest man in the world" himself.

"It's part of that whole thing ... it sounds a bit New Agey ... the whole idea of personal consciousness and trying to move beyond the treadmill that we've been stuck on for the last how ever many years. It's just part of what interests me, and in a way it followed on from Red King Rising, which was about Thatcherism and Victorian values, and stuff that's now quaintly archaic. What this play did to follow on from that, was that even though things end, because I could see that Thatcherism was coming to an end, you could see what was happening in Eastern Europe, there was a sense of things coming to an end. In the play, it was basically saying that it's a circle that we're trapped on, and even if Thatcher disappears, as we've seen, even if Kinnock comes in, the same vicious circle continues to turn. Unless we can break out of that, which was Crowley's message. But whether it gets across I don't know."

So What's This Magick Stuff All About Then?

Morrison is an active practitioner of Chaos Magic, an eclectic occult philosophy described by Peter Carroll in his books Psychonaut and Liber Null. Whereas most occult traditions are rigid and formal, Chaos Magic encourages users to experiment with any traditions that attract them, using whichever techniques best suit their interests. The Chaos Magicians are as likely to use African shamanic rituals as they are to stimulate trancelike states with high-tech equipment. Morrison's interest in the area dates back a long time.

"It goes back to my childhood", says Grant, "and my uncle Billy, who was deeply involved in the occult and all kinds of strange mind experiments. He had a magnificent library of the occult, and I used to go up and see him. He used to do all kinds of things - he worked on his mind with strobe lights; he owned a piece of radium that he kept in a box that he used to show me in the dark, and he attempted to teach his dog French by playing subliminal tapes into its brain. He was just a big early influence of the bizarre, I think. He used to let me read his books, and that's what got me interested in it all, way back then.
He was involved in a car accident, and I think after that he'd attempted to get in touch with the devil or something, to see if he could do something about his injuries. But I don't know if he was interested before that - he probably was, I think my mother's father was pretty interested in all that kind of stuff as well. My mother and her mother have got sort of fortune telling gifts, she reads tea leaves and things and it works, so I've always been open to these things, to the possibility of them being valid."

Are you the kind of person that strange things naturally happen to?

"Not naturally, no. I think my mother and my aunts and the female members of the family actually seem to have really strange stuff happen to them, and they are psychically sensitive, but I don't have that kind of stuff happen on a regular basis. It has happened in the past on certain occasions, but I don't really live with one foot in the other world, unlike some people.
When I've performed certain magic operations, certain things have happened. Demonic presences have seemed to appear, poltergeist activity has occurred."

Obviously, to most people it sounds completely ludicrous to talk about 'demonic presences', but Grant tries to explain more clearly.

"These things happened after I performed the particular operations that are supposed to result in demonic presences making their appearance, and so that's the name I decided to give them. Objectively, all that happens, is there seems to be something that I can only describe as a stress in the air, like a point of gravity that was pulling the air towards it. It was like an area of intense heaviness, but it wasn't just that, it's hard to describe these things in any physical way. There was a sense of something that was actually creating the stress on the air around it. And that descended onto me and brought the most appalling fear, and hideous doubt and horror, and existential terror.
In the case of what seemed to be poltergeist activity, other people actually watched objects march along a mantelpiece and fall off the end."

The Comics - Not A Laughing Matter!

Grant's exploration of the occult in his comics goes back considerably further than Arkham Asylum.

"Way back, the first stuff I did in Near Myths in 1978 was concerned with all the things that I've finally got back to," Grant points out. "I did that while I was still at school, and it was just basically my unconscious let loose. They were giving me ten pounds a page, and there were no restrictions on it. It was supposed to be the first real adult comic in Britain. Of course, it disappeared after five issues, but we were allowed to do what we wanted so it had a kind of purity about it which I quite liked."

Having started off in this way, Morrison has devoted his energies to superhero comics of one sort or another, but is now hoping to get away from what he feels is a restrictive genre.

"I've managed to make enough of a reputation to be able to do these kind of things without including the flavour-of-the-month superhero."

His 2000AD serial, Zenith, referred to Chaos Magic frequently. Was it an attempt to seriously explore Chaos Magic, or was it just something he was particularly interested in at that time?

"I had planned to explore it a bit more than I ultimately did. I don't know if it would ever have been a serious exploration, but it would have formed a bit more of an obvious backdrop to what was going on. In the end I just lost interest in Zenith, and Chaos magic didn't seem to fit in there anyway. It kind of faded, evaporated."