We Are All Unintentional Hypersigil Machines
We’ve been watching Doom Patrol, a television show that riffs heavily on Grant Morrison’s ground-breaking run on the comics in the late eighties and early nineties. Naturally, this sent me scurrying off to revisit Morrison’s philosophy of narrative as a hypersigil—an extension of the chaos magic philosophy of creating a glyph that codifies your intention and imbuing it with energy to effect change in the world. For Morrison, a hypersigil was an extended work of narrative that served the same purpose. Stories designed to change the self and the world. He created three works that were explicitly hypersigils—The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, and The Filth—all of which were created during or around his Doom Parol run. Morrison is batshit insane, of course, and that’s part of his charm as a creator, but it’s interesting to watch some of his more out-there ideas get teased out by other writers. For example, the curation of a social media profile lends itself to the
