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 process of sigilization, with users offering up a vision of their life and what’s meaningful in it, investing it with attention and intention, then creating a feedback loop where that increased attention reinforces the vision they’re curating.

Social media as subconscious magic powered by a story of the self told by the self. Fictions that make themselves real.

And what’s interesting about this is the way Morrison sounded like an outright mad bastard when he first started banging on about hypersigils on the internet, but it was also a time when this kind of active curation of the self wasn’t commonplace. We passively received more narratives than we created, and the choice to incorporate something part of your identity was relatively contained. You might be a hardcore SF fan around other hardcore SF fans, but you probably weren’t sharing your weird-ass Babylon 5 theories with friends at work.

Now, the bits of your life deemed important enough to like, share, or talk about on social media are likely to bleed out into the rest of your life. Every day you make choices about the way you think of yourself, which changes the way other people think of you.

Morrison may be barking mad, but the hypersigil is an intriguing metaphor for what’s become an incredibly commonplace way of engaging with the world.