Invisibilities

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I am writing this overlooking the Ganges. Tour boats packed with pilgrims and middle-class Indian tourists in orange vests putter along, snapping photos of the ancient city of Varanasi. The 17th century poet Tulsidas lived nearby, composing his legendary version of the Ramayana along with the much-loved Hanuman chalisa. A kilometer or so north, abutting the garish new Modi-directed Kashi Vishwanath compound, lies Manikarnika Ghat, the cremation grounds whose sacred flame has been smoldering for so long you might as well call it time immemorial. People have also been journeying to Varanasi for a very long time, believing that to die in Kashi — another name for the place — is to achieve liberation in one fell swoop.

One of these people was Edith Manning, a character in Grant Morrison’s comic-book mindfuck The Invisibles, published by DC’s hip Vertigo line from 1994 to 2000. Manning, who received tantric initiation in the 1920s, announces her intentions to her sometimes lover Gideon Stargrave, whom, after meeting a decade earlier on these very same ghats, she initiated into the occult anarchist enclave known as — you guessed it — the Invisibles. There, Stargrave takes on the violent superheroic identity that also serves as a foil and doppelgänger of Grant Morrison himself: King Mob.

I thought about these fictional characters when I arrived here because, days before flying, I finished reading through the entire run of The Invisibles. And no, I don’t mean re-reading. Shockingly enough, I did not read the whole series when it came out, despite the fact that there were few more “Erik Davis” cultural touchstones in that decade. The 90s were my home base decade, when I was in ravenous culture-vulture mode, and I was plugged into many dimensions of Morrison’s masterwork: chaos magick, psychedelics, underground media, conspiracy theory, ontological anarchism, perverse subcultures, voodoo, tantra, and graphic novels (I wrote about Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, Batman and Yummy Fur). So why didn’t I scarf down a sometimes brilliantly illustrated tale of a team of colorful mutant punks taking on Lovecraftian archons in a metaphysical postmodern blender larded with so many of my favorite flavors? I had my reasons at the time — I’ll explain in a moment — but my lapse was a kind of boon, because it set up the tremendous reading experience I just underwent: an encounter that enabled me to at once reassess the decade that shaped my voice and views, and to appreciate, from the perspective of our vertiginous times, the apocalyptic and prophetic power of Morrison’s délire.

I bought my fat hardback doorstop at Comix Experience, my favorite comic shop in San Francisco. There are way hipper stores, stuffed to the gills with edgy indies and genderqueer memoirs, and more classic superhero shops as well. Comix Experience strikes the perfect balance for me, a balance also reflected in the staff — Brian is the Gen X owner, but a smart enough fellow to hire a trio of awesome and very sharp younger women who do a lot of the curation. When I bought the Morrison tome, Brian made an excellent suggestion: read only one issue a day. “You will want to binge, but don’t.” Towards the end of my reading, I scarfed down a few episodes in a single day, and the density provided a definite high. But I preferred the consistent drip-drip-drip of weirdness offered by a daily dose.

The Invisibles is one of the great representative works of the 90s, like Infinite Jest or Twin Peaks or Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It’s also the last gasp of high and mutant psychedelic subculture that stretches back through Hakim Bey, the Church of the Subgenius, Illuminatus!, the Merry Pranksters, and the Discordian Society. (I have a long argument about why “subculture” in the classic sense becomes impossible in subsequent decades, but that belongs elsewhere.) Morrison’s work also captures the buzzing apocalyptic tenor of the decade, which is as hard to communicate to younger generations as the hippie faith in the Revolution was to mine. Reflecting on the 1990s later, Morrison wrote, “The alien icon started to appear everywhere. Something was going on. I don't think it was just me. I think it's why the culture started producing more psychedelic energy. Films like The Matrix and ads that looked like surrealist films. Something got in. I'm utterly sure something got in.” It got into me, too, and Techgnosis was one of the results, a text marked by a similar frisson of ominous technocultural becoming, singed with the flickering foreshadow of some oncoming Event.

The Invisibles is also probably the best 1990s example of the phenomenon I wrote about in my 2019 book High Weirdness, which focused on the remarkable (and remarkably similar) experiences suffered in the 1970s by Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Though in some ways resembling classic religious or mystical experiences, the visionary explosions that shattered these men did not respect such neat genre boundaries. Instead, their experiences reflected an arguably postmodern and definitively weird juxtaposition of druggy hedonism, gnostic mysticism, shamanism, crackpot paranoia, science fiction, absurdist humor, media hacking, and chaos.

Morrison too is intimate with high weirdness. In one of his columns for “Invisible Ink,” the comic’s fascinating letters column, Morrison wrote that “Nobody ever believes me when I tell them that the ‘weirdest’ bits of my comics are actually the most autobiographical.” In his final column, he spills the beans, and describes his own extreme experience, “a full-on Tibetan, Sci-Fi Vision of AllSpaceTimeMind As A Single Complexifying Iteration Which Is The Larval Form Of A 5th Dimensional Adult Entity.” He was on top of a temple in Kathmandu, and his drug of choice was, surprising in some ways and not at all in others, a good old ball of Himalayan hash, as sticky as Shiva’s toejam. He directly compared his initiation to the experiences of PKD and McKenna, as well as the achievement, among Thelemites, of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

Trips that fragment and unfold spacetime into an alien haunted hypermatrix of apocalyptic force are, truth be told, common enough. In a sense the high weirdness really begins when these experiences loop around to manifest as texts. As with PKD’s Valis or RAW’s Cosmic Trigger, reading The Invisibles is to enter the foaming wake of Morrison’s grand grok. Like RAW, PKD, and McKenna, Morrison never crystalized what happened to him into a stable myth, which keeps the text open and not at all religious. Instead, the dynamic multiplicity of these experiences spilled into infectious cultural objects that, for some of us anyway, and certainly for myself, possess the uncanny and sometimes creepy ability to draw you — synchronistically and metafictionally—into the visionary maelstrom.

A wizard of meta, Morrison himself admits as much. In that final “Invisible Ink,” he reflects that “for the past six years…I have been using [the comic book medium] to recreate the complete and unabridged sensation of an ‘alien abduction’, thrill-ride style. I’ve attempted to simulate an initiation into some of the secrets of time and ‘high magic’ (where ‘simulation’ and ‘reality’ are synonymous, as in the formula Fake It Till You Make It) and create something that not only pays the rent but deprograms the nervous system and unravels the wallpaper.” The following page from the first arc, illustrated by Steve Yeowell, offers a particularly psychedelic slice of Morrison’s thrill ride:

The Invisibles is no doubt flawed, with missteps in art, structure, tone and narrative. Nonetheless, Morrison succeeded at crafting a Great Work of initiation simulation, for his era and for ours. He did so in part by recognizing and intensifying the peculiar media tenor of the 1990s. In particular, he sensed the way that information and its circulation and transformation were taking on a psychedelic quality that invoked, on the one hand, a decades-long bohemian history of counter-canons, cut-ups, and media hacking; and, on the other, a raw millennialist buzz marked by data density, sampling, and remixology.

Rather than the sometimes stodgy occult pedagogy of Alan Moore’s wonderful Promethea (1999-2005), Morrison offered a more scattershot sorcery of nodes, winks, masks, and hyper-links, both spelled out and not. Gnosticism, Situationism, Zen, commedia dell’arte, Phil Hine, Marquis de Sade, Michael Bertiaux, Jim Keith, Robert Chambers, William Burroughs, Whitley Strieber, John Lennon, Valis, and Terence McKenna’s transcendental object at the end of history — all are spliced and diced into a high-brow/low-brow mosaic stretched between the poles of critical theory and porn. Consider, if you will, the way the following three panels, illustrated by Phil Jimenez and taken here out of context, manage to weave together Oppenheimer, Lovecraft, UFO lore, angelology, metafiction, and McKenna’s transcendental object-as-shamanic goop, all the while foreshadowing the world-rending implications of David Lynch’s all-time episode 8 (“Gotta Light?”) from Twin Peaks: The Return.

Morrison’s bits and bobs aren’t just floating signifiers — they are, or at least strive to be, operative and infectious signs, charged amulets of a postmodern ritual remixed on the fly, and in your brain. Rather than being a comic about magick, The Invisibles wants to be an act of magick. In Vol 1, #16, Morrison infamously called on his fans to practice sigil magic to keep the comic alive in the face of poor sales. Derived from the work of Austin Osman Spare, an important figure for chaos magicians, sigil magick involves energetically charging a self-generated glyph in order to achieve specific desire. Morrison provided the sigil and a date: anytime on November 23, 1995, which happened to be Thanksgiving in the U.S. The fans would provide the energy, which he recommended generating though masturbation.

Edgy stuff no doubt, which Morrison wore on his black leather sleeve. But that, for me at the time, was part of the problem. While I read a lot of Vertigo comics, I didn’t really resonate with the nihilist swagger that animated titles by Morrison, Garth Ennis, or Warren Ellis. In an early proposal for The Invisibles, Morrison gave voice to this rebel yell: “If you’re driven to disrupt the structure of your office or school or of large scale Dominator culture itself (in the form of governments, dogmatic religions, big business), you may be contacted.” Such transgressive razzle-dazzle was a major feature of the cultural edge in the 90s, permeating postmodern theory, Mondo 2000, scuzzy noise rock bands, even old Greil’s influential Lipstick Traces. But the writing was on the Baudrillardian wall: subversion was also the central gesture of postmodern consumer culture, which came to simulate the repressive Big Brother you could pretend to subvert in the name of some liberated desire that, truth be told, was already a simulacrum of itself.

Today, popular culture has essentially absorbed underground culture, and with it the transgressive practices that once carved out furtive room for flesh-and-blood subculture. So while we still regularly encounter the transgressive mode, pitting sexy, rule-breaking oddballs and freaks against stodgy and monolithic forces of Control, the myth is now eviscerated, like a prop gun that goes Pop.

The System, in other words, is groovier and hornier — and soon with AI, more brilliant and creative — than you. Cultural shock and edgelord sneers gleam like sparkles on the detergent pods all the kids gobbled after watching social media. I criticized Žižek in my last column, but on this point the Ziz has it down:

Today, more and more, the cultural-economic apparatus itself — in order to reproduce itself under market competition conditions — has not only to tolerate but directly to incite stronger and stronger shocking effects and products….Here again, as in sexuality, perversion is no longer subversive: shocking excesses are part of the system itself — the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself.

Read today, the transgressive edge of The Invisibles often struck a sour note, but it was also clear that Morrison understood the bind he was in. In a chaotically dialectic work like The Invisibles, King Mob’s rebel stance is a concept ripe for deconstructing, right along with the violence that pervades the book. This violence is justified by the narrative’s reliance on the standard Manichaean comic-book contest between Good and Evil, to which Morrison gives, on the surface anyway, a gnostic-Situationist twist. But after being ensorcelled by a 64-character mind-fucking alphabet, King Mob is commanded to “generate auto-critique.” And the critique he generates is that “[t]he most pernicious image of all is the anarchist hero-figure. A creation of the commodity culture, he allows us to buy into an inauthentic simulation of revolutionary praxis.” Boom.

Over the series, King Mob grows similarly ambivalent and even bitter about his own Pulp Fiction–worthy hyper-violence. As Riley McDonald argues in an MA thesis I found online, The Invisibles ultimately questions the effectiveness of the violence it indulges in, as well as the us-vs-them dualism that motivates the mayhem. The character Boy, for example, quits the team precisely because of the gore. McDonald suggests that as the story arcs towards its end, Morrison replaces the usual Manichaean “war” with a more open-ended and postmodern framework that recalls James Carse’s concept of the infinite game. “By viewing things through the lens of a game or a rescue mission,” McDonald writes, “the viability of violence and war as a means to bring about liberation are called into question.”

As the war melts into a game, it grows into a game of masks, or masques (as per the Harlequinade, creepy commedia dell’arte figures who we ultimately learn are the secret chiefs of the Invisibles). As the game grows, RAW’s Illuminatus! looms large, and we begin to realize that “the baddies” — the perverse imps, cosmic archons, and corrupt human servitors — are not so distinct from our heroes after all. Conspiracies turn inside out, eating each other like ouroboros worms, until readers are no longer clear whose side anyone is on, including themselves. In the end, everyone seems to be driving towards roughly the same goal, the same climax that compels “both sides” of Wilson and Shea’s Discordian romp: to “immanentize the Eschaton.” This marvelous phrase — lifted from William F. Buckley, Jr., who got it from the conservative historian Eric Voegelin — also describes high-dose psychedelics to a trippy T.

Morrison plays this immanent eschatological game as a comedy, a metafictional masque that stages the next step of human evolution: imagination unbound, total freedom, the kind of stuff that Terence would tell us when he was feeling upbeat. But the chaotic vortex that Morrison releases also recalls Marx’s great prophecy about capitalism: that everything solid melts into air, or better yet, into plasma. This deterritorializing force, now shockingly evident in our dizzy everyday lives, was always only incidentally about liberation. In a sense, that’s why postmodernism ultimately failed: all that transgression and subversion and “play” bottomed out as ironic exhaustion. This has consequences for Morrison’s narrative. As Sean Rogers complains, Morrison “too often simply amplifies the spiraling, vertiginous feelings of idea-rich complexity that [he] is everywhere at pains to induce, and ignores the hollowness that resounds at the work’s core.”

True enough. But that hollowness can also be read as something more like emptiness, in the Buddhist sense of shunyata, that void that flickers through and as appearances. In the end, Morrison’s response to the double binds and metafictional loops he discovers is metaphysical. The Invisibles deconstructs dualities — between body and mind, good and evil, self and other — and it ultimately does so from a nondual perspective, which Morrison calls the “supercontext.” But Morrison’s nonduality does not rest on some anodyne abstract unity, but rather seethes with an infinite diversity of embodied appearances in series. This is what Morrison saw in his Kathmandu vision: that the complete human body is “decades long, billion-eyed and billion-limbed, the worm-cast that you leave in time.”

Beyond its magnetic appeal as an occult or psychedelic metatext, or as a 1990s Zeitgeist spore-print, The Invisibles resonates like hell today. Even though the first issue now lies closer on the timeline to the JFK assassination than to our own dizzying moment, Morrison’s maelstrom feels all too familiar, its insanity a presage of our own. Though the details don’t always match, even as myth, we also find ourselves immanentizing the eschaton, even against our deepest needs and desires. Consensus reality shatters into a hypermediated hall of mirrors shot through with elite cruelty, revivified occult forces, tangible conspiracies, nihilistic youth cultures, mindfuck technologies. But these are still features — what really resonates is the topsy-turvy vibe of ontological havoc. As Helga says late in the comic, “The culture has become addicted to the chaos it thought it was inoculating itself against.” But as the faith in inoculations is forced out of fashion, we find ourselves simply addicted to the chaos.

Upcoming Events

• Psychedelic Buddhism 2025 is the first conference of its kind (as far as we know): a gathering of scholars and practitioners devoted to the open discussion of the intersection of Buddhist wisdom and psychedelic practice. Convened by my old pals in the Psychedelic Sangha, and taking place at the New School and online, the conference is focused on pragmatic insights and building a supportive, evolving community. This two-day gathering will get started on Friday, February 21st with a pre-recorded overview of the topic from me, which will be followed by a streamed talk from the legendary Tenzin Bob Thurman and a live keynote from Lama Liz Monson. Saturday, February 22nd will include three virtual panels, all online, one of which includes the penetrating California Zen priest Kokyo Henkel. Register here.

• “Practice Circle.” On Sunday, March 9, at the Berkeley Alembic, from 2 to 4 pm, I will once again host a conversational workshop with the lovely Jennifer Dumpert about the topic of practice. The first event, “Practicing with Practice,” went very well, and the Practice Circle will hopefully become a recurring event. According to Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk, we humans are at root “practicing beings” who to some degree make ourselves through what we do. But what do we mean by the term? How does “practicing” meditation or yoga relate to other forms of practice? What makes psychedelics a “practice” and not just a trip? The Practice Circle makes room for practitioners to individually and collaboratively reflect on the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice — issues like commitment, belief, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, trust. We will also talk about ways to craft practices of one’s own. Suggested donation, $20-50, no one turned away. Registration here.

• Alembic Fundraiser: The Berkeley Alembic is just over three years old, and the nonprofit continues to grow and transform. Though it began as an experiment, it’s clearer to me now what we are doing. We have created a public center for “consciousness culture”: the pluralistic, discriminating, and creative engagement with good old altered states, in body and mind, soul and society. But running a nonprofit event space devoted to community and quality is tough, especially in the spendy Bay Area. To that end, we are holding our first public fundraiser. On Saturday, March 8, at 7pm, Michael Pollan, creator of the game-changing book and Netflix series How to Change Your Mind, will be joining me, Erik Davis, for a conversation and Q&A session about the state of psychedelics today, as well as his ongoing involvement with the field. Come and participate in the conversation, and hear updates about the future course of the Alembic. Before the event, at 5:30, the Alembic will also host a catered reception with Michael. Tickets here.

• How to Navigate the Weirdness. The world is weird, and only getting weirder. In two talks at the Berkeley Alembic — Wednesday, March 19 and Wednesday, March 26, both at 7pm — I will wrestle with the strangeness in our midst: UAPs, simulation hypothesis, AI gods, conspiracy theory in the White House, corporate shamanism, jhana-on-demand, media psychosis, and all manner of climate chaos and apocalyptic foreshocks. There is a thread running through all of these topics: the apparent unraveling of consensus reality, and the mind- and resource-war for the attentional future. Taking and developing concepts and strategies from my book High Weirdness, I will strive to both honestly assess our impossible situation and to identify a few navigational tools for sanity, sense-making, and creative engagement. Donation; pre-register here and here.

Appearances

• Howling in the Wilderness. I haven’t been doing a lot of podcasts lately, but Brian James pulled me out of my hermit cave to do this one, which begins with a discussion of the desire to stay hunkered down in a hermit cave, and to retreat from the Internet shitstorm. In episode 164, Brian and I share what seems to me a characteristically Gen X ambivalence about “success” in the attentional economy, and the question of what we are trying to achieve with our media given the changing technological and cultural conditions, even as we wrestle with the changing spiritual needs of aging bodies. My friendship with Brian does remind me of the good the Net can bring, since it has developed entirely in the context of email, podcasts, and Substack.

• Autre. My books are rarely reviewed, and I have barely ever gotten profiled in print. So I was pleased as punch that the good folks at Autre magazine, and especially the writer Riska Seval, decided to write about me and Blotter and California in their latest “Citizen” issue, which has YG in a crazy coat on the cover. Autre is a fat uberhip fashion mag, which is thankfully fragrance-free, and even more thankfully a window into a world — young, artsy, cosmopolitan, wacky, queer — that also has an appreciation of cultural history. Riska and Los Angeles editor Oliver Misraje visited me and Mark McCloud in San Francisco, and the journey is part of Riska’s essay, one that is at least as much about her as me. I say this in a good way, because I am terribly curious how folks of her generation respond to Techgnosis, which she read for the profile, and now I have a much better sense of how this ancient tome resonates with today’s fractured sense-scape of mystic nonsense. She also characterized my person well. “Davis was serious about his irreverence, intense about his lightness, and wavered between enchantment and disenchantment with the world around him.” This issue appears to be sold out already, but Riska posted the piece on her Substack.

I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. If you want to support my work, you are encouraged to consider a paid subscription, though at the moment there is no paid-subscriber-only content. You can also support the publication by forwarding Burning Shore to friends and colleagues, or by dropping an appreciation in my Tip Jar.