Guest writers Ben Clarkson and Matt Bors, the creators behind the graphic novel series “Justice Warriors”, take Julian and Jake on a twisted journey into the ideology of Grant Morrison. Morrison is responsible for the Invisibles and a seven-year Batman run considered by fans to be some of the best Batman comics written to date. He also claims that he’s been abducted by aliens in Kathmandu, and that we’re all giant centipedes weaving through time and space.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes:
www.patreon.com/QAA
Matt Bors: https://x.com/MattBors / mattbors.com/books
Ben Clarkson: https://x.com/benclarkson / https://thebenclarkson.com
Justice Warriors: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Justice-Warriors-Vol-2/Matt-Bors/JUSTICE-WARRIORS/9781952090325
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Premium Episode 296, Grant Morrison and Chaos Magic.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, Ben Clarkson, and Matt Bors.
Election time is upon us, and so is another installment of Justice Warriors, which is the comic book drawn and written by our guests, Ben Clarkson, So can you explain to us, please, what does it mean to vote harder?
from Bubble City return, but with a new subtitle, Vote Harder.
So can you explain to us, please, what does it mean to vote harder?
How can one make their vote a little harder this season?
Well, you only get one.
So you can't vote more, you can't vote higher or lower.
You gotta vote harder.
Well, that's unless you live in the, you know, in the high rise.
In the high rise of Bubble City, you get, you know, a couple thousand votes.
But if you're on the very lowest level, you only get one.
If you've got good square footage, you can leverage your square footage to more votes.
Yes.
That's how you vote harder, is that you own property in Bubble City and then your vote is disproportionately weighed more than the mutants in the Uninhabited Zone.
Yes.
For the uninitiated listener, Matt Bors and I, my beautiful compatriot who's guesting with me today, I'm Ben Clarkson.
We have a comic book, which is a satire of elections in an insane city called Bubble City.
And it's a rip-roarious, insane, disgusting, ultra-violent smorgasbord for whoever would like to read it.
Yeah, the first one was so good, you know, I was like, what are they gonna do?
What are they gonna do?
Can they make a good sequel to it?
And it's amazing.
I honestly, I love both of them so much.
I was saying before we hit the record button that the boys had really outdone themselves in this book.
Oh, fuck me, my goddamn alarm.
Uh, the boys had really, really outdone themselves in this book.
The world building, the art, the just packing like every page with little, like, this is a horrible description and please don't take offense, but like, like where's Waldo?
Where like wherever you look, there's actually more of the story being told in like the tiniest corner of of the panels if you're looking and stuff happening between the panels something that i had really never seen in a graphic novel where you're actually sort of advancing the story in the space between the panels where like the white should be i mean and it's really funny and it's ultra violent and it's got good politics and yeah it's just i'm like halfway through it
i'm just i can't wait to finish it i was actually saying that i i want to get that you know they sent us a pdf but I wanna get the hard copy 'cause I wanna see it like on the page.
Like that's, that's how into it I am.
There's like a whole secret plot in the book in like background details that only gets unlocked in one of the last, you get a clue on what to look for in one of the last panels of the book.
And then you can read it again and there's like this whole conspiracy happening underneath the plot of the book.
So I really wanted to make it like, Love that.
You're a conspiracy theorist while reading the book.
That is so dope.
It really, it made me feel like I was a kid again reading, like, something like The Eleventh Hour.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, like, children's book where there is so much going on and these stories that are unfolding and there's clues and stuff to bake.
I mean, there's really, like, this kind of, like, childlike, uh, sort of, like, imagination to it but with, you know, totally cynical politics as one would have, like, you know, nowadays.
There's lots of dating app stuff, which is fun.
Everyone is super online in the world of Justice Warriors.
Everyone is hysterical from the police chief to the celebrity pop star mayor on down to the police and the mutants and the people even trying to change the world for better.
Everyone's a little bit crazy and way too online.
I like that your kind of populist, pseudo-left guy is just a woman who's been fused to a kind of tank, but it looks like a big jelly bean type thing.
I mean, she's a literal childless cat lady.
She's a mutant cat who, I guess like Kamala, is a cop in a sense.
She is a tax tank operator.
Yes.
She's a tax tank operator.
It goes door to door.
If you don't put your tax money in through the point of sale service on the tank's nose, it'll burn down your house.
Yeah, and she's introduced, she's introduced, like, essentially, like, having a firefight with, like, an HOA gang, like, in, like, some, like, but, like, something out of, like, Dread, where, you know, they're in, like, the, you know, the firing out of the windows, and she's firing laser cannons back at them, and then, yeah, once she gets fused to the body of the tank, she decides she's gonna take a run at politics, which is...
Which is hilarious.
We keep you guessing through the whole book what's going to happen.
Once you're melted to a fuselage, it's time for politics.
Yeah, exactly.
She kind of has a superhero origin in a way.
The tank gets struck by lightning, which is what fuses her to it.
And then it also kind of gets her woke in a way.
She realizes that she's been part of this evil system.
The mainframe sort of overloads her brain with all of the stuff that she's taken part in over the years.
And then she sees an election poster and basically says, fuck this.
I'm in a tank now.
I should be in charge.
She's right.
I wish we had more actual tank candidates.
I want more mechs.
Yeah, more mechs in the election.
I totally agree.
Tell me you wouldn't vote for them.
Yeah.
Well, we're approaching one of my favorite B-80s movies, which is Robot Jocks, where political conflict was settled by two guys from warring countries just plopped in giant mechs to battle it out in front of an arena.
That sounds very similar to maybe our plan for number three.
Well, you should probably watch Robot Jocks in that case.
If nothing else, to get ideas, a lot of people don't know about Robot Jocks, but it's out there on YouTube for free.
Wow, thank you.
Could Trump maybe endorse the comic and tell people that they can follow the link?
Oh, please.
Justice Warriors is a great comic.
It may or may not have predicted my assassination attempt.
I'd want to ask the authors about that.
The Secret Service wants to ask them a couple of questions too.
You can buy the book wherever graphic novels are sold, and Ben Clarkson, Matt Bohr's really great guys, they've got a horrible deal.
Coming on the QAA podcast to talk to two idiots.
One more of an idiot than the other, but which one it is remains to be seen.
Poor guys, gotta talk for a while.
We made them write the episode.
We didn't do very much work at all, so horrible deal, but great authors, great artists, good guys all around, big Trump fans, and SCIA is going to be asking them some questions about things that are in the book.
Thank you so much, Donald.
A beautiful, beautiful Trump impersonation.
We do have multiple assassination attempts in the book.
Three of them, in fact.
I won't say how many are successful, but we have at least three, so we're outpacing reality so far, but there's still an October surprise to go.
Yeah, if there's a laser carving someone's face into the sun, then we're gonna take up some plagiarism charges with reality.
Well, if Trump did read the book, and I should say, you know, we're not trying to do like Trump and Kamala.
It's not like that, right?
No, it really isn't.
But if Trump saw that idea, he would 100% want to do it.
Yeah, don't give him any ideas.
But that's actually one of the things that I really liked about that.
So often when you have fiction that is making, you know, satire or commentary on a political, you know, on the sort of current political hellscape, you can often see one-to-one, you know, okay, it's one-to-one, okay, this is supposed to be Trump, this is supposed to be Kamala, this is supposed to be Jill Stein, you know.
And, uh, you guys don't do that.
I really like how there are bits and pieces of different politicians that, you know, that sort of, they don't necessarily rhyme, but like, you know, it's, you can find bits and pieces, but there's no, it really is an original story and these are original characters and, and, yeah.
We're trying.
I used to do political cartoons and I mean I got tired of it honestly because people, it is about a one-to-one.
I mean you're doing, Trump is doing this and then the message is unambiguous and people either agree with it or don't and like it on that, on those grounds.
Right.
You know, with Justice Warriors, we get to do world building and storytelling.
And I think you can enjoy it on like, it's dumb in a way.
It's like a dumb action movie with a cop that's literally made of feces.
And it's fun.
And you can just read it and enjoy it on that level.
And then it's also like, a little brain poisoned like us and highly political and saying things about our terrible world.
It's way too online, but as a book, so it's different.
Yeah, that's true.
So by reading it, you get offline.
You touch grass and you read this book.
It's great.
Log off, open the book, log in.
I like the sort of like gun smoke character, like the television character who like all of a sudden kind of inexplicably just begins like communicating to like one of the cops like through the show and like sends him on a mission.
Like before you know it the lines of like his own sort of like media diet reality have been blurred and it's like no explanation it just like starts happening and he just instantly accepts it.
It's very, you know, it's a little bit Manchurian Candidate, a little bit Parallax View.
We're pulling from like the paranoid thrillers of the 70s.
I've been, as we've been doing like the press tour, I've been like boiling down the pitch.
And it's basically, it's a political thriller for the deranged online era.
And when you have these like assassination attempts, and you like the first guy was kind of like an incel loser who, you know, couldn't get it together to shoot up his high school before he graduated and he heard Trump was coming through town.
So he's like, Okay, here we go.
I don't want to live to be 22.
It sounds boring.
And then the second guy is kind of is like a kind of has.
He's a Ukraine brain.
He's got Ukraine brain.
Yeah, and COVID brain.
He's like, I believe that China created the bioweapon of COVID to sideline the fight in Ukraine or whatever.
He's a lunatic, basically.
Poisoned by geopolitics.
He has a line of like, oh, my TV's talking to me.
But isn't that our experience?
All of our experiences every day?
We all think, oh, that's for me.
They're saying that stuff for me.
So, fellas, you've brought us an interesting little topic here, so I will let you take it away.
But yeah, obviously, if we haven't made it clear, go pick up a nice copy of this nice physical object.
Enjoy it.
Please.
Yes.
We'll have a link in the description.
So, hi guys!
Pleasure to be here again.
We've got a bit of a rabbit hole to go into today.
Matt and I are, as you know, as we mentioned before, comic book writers and artists, and we wanted to present you with a deep dive on a singular figure in comics, if there ever was one.
We want to talk today about Grant Morrison, who is not only one of the most successful comic book writers in the history of the medium, he's also a practicing magician, but not a cool Chad, stage magician.
Like, he's a wizard.
He's like a sorcerer and maybe the world's most accomplished baker.
Okay.
But maybe he's baking for the good of the world.
Imagine if you can.
A bald Scottish guy who dresses like Neo from the Matrix and will bake anything that pops into his head, but he's not pilled.
A baker who's not pilled.
Interesting.
What the heck?
Well, maybe he's a little pilled.
Yeah.
We'll see.
He can be a little pilled as a treat.
So today, we're going to talk about magic with a K, the creation of powerful sigils, the hidden reality of the cosmos, alien abductions, and how all of this relates to Batman.
But to start, I want to introduce you briefly to Grant Morrison.
Here we are!
Right!
Fuck, man!
I'll tell you, when I was a kid, I read Robert Anton Wilson and all this shit, and here we are, we're standing here, we're talking about this shit, and it's real.
Okay, I'm pissed, and in half an hour I'm going to come up on drugs, so watch for it.
I guess, I don't know, is there any practicing magicians in the audience?
Put your hand up if we've got any.
Yeah?
Come on, bold!
A few?
Okay, by the time we've finished this, you're all going to be practicing magicians.
This shit is easy, right?
So Grant Morrison is a Scottish- Woah, woah, woah.
Hold on.
Hold on.
You can't- I need subtitles on that video.
You can't just play that and expect me not to like rant for like two minutes about how confused I am about what this guy's vibe is.
He's like a character out of Trainspotting or like a punk.
Yeah.
Like a punk lead singer, you know, from like 86.
You've actually completely nailed it.
As we proceed, your prophecy will come true.
Well, as usual.
Okay, please continue.
As you can tell, Grant Morrison is Scottish, and he was born in the 1960s.
He comes from very humble origins, grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Glasgow.
His father, this is very important, was an anti-nuclear activist, which I think is very cool, because nukes still around.
Nobody's complaining about them today.
People who complain about nukes?
Chad, based, in my opinion.
Yeah, we need them to come back.
We do need them to come back.
Yeah.
It'll get big again after the next one drops.
Yes.
It's just been a fallow period.
So his dad used to bring him actually to like ICBM facilities in Scotland because they put a bunch of missiles everywhere.
And his dad would get him to like pretend to throw his ball onto the base so they could sneak onto the base and he could take photos, which is a baller move.
Yes.
Morrison has attributed these experiences to scenes from his batshit insane comic, The Invisibles, of breaking into massive underground bunkers, secret government conspiracies, and alien time travel devices.
His work can be incredibly paranoid, and The Invisibles especially features cosmic spies having the true nature of reality exposed to them so they can shatter an extraterrestrial mind control matrix, and there are secret conflicts between soldiers of light and obedient corporate forces.
The enemy is formless, immortal demons inhabiting the bodies of human beings.
Basically, The Invisibles is QAnon meets The Matrix.
And it's just all cool, leather-clad hotties breaking free from social control to see the hidden truth of the world.
It's paranoid.
It's insane.
Lots of symbols and, like, things have relationships to each other that aren't quite clear, but they're linked.
There's a lot of Egyptian and Christian imagery.
John Lennon is summoned as a psychedelic god, and he's brought to Earth by tarot cards.
It's very 1997.
Is there anything more Gen X than this?
Yeah, no, it's true.
No, no, not at all.
A long leather trench coat.
Yeah, this is the most Gen X thing imaginable.
Like when Grant Morrison saw The Matrix and he was like, they fucking ripped me off.
Yeah, that's a lot of people have said that.
I mean, I don't, you know, it was in the it was in the air at the time.
Yeah.
And he'll even acknowledge that that that gets into some of his vibe as as as we go on.
So then like his parents split up.
He's a he's a weird kid.
He goes to live in an all boys school.
And then he becomes a rock musician dandy living in Glasgow.
One prophecy fulfilled from Jake.
He is a he was like a rock singer in a band.
Yeah.
And it says this stage in his life that he is exposed to magic magic with a K. So now we have Morrison talking about his first magical ritual that he ever took part in.
But I did this and I thought, okay, show me something.
So I did the ritual and I lay back and I'm on nothing and I got the whole... I'm in the white hot room, you know, and it's like all these mages of times past and things like... Holy fuck.
And it was for real.
Yeah.
But then, you know, I did the thing and this was all, like, I could talk myself out of it because I'd imagined it.
Yeah.
And it was here and it was a spiral.
It was the entire universe flushing down the plug hole, which has been a repeated motif.
Yeah.
But then at night, I woke up in the middle of the night and I was just...
Pressurised space above me.
Like collapsing all the perspectives and the visual field was descending into this hole.
And there was just this thing like siphoning into my brain.
But then the lion appears and it's like I am neither north nor south.
Yeah, I forget.
So, for me, it was like, okay, this is actually... I just did something that changed my consciousness considerably, that didn't involve drugs, that didn't involve anything other than he said this would happen if I did this, and oh, he was right.
So that changed everything, and I just...
Can I just say, if I wasn't reading the transcript as we went along here, I wouldn't understand 20% of the words, but everything that he said sounded like something I said when I was 21, like in the three days after I had eaten an eight-quarter bag of mushrooms by myself, except for the part at the end where it didn't involve drugs.
Yeah, that's a confusing one.
Yeah, that's very confusing.
I also am skeptical about whether or not a lot of these are not drug trips, which I'll get into with magic, too.
But when Grant Morrison tells a story about magic, he almost always says, like, believe me, I wasn't on drugs when this happened.
Believe me.
Like, clockwork.
Believe me.
Believe me.
It's crazy.
He's one of those people that speaks in, like, sound effects.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, he's one of those guys, and you'll just sort of be talking to him, and there you go.
You know, they kind of just like trail off.
And you're just like, oh man, like damn, like I wish I, I wish I like had the freedom to, to speak in that way.
You're talking about shit that words can't describe.
You got to kind of bring in the, uh, the sound effects.
Jake, after this, after this, you will be that guy.
Magic will change you.
I will.
I'll be at the Starbucks.
I'll be at the Starbucks being like, yes, I would like, could I do a grande ice cube?
And they'll know.
They'll get it.
They'll know.
They'll know.
To step back, Magic with a K is a series of beliefs and religions tied to the occult, clumped together in a category called esotericism.
And specifically, Magic with a K comes from a certain weird type of Victorian Orientalism and a revival of paganism.
One of the big originating points for Magic with a K, the originator of Magic with a K, is Aleister Crowley.
Circa late 19th century, early 20th century.
And Crowley was a bit of a sex maniac, adulterer, heroin addict.
But he was also very into dressing up like an Egyptian pharaoh and performing rituals from lost rabbinical texts.
You know, that was back in the days when you couldn't get cancelled for that stuff.
Yeah, and Crowley, like, he'll always come up when cute people get, like, a little esoteric and start to be like, if you want to understand, like, where these demonic rituals come, you know, come from, like, that these politicians are performing, you got to look into Aleister Crowley.
And it's the idea, the idea is that he's kind of the originator of, like, the satanic ritual, basically.
And like he is he is the originator of the satanic ritual, but it's much more pathetic and sad in reality.
Yeah, then like, oh, he's summoning the devil.
He's trying to do get pussy.
Yeah, that's it.
That's like 100% of it.
I'm summoning a little bit of pussy.
If I can interject here for a minute before we really get cooking, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, the biggest comic writers of their generation and people that I deeply respect and love their comics, they both have this like magic gimmick that I just find so silly.
They're like magicians and wizards.
And I'm like, oh man, you could like get away with that in the 90s, like when you weren't online all the time and you had to like perform your identity.
It was like there was mystery to them.
And I'm like, what percentage of this is just getting pussy?
I will elucidate that, and a lot of it is.
I'll say this, I'll say this, I'll say this.
When I was in junior high and I wasn't super athletic or tall and The interest was starting to focus on women and going through puberty.
I made a decision that I would get good at magic and that would be what I had.
That the athletes and the traditionally attractive guys wouldn't have.
I would get good at magic and to this day I've got a couple tricks up my sleeve.
I bet.
You gotta have, everybody's gotta have a gimmick, right?
I don't have a deck of playing cards here, but I could show you.
I'm not going to, but I could show you.
I assume there's some level of, like, discordianism at work here with Morrison, right?
Because, I mean, that's, I know that that defines Alan Moore quite a bit.
Discordianism and chaos magic are closely related and emerged at nearly the same time.
Discordianism is rejected by practitioners of chaos magic because it is too, I'm going to use the term, prescriptive.
It's too much like things mean things, even though it's too dogmatic for a chaos magician.
Interesting.
Which is something I can get into a little bit later, but Discordianism also is chaos.
There's also like, there's another movement out of France, Pataphysics, which is very similar to Discordianism and chaos magic, which also has an occult twist to it, but is even sillier than all of this.
Yeah, everyone's taking designer drugs and making their little magic castle to live in, and it makes sense.
Yeah, you had to go to a place to learn this kind of magic.
You had to travel to a place.
You had to study with one of the greats, you know what I mean?
This is like prestige-style magic, as opposed to like, you know, David Blaine going to like Harrison Ford's house, you know?
You know, it's like a different kind of... It's the kind of magic that, you know, Batman would have to trek up into, like, the Andes Mountains to, like, train with some guru and he would learn, like, the ancient dark arts.
Like, it's that kind of stuff.
Well, just wait until we get to the Batman later because that's exactly what's going on.
Mm-hmm.
So Crowley basically set the tone for this new spiritual movement known as Ritual Magic with a K. I have a clip here of Duncan Trussell explaining Ritual Magic with a K to Joe Rogan and it's important to keep in your mind's eye for the listener because we're going to see it but it's important to keep in your mind's eye that in this clip Trussell is dressed in a full ghillie camouflage suit wearing an N95 mask while Joe Rogan is dressed like an astronaut.
It was during COVID obviously.
So, witchcraft, as we understand it now because of Hollywood, is like, you know, ladies riding around on brooms and shit, but it just used to be midwifery.
It used to be, like, healing women who would, like, deliver babies and stuff.
But these were all connected to, they all had pagan roots.
And so, essentially, you can follow back this branch of data that some people say started in Sumeria or Egypt.
Ways of meditating, ways of connecting with the universe that are ritualistic in nature, but seem mysterious to us.
Because even though, like, if you want to see what it looks like, just look at a Catholic mass.
You're looking at a ceremony.
It's theurgy, I guess you'd call it.
That is a magical ceremony where Bread gets converted into the flesh of a God that you eat.
So that's your watch.
They're all wearing robes.
They're burning incense.
So that is magic.
That's what ceremonial magic looks like.
It's non different from ceremonial magic.
Someone in the Catholic Church might tell you this isn't magic.
This is...
Me praying to the infinite and asking for forgiveness.
That's magic!
You're connecting with a divine intelligence.
You're hoping from your connection with the divine intelligence to produce some change in your own psychology, in your own life, and maybe create good fortune or whatever it is you're praying for.
Healing, Whatever it may be, that's magic.
So magic is that.
He is in a full ghillie suit, you can barely see his eyes.
You would have to grind, you would have to grind for hours and hours and hours to unlock this skin.
So magic, as he said, is an attempt to commune with the divine to effect change through ritual in ritual magic.
Trussell here claims that the beliefs go back to ancient Egypt or ancient Samaria.
But magic with a K, basically, as we know it, as the historical record sets out, basically starts with a bunch of well-to-do dandies in the back room of a London social club.
The Golden Dawn, which has a terrible name, terrible, terrible ISO now, was this secret society in London High Society that basically took a bunch of Egyptian texts and rabbinical writings out of context and were like, hey, we're going to do this stuff now.
So magic is and always will be firmly British.
Like, what we understand as magic in the West is an invention of British people from the Victorian era.
Harry Potter is just part of a long tradition of Brits talking nonsense about wizards.
This is probably, in my opinion, some sort of reaction to Victorian social repression.
Magic is a product of Victorian society, which was very prudish about sex, and ritual magic is weirdly super focused on sex and ritualized sex between the participants.
Crowley himself was raised as like an extreme Christian in an extreme Christian sect, and he later rebelled, describing himself as the beast.
His motto was, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Basically, if it feels good, do it, even if you shouldn't.
Can't imagine this ends without a few crimes along the way.
A horny man and an ideology to justify it.
He ends up having a lot of weird, he ends up having a lot of interactions with people.
And, you know, there's a really great book by Charles Portis called The Masters of Atlantis, which is sort of a satire of the history of magic.
And I didn't realize that until I did some of this research.
Love that book.
It's a great book.
I highly recommend it.
But just like in Crowley's life, the moral of the story of that book, and also Grant Morrison's life, is it's all about friends at the end of the day.
It's all about the people you love who are around you.
It's about the people you fake sawed in half during the magic show.
Yes.
It's about the half of the assistant you got along the way.
So the rituals in magic were a way of, you know, sort of unconsciously, mechanically acting out some sort of mystical action that would get you access to wisdom and power of demons and angels to affect your desires.
They are attempts to make change in the world around you.
The rituals, as we understand them, were unlikely to have any of the intended results, like a three-way hot date.
How is that going to make your relationship with your mother work?
I don't know.
I don't like that joke.
I'll give anything a shot at this point.
The rituals often involve robes, secret knowledge, and taking, get this, loads of drugs.
Lots of drugs in magic.
Lots of altered states and drug taking at every level of Magic with a K. What were the preferred drugs?
Quaaludes at that time?
Or LSD?
I mean, just smoking a little bit of dope?
Alistair Crowley was really into heroin, but they would take I'm sure they would take mescaline, they would do marijuana, hashish.
Hashish seems to be, like, very common.
Especially early magic.
And just as an aside, Stanley Kubrick actually probably took the aesthetics from some of the Golden Dawn rituals to design Eyes Wide Shut.
So all that stuff you see in Eyes Wide Shut, that's not, like, Illuminati shit.
That's, like, sex-crazed, repressed, upper-society British crap that he's put in there.
That's interesting context.
I'll have to watch it again through that lens.
Before they had apps where you could find someone to fuck your wife, you had to have a much more elaborate system.
No, that's like 100% of what this is.
I'm dead serious.
It's just like a weird orgy group, but they had to find some excuse that they were allowed to do it.
So chaos magic comes out of this.
Okay, chaos magic comes out of this idea of like practicing some sort of ritual action to get access to the divine, which is just an excuse to peg your neighbor.
And it's a it's a reaction to the repressive qualities of ritual magic, which had by the 1970s really congealed into a religion.
It was very dogmatic ritual magic.
So, if ritual magic is Catholic, like Duncan Trussell sort of alluded to, with all the robes and the masks and the candles, chaos magic was sort of a Protestant reformation of magic, with a major focus on personal experiences, discipline, and a rejection of dogmatism.
It's super countercultural.
Imagine a hippie summoning ball with only a Bic lighter and some hotel stationery.
Once again, high on drugs.
That's right.
So here we have a clip of our beautiful bald boy, Morrison, describing the basic practice of chaos magic, which is the creation of a sigil.
This is very important.
Quite simply, it is my desire that my cat wins the Olympics.
Take out all the vowels, right?
Write this down, for fuck's sake, and do it!
Don't just listen, do it, right?
Take out the vowels, and you'll be left with a string of consonants.
Take out the repeated consonants, and you'll be left with a string of consonants that have no repeats in it, you know, whatever, x, y, a, d, whatever.
Turn that thing into a little image.
Take the D. Draw a big D. Then you've got a T. Draw a T under it and keep reducing it down until it looks magical.
And there are no rules for this thing.
Do it until it looks magical.
At that point, you now have a sigil.
The sigil will work.
You can project desire into reality and change reality.
It works!
Your cat can win the Olympics if you draw a sigil.
It works.
It works.
So just to reiterate in case the Scottishness was too much for the listener, you write down what you want, you take out the vowels, you take out the double letters, you get a string of consonants, and you turn that into a drawing, and then your wishes come true.
Who found this out?
Who found out, oh, I did it the other way.
I took out the consonants first, but actually you gotta take out the vowels.
Where was this process?
Look, if you were in junior high or elementary school at some point and you took yours or your crush's initials and turned it into like a fun little symbol, a logo for yourself, if you will, on the side of your math quiz, you have drawn a sigil.
It's a powerful, magical image.
Yes.
And were you not making out with her in the back of the bus one week later?
Yeah, if you have drawn the Stussy logo on the cover of your Trapper Keeper, you are actually doing magic.
And did you not beg your mom to buy you a $60 t-shirt one week later?
Yes, you did.
Did she get it for you begrudgingly so?
Did it get you the dates that you wanted?
Probably not.
Magic still was done.
This is an elaborate story.
So, obviously it's very easy to dismiss this, this magic, this sigil as ramblings and nonsense.
But since it was so simple, I wanted to try.
So, I made, for the purposes of our fun little episode, I made three sigils.
Yes.
Obviously, if one is doing magic with a K, it should be in an altered state of consciousness.
So I imbibed an ancient herbal remedy when I made these, which granted me new perspectives.
It opened the doors of my mind.
And then I proceeded on this higher plane to make a sigil for each one of you.
So, I started to arrange the letters on the page until it looked magical.
And then I started seeing, like, the outlines of a drawing, of an image.
And being an artist, it's easy for me to organize it.
Pull something out of that noise.
And what came out of my little wishes were three drawings.
And so, Julian, I'm going to ask you to... Here is your sigil in the Google Doc.
It's the first one.
I want you to describe the sigil for the listener.
Okay, well, it appears to be some sort of underwater exploration vehicle, or could be space.
Hard to tell, but there's a little person in a kind of cockpit.
And then that's connected to what looks like a kind of hockey stick shaped object that comes down from the fuselage.
Okay.
And the submarine is shark-shaped.
It's fish.
It's fish-shaped.
There's a dorsal fin.
There's a big bubble around it.
It's inside of a bubble, yeah.
It's inside of a bubble.
Okay.
So that's for you, Julian.
Thank you.
You keep that in your mind.
Okay.
We can come back to it.
Jake, here's your sigil.
Would you like to describe it for the listener?
I love it.
I love it, and I'm so jealous of you.
I wish I could draw like you can, man.
It's awesome.
Okay, this is a gorilla Dracula, or possibly wearing a Matrix trench coat.
He's got the high collar and nice pompadour, sort of sharp bottom teeth, very gorilla-like, and he's wearing glasses in the shape of the Weezer W.
Incredible.
he's got something to say and what he's saying is what's with these homies dissing my girl incredible yeah this is definitely very jake and then matt can you describe this last one yeah boy what am i looking at i'm looking at a person a man in like a kind of a full body suit standing on top of a machine of some sort uh The machine is a few feet high.
It looks like an engine.
It looks like it might be blowing wind out of one side of it.
And it has sort of some, some funky shapes coming off like the top is that he's standing on is a little bit zigzaggy.
And there's like some sort of pipe on one end.
It's a couldn't tell you what it is.
Okay, so that's what came out of this.
And the experience of making these was very weird, and I'm into it.
I'm very into it.
Because usually when I make a drawing, I have an idea of what I'm doing before I do it.
I sort of picture in my mind's eye like, oh, I want to draw a gorilla singing Weezer.
Mm-hmm, but this time I'm sort of like I'm almost like a being AI where I have like a couple of shapes and then like my unconscious just sort of Organizes it and says oh, that's a that's a submarine.
That's a that's a this that's a weird lawnmower that a man is riding in through the sky and then I complete it and So it's very unconscious, and there's a mechanical aspect to it, too.
Like, where did the picture come from?
I do not know.
It wasn't necessary for me to come up with a drawing to generate it, but I did get a drawing out of it.
Something came out of it.
And then, I have to sort of figure out, okay, what does this mean?
Like, obviously, all three of you are trying to sort out that drawing.
Like, what is that drawing?
And whether or not it has some specific meaning for you, you have some sort of relationship or understanding of that image.
And so, from my experience, producing a sigil is a bit like using your unconscious as a magic 8-ball.
You're you're placing things randomly around and then you try to make sense of it and you try to process this image and understand it.
It's like a Rorschach test.
You're just giving yourself a random constraint.
It's like a journaling practice.
It's like a drawing game.
I used to be in this art collective.
uh in Winnipeg and we would like pass books back and forth and finish each other's drawings and you didn't have control over it and you would get like some hilarious unexpected results that you you were in awe of because you didn't come up with it it was sort of a group thinking effort and this is like a solitary solo version of that where you're like inventing a drawing or coming up with something or generating an idea uh off of a prompt
Well, I think where I'm coming down on this is that it's important to pump Ben full of drugs and get him drawing sigils because these are characters and vehicles that belong in Justice Warriors.
Yes.
Yes.
I'm going to use that gorilla with the Weezer glasses.
Yeah, I like this sort of like hand soap hoverboard that Matt's flying on.
Yeah.
It's like a magic carpet slash like motorcycle, like Indian motorcycle engine with like a hand soap spout on the end of it.
So I didn't stop at these.
I actually thought that this was a really cool experience, and so I started making these all of the time.
I've been making sigils non-stop.
Some have worked!
This is where we find out that Ben has lost his mind.
Yeah, I'm down the rabbit hole.
I'm lost in the twists and turns of rabbit town.
Because you can make sense of these images, and you can relate them to your life, whether or not that makes any sense at all.
So, my wife recently had a bit of a back injury, and so she has like this pinched nerve in her back, and she's been going to see a lot of doctors and physiotherapists and stuff, and she was very worried about it.
So I was doing these sigils with my daughter, and I showed her how to make one, and so we wished that my wife's nerve would feel better.
And so my daughter generated this drawing of like, there's grids and bars, it's a giant robot walking through the forest she made.
And then, two days later, my wife goes to see a new specialist physiotherapist who really helped her, and her pinched nerve stopped hurting for the first time since her accident.
Huge improvement!
Has anyone in your life drawn a sigil lately?
Because your back is looking crazy.
And so my wife is leaving the physiotherapist's office and she looks at the exercise equipment and it has all of these robot-shaped things with bars and grids and she thinks, oh, that's what the sigil meant.
It's not that my daughter and I willed this into existence.
But there's like this weird process of cognitive bias that takes place when you make one of these things, where you see retroactively it makes sense.
When I go to the Weezer concert in October, and I look to my right, you know, as they're playing Surf Wax America, and I see a gorilla in a trench coat wearing these glasses, I'm gonna be pretty creeped out, I'm not gonna lie.
Especially when you're dissing his girl.
You're going to think of the sigil while you're there, right?
Yeah, of course.
Now this image is going to be with you, and that's a process that I find really interesting, and I'm going to elucidate on this a little bit more.
So one of the main texts of Chaos Magic is called the Book of Results, and it's a way of acknowledging that you will see results from doing this process.
Are you actually summoning things into your life?
Probably not.
Probably you're just giving yourself a little bit of cognitive dissonance by making these drawings and you're going a little nuts.
But you start to see the connections and you start to see, you start to believe that you have a little bit of control over things that are happening to you.
So now we're going to jump to Grant Morrison talking about his experience being abducted by aliens.
All right.
Another just totally Gen X thing.
It's a comic book which is kind of my attempt to explain what happened to me after being abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994.
And the only reason I was abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994 is because I went to Kathmandu in 1994 to be abducted by aliens!
And it works!
And these fuckers, they will turn up!
And what they told me was this, and they tell everyone the same bullshit, but it's in different perspectives, it's from different nervous systems, it seems to be filtered through everyone's own view of the world, but they keep telling us the same shit.
So I met these guys, I'm sitting in the roof garden of the Vajra Hotel in Kathmandu, and they arrive en masse, and they look exactly like Terence McKenna described.
Why is that?
Because I'd just read Terence McKenna a year before.
What they told me was they took me out of my body, I wasn't in my body anymore.
This doesn't normally happen with hash, this happens on DMT, or it happens on ketamine or something, right?
I'm on hash, a tiny little bit, size of a lentil.
And I start tripping, and I'm out of my body.
And these fuckers are there, and they said, where do you want to go?
The first thing I said was Alpha Centauri, which is the first thing you would say, of course.
And they took me to Alpha Centauri, and it's fucking real, it's there, there's three suns, the whole thing was moving exactly as we're told it's supposed to move astronomically.
And I'm there, and I said to them, what the hell's going on here?
As you might.
And they said, we've come to tell you this stuff so that you can put it in your work and explain it to the world.
Why do they always say that to everyone?
Why do they always tell everyone to go out and tell the world what's going on, and everyone tells us the same shit?
So these things, I met them, and what they were was like silver, like those things you get in rave videos, basically.
Silver morphing mercurial blobs of chrome that think.
And they took me to the fifth dimension.
And the fifth dimension is outside space and time, and they explained to me what time is all about.
The universe we live in is designed to grow larvae.
Believe it, don't you?
I don't have to believe it, I'm just setting the story here.
They explained to me that Beyond space and time, we have our actual selves.
These things that we're experiencing right now are sections through time.
Everyone in here is a section through time.
But in actual fact, you're not experiencing your real body.
What is your real body?
Your real body is a process that starts when you're born, and it moves forward until you die.
That is you, seen from outside, that's what you look like.
You look like a gigantic centipede, spread around all the little things that you always do, up and down through your house, up the stairs, down to the store, back, and it's a centipede.
It's us, right?
It starts as a little baby, and it comes out of your mother's womb, and it gets bigger.
And that is the process in time.
The audience just like, "Mm-hmm.
Wow." Interesting, sir.
I want to say, as somebody... I've done mushroom trips that have totally blasted me out of my mind, where I have felt that I have had actual out-of-body experiences.
I don't think that I literally did, but there's no other way to describe it.
And in the two or three days afterwards, I probably sounded like Grant Morrison.
I just came down from it eventually.
Yeah.
It's crazy to see somebody like this out there that's so successful and like one of the sort of pioneers of, you know, that time in, you know, comic book writing.
Like usually these guys are, you know, they've cornered you at a party and like you can't wait to sort of like figure out how to escape from them.
But I will say like the last part that he's talking about, I'm totally on board with that.
Like I've read books about string theory where it tries to explain what humanity looks like or what a human being looks like if you're looking at it through the fourth dimension, which is seeing all of time at once, or maybe the fifth dimension.
I can't remember which one it is.
And they do describe this process of you would look like a worm going through, you know, he says centipede.
but you would look like a worm, sort of like, you know, from the moment you're born and, you know, doing all the little things you do, me getting up, you know, recording this episode, going, you know, and downloading, you know, a free-to-play MMO afterwards, you know, and they tried to actually do it in Donnie Darko. you know, and they tried to actually do it in Yes.
If you've watched Donnie Darko, that's kind of the visual that they use.
So I'm like kind of totally with him on that last point.
Well, you know, Grant Morrison isn't anyone that you have to be cornered at a party and listen to.
Luckily, he can write and these crazy ideas get sort of filtered into comic books and you get the invisibles and all sorts of other stuff.
It's making me want to become more unhinged and drug addled.
It won't be good for my family, but possibly for the generation of superhero ideas, I think so.
Yeah, I'm definitely more unhinged after doing all of this research.
I really like it.
So the centipede thing is something I want to unpack a little bit, too, because that's going to tie into sigils.
So this idea of you over time thinking of yourself as this constant, as this nonstop human centipede is very important for another concept in magic called gnosis.
And gnosis is Greek for knowledge, and it's a central belief of the Gnostics, which is basically like, oh, there is a hidden knowledge.
There is a hidden reality to the universe.
And this hidden reality to the universe, as Grant has sort of framed it, is this idea that you're connected to everything, the cosmic perspective on your life, and that feeling you get when you try to live in this cosmic perspective.
This is really important to magic.
This is what many magicians think of as the altered state you're supposed to live in, is you're supposed to be in this state of gnosis, in this state of cosmic awareness.
And so Grant is talking about his form of cosmic awareness, which is thinking about his life as this long centipede But you can think about it, uh, you can get this feeling, this, this vibe, personally, if you just think about, let's all just think about how we're all made of stuff that was processed in a star.
All the carbon in your body was in a star one day.
The iron in your blood was in a supernova and then it exploded and it turned into gas and then it formed into a ball.
ball and then that was like in a boiling liquid that turned into a virus that turned into a bacteria and we're cousins with that bacteria and we're all cousins and we're all connected and we're all this these human centipede worms which join up at certain points and we go back in time into our mothers who go back in time if you look at it from this perspective that perspective that place and that feeling is gnosis
oh let me tell you something i I think this episode is going to have to be delivered with a lentil of hash.
One of the great innovations in the X-Men was the creation of the antagonist with the terrible name of Sublime.
Which didn't practice Santeria but was a sentient bacteria from like the primordial ooze at the beginning of the universe and it, you know, viewed mutants as like its evolutionary antagonists.
Yes, 100% Morrison. 100%.
Oddly enough, I just recently, a friend sent me a scientific research paper that is about these scientists, no slouches either, who believe that they have discovered essentially sentient clouds of plasma that live above our ozone layer that are feeding and attracted to the energy and electromagnetism given off by satellites and stuff.
So I don't know, maybe, I don't know.
Maybe it's all- Morrison's writing the news now.
Maybe it's all fucked.
Maybe we know everything.
Maybe we know so little.
Okay, so coming back to Gnosis, because I'm gonna tie all this together.
This is a Morrison thing to tie it all together.
That feeling of Gnosis, that cosmic connection.
That's what the sigil is supposed to do.
You're supposed to leave breadcrumbs through time for yourself, so that you can remember yourself, you can remember your being, you can remember how you thought about things, meanings in your life, by remembering these images.
And so the images can pull you out of time, can pull you out of the flow of your life, and show you, you already had the things that you wanted.
Or you didn't actually want that thing in the first place.
The real treasure were the sigils we got along the way.
Yeah, babe, I'm sorry.
I've just been ripped out of time.
I'm thinking about the sigil of a guy riding on a little lawnmower engine that I got on a podcast in 2024.
I remember.
I remember.
It was when Weezer was my favorite band before I decided one day that I didn't like them anymore somehow.
Jake, that would be so horrible.
My lord.
You without Weezer?
Ah, there's other bands around.
I mean, you never know what happens, but like... I'm using reverse psychology to like... I even put all my eggs in one basket, you know?
I don't know how you do it, Jake.
Like, I don't know.
After Maladroit, how can you stain them?
No, don't get him started.
Do not get him started.
I mean, you just gotta listen.
You gotta search.
You might not like any of the studio tracks on Make Believe, but if you find some kitchen tape demo of Hold Me where you can hear the pain in Rivers' voice and you're like, oh my god.
God, this is actually, like, a beautiful song that was, like, ruined for the studio.
You know, it's all about identifying with the guy.
If you love the guy, then you understand, like, where the magic is, you know?
You understand where the magic is.
We have to move on.
You said that with such panic in your voice like I haven't heard in quite some time.
Yeah, I know where this is going.
Yes, so Chaos Magic, as I have learned, is about giving yourself sort of a personal form of schizophrenia, where you are creating specific images of meaning for yourself through time to feel connected.
Once again, let's come back to what magic is.
Magic is participating with the divine to effect change in your life.
So you generate these little divine images and they tell you who you are over time by being able to come back to them and giving you a perspective On yourself.
Because, at the end of the day, that's what we're doing anyways.
Like, we live in a world which is incredibly schizophrenic.
I draw all day, and then someone gives me a voucher for groceries.
How are these things connected in any way, shape, or form?
You make up a story about how one thing causes the other.
Sigilization is just the creation of your own.
And it's also, magic is also the celebration that everyone has this part of their brain for baking.
Everyone can bake their own meaning in their lives.
Magic has a tradition of being practiced by those who don't have control over their lives.
It's a search for control and a search for meaning in the face of the prescriptions and repression of modern life.
Here's a great synopsis by Arthur Jones and Giorgio Agnellini, who made the film Feels Good Man, the Pepe the Frog documentary.
Yeah, buddies of ours.
Yes, big fans.
Magic is about sort of people, you say it better than I always.
Well, I mean, he's sort of quoting this, um, this occultist named Dion Fortune.
Right.
And he's sort of an acolyte of hers.
Um, but yeah, they sort of talk about, obviously it's sort of all the trappings of magic that seems a little bit like hocus pocus, but this other thing they're talking about is much more serious.
And that's the idea that magic has always been the politics of the unheard.
That if you are, magic proliferates and sort of happens within communities where they don't feel like they have any agency in the world that they live in.
So it happened in like feudal situations, it happened among slave cultures where people didn't feel like they had agency in their own reality.
And so they would kind of create ceremonial ways of like art and willpower trying to affect their reality in a positive way and also give them hope.
And so now, we'll follow that up with a last clip from Morrison.
I'm just a product of my environment.
Yeah, but as a reaction to your environment, you've done alright.
No, but my environment was great, yeah.
My mum and dad were activists, and they were... My mother didn't have me till I was 30, my dad was 35, so they were already smart, but they were just poor, working-class people.
They were activists against, you know, nuclear proliferation.
So I was taking on marches.
My dad actually broke into bases and did all this stuff.
So you can see a lot of that in my work and The Invisibles and this obsession with underground places and conspiracies and the fact that, you know, the ruling elites have it all over us.
Because my dad, you know, he could see all these things.
He could photograph the interior.
We saw coffins stacked up with everyone's names on them.
Wow.
For the nuclear war.
It haunted my dreams.
And I know it haunted the dreams of an entire generation of people.
Yeah.
But it was very much there.
But my parents were against it and fighting it.
And they were not winning, you know.
My dad was a hero.
He'd been a soldier in the war.
But he was a radical, working-class activist.
My mother was an intelligent woman who didn't get to college, who just became the wife of a radical, working-class activist.
So, they had all this thing going on that I grew up with, but I could see that they were failing to fight this monster.
And for me, it was like, I found a Superman comic.
Superman's taking the bomb on his chest.
The atom bomb's like...
Yeah, it tickles.
And imaginatively, that was the salvation.
It was like, OK, beyond the bomb, the thing that my mother and father are so scared of, the A-bomb, the fucking end of the world, Superman just laughs at that.
And the Hulk only begins his story when that occurs, you know?
And suddenly it's all in the mutants come from that.
And the comics, honestly, imaginatively, give me a space to escape that existential post-war horror.
And so now we tie it all together.
The sigil, this personal image that you create, can be an image of salvation from all of your worries.
It can give you control over your life.
It can give you a reprieve from the apocalypse.
Breaking into an underground massive bunker full of children can become a symbol for taking back your own life.
The symbols you have lying around are the ones you use to understand the world.
Magic is the process of us making and manipulating symbols in an attempt to control the world around us.
Schizophrenia might be the only way we can find a new idea to break out of our ruts in our lives.
You've got gun violence, climate change, apartheid, war, disease, the breakdown of our quality of life, rapid technological transformation.
Of course people are going to turn to schizophrenic magical baking.
Turn to magic itself, magic with a K, to try to effect change in their lives in the face of repression.
That's right.
Q is magic.
Q is magic.
You heard it here first.
After doing this, I firmly believe Q is magic.
I think instead of sending checks to people like Trump bucks during the pandemic, I think they should just send everyone a sigil, pay Ben to do it, and everyone just impose meaning on their lives and benefit that way.
Yeah, that's right.
That would be a form of government that I think you guys would put in a comic.
Well, we kind of did in a way where the first volume of Justice Warriors is about a cyberpunk zodiac gang that tries to take over society.
So they're not exactly into magic, but they're into astrology, which is very similar.
And they're kind of like if Maoists got astrology pilled.
Yeah, I like the idea of a symbol standing in... A symbol gives you power.
Do you think that's what Prince was doing with his symbol thing?
100%.
I'm fully magic-pilled on all of this stuff now.
They're all doing sigils.
The McDonald's symbol is a sigil.
After I got into this stuff, I was listening to songs with my kids.
They wanted to listen to Taylor Swift, and I was like, Taylor Swift is a powerful magician.
She is a sorceress.
She is summoning sigils, which affect people's minds.
Well, you and the QAnon people agree then, yeah?
Yeah!
No, I'm like fully QPilled at this point.
That's why I say that Morrison is like a baker for good.
He's baking things just for himself all the time.
And I think that there's something in our society which, like, not to...
editorialize on this a little bit too much.
We don't have gnosis in our lives.
Like, we don't- we're never encouraged to have this, like, cosmic- there's no place for us to be Keanu Reeves' woe anymore.
And I think that that's something that is necessary to all cults, is to give them, like, a cosmic connection, place them within their world, connect them to their own bodies, connect them to feeling, connect them to a system of meaning.
And I think that magic can be a powerful tool for people to create meaning in their own lives and create agency in their own lives.
Heck, I've been using it and I find it very helpful for my anxieties.
That's the funny thing is, I am somebody that is prone to believe in magic, and I have to go the other way.
I have to convince myself that it has nothing to do with magic, there's nothing supernatural at play, because then I will ascribe anything that happens in the future to either good magic or bad magic, or am I trapped in the good timeline or the bad timeline?
And it's really interesting.
My brain has to turn away from that stuff, even though that's kind of what my default setting is.
Yeah, I think there's something to be said about how conspiracy theories are essentially folktales that attempt to re-enchant the world.
And at the same time, my criticism of discordianism that I had in the episode we did on it is that this ends up in a form of extreme individualism.
Yes.
Where there is a total rejection of common reality, and that can be pretty bad.
That can spin off into dangerous things.
I also suspect a lot of this has to do with guys wanting to get laid, and if you took that out of the equation, it would make a lot less sense to their lives.
But we're all happy that Benjamin's getting laid.
His wife's back's better.
Yeah.
This point about the rampant individualism actually leads well into our next segment, because something that Grant Morrison is really into is the collective unconscious, how these shared images and shared cultural ideas that actually can create gnosis, because you have how these shared images and shared cultural ideas that actually can create gnosis, because you have to feel You have to accept that other people are going to understand it, or even your own personal system of meaning.
It's not a private system of meaning.
Deleuze calls this group fantasy.
You get it from somewhere.
You get it from the culture.
You get it from your parents.
You get these images from images that are lying around.
And one thing that really are lying around are comic books.
So Matt, how are Grant Morrison's comics?
Well, I love him.
I've been a longtime Grant Morrison fan, and I reread the entire Batman run for this pod, which is like, you know, seven years worth of comics, thousands of pages.
Damn.
And I was just going to take you through The Batman run focusing on occult aspects and sort of the kooky threads that Morrison connects Batman to, these bigger ideas in our culture.
Because Morrison believes that, in a nutshell, that superheroes are modern mythology.
That was a big part of their book Supergods.
And who's to say that's not true?
So, in 2007, Grant Morrison began a Batman run that would span seven years and come to be regarded as one of the best all-time takes on the character.
It's classic Morrison in that it's high concept, heavy on lore, disjointed ideas that become a little hard to parse if you could even imagine from the audio clips of Morrison earlier, and it's It's great fun and genuinely good comics.
I think that this Batman run is really as good as cape comics get, and it's helped along by god-tier artists like Andy Kubert, Frank Quietly, Frasier Irving, and Chris Burnham, among many others.
It famously introduces Damian Wayne, Bruce's shit-kicking son, conceived with the international terrorist Talia al Ghul, who was then grown in a vat by the League of Shadows, unbeknownst to Bruce because women's reproductive health is her own business.
And Damien's purpose in life, naturally, is to inherit the Earth as the demon's head.
Okay.
But instead of doing this, Damien, seeing Batman's model positive masculinity, becomes the next Robin and a hero to which he remains to this day in the comics.
And they even have a Batman and Robin movie coming out, I think, with Damien as the Robin.
So, the Batman run begins with Batman emerging from something called the Thogol ritual, a form of extended meditation where one simulates death and the afterlife.
This is apparently based off something called the Togol meditation in Buddhism.
So Grant threw an extra H in to make it hit different when they were up in the mountains getting abducted by aliens.
So deep into Togol, Batman purges the dark elements of his psyche to purify himself and become a better Batman.
And this is over the run.
Batman kind of iterates on himself and becomes a better Batman.
But the idea with this, I think, starting out is that Grant Morrison is taking over after like 25 years of kind of dark and gritty Batman.
You know, the second Robin is beaten to death with a crowbar.
Batman's back's broken.
The city's destroyed by an earthquake.
Batman's earned a reputation as this brooding figure and Morrison wants to bring him back into the light to create an uber bat that will emerge from convoluted comic book canon itself.
So the run is notable in that it largely ignores Batman's famous rogues gallery and instead pits him against an adversary named Dr. Hurt and his three replacement Batmen and his mysterious criminal organization called the Black Glove.
Now, Dr. Hurt, you may not believe this based on his name alone, but he's a very bad man with dark ties to Bruce Wayne's past.
And this is when you get into Morrison's... Morrison loves to go into Silver Age comics, find something.
Oh, he likes to grab an image from the past?
Yes, yes, and pull it centipede-like forward.
So, in this case, a 1963 Batman comic with a story called Robin Dies at Dawn, where Batman volunteers to participate in a special military experiment to test the long-term effects of isolation on the human psyche.
Why not?
Yeah.
And I think that's just his actual setup for like a silly adventure where he's away and then he has to come back and save Batman.
But what Morrison does is retroactively say that this moment is when Dr. Hurt launched a sinister plot to MK Ultra Batman and break down his psychology to study history's best trauma-based warrior for the federal government.
He would then implant a secret phrase, a trigger phrase, in his mind in order to disable him when the time came, which Morrison does a little bit later in the run.
And at various points it is suggested that Dr. Hurt is an immortal relative of Bruce Wayne's, possibly his father, and or in fact Satan.
Yeah, you following along?
Yeah, no limits.
Dr. Hurt describes himself as, quote, the hole in things, the enemy, the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning.
And that's kind of a motif throughout the entire series, the holes, puzzles Batman is always trying to solve, the hole in himself, the trauma at his center that he filled with Batman.
And over the years, this idea of like Batman always winning has become more and more of a character defining trait.
Batman, because he's a human in a world of superheroes, so the way he can kind of hang on their level is that he's so smart, so prepared, so determined that he can basically never lose.
And so Morrison and Mark Waid kind of really drilled down on that in the 90s in the JLA, and then in this run Morrison solidifies that idea by giving Batman his first indomitable foe, the Devil.
Tell me something, my friend.
You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?
Well, to quote Batman, if you want to get nuts, let's get nuts.
The one thing Dr. Hurt didn't plan for, despite being Satan himself, or Batman's father, or both, is Batman having already thought of this and creating his own Manchurian backup personality that could take over and drive his body in case he is psychologically compromised, as Dr. Hurt does with the trigger phrase that he implanted in him long ago.
You know, and then in classic villain form, Satan form, he doesn't just kill him.
He pumps him full of drugs, he's an amnesiac, and leaves him on the street in a pile of garbage.
You know, mistake number one, right?
Thus, we find ourselves witnessing this absurd spectacle of the Batman of Zurinar, which is this alternate personality, a more aggressive Batman that wears a colorful red, yellow, and purple bat, you know, cowl and cape, carries a baseball bat, has a...
radio that doesn't work that he talks into and is followed around by a hallucinatory bat mite cartoon that narrates his thoughts all in his head.
Okay.
Wow.
Yeah.
I definitely have not read this run of Batman.
This sounds way more interesting.
This is, this is baseball Batman.
This is psycho Batman.
If they did a, um, like an into the spider verse version of Batman, like this would be one of the personalities that would show up voiced by like, I don't know, Kevin Hart or somebody.
So this is how Batman thinks, right?
What if I'm psychologically compromised and can't mentally function?
I need a backup dissociative identity disorder that can kick into high gear and come out and play superhero.
Of course.
So that's what happened to Ben Affleck.
Yeah.
It's triggered by a divorce filing.
He gets a back tattoo and a pack of cigarettes and turns into the bat fleck of Zeranar.
Yeah, he starts ordering Jack in the Box.
Dropping his Dunkin' Donuts everywhere.
Starts really baking.
So Morrison takes these...
Like, all these concepts involving Batman to, like, the outermost extremes in this series.
Having him escape from absurd death traps.
Dr. Hurt buries him alive.
You know, again, it's just kind of a Silver Age Batman death trap type thing.
So he buries him alive, but of course, Batman can't beat him.
He's already planned for that.
He's already buried himself alive before on purpose to learn how to escape from it.
He's done the Thogol ritual, he's MK ultra-pilled, and he has his mind backed up with another personality.
that has a cartoon Batman in it that talks to him.
So you can't beat him because he has already come up with 10 responses to your attack before you've even developed your plan.
He has a plan to his backup plans.
That's Batman.
Backup plan to the backup plan to back up my backup plan.
And one, and two, now you know what to do.
Motherfucker, let's go.
That's Batman.
Well.
One of the Batmans.
So continuing with the Satan theme, Morrison's run happened to take place during Batman number 666, right?
It's been running for decades.
And how do you not do something fun for Batman 666?
So what happens is the story cuts to the future, a dark future, where Damian Wayne, who's like 10 years old in the comics, is now a brutal Batman in charge of Gotham.
He sits at his back computer and the news reports record highs, poor air quality, and a pandemic from China killing 18 million people that's now easing up and quarantine restrictions are being loosened.
So it effectively takes place in 2020.
But Damien is not posting black squares on Instagram.
He is taking real action to secure the safety of Gotham, selling his soul to Satan in exchange for the safety of the city.
Be him up.
Be Elizabeth.
Asmodeus.
Saddamas.
Lucifer.
We are doing some special things to the audience today.
Yeah, you're all cursed now, by the way.
Sorry, guys.
Yeah, Damien, you know, the naming conventions in this series are not too subtle with Damien and Dr. Hurt.
So Damien deduces what many of us thought was happening in 2020, that the Armageddon is upon us and the Antichrist Batman has returned and is killing the local crime bosses.
Now, a lot of this is just not explained as, you know, Morrison writes books that just kind of move at like a hundred miles an hour and things are kind of filled in later or not.
So you don't really know what's happening because this is just a huge jump forward.
But the Bat Computer creates a map of where all the crime bosses are being killed.
And wouldn't you know, it creates an inverted pentagram at its center.
Hotel Bethlehem.
Now, it doesn't take the world's smartest detective to deduce that that is probably where the Antichrist Batman is and wants a showdown.
So, he goes there, and like his father, he's prepared for everything.
So much so that he's rigged the entire city of Gotham with explosives in his spare time so that he can detonate bombs under any enemy that's standing anywhere.
The entire city is rigged for a 9-11 style pancake collapse, if need be.
But not today, because Damien shakes off bullets by the police who arrive, presumably from some power that he's been granted in his satanic bargain, and utters the badass line, the apocalypse is cancelled until I say so.
I love how this is completely nonsensical and unable to be understood.
It's completely inscrutable.
But once you know something about Grant Morrison, it's like, oh, of course.
Yes, of course, he's going to cancel the apocalypse with a superhero through a secret conspiracy to set bombs in every skyscraper.
Yes.
Yeah, well, this is why Morrison is perfect to write superhero comics, because every kind of off the wall idea you have can sort of pass.
Yeah.
You know, you don't have to apply the same levels of logic and rigor that you would in a movie, say, where you can't just have a character say, Oh, well, I've actually rigged the entire city with explosives.
I've taken, you know, 14 years to do it and i can just blow you up right where you're standing you can just have a person say that in the comic and just say okay oh yeah whatever i mean i've heard morrison interviews i get it that's like how my three-year-old plays yeah so what morrison is starting to do with this issue is hammer on the idea that there's always a batman and that not only that he always wins and can't be beaten and has thought of everything but that he's bigger than a man he's an idea and he's even bigger than an idea
he's like a god-like concept that by existing by creating batman bruce wayne sort of transcends superhero-dom and humanity and becomes something of a god uh He solidified this idea even further by giving Batman his second big foe in the series, time itself.
Oh, here we go.
Yes, there's a lot of time travel, a delightfully absurd amount.
This has to do with an event called Final Crisis, and explaining it all would sound even more insane than all the stuff I'm already saying.
So just briefly, the villain, Darkseid, shoots Batman with these, like, Omega rays, the Omega Sanction, and that kills Batman.
But, you know, it was initially on the last page.
It seems like he's dead.
But of course, it's comic books.
So what happened is he basically shot Batman with a time bullet, and it propelled him back into time to the caveman era, where he's faced with some unfriendlies from a local clan.
So he, of course, kills a gigantic prehistoric bat, skins it, and wears its skin and head as a cape and cow to become Cave Batman.
Sick.
It impresses the Neanderthals so much that they create a bat-worshipping religion.
I mean, what would you do if you'd never seen anything like this before?
Oh, I'm Orthodox Batman.
So the premise of this part is sort of that he's in an odyssey through time, and he goes through the caveman era, the colonial era, where he battles a sort of Lovecraftian being and helps a distant relative who is thought to be a witch.
He ends up fighting Blackbeard the pirate, who is looking for some buried treasure, which happens to be buried by the ancient bat people from the religion he started before he goes on to be a bat cowboy in the West.
and eventually reaches the present to fight Dr. Hurt.
Wait, so he's not aging during all of this?
No, no.
He's just hanging out in time.
He doesn't have his memories for the longest time, but he is sort of drawn to Bat imagery.
So what's happening is that he is traveling through time and he's remembering Batman himself.
He's planting clues for himself.
He's realizing, he's self-actualizing and creating the Bat myth through time that then grows.
And, you know, he's seeding Batman early in history and creating a Bat religion, which is all around him.
He's slowly building the Batman IP over time.
Yes.
He's increasing the market share of Warner Brothers and DC Comics.
Yeah.
But so he so essentially, if Hurt had never, you know, sent him back through time, he maybe never would have become Batman because it took this time travel to cultivate all of the sigils, I guess, that would lead him to become Batman in the present.
You know, it's kind of like that.
I am my own grandfather type thing.
Yes.
Well, one thing Morrison talks about is sort of like the Earl Burrows and how everything's cyclical.
So like, Dr. Hurt is part of a, it's sort of, you know, who he is, is half revealed.
Basically, they say he's not satan literally and he's not batman's father but he is a guy named thomas wayne who is an ancient relative like a couple hundred years old who survived through cult magic obviously to lengthen his life cult magic yes well he wants to summon the bat demon barbados so we're now full circle is bruce wayne the bat demon barbados unclear okay yeah i mean i don't i don't think that barbados uh exists he he's
He believes that it does.
Dr. Hurt believes that it does.
My thesis of, like, schizophrenia is really holding on strong with all of this.
Yeah, I would say that it reads better because it takes place over the course of seven years, and I'm Giving you like the high points.
I'm giving you the craziest high concept stuff It is fun reading like Batman's adventures through time and stuff.
Does it make sense?
I mean that's It sort of depends on the reader like Morrison intentionally fills a lot of clue puts a lot of clues and threads in here like all of them aren't don't necessarily make sense, but it's like a proactive reading experience for for fans, where you sort of become pilled and start to bake.
And you're trying to figure out, oh, did he start Batman by going back in time and creating the caveman Batman religion?
And so Dr. Hurt's wrapped up, but basically the Joker kills him because, you know, he needs to take his spot back as Batman's primary antagonist.
That's interesting.
I always love when they have well-established superheroes mashing up with other fictional characters that you wouldn't normally have.
I know that there was a Superman versus the Xenomorphs from Aliens run, but I feel like Batman has also fought the Xenomorphs as well, and now Blackbeard as I'm learning.
Batman's fought the Predator on multiple occasions.
Yeah, okay.
And, you know, if you were, you know, if you were a Predator, you would probably want to take on Batman.
I mean, if you were... Yeah, that's the ultimate.
That's the ultimate prey.
Yeah, I mean, it may be a bad decision, actually.
Maybe not smart on your part because you're not coming back with a trophy.
Yeah.
Explaining this to me in depth like this, to the detail, really makes me want to bully you for being some sort of nerd.
At least you're honest.
I'm like, Oh, okay.
He's also saying, okay, get in the locker.
I didn't write it.
Makes a whole lot of sense when you read it.
Yeah, I have a theory that Grant Morrison is actually legitimately a paranoid schizophrenic.
That he processes his delusions.
If he's not a drug addict, I think he's a paranoid schizophrenic.
And he actually has mass delusions and actual hysterical events.
And he just makes that the plots of the comic books.
Yeah.
Wildly popular.
Yeah, I'm glad that they have an outlet for this stuff.
When you hear Morrison talk about being abducted by aliens and shit, I'm like, I don't know what to make of that.
You're either delusional or lying.
I have a question for you guys.
How does a guy like Grant Morrison get picked to do these Batman runs?
Because it's an IP that's owned by DC, I guess.
Does a writer come in with a pitch to DC and they go, hey, we really like this, or do they seek Him out, they go, hey, we really like The Invisibles.
Would you be interested in doing a run on Batman?
What's your take?
What's your angle?
How would that come about?
Because he strikes me as the type of guy that does not interview well.
He got sniped from Britain.
So there was this British invasion of comics led by Alan Moore in the 80s.
And so he came over from Glasgow and was brought over by DC and they brought him under that wing.
They gave him a really small Batman book at some point that was not a priority, but then it became probably one of the best-selling Batman books of all time because it came out at the exact same time as the Tim Burton movie.
And this is actually when Grant Morrison sort of turns into a crazy person as well, because he basically made in our money today, overnight, $250,000 in royalties.
And so he instantly just starts doing drugs.
He tells stories about him like literally experimenting with alcohol where he would pour himself like a pint of champagne and be like, what will this do to me?
Hmm.
Doesn't sound like a disciplined magician to me.
Yeah.
Sounds like a guy who got a lot of money all of a sudden.
Yeah, and so that's basically the point when that's right before his alien abduction occurred.
He was traveling rich like no 32 year old ever is, unless you're into crypto, and just like experimenting with all sorts of substances.
And I think that something like busted up in him in that point.
But to answer your question a little bit more, like this starts in 2007.
It's sort of late career Morrison.
I mean, by then they're like one of the biggest writers in comics for like a decade or two plus.
So, you know, you start out smaller doing Animal Man in I think the late 80s or 90s.
That was a good run.
And like Alan Moore, like they both brought something new at the time.
They have this like, well, they have their magic gimmick.
Yeah.
They're also very, you know, literary and they're bringing all these literary influences in addition to their crazy ideas.
You know, Alan Moore is sort of bringing anarchy politics in and Grant Moore is bringing like, you know, fifth dimensional aliens pulling you through time as a human centipede.
So yeah, and then they're selling like crazy.
Back in a day when comics used to sell a lot more, their careers came up in an era I'm certainly jealous of.
So then when it comes to like, you got to sell Batman books, you know, you get one of the... I don't know if Morrison pitched it or someone came to him, but it's like the best idea they ever had was putting this nut on Batman and letting him run wild.
Yeah, he feels a bit like when they need to shake things up, like, get Morrison on it.
We need a Colonel of Hash and Morrison.
Yeah, it's like they went out and hired the Joker to write Batman.
In a twist of fate.
But no, it's cool.
It's like, you can tell that these guys are sort of like counterculture, like within the comic world.
And they are exploding out of the sort of good versus evil, you know, sort of just like law enforcement and detective sort of vibes that Batman, I guess, is kind of built on.
And they're making him more psychedelic, which is cool because Batman is such a, he's a guy who's trying to hold it so fucking tightly together all the time i mean this is a guy who has just been like completely traumatized you know watching his parents get murdered in front of him he's so buttoned up he's so anti he doesn't show emotion he's not very funny he doesn't have a sense of humor so like to see him yeah like kind of spinning out of control through time and space is a really interesting approach to a
you know a character that everybody has sort of come to know as as being one way right yeah well bruce wayne's a party boy but yes i do want to i want to hear this unified theory of the batman Yes.
Yes.
So this is what I think Morrison was doing.
And even Jake, it could be as if the Joker wrote it, really, because the Joker truly understands Bruce Wayne more than anyone, maybe even himself, one might say.
But I think if you watched a lot of the movies, like Michael Keaton hanging upside down, sleeping like a bat, the stuff they've done in the comics, breaking his back and whatnot, they kept going with this stuff that he's like a dark weirdo and traumatized.
And I think Morrison wanted to sort of change that and actually has a very earnest, positive take on Batman that I kind of like, but I might get put in a locker for saying this.
Yeah, no, that's it.
I'm ready.
He's violent, folks.
This is like this is all right.
This is as earnest as I'm going to get about superheroes ever, hopefully.
So Batman is the idea that rose out of this kid's grief and trauma.
And he filled the hole that Morrison writes about all the time with Batman.
So he would train, he would seek out every fighting technique on planet Earth, every meditation practice, he would sign up for government isolation experiments to see what happens when you spend ten days by yourself with your thoughts, and he got pretty carried away in the process, I think we can all admit.
It's an idea that evil can be conquered through sheer will and dedication without any superpowers attached to them.
And that you can avoid the, uh, the bad day scenario, which I think is a big dynamic in Batman is the bad day, like one bad day, the Joker, Two-Face, a lot of the villains, Mr. Freeze, they have also had these past traumas and they were transformed by it.
They can't let go.
And Batman said, you know, he's going to handle it differently.
If not be a normal person, then he's going to at least deal with it and process it in a way that feels cool and looks productive.
So you're a caveman skinning a giant bat for an outfit, but you're kind of doing it for mindset reasons, and you're modeling strength, and you inspire others.
So you've thought it through, and you're creating a bat religion.
You're creating a sigil, essentially, that lasts Beyond you, beyond your death, it exists before your birth, it exists prehistory now.
You're a central pillar of society and you're like a moral teacher like Jesus.
I mean, I honestly think that's what Morrison believes Batman is.
And I think that's what the purposes of superhero stories basically are, right?
It's these moral tales of how to behave and how to act and how to improve the world.
Yeah, and all the villains are like shadow versions of the superhero.
And what you need is you need your magic sigils.
You need to be disciplined with your magical practice to ensure that you don't become a villain.
So like, Morrison took it to the utmost extreme, which is pitting Batman against the forces of time itself, against history and Satan.
and showing that batman is always there a character and an idea stronger than even time itself that it was planted in the past by bruce wayne that he is an undefeatable trauma-powered hero whose real superpower i would posit is psychological resiliency he has faced his demons he's He's seen his parents die, he's seen Robins be killed in front of him, and he's come out of the other side, uh, stronger.
He's not wallowing in self-pity, he's skinning giant bats and showing cavemen how to live their lives properly.
He stoggled his soul, zurinard his brain, and beat the devil.
Yeah, he is a proper psychopath.
I mean, really.
Which is why the Joker understands him the best.
It's because they're both psychos on two sides of the aisle.
We see this in political influencers all the time.
He's an influencer for sure.
He's a psycho, clearly.
Yeah.
Not normal.
But he's decided to channel it, much like Morrison, in a positive, societal way.
He's contained it.
He's figured out how to... It's not normal, obviously, to dress as a giant bat, but he's not making any excuses for that.
He's just saying, this is what I do to deal with my shit.
What is your plan?
It's not hurting anyone.
Just let me do my sigils.
He doesn't kill.
Let me do my thing.
Yeah, that's another interesting thing.
He never he doesn't kill.
That's that's what separates him from, you know, the other sort of Gotham psychopaths.
Yes.
I mean, that's the whole thing with like, that's why I said this is the earnest take on superheroes, which is, you know, they've been subverted and everything because it's hard to posit over and over and over that Superman and Batman can always do the right thing.
Never kill people.
Always do the right thing and save the day.
But that's what these are.
I mean, they started out as morality stories for children and adventure stories where the good guy is supposed to always win.
And then I think that like, what people like Morrison try to do is say like, okay, these are now like mythological figures who are modern, they're IP, but they're also, we don't have religion anymore.
We don't have, barely have politics.
So you have to like read Batman and be like, I should be a good person.
Yeah.
If I had millions and millions of dollars.
Yes.
Yeah.
Thank you so much, you guys, for bringing some unusual and magical fare to the podcast.
I feel like this is a real brain... What's that thing you say, Jake?
A brain... A brain boiler?
A brain breaker.
Brain boiler.
Brain bubbler.
Brain boiler.
Brain bubbler.
I had my brain bubbled by this process, personally.
The listener was just a frog in a pot of water, heating up through the whole pod.
By the end, I'm talking about why Batman is good, and they don't even know how they got here.
Yeah, they find themselves in their study, you know, on the bus, in their car, with the decapitated head of a prehistoric bat.
They're wearing it as a hat.
They don't know why.
Kind of a Batman.
I mean, he is kind of a Batman.
He chopped the whale's head off.
I think if the sigil stuff teaches us anything, it's that you kind of got to roll with that.
Like, people could become inspired by your example.
The bat could become... What's the next Batman?
It could be the Weezer drawing that you have, Jake.
I don't know.
You guys, you guys are the comic book artists and writers.
I think it's kind of up to you.
I'd love to help if you want.
Hey, I just, yeah, I could sit in with you.
I could pitch a couple ideas, you know, if you wanted.
I mean, that would be, that would be really long.
I can see Jake being rocketed back through time and drawing the Weezer winged W on the wall of a cave.
Definitely.
Teaching cavemen about Rivers Cuomo and what he's gone through.
What's with these cavemen dissing my rock?
Well, where can people follow you?
Obviously we'll have a link to the graphic novel and I guess we'll also link to your social media outlets.
Is there anything else you boys wanted to plug?
Matt has a wonderful new comic coming out from Ahoy Comics.
Tell them all about the reboot of the Toxic Avenger, Matt.
Yeah, thanks.
I'm writing a new Toxic Avenger comic which drops in stores October 9th.
And it's all about how the Toxic Avenger travels through time to become...
It's actually, I'll give you the pitch real quick.
I'm rebooting the Toxic Avenger and it's actually, there's a toxic train spill in a town and it's put under quarantine.
Kind of based off of what happened in East Palestine, Ohio, except it's a lot more gory, violent, there's mutated teens, there's a lot of satire.
I mean, you know, it's similar vein to Justice Warriors.
Fuck yeah.
I love Toxic Avenger.
I had the toys when I was growing up.
They did a weird, like, children's cartoon run of that comic for some odd reason.
Well, basically, I haven't made a secret about it.
What I'm doing is sort of rebooting the Toxic Crusaders.
So, like, by the end of this first series we're doing, it'll be pretty clear that the next one is the Toxic Crusaders.
Like, I'm sort of taking the Toxic Crusaders, merging them with some elements from the movies, and then updating the whole thing.
I might do a trading card.
Very cool.
Yeah.
Go check that out, folks.
Pick up Justice Warriors Vote Harder.
And yeah, thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You know where to find us, patreon.com slash QAA, where you can subscribe for five bucks a month and get a second episode for every main.
And yeah, also access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
For everything else, we've got a website, qaapodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. - Please.
And how was Austria, Master Bruce?
I noticed you failed to bring me back a present.
I wish I knew a little more about sacred geometry.
My reading on the subject has been woefully inadequate.
Remind me to order some books, Alfred.
I was rather hoping for a smart pair of lederhosen.
I read somewhere that the term Gothic might possibly be derived from the word Goetic.
Goes in the Greek meaning magical.
I'm beginning to believe that.
These are the architectural plans I discovered in the drowned monastery of Lake Dess.
Now watch while I superimpose the plans of Gotham Cathedral.
See?
An almost perfect match.
A man with Dreams, ghost-murdered children, and occult architecture.
How does it all connect?
One shudders to think.
Apparently, Gothic architecture was based on a kind of arch called the ogive.
The idea was that all the stresses and forces of the building were directed upwards.
The cathedral became a transmitter aimed towards God.
Cathedrals were also designed to have certain acoustic properties.
One more thing.
Like musical instruments on a grand scale, the whole effect was to produce a vast crucible in which a kind of spiritual alchemy could take place.
Does any of this help explain your dreams, Master Bruce?
If architecture could be used to focus and direct spiritual power, then could it also be used for evil?
And if so, What kind of evil are we talking about?
What's going to happen in Gotham Cathedral on May Day?
