While looking through stuff about comics author Grant Morrison the other day, I came across a term which he is said to have coined: “hypersigil“.

A hypersigil is an artwork (record album, novel, building, etc.) created with the intent to alter oneself and/or the reality around oneself; a meme-complex created with magical intent. The term was coined by Grant Morrison to describe his purpose in writing the comic book series The Invisibles.

Also check out their definition of sigil, if you don’t know. Anyway, the idea itself is a good one I think, although I could take or leave the magic(k)al connotations.

In a way, this whole website basically adheres to the definition laid out above. It’s been sort of a creative playground which let me tool around psychologically, and kind of mold myself in a bold new direction. I have a couple old articles where I kind of deal with that (here, and here).

The whole concept of the hypersigil sounds a lot like a “hip” “technoccult” kind of re-packaging of Jung’s classic ideas about “active imagination“. Except Jung’s definition of that had more to do with like opening yourself to the subconscious contents, and allowing whatever they are to come forth and be expressed uncritically, and that in so doing, you would be changed in marvelous important ways. In fact, Jung talks about how active imagination is best done by people who are like lop-sided mentally, in that they rely too much on their consciousness, and filter everything through it. The idea of a hypersigil seems to go against that, because it sounds like you’re trying to catch non-rational (ie, magic) contents into a big net of willpower and intention set up by the conscious mind (albeit in a creative setting anyway).

Anyway, yeah I think it’s a sort of interesting topic and definitely touches back on that whole mystic vs. magic thing that I posted a couple days ago. Oh, I almost forgot the one other thing this whole idea reminds me of: transubstantiation, or as I like to call it, Fake it till you make it. Like this whole idea of when you pretend to be something for long enough, you eventually become that, whether you really meant to or not. Kurt Vonnegut has a pretty decent short novel based around that idea, Mother Night. I guess it’s the whole “Careful what you wish for…” saying too, now that I think of it.