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Friday, October 30, 2020

Prop Anon talks to Grant Morrison about 'Illuminatus' (and other RAW topics)

Grant Morrison (Creative Commons photo)

Prop Anon interviews Grant Morrison for Mondo 2000, so you likely will want to read the whole thing, but I will highlight a Q and A about the planned Illuminatus! TV series (if anyone has an update on it, please advise): 

In December 2019, Deadline announced that your partner on Happy! Brian Taylor was going to be the showrunner for Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’ Illuminatus! as a TV show.

There seem to all these great stories of my youth now being made into television shows.

GRANT MORRISON: I think there’s a bunch of challenging stuff coming out and these shows add to that. I think people are looking for new myths to help us make sense of the curious times we’re in. I think you need those kinds of stories and works that are coming at our problems from all angles. Think of the opening of Illuminatus! and it’s though the eyes of a squirrel and through George Dorn and a bunch of other characters. There’s a multi-prismatic viewpoint of the world. And I think the minute they can start capturing that sort of thing in TV, showing it through the eyes of all kinds of different characters with different viewpoints and different world view and reality tunnels, it will be pretty interesting.

It’s the fractalization of the media — that’s what made it all possible. There was a time you just couldn’t get away with any of this. I remember a time I was pitching Doom Patrol to Warner’s and their response was that this is ‘wackadoodle’ and now it’s one of their best and most successful shows. And it’s totally based off the stuff that me and Richard Case did with that comic 30 years ago. Stuff people told me would never be adapted, could never be adapted. I think that the success of things like Doom Patrol, or Umbrella Academy or The Boys shows the way that people’s imaginations have been expanded by more fantastic or quirky shows, opening the doors to wilder and more personal stuff.

[There is more discussion about RAW at the above link -- The Management.]


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link, awesome interview. Love Grant!
D.M.S.

Anonymous said...

Iain Spence:

Morrison on regular form here as he attempts to ride 10 horses at high speed. Hence the needless conflation of Islamic terrorism with punk rock. Punk was, along with other atavistic youth trends, born out of those parts of global culture most advanced in terms of late atheism, rationalism and materialism. Pop culture, along with ‘every rock star reformer’ is as far removed from jihadi monotheism as you can get.
Likewise there’s a world of difference between the tearing down of statues (as symbols of racism) and the tearing down of buildings on 9/11. To lump both together with ‘magic’ and the god of Horus is I think, remarkably naive.

The idea of mapping out humanity through the stages of the matrifocal (paleolithic baby), patriarchal (infant) and atheistic (child), is a fascinating subject, but if Crowley's map is as confused as Morrison’s, I’ll gladly stick to alternative guides by the likes of Erich Neumann. By comparison Morrison seems to me to be incapable of focused, balanced inquiry.

Oz Fritz said...

Morrison's rendering of Crowley's map appears substantially wrong. For instance, he characterizes Horus as a male deity, true perhaps in traditional Egyptian mythology. In Crowley's cosmology, Horus becomes an androgynous character, a twin god with a male component, Ra Hoor Khuit, and a female one, Hoor Pa Kraat. Horus also seems much more than a deconstructionalist. I consider The Song Remains the Same , the song by Led Zeppelin a good description of Horus.

Anonymous said...

Iain Spence:

I think there’s been quite a few people who’ve played with the idea of mapping out humanity via a recapitulation of the stages of childhood. Wilson lists the likes of Bachofen, Lewis Morgan and Engels (Coincidance), and of course we all know about Leary’s version. If memory serves me right I think Tim’s best guide appeared in Changing My Mind Among Others. Neumann’s isolation from Jung seemed to bring out his own extension of Jung’s brief version.

Well, tomorrow should be interesting...good luck to you all in the USA : )