Morrison likely read the obscure Rosicrucian treatises from the ealry modern period plus the works of others who wrote about them. There's a lot of Robert Anton Wilson on his stuff too.

The entirety of the Invisibles is built on the allegory of the Invisible College (hence the name of the series) and their ideas on how to transform the world and their struggle in secret against those who oppose them. The whole of the Et in Acadia Ego sequence is based on the many esoteric works claiming secret meaning of Poussin painting (which also plays a large role in Templar mythology, especially those who place the Rosicrucians as a survival of the Templars who went into hiding after they were suppressed by the puppet pope of the French monarchy.

When Invisibles started I was wrapping up my Master's thesis which touched on more historical aspects of the Templars but I had also done a lot of grad research on the Hermetic movement, the Rosicrucian Manifestos, and the influence of millennialism (see Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium for a guidebook to the movement through history), the prophetic writings of Joachim of Fiore, and more, plus I had been turned on to Wilson's Illuminati trilogy and his other writings, and part of the reason I liked Invisibles so much was that it seemed Morrison had taken a bunch of my research notebooks and turned them into a ripping comic book adventure. I had encountered but McKenna's ideas but never read McKenna before Morrison talked about his stuff int he letters pages of the Invisibles and had tracked them down. I had been a fan of Grant's stuff on Animal Man and Doom Patrol before Invisibles, and really enjoyed Invisibles when it hit, as I said, but when I first started encountering comic chatter on the net a few years into Invisibles, and saw everyone praising Grant for all these wild original ideas, I was like WTF? Don't you people read the kind of weird stuff Invisibles is based on? There's nothing much original there. It may be "new" to comics but it's hardly original stuff he was putting int he books. It was tapped into a tradition that was centuries old and had been passed on through allegorical stories purporting to be original and often true stories based on personal experiences (things like the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkruetz by Andrae) by those within the traidition to speak to others in the tradition without revealing the tradition itself. I was able to track down most of Morrison's sources and influences in the pre-internet age when you had to rely on university interlibrary loans, occult bookstories and antiquarian societies to find some of the stuff, and frankly it surprises me in the ease of access to information age that is the internet era more people having tracked down the stuff Morrison cribs form for this series and called out the claims of originality. But then most folks are too lazy or don't care enough to, and the lie that Morrison is a great original idea man has been repeated often enough that it has become a "truth" for those who want to believe it.

Morrison is an entertaining comic writer. He has a knack for taking obscure esoteric ideas outside the mainstream and turning them into comic stories that seem deeper and more original than they are. He would have been an interesting the subject to a great sequel to Orson Welles F is for Fake.

-M

I was more of an economic historian by training and the thesis itself focused on the development of banking mechanisms (the Templars are now often credited as being the first international bankers or the first multinational, but in the mid-90s when I was doing the thesis the Medici and other Renaissance bankers were often credited with the feat of introducing banking to Europe, but I traced the financial mechanism back form the Renaissance to the Templars and further back to Arab and Jewish merchants operating in the levant pre-Crusades (and only stopped there because I could not read original sources in Arabic or Aramaic), so that thesis doesn't revolve around the esoteric stuff I mentioned, but I was also interested in intellectual history, and doing independent studies with my thesis adviser and other work with him researching the influence of the Hermetic tradition on the scientific revolution (both Newton and Francis Bacon were Hermetic alchemists and potentially part of the movement that became known as Rosicrucianism-check out the works of Dame Francine Yates for a foundational work on the subject) and on the influence of milleniallism on several of the intellectual traditions of the late medieval and early modern period which is where I encountered a lot of the more esoteric stuff. Ironically, it was encountering Eco's Foucault's Pendulum as a senior at university that introduced me to the Templars and the esoeteric traditions that laid the groundwork for a lot of my graduate work and had led me to the Robert Anton Wilson stuff during the 3 years I took off between undergrad and grad school.

I am not sure I still have copies of the thesis-I haven't touched on it since an offer to turn it into a monograph by a non-profit educational outreach organization fell through about 15 years ago. If I do, it's a print hard copy not a digital file as it was done on a Mac and I haven't used a Mac since the turn of the century.

-M

When I read Morrison's Supergods, I realized Morrison styles himself s the Aleister Crowley of the comic book set-playing at being the chosen of some higher consciousness to be the messenger of some hidden revelation designed change the world and allow some transcendence but what it it's true goal is, is to accumulate as much adulation for himself as possible, all of it boiling down to bullshit to dazzle the masses who want something to believe in outside "the norm" but really just looking for a different standard to conform to and get a sense of belonging. Morrison is great at peddling that vibe, and he's a decent storyteller so it works for him. The cult of Morrison is legion.

-M

Supergods is hands down the worst book I've read in the last 25-30 years. I'll preface by saying that I'm very good at reading books that I'm pretty sure I'll at least like. I know what I like and what I don't and I'm not wrong very often. So it's rare that I read a prose book that I actively dislike. Supergods was one of them.

The "history" section of the book was trite and poorly researched and significantly inferior to a not-particularly-good website. The remainder of the book was the type of self-involved navel-gazing that makes me want to alternately pull my hair out and throat-punch the author. I'm not a Morrison hater. I'm also not one to deify him. I've loved some of his comic work. I've been indifferent to some of it. And there's been some I haven't cared for. But Supergods is a new level of God Awful.

Moorcock seems to have inspired a lot of English writers, which is strange to me considering that he's not very well known in America unfortunately except in certain circles that are fans of the high fantasy/hard science fiction genre. Gaiman also penned a whole friggin' comic about him and Elric. Though to be perfectly honest, it feels weirdly surreal and uncomfortable almost for the sake of it just like the Comical Tragedy Of Mr. Punch. But it is from the perspective of a child after all, and recollections of childhood experiences, traumatic or otherwise, are almost always 95% over interpretation and exaggeration

Huh. I should be on the look out for that. I've enjoyed all the other adaptation of Gaiman's prose. I must have read the story, but don't remember anything about it.

So, it's confession time. I started My New X-Men review thread becase what I really wanted to discuss was the Joss Whedon run on Astonishing X-Men, but I felt that it was best contextualized as a continuation of, and rebuttal of, the Grant Morrison run that immediately preceded it. But I didn't anticipate, well, that Grant Morrison is very weird and esoteric. As I mentioned early in this thread, my other readings in Morrison sometimes left me feeling bewildered. This suggested that either I was a bad reader, or he was a bad writer, or both. But there is another possibility (again not to the exclusion of the first two).

When I reviewed Astro City by Kurt Busiek, I knew going in that the whole series was an homage to Silver Age heroism, not only in theme, but also expecting the reader to be familiar with many Silver Age characters and situations on which Busiek was commenting. He could tell parts A and E of the story and reasonably expect the reader to know B,C, and D. He could throw out references to comics creators and use them as wry commentary on various elements of his own fictional world. So Busiek was making lots of in-jokes, but I (having a passing though certainly not encyclopedic familiarity with the Silver Age) was in on the joke.

But with Morrison, I now realize, there's a lot of knowledge he assumes with which I am simply unfamiliar. The Rosicrucian stuff mentioned in this thread is one example. Morrison is also apparently deep into the British underground rock scene as not only a consumer but also a producer, and the world of kinky performance art, and the culture of psychedelic drugs. In 2012, he published a whole 450 page nonfiction book, "Supergods," which apparently explains his personal philosophy and how it came out in works like New X-Men and All-Star Superman. I had no idea, and now I wish I had read it before I started reviewing him. He's into a whole world of pop psychology tied up with "The Sekhmet Hypothesis" and "Prometheus Unchained" that would meet with the approval of his villain John Sublime.

He has a lot of things that he'd like to say in comic book form. But the only way he can get access to the top-tier artists he craves is to work with major publishers like Marvel and DC. And working with Marvel and DC has generally meant toning down the thematic elements, hiding them, hinting at them under the cover of adventure stories about people in tights punching each other. I suspect the major market (such as it is now) has proven more open to his more ambitious ideas than it was twenty years ago.

Anyway, I know now that there's a lot more to know before I'm qualified to really write informative reviews of Morrison works. Seems like there's a Masters or Doctoral thesis in it for someone.