Earlier this week, we outlined an unusual interpretation of Dan Brown‘s The Lost Symbol, playing with the idea that the novel is initiating readers into the world of noetics, convincing them that we’re on the verge of a transformative breakthrough in human consciousness, and doing so through the use of an overwhelming symbolic structure akin to Masonic rituals such as Brown hints at throughout the story. (To reiterate: We are not saying he did or did not write The Lost Symbol the way he did according to the agenda we sketched; short of asking him directly, we have no way of knowing Dan Brown’s intentions. We’re only saying you could look at the situation this way.)
Anyway, we touched briefly upon the concept of the hypersigil (“an extended work of art with magical meaning and willpower”) and promised, glancingly, that if we came back to this subject, we’d talk about someone who’s done this sort of thing before, to prove we weren’t making it up entirely out of thin air. Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you (as we have before, and not just once) Mr. Grant Morrison.
Seven Soldiers: Zatanna, 2005
Morrison has explicitly stated in various interviews over the years that his most prominent comic book series, The Invisibles, was conceived as a distillation of a mystical experience in Kathmandu (sometimes not-seriously characterized as an alien abduction) in the mid-1990s—he’s referred to the series as “a unique and living transcendental object which I brought home with me from the 5th Dimension for everyone to play with”—but that’s far from the only time he’s used comics as a vehicle to plant mindblowing ideas about the future of human evolution in readers’ minds… ideas that have a lot in common with the claims made about noetics embedded in The Lost Symbol.
(This is all more like notes on an idea than a fully fleshed-out article, but we think you’ll get the gist.)
JLA, 2000
Take a look at “World War III,” Morrison’s last extended storyline for the JLA comic: Morrison has described Mageddon, the “primordial annihilator” the Justice League faces, as an embodiment of his own depression and despair which he threw into the comic figuring that if anybody could figure out how to knock it out of commission, it would be Superman, Batman, and the rest of the team. When Superman fell prey to Mageddon’s overwhelming negative energy, the solution ultimately involved giving everybody on Earth superpowers by manipulating the “morphogenetic field,” which is not exactly the same thing as the “universal consciousness” Brown talks about, which is itself connected to Jung’s “collective unconscious,” but is in roughly the same ballpark (and if you read enough David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake you could probably fit all the pieces together, but that’s beyond our scope today).
JLA, 2000
Morrison has returned to this idea of human transformation over and over again, in comics like Flex Mentallo and The New X-Men; his interpretation of Batman was heavily grounded in the notion that Bruce Wayne was setting a benchmark for self-actualization through his physical, mental, and emotional discipline. But in addition to using the superhero metaphor to describe his version of the noetic utopia in a straightforward narrative fashion, he has also dropped hints to perceptive readers that there are real-world applications to what he’s writing about…
Final Crisis, 2008
Furthermore—and this is where the parallel to Dan Brown may be seen as meaningful—Morrison has laid all these ideas out in a mainstream media platform, even using some of that platform’s most mainstream franchises. It’s a deliberate strategy: “I thought if you’re going to be a magician at all it’s not about wanting to be scary and wearing a robe or something, what you have to do is you have to do things for people,” Morrison has explained. “A magician or a shaman or whatever you want to call it is someone who has been pulled out a little, shown something really bizarre, managed to hold on to enough and then thrown back in, and the point is, once you’re back in what do you do? You’ve got to tell other people, you’ve got to get other people involved.” In another interview, he’s described the subversive power that comes from operating within mainstream circles, encouraging similarly inclined creative spirits to “be beautiful and seductive so that culture wants to eat you up… be the little pill that culture swallows, the drug that changes everything and forces new vision.”
Does that sound like The Lost Symbol to you? Again, let’s be clear: We have no idea what Dan Brown was thinking or planning while he was writing, but we’ve seen what you’ve seen—two million copies sold in the first week, and already the novel has inspired many of the people who bought and read it to start learning about noetics. Whatever Brown’s intentions may or may not have been, the novel is already starting to exert a “gravitational pull” on our cultural consciousness the long-term effects we have yet to determine.