Pop-Culture Magic: Fictional Gods, Lovecraft and Superheroes

Pop-culture magic is the practice of using characters, worlds and symbols from fiction, film, comics, games and other popular media as the basis for ritual, invocation and spiritual work. Closely associated with chaos magick, which treats every belief system as a usable tool, it has precedents in older occultism's borrowings from novels and in the magical use of H. P. Lovecraft's invented gods, and it overlaps with what scholars call invented or fiction-based religions.

What Is Pop-Culture Magic?§

At its simplest, pop-culture magic means doing with a fictional figure what earlier magicians did with gods, angels and spirits: invoking a superhero to take on their courage, addressing a character from a novel as a guide, using a symbol from a film as a sigil, or treating a fictional world as an astral landscape for visualisation. Some practitioners build entire pantheons from a favourite series; others use a single character for a single purpose.

The theory behind the practice comes mainly from chaos magick. If, as chaos magicians argue, the power of a deity or symbol depends on the belief and attention invested in it, then a figure known and loved by millions may be at least as potent as one from an ancient pantheon whose worshippers have long disappeared. Some practitioners add a psychological interpretation, in which fictional characters are vivid personifications of qualities the magician wishes to cultivate; others speak of characters as having become something like egregores, collective thought-forms sustained by fandom.

Precedents: Fiction in the History of Occultism§

The boundary between occultism and fiction has always been porous. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Zanoni (1842) portrayed Rosicrucian adepts and was read as a quasi-initiatory text by later occultists; his The Coming Race (1871), about a subterranean people commanding a mysterious energy called "vril", gave rise to persistent myths about a real vril force and secret societies devoted to it. The Golden Dawn attracted novelists and poets, among them W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and fiction became one of the main channels by which its ideas reached the public.

The most important precedent is the work of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). In stories such as "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), Lovecraft created a mythology of vast, indifferent beings and a forbidden book, the Necronomicon, which he invented as a literary device. Lovecraft himself was a materialist who regarded his gods as fiction. Yet from the 1970s occultists took his mythos seriously. Kenneth Grant, in The Magical Revival (1972) and later works, argued that Lovecraft had unknowingly tapped real currents of occult experience; several books published under the title Necronomicon, of which the "Simon" edition of 1977 is the best known, presented the fictional grimoire as real; and Lovecraftian rituals became a minor genre of magical practice.

J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium has inspired practitioners who honour the Valar or identify spiritually with elves, a phenomenon studied by the historian of religion Markus Altena Davidsen. Here the gap between fiction and practice is especially clear, since Tolkien was a devout Catholic who would not have welcomed such uses.

Chaos Magick and the Fictional Pantheon§

Chaos magick made explicit what earlier borrowings had left implicit. From its beginnings in the late 1970s, it held that belief is a tool and that any symbolic system will serve if it is believed in fully for the duration of the work. The movement's own emblem, the eight-arrowed chaos star, was taken from Michael Moorcock's fantasy fiction, and Peter J. Carroll borrowed the colour "octarine" from Terry Pratchett. Discordianism, which honours Eris with a mixture of irony and devotion, showed that a half-joking religion could still sustain real practice; see Discordianism.

In the 1990s and 2000s chaos magicians wrote extensively about invoking fictional beings. Phil Hine's Pseudonomicon explored Lovecraftian magic, and Taylor Ellwood's Pop Culture Magick (2004) offered a systematic treatment of the subject. Typical practices include constructing an altar or shrine to a character, invoking a character's persona in ritual, using a familiar symbol or catchphrase as a sigil, and creating servitors modelled on fictional figures. Such practices are described here historically; like other forms of magic, they promise nothing and are no substitute for practical help with real problems.

Practitioners often stress the importance of genuine emotional engagement. A character to whom the magician feels no attachment is considered useless, while one loved since childhood may carry great force. In this respect pop-culture magic resembles devotional religion: it depends on love, attention and imagination rather than on correct correspondences.

Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and the Comics Magicians§

Two British comics writers did more than anyone else to popularise the idea that fiction and magic are related. Alan Moore (born 1953) announced on his fortieth birthday in 1993 that he had become a magician. He chose as his deity Glycon, a snake god whose cult was founded in the second century AD by Alexander of Abonoteichus and denounced as a fraud by the satirist Lucian, who claimed that the god was a puppet. Moore embraced the joke: if a god is in some sense a fiction, then a fictional god is as good as any. His comic Promethea (1999–2005) presented a sustained exposition of Kabbalah, tarot and the idea that art and magic are the same activity.

Grant Morrison, whose series The Invisibles (1994–2000) was conceived as a hypersigil, published the essay "Pop Magic!" in Richard Metzger's anthology Book of Lies (2003). In it Morrison encouraged readers to treat cartoon characters and pop stars as gods, sigils as advertising logos in reverse, and pop culture in general as a vast magical resource. Morrison's later book Supergods (2011) explored superheroes as modern mythology. The influence of these writers on readers who went on to practise magic was considerable, as described in Magic and Culture.

Jediism, Invented Religions and Fiction-Based Faith§

Pop-culture magic overlaps with a broader phenomenon in which fiction becomes the basis for religious identity. The Church of All Worlds, founded in the United States in 1962 by Tim Zell and Lance Christie and incorporated in 1968, took its name and practices from Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and became an important organisation in American Paganism. In the 2001 census of England and Wales about 390,000 people recorded their religion as "Jedi", following an internet campaign; the response was partly a protest joke, but small Jedi organisations with sincere members have existed since. Parody religions such as the Church of the SubGenius blend satire with genuine community.

Most practitioners of pop-culture magic do not regard themselves as members of a fiction-based religion. They work with fictional figures alongside, or instead of, traditional gods, without organising a church. But the two phenomena share a premise: that stories known to be invented can still carry spiritual meaning.

Scholarly Views and Criticisms§

Scholars have proposed several frameworks for understanding these developments. The sociologist Adam Possamai coined the term "hyper-real religion" for spiritualities that draw on popular culture, arguing that in consumer societies the line between media and religion has become blurred. Carole M. Cusack's Invented Religions (2010) studied Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds and Jediism, and argued that their openly fictional origins do not make them less meaningful to adherents. Christopher Partridge's concept of "occulture" describes the shared reservoir of esoteric ideas in films, music and novels on which both practitioners and audiences draw.

Critics raise objections of different kinds. Traditional occultists and members of established religions sometimes regard pop-culture magic as trivial, a confusion of entertainment with spirituality. Others worry about commercialisation, since fictional characters are owned by media corporations and their images are sold. Practitioners respond that every god was once a story told by someone, that ancient myths were themselves the popular culture of their day, and that working with fiction avoids appropriating the sacred figures of living religions. The debate continues, and it touches the central question of chaos magick itself: whether a symbol's power comes from tradition or from the attention we give it.

Frequently asked questions§

What is pop-culture magic?§

Pop-culture magic is the use of characters, symbols and worlds from fiction, film, comics and games in magical practice. Practitioners invoke fictional figures, use familiar symbols as sigils, or build personal pantheons from stories, usually on the chaos magick principle that belief and attention give symbols their power.

Do people really worship fictional characters?§

Some practitioners treat fictional figures with devotion, and fiction-based religions such as Jediism have sincere members. Many others use characters as psychological or symbolic tools without regarding them as gods in a traditional sense.

Why did occultists take Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos seriously?§

From the 1970s Kenneth Grant and others argued that Lovecraft's fiction expressed real occult experiences, and grimoires titled Necronomicon presented his invented book as genuine. Lovecraft himself regarded the mythos as fiction.

Who is Glycon in Alan Moore's magic?§

Glycon was a snake god whose second-century cult was described by the satirist Lucian as a fraud built around a puppet. Alan Moore adopted Glycon as his personal deity in the 1990s, embracing the idea that all gods are in some sense fictions.

Sources and further reading§

• Pop Culture Magick — Taylor Ellwood, 2004
• Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult — Richard Metzger (ed.), 2003
• Supergods — Grant Morrison, 2011
• Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith — Carole M. Cusack, 2010
• Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real Testament — Adam Possamai, 2005
• The Magical Revival — Kenneth Grant, 1972
• Zanoni — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1842
• The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories — H. P. Lovecraft (ed. S. T. Joshi), 1999