The Time I Accidentally Created A Hypersigil

Here’s a story about the weirdest thing that ever happened to me.

When I was a kid, I loved comic books (okay, still do…).

I got my first comic when I was 3. It was an issue of Action comics that featured Superman fighting a villain named the Purple Piledriver who shot stuff out of his weird helmut.

I was too young to know what a double entendre was.

I’ve long had a theory that kids who are really into comics will, eventually, try their hand at making them.

When I was young, I took notebook paper, a pencil, and crayons and created a multi-issue run on Avengers (this was the 70s — they weren’t cool yet).

I also did a comic where Pac-Man wore a cape and was a superhero (this pre-dated the Super Pacman game and cartoon).

Even into my adult life, I would try to make comics.

I would always get a few pages in and then give up.

Then, one night, sitting outside a local bar, I had a story idea land, fully formed, inside my head.

The next day, I sat down at the dining room table and started drawing it.

When I was finished, a couple of months later, I had a complete 90-page story in my hands. This was 10 years ago, this year.

The story was titled Monster Truck and it was about a werewolf named Lupe who owned a food truck.

Lupe was offered his dream job — being an executive chef at a fancy restaurant.

His dream job turned out to be a nightmare, though, when his new employer turned out to be a Lovecraftian monster who wanted him to cook children.

With the help of his friends:

Gil, his roommate, and fellow cook,

Hazel, his girlfriend, and a witch

and Pops, a human hotdog vendor

Lupe managed to rescue a bunch of kids, rob his employer of his power, and defeat him in battle (using a giant Mech — the story had a lot of influences…)

I uploaded it as a webcomic and a couple dozen people saw it. It was fun, the scratching of what felt like a life-long itch, and then it was over.

Or so I thought.

One night, it dawned on me that the events of the story weirdly foreshadowed the events of my own life. I lay there piecing it all together like the detective at the end of The Usual Suspects. As the metaphoric Kobayashi mug fell from my hands and shattered on the ground I sat up in bed with a start. I relayed my sudden discovery to my wife and asked her to confirm my uncanny findings. Was I crazy? She confirmed that my life had taken on an odd similar trajectory to the story.

When I was making the comic I worked in the video production department of a large church — a job I had loudly and often proclaimed to be my dream job.

My wife became pregnant as I was working there. Her pregnancy sent me into a tailspin of religious doubt. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to bring my soon-to-be-born child up in Christianity.

After months of therapy and soul-searching, I left my faith (and my job at the church).

So, thanks to not wanting to be a part of a child sacrifice, I left my dream job and robbed an ancient god of his power over me.

At some point, in all that, my wife began dabbling in witchcraft as well.

Despite the lack of giant Mechs, the confluence was striking to me. The story that dropped into my head that night, that I had spent months toiling over, ended up predicting? causing? changes in my own life.

In the title, I refer to this as a Hypersigil. That’s a word coined by Grant Morrison. Morrison is a popular comic book writer.

In the 2000s, he wrote a comic series for DC Comics called The Invisibles. He based the lead of the series, King-Mob, on himself. As the series continued over six years, Morrison, a practicing chaos-magician, realized whatever happened to King Mob in the comic, ended up happening to him in real life (even down to catching a flesh-eating staph virus and bursting a lung). He named this phenomenon a “hyper sigil” because it seemed like an elaborate, expanded version of the chaos magic method of creating sigils to affect the magician's reality.

I’ve considered lots of possible explanations. For a while, I compared what happened to me to Carl Jung’s idea of the Transcendent Function. Ten years later, I’m not convinced there’s any difference between a hyper sigil and the transcendent function.

I decided, at one point, it was just a coincidence. But, if it was, it was a coincidence that held great meaning for me, making it a Jungian synchronicity (if it’s not obvious, I find Jung’s general metaphysics helpful for explaining things). But again, I’m not sure if there’s a big difference between a hypersigil and a synchronicity.

So, yeah, 10 years out, that’s the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.

And the explanation I find myself coming back to just makes it weirder.