THE FOUR COLOR GRIMOIRE 05

No Gods But My Own was the name of my Substack newsletter. I’m in the process of shutting it down and wanted to have a more permanent home for these essays here at We the Hallowed. The Four Color Grimoire was the second volume in the series. Originally posted on on March 30th, 2022 and published in the book The Four Color Grimoire on March 31st, 2023.

05. WILL IS THE ANTI-WEAPON

What is will?

Is it a tool?

A weapon?

Maybe a little bit of both?

If you had asked Aleister Crowley what true will was he would probably tell you something about the nature of the individual or the thrust toward destiny.

Do what thou wilt.

If you had asked Friedrich Nietzsche he would’ve said something about the will to power and struggling against your surroundings for the sake of personal growth and self-perfection.

For The Guardians of Oa it’s nothing more than a soldier and their rifle.

Limited only by the will of its user and a finite energy charge, the Green Lantern ring bestows the wearer with immeasurable power. They are able to manifest hard light constructs from the imagination of the user. Any language is quickly and easily translated through the ring’s internal intelligence and it can wrap their users in an aura of protection, making them capable of withstanding nearly any blow and survive in the vacuum of space. These are only the beginning of a power ring’s many uses.

The power ring of The Green Lantern is the very essence of magic: the will made manifest in the world through the actions of a trained practitioner. They need only their enchanted ring, their lantern-shaped power battery, and a small incantation, the oath of the Green Lantern, recited at the right time and place to perform a ritual that grants them whatever they can imagine.

There is no better example than a Green Lantern for what directed influence can do to will and imagination. It also shows how institutions can exert either positive or negative pressure on even the most well trained minds. It’s for that reason that The Green Lantern is the patron saint of will and imagination while also embodying extreme discipline and institutional influence.

Earth has had more than a few Green Lanterns over the years. Each of them provide good examples of the power of the will. Some of them get corrupted by it, some are redeemed by it, and some are made into gods from it. All of them provide good lessons that can be translated into real world applications. I want to focus on two in particular but all of the terrestrial incarnations of The Green Lantern have potent myths worth exploring.

The first Green Lantern appeared in the early 1940’s and used a mish-mash of mysticism and fantasy as the foundation for a pretty run of the mill superhero. He was a rail worker by the name of Alan Scott who got trapped after a railroad bridge collapse. While trying to escape the rubble, Alan heard a voice within his head which directed him to an enchanted train lantern which was crafted from a strange meteorite and contained a mystical green flame. That flame directed Scott to craft a ring from the lantern so he could wield its magical powers.

The original Green Lantern fought the same thing all heroes from the forties would fight: Nazis and gangsters. The most notable thing about Alan Scott was that his magic ring had one very detrimental weakness in the form of wood. Anything made of wood could break his green light projections and do him physical harm.

I wanted to bring up Alan Scott first because he’s an important outlier in the concept of will as a superpower. Unlike the later Green Lanterns, Alan Scott called his own shots from day one. He had no contact with Oa or the Green Lantern Corps. He chose to craft his own ring based on the instructions he was given by the green fire, his spirit ally. He chose his name and his costume, unlike the corps members who were given no choice but to act and dress as soldiers in uniform.

Alan Scott had no authority to answer to. He got to choose the path of magic, just like any of us. Over the years a lot of these details have been retconned into oblivion but, at his core, Alan Scott has more to say about true will than any of the examples yet to come. The story of Alan Scott is that of a man learning his tools and refining them with time and experience. He started out as a workman and that informed everything he became, inspiring him to approach his magic and heroism with the heart of a yeoman.

It wasn’t until 1959 that we saw the more familiar incarnation of The Green Lantern. Before taking flight in an experimental aircraft, test pilot Hal Jordan’s ship is engulfed in emerald light and taken to the crash site of an alien spacecraft. An alien by the name of Abin Sur tells Jordan, with his dying breath, that he was looking for a person who was utterly honest and without fear to take over his position in an intergalactic police force known as the Green Lantern Corps.

Jordan fit right into the lifestyle of the Green Lantern Corps. Before his time as a test pilot, he had served in the United States Air Force. That training made him particularly well suited to serve and over time Jordan rose up in the ranks, becoming something of a legend among other Corps members.

Members of the Green Lantern Corps split their time between training in Oa, patrolling their assigned sectors, and sometimes getting brief leaves to their home planets. Time on Oa exposed Jordan to hundreds of different species among the thousands of fellow corps members. For Jordan this was military life all over again and he thrived there.

The Guardians of Oa held the Green Lantern Corps to rigorous standards. They expected Green Lanterns to be paragons of virtue, never to abuse their powers or go against the code crafted by The Guardians. Any dereliction of duty or ethical dalliance would be met with swift and severe discipline.

The magic practiced by Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps was more akin to being part of an order or school, a kind of militarized group magic. It was all order and rules Nothing could be performed without the express permission of The Guardians on Oa and if you defied their will you could be punished or stripped of your position in the Corps.

Hal Jordan learned this the hard way when his own mentor, Sinestro, had to be banished from the Green Lantern Corps for abusing his power and subjugating an entire planet. Jordan himself was responsible for informing the Guardians of Sinestro’s infractions.

Sinestro’s story teaches another important lesson: dogmatism creates its own enemies. After being banished from the corps and stripped of his power, Sinestro became radicalized. He found the one power that could strike at the order that banished him: a new ring that could exploit the one absurd weakness of the Green Lantern power ring, the color yellow.

Hal Jordan shows us that following rules and traditions can be a great source of power but comes with the steep cost of stifling individual expression to maintain the cultural purity that organizations need to thrive. He shows us that there is strength in dogma but not without an unknowable price.

The Guardians of Oa, like any authority, want to tell us that will is a weapon. I believe the opposite is true. Will is the power to stop the trigger from being pulled or the hands being thrown in anger. Will is what we use when we DON’T fight. When we don’t give in to the tides and urges of our baser instincts. Will is a choice and a shield.

Will is the anti-weapon.

Maybe it’s this fundamental misunderstanding of will that manifests the absurd weaknesses in the rings of the first incarnations of the Green Lantern. Alan Scott was weak to wood and Hal Jordan found trouble with the color yellow. Later Green Lanterns had no such weakness, needing only to be refueled by their special power batteries. Hal Jordan’s weakness is especially notable since his nemesis, Sinestro, had a ring which projected light constructs in that color and wore a yellow costume.

Could it be that their attempts at weaponizing the will did nothing more than create new avenues for conflict instead of diffusing it? The corruption rooted within the philosophy of exerting the will as moral authority and ultimate weapon is what broke Sinestro. That same corruption came later for Hal Jordan, too.

During a routine patrol off-world Hal Jordan’s home base on Earth was destroyed. The entirety of Coast City, where Jordan and everyone he had ever loved had called home, was burned to the ground, destroyed by space fascists with a grudge. Thousands died, including the love of Jordan’s life.

The horrific event drove Hal Jordan to madness. Using every ounce of charge in his power ring, Jordan built a construct of Coast City on top of the rubble of his home and made models of the slaughtered inhabitants to interact with. When the Guardian of Oa came to intervene, stating that it was against their rules for Jordan to use his power for something so personal, it only provoked him further. The Guardians dispatched some of their strongest warriors to pacify him but Jordan made short work of them, killing each of them before taking possession of their rings. After that Jordan went directly to Oa to confront the Guardians and drain the source battery for every Green Lantern ring so that he could use that energy to make the ghosts he constructed permanent.

Oa, the Guardians, and the entire Green Lantern Corps paid the ultimate price for the weapon they had created. Hal Jordan broke bad because the unquestionable authority he had believed he possessed failed him and failed his city. His weapon, powered by the basest essence of his being, failed everyone he loved because he couldn’t be there to pull the trigger.

He could’ve done better.

He would do better.

All he needed was ALL the power.

He was the best of the best, after all, so why wouldn’t he be the only weapon necessary to maintain peace in the galaxy? Why wouldn’t he be the right choice to start everything over?

That is the mindset of the authoritarian and the tyrant. This is the ultimate result of using the will as a cudgel and we have seen this manifested in the world time and time again.

Eventually Hal Jordan redeemed himself but only after nearly succeeding in rewriting the entire universe to erase the tragedy that had befallen his home and those he had loved. During a great crisis, Jordan sacrificed himself to destroy a threat to the sun at the center of our solar system and reignite its flame.

There is a lesson here; that the will can never be more than an amplification of what’s already within you. The will is nothing more than a forceful representation of the presence of those exerting it.

Heart of an artist?

Heart of a homicidal maniac?

This is what the will manifests.

Hal Jordan was a cop and soldier. All he knew was rules and rigidity. When those things were shown to be just as fallible as anything else it caused the will to manifest in a dramatically different way. The core of what he had been as a member of the Green Lantern Corps was still very much intact but had carved a much more malicious and malevolent path through the ruins of that systemic failure before returning him to the heroic code of ethics that had existed before trauma had changed his entire landscape.

There is a very particular reason I chose to evoke Crowley earlier. I can’t think of any single person who has had a more outsized influence on the field of magic than the great beast himself and no one better illustrates the effect institutions of magic have on the will of the individual.

This is the ultimate lesson of The Green Lantern. That when we choose to follow an authority without question we mute our own voices and allow those institutions to turn us into puppets of their will through their systems and traditions. While I’m not saying that Thelemites are Crowley’s soldiers, it does have to be said that his teachings reach the same level of mass devotion in certain circles of the occult and could rival that of any military or religion. The same can be said of many different teachers or schools across the spectrum of magic.

In terms of the will and your place in magic you have to ask yourself if you would rather be an Alan Scott or a Hal Jordan. One embodies an anarchic magic, cobbled together through experience and trial. The other embodies a magic brought out through formula and rigidity, made manifest through masters and routine. One hones their will with the wisdom of experience and independence while the other forges theirs through devotion and rules.

Both are heroes and weapons at the same time, just at different measures.

So is your will a refined tool or is it an impulsive weapon?

Whose law will it reinforce when the need arrives?

These are the questions The Green Lantern asks.

We can only assume that the green flame won’t answer for you when it’s time to decide who you are.

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Eric Millar

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