Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  Writers often talk about how their characters or stories become independent of them, saying or doing things that hadn’t occurred to their creator, and this was an example. When Moore read it back to himself, he found that ‘Having written that and been unable to find an angle from which it wasn’t true, I was forced to either ignore its implications or change most of my thinking to fit around this new information.’ That the words were coming out of the mouth of the man From Hell identifies as Jack the Ripper seemed to inspire rather than concern him. As Moore saw it, Gull was ‘quite aware that he is going mad, but that was what he wanted to do. He saw madness as a gateway to a different sort of consciousness’. When Gull talks to himself later in the chapter, ‘Gull the doctor says “Why, to converse with Gods is madness” … And Gull, the man, replies, “Then who’d be sane?”’

  Back in 1988, Moore had started with the idea of simply writing ‘some sort of reconstruction of a murder as a graphic novel’ and alighted on the Jack the Ripper case. Now he began to understand that the power of the Ripper story came from the mystery, the legend, the historical context, the conspiracy theories – above all else from a quest to impose meaning on it. One of his inspirations was the title of Douglas Adams’ novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987). When, like Adams, he realised that a holistic detective would have to take everything into account, every ‘trivial’ nugget of fact and ‘incidental’ detail, the scope of his enquiry into the murders expanded considerably:

  we start out with the murder of five people in London. A well-known murder that took place in the late 1880s in London. Now from that we find that there are threads of meaning that stretch back as far back as say the Dionysiac architects of ancient Crete, that stretch into the architecture of London and London’s history. That stretch into all these different areas of society and privilege that run all the way up to the twentieth century … the whole system is connected and you can start at any point and from there you will find this radiant web of connections that sort of spans everything.

  From Hell Chapter Four was written in the first half of 1991, so more than two years were to pass between Moore’s initial insights and the declaration that he was a magician. Having already become fascinated by the question he, along with every other creator, was asked most frequently – ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ – his natural instinct, in line with Brian Eno’s philosophy, was not to be scared of examining his own creative process, but instead to interrogate it: ‘Brian Eno is one of my biggest influences. He had no respect at all for all that precious mystique of music. He’s got a purely mechanical approach to art and craft. He said, in effect, “There are hard scientific principles at work here. If you look at them you can work out what they are and you can use them”.’

  He had already undergone such a process of self-examination in 1985, in his essay On Writing for Comics, where he had given a prosaic answer: ‘I’d probably say that ideas seem to germinate at the point of cross-fertilisation between one’s artistic influences and one’s own experience.’ A couple of years after that, he had been scathing of anyone who wasn’t equally pragmatic: ‘I really have no time for this big mystique of art. I think that’s a lie. I think that a lot of artists will try to pretend that they exist in some state of cosmic crushing misery that the rest of the human race can not possibly appreciate and that is just simply bullshit. Art is the same as being a car mechanic. It is just purely a matter of application. There is nothing mystical about it at all.’ Now, though, he began to make connections between the mathematics he was researching for Big Numbers and the study of the occult he was making for From Hell. Reading up on linguistics allowed Moore to see that both were systems attempting meta-analysis of the universe – languages. Language was clearly essential to creativity and to consciousness itself.

  There’s a fact that Alan Moore recognised sooner than most of his readers: his work in the late eighties was in danger of being stuck in a rut, of becoming sterile, over-calculated. He needed ‘a new way of looking at things, a new set of tools to continue. I know I could not carry on doing Watchmen over and over again, any more than I could carry on doing From Hell over and over again.’ Now he found a name for this different approach, one that would extend his analysis of his working method into a more general theory of how the creative process worked: ‘Beyond the boundaries of linear and rational thinking, a territory that I came to label, at least for my own purposes, as Magic.’

  Moore’s interest in magic did not arrive out of the blue. He remembers being fascinated by myths and legends as a child, and recalls that the first book he borrowed from the library, aged five, was called The Magic Island. He often dreamed of gods and the supernatural, and as a teenager this developed into an interest in the occult and Tarot. Back then, he’d written poetry and drawn pictures inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Moore had later, of course, created the ‘blue collar’ magician John Constantine in Swamp Thing, and Nightjar, the abandoned series for Warrior, had been about a secret war fought between modern-day magicians; he had also experienced a number of odd coincidences and occurrences which he had tended to dismiss – although he was fond of telling the ‘strange little story’ of how he had once ‘met’ his creation Constantine in London. But, until this point, magic had not featured heavily in his professional work – Maxwell was a magic cat in name only.

  Steve Moore, however, had long practised magic, and had edited the Fortean Times, a magazine dedicated to reporting the spectrum of strange phenomena (Alan read the magazine and occasionally contributed reviews and letters). Friends like Neil Gaiman were well-read on the subject. While writing From Hell, Moore had begun studying the history of magic and ritual and either discovered or reacquainted himself with mystical artists like Arthur Machen, David Lindsay, Robert Anton Wilson, Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley.

  For Moore, ‘magic’ is the name he gives to instances where language can be seen to affect reality; it’s how human consciousness and imagination interact with the world. The principal way in which human beings do this is through art: ‘writing is the most magical act of all, and is probably at the heart of every magical act.’ Fittingly, the most ornate elaboration of his belief system to date has come in comic book form. In the 32-issue series Promethea (1999–2005), with art by J.H. Williams and Mick Gray, the main character, Sophie Bangs, is initiated into the secrets of magic, and her story depicts all sorts of elements that we know are part of Moore’s own experiences.

  The artistic unfurling is an essential part of the explanatory process, which means that a quick summary of Moore’s magical belief system can only sell it short. That said, it is possible to break it down into three key components: psychogeography, snake worship and ideaspace.

  Psychogeography, as Moore practises it, is a deep exploration of the landscape and history of a specific location – in his words, ‘a means of divining the meaning of the streets in which we live and pass our lives (and thus our own meaning, as inhabitants of those streets)’. The chapter of From Hell that furnished Moore with the line ‘the one place gods inarguably exist is in our minds’ represents a good example of the technique. William Gull directs the cab driver Netley on a tour of London, drawing attention to a number of sights. Some are familiar tourist traps like the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and Cleopatra’s Needle, and we’re reminded how odd those landmarks are. Gull shows that many of the same symbols, including the Sun and the Moon, recur in the most unlikely places. They complete a circuit of the striking London churches designed by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early eighteenth century. At the climax of his tour, Gull reveals that if you draw lines between the Hawksmoor churches on a map, you construct a ‘pentacle of Sun Gods, obelisks and rational male fire, wherein unconsciousness, the Moon and Womanhood are chained’.

  In his annotations, Moore makes no secret that his main source was the poem ‘Lud Heat’ (1975) by the British writer and avant-gardist Iain Sinclair. He was also heavily influenced by Sinclair’s
examination of Gull, the novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987). Sinclair’s work had been recommended to him by Neil Gaiman, whereupon Moore got in touch with Sinclair and the two men become fast friends. In 1992 – a year before he announced he had become a magician – Moore made an appearance ‘typecast as an occult fanatic’ in The Cardinal and the Corpse, a film made by Sinclair for Channel Four. In the story, he plays a man (in a leather jacket and Rorschach T-shirt) searching for a book by Francis Barrett that he says ‘is a key to the whole city, it’s called The Magus … the key to the city, the Qabalah.’

  Moore – unlike Gull – has made it clear he does not believe he is uncovering some existing code put there by some other being, natural or supernatural. The lines exist, but as lines of information:

  That is a pattern I have drawn upon existing events, just as a pentacle is a pattern that I’ve drawn over real sites in London. It’s a meaning that I’ve imposed. I suppose what I was trying to say is that history is open to us to cast these patterns and divine from them, if you want. I mean, no, there is no pentacle over London by design. There is no secret society of Freemasons that actually put these sites into a pentacle shape, but those points can be linked up in a pentacle, that means that those ideas, the ideas that those ideas represent can be linked up into a pattern as can events in history, like the events of the Ripper murders.

  But there’s an ambiguity when Moore says he is ‘divining’, or when Sinclair talks of ‘dormant energies’ and a ‘grid of energies’ in the London landscape. Is this meant as a figure of speech, or more literally? Sinclair wants it both ways: ‘it was reinvented into London with people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association, who mixed those ideas with ideas of ley lines and Earth mysteries and cobbled it together as a provocation, and I took it on from that point.’ In his 1997 performance The Highbury Working, Moore gives a tongue-in-cheek description of the practical work undertaken by his Moon and Serpent group of magicians: ‘think of us as Rosicrucian heating engineers. We check the pressure in the song-lines, lag etheric channels, and rewire the glamour. Cowboy occultism; cash-in-hand Feng Shui. First you diagnose the area in question, read the street plan’s accidental creases, and decode the orbit maps left there by coffee cups, then go to work.’ Whatever the status of this energy, there’s a purely materialist point being made. Like Sinclair, Moore uses psychogeography to draw attention to the history of an area, to map the deep roots of history and culture.

  Sinclair’s work continues that of the Situationist movement which flourished in the sixties and has inspired many British radical groups since. Situationism encouraged the exploration of the terrain of a city as an act to reappropriate the landscape from the demands of consumerism and commodification. It’s a conscious response to the process, accelerated in the Thatcher era, of redeveloping old, proud working-class areas into office space and yuppie flats. Sinclair concentrates mainly on the gentrification of the East End of London, Moore on redevelopment in his native town of Northampton. Sinclair would agree with Moore’s line from The Birth Caul that the recent burst of property development represented the ‘final wallpapering of England’.

  Psychogeography has also provided the basis for Moore’s prose novels. Voice of the Fire (1996) was built up from short stories, all set in Northampton at various periods from the Neolithic to an autobiographical chapter set the day Moore wrote it. A Grammar, an abandoned novel that was in its ‘early planning stages’ in 1997, followed ‘a sheep track between Northampton and Wales. It’s a drover’s track that existed probably since the Bronze Age and it crosses through a lot of fascinating territory: Shakespeare Country; Elgar Country; the territories of Pender, the last pagan king of Britain; Alfred Watkins, the ley-line visionary’. The forthcoming Jerusalem is in a similar vein.

  Moore first publicly declared that he was now worshipping the snake god Glycon in a February 1994 interview with D.M. Mitchell in Rapid Eye, a magazine described by style bible I-D as a ‘heavyweight periodical devoted to documenting apocalypse culture’. An article in Fortean Times stated that Alan Moore ‘was introduced to Glycon by Steve Moore … whereupon they decided to form the Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels’. Other accounts have implied, either accidentally or through ambiguous language, that the encounter with Glycon was an unplanned occurrence during a magic ritual and that Moore only subsequently learned the fascinating, and extremely apt, history of Glycon worship. This is not the case. For at least fifteen years Steve Moore had enjoyed contact with the moon goddess Selene, as Alan would outline in some detail in Unearthing: ‘I found Steve Moore’s relationship with the goddess – largely conducted through ritual and dream – to be both interesting and potentially instructive.’ Alan wanted his own supernatural guide. Although it was unintentional on his part, it would be Steve Moore who found Alan’s god for him. When Steve showed him pictures of a statue of the moon goddess Hecate that had been excavated in Tomis, Alan’s eye was caught by another statue that had been found with it. ‘I can best describe it as love at first sight. This unutterably bizarre vision of a majestic serpent with a semi-human head crowned with long flowing locks of blonde hair seemed in some inexplicable way familiar to me, as if I already knew it from somewhere inside myself, as pretentious as that probably sounds.’ The two then researched this snake god, which they learned was called Glycon.

  The name means ‘sweet one’ in Greek (it’s from the same etymological root as ‘glucose’). A snake that uttered prophecies, Glycon was the focus of a second-century cult which attracted the attention of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The satirist Lucian was personally acquainted with the man running the operation, Alexander of Abonoteichus, and felt him to be as villainous as his namesake, Alexander the Great, was heroic. Lucian goes into great detail about the formation of the cult, describes at some length how Alexander’s prophetic utterances were faked and what he charged people to hear them, and explains that the snake god Glycon was a simple ventriloquist’s puppet. Rather than being discouraged by such fakery, though, Moore embraced it, feeling it would ‘pre-empt the inevitable ridicule by worshipping a deity that was already established as historically ridiculous’. It was only after Glycon passed this thorough background check – if ‘passed’ is quite the right word – that Moore sought contact. ‘If, as I believed, the landscape that I hoped to enter was entirely imaginary in the conventional usage of the word, then it seemed to … not make sense, exactly, but to be appropriate … that I should enlist an imaginary playmate as my guide to it.’

  Late on the night of 7 January 1994, Alan Moore and Steve Moore took magic mushrooms, and as they talked about magic, they came to share the experience of meeting the snake god Glycon. Alan had a conversation with the god that lasted ‘at least part of the evening’:

  the first experience I had, and this is very difficult to describe, but it felt to me as if me and a very close friend of mine, were both taken on this ride by a specific entity. The entity seemed to me, and to my friend, to be … this second-century Roman snake god called Glycon. Or that the second-century Roman snake god called Glycon is one of the forms by which this kind of energy is sometimes known. Because the snake as a symbol runs through almost every magical system, every religion … At least part of this experience seemed to be completely outside of Time. There was a perception that all of Time was happening at once. Linear time was a purely a construction of the conscious mind … There were other revelations.

  A poem Moore would write soon afterwards, ‘The Deity Glycon’, describes an encounter with this ‘last created of the Roman gods … and the idea of a god, a real idea … his belly filled with understanding, jewels and poison’.

  ‘Alan Moore’s private magical workings with Glycon are, of course, private’, but we can glean some sense of the form his magical activities take from articles Steve Moore has written about Selene, including the publication of a detailed ‘Selene Pathworking’ designed to engineer an encounter with the goddess. Preparation involves ‘rela
xation by any preferred method’, ‘deep breathing and mantra’, then the visualisation of a detailed scenario not unlike those found on self-hypnosis tapes (‘all you can see is blackness. Now you visualise a small glowing disc of silver-white light’), but written by the participants beforehand to give a sense of structure, ritual and purpose to the occasion. At first Alan used magic mushrooms as his ‘preferred method’ of relaxation, but he no longer does so:

  Back when I was starting out in magic, I probably did an awful lot more mushrooms. I don’t think I’ve done any actual mushroom-based rituals since … end of last year? [1999/2000] … I find that whereas once I would have used drugs to explore all of the various spheres that I explore in Promethea’s Qabalah series – I mean, indeed I did use drugs to explore the lower five sephirot, but above that, I’m using my own mind, I’m using I suppose it’s what you’d call meditation, although it’s exactly what any writer does when they’re trying to get into a story, it’s just that the story in these instances is deeply concerned with these qabalistic states, so getting into the story is almost the same as getting into the state.

  A reference by Leah Moore to the postman seeing her father ‘covered in blood and feathers’ was, as we might guess, facetious. Moore has stated, ‘I’m in the unfortunate position of being a diabolist and vegetarian, I’m afraid living sacrifices were out of the question … I have burned objects of meaning and significance to me.’ At various times he has conducted rituals alone, with Steve Moore, with ‘a musician’ (in fact Tim Perkins) and with ‘other magicians’. Moore once showed Brian Bolland his cellar and told him demons had manifested there, but he’s also conducted workings in his living room. Once the ritual is underway, Moore has said he enters a ‘fugue state’ where a ‘disorientating, overwhelming, even terrifying’ amount of information is presented to him and he has to find a path through it. The only way to do that is to lose a sense of ‘self’, so that once the ritual is over ‘recollection of the experience is necessarily non-linear, fragmentary … It’s not that I have any reservations about discussing these matters clearly and lucidly; it’s just that I can’t.’