Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  As for specific encounters, we know that in January or February 1994, Moore ‘had a moment which was right on the very cusp of madness, in which I thought I was Jesus, that I thought I was the messiah and had come to lead the world out of darkness and into light. I thought “well, it’s hardly surprising. I always knew I was a special, lovelier-than-average person. It only makes sense that Jesus would turn out to be someone fabulous like me.’ Then, luckily, a more sane part of me moved in and said “Focus, you cunt! You’re not Jesus – this energy is Jesus – the Christos”.’

  A line in Promethea #12 (February 2001) that ‘initiation may be a dark and dangerous ride, a journey through the land of shade required before progress is made’ suggests Moore’s early experiences were not all pleasant. We know that something of the kind happened ‘about a month’ after the initial encounter with Glycon (again, then, February 1994):

  I also had an experience with a demonic creature that told me that its name was Asmoday. Which is Asmodeus. And when I actually was allowed to see what the creature looked like, or what it was prepared to show me, it was this latticework … if you imagine a spider, and then imagine multiple images of that spider, that are kind of linked together – multiple images at different scales, that are all linked together – it’s as if this thing is moving through a different sort of time. You know Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase? Where you can see all the different stages of the movement at once. So if you imagine that you’ve got this spider, that it was moving around, but it was coming from background to foreground, what you’d get is sort of several spiders, if you like, showing the different stages of its movement.

  Moore noted that Asmodeus spoke ‘with great politeness and charm’. Unlike Glycon, Moore says, he only did his research into Asmodeus after encountering him, although we know he was previously at least aware of the name, as it had appeared in one of his very first published pieces. The third stanza of the poem ‘Deathshead’ in Embryo #2 (December 1970) runs:

  I told you the words

  That might call up Asmodeus

  I wrote out the score

  For the ghosts of Japan

  He would later depict Asmoday in Promethea as a malevolent, fearsome force.

  These early magical experiences inspired a burst of creativity from Moore as he attempted to assimilate and describe them. He created a picture of Glycon, which he named The Garden of Magic; or, the Powers and Thrones Approach the Bridge (see next page).

  Within a week of his first encounter with the god, he had written two songs, ‘The Hair of the Snake That Bit Me’ and ‘Town of Lights’. The first of those begins ‘Step up now, Gentlemen and Ladies, come this way here in the Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels’, and soon afterwards, an actual organisation of that name ‘tumbled into existence, a fictional freakish sideshow alluded to in the song lyric that somehow seemed to be begging to be brought to some kind of peculiar life’.

  The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels consists of Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Tim Perkins, David J, John Coulthart and Melinda Gebbie, but it’s an extremely loose ‘organisation’ and doesn’t have initiation rituals or, indeed, any formal structure, to the point that it ‘doesn’t actually exist in the conventional sense’. The participants came up with a fake history for the society dating back centuries, a parody of secret societies such as the Rosicrucians and Masons which are associated with similar claims. The ‘moon’ and ‘serpent’ are, respectively, Selene and Glycon.

  When the journalist D.M. Mitchell interviewed Moore in February 1994, he managed to capture some of Moore’s initial disorientation at his experiences: ‘This is all very new to me. I’ve been receiving some kind of bargain basement apotheosis, and my head’s still spinning. Probably in a few months I’ll be able to talk about this more calmly and more coherently.’ Mitchell knew Moore had begun a new book, Yuggoth Cultures, a collection of poetry and prose pieces based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, because it had grown from a short story commission for Mitchell’s anthology The Starry Wisdom. Though Moore had been interested in Lovecraft since he was thirteen, he told Mitchell: ‘I have recently seen him in a different light.’ This was surely because Moore had been reading the works of Kenneth Grant, the occultist appointed – at least according to Grant – by Aleister Crowley as his successor. Grant asserted that Lovecraft’s tales of Great Old Ones ‘represented valid channels of magical information’. But Moore claims to have abandoned writing Yuggoth Cultures after he left the manuscript in a taxi, and there’s supporting evidence that this is more than just a tall tale: he mentioned the book in his Rapid Eye interview, and it was advertised and assigned an ISBN number. In the event, the surviving fragments, barely a few hundred words long, were printed in the anthology itself titled Yuggoth Cultures.

  The two songs Moore had written became the opening and closing numbers of the new group’s first performance piece, also called The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, which was staged around seven months after his first magical encounter, on 16 July 1994. It was intended as a one-off: as a child, Moore had seen the comedian Ken Dodd perform, and had been struck during the performance that Dodd performed the same jokes night after night, that the spontaneity and intimacy with the audience was an illusion, and that he could have almost exactly the same experience again just by going back the next night. Each of the Moon and Serpent’s workings has in contrast been specific to the time and location: in this case, it was the night the comet Shoemaker-Levy impacted Jupiter, one of the more spectacular astronomical events of the twentieth century. Moore and his colleagues intended it as a public magic ritual, taking the form – in a clear echo of his old Arts Lab days – of a multimedia performance that would engage the audience in an immersive, rich blend of music, monologues, dance and poetry.

  The piece laid out the basics of Moore’s cosmology, sketched in some background details, and depicted magical experiences which were presumably very close to his own. The performance began with the ‘roll up, roll up’ call of ‘The Hair of the Snake That Bit Me’, moving on to ‘The Map Drawn on Vapour (I)’, where Moore set down some of the basics of the associative nature of Ideaspace, and related it to his own experience with Iain Sinclair and psychogeography. This was continued in ‘Litvinoff’s Book’, which discussed East End gangsters, before segueing into ‘A Map Drawn on Vapour (II)’, virtually a recap of Gull’s tour of London in From Hell. From there, Moore moved to a more transcendental realm. ‘The Stairs Beyond Substance’ discussed quantum physics and the limits of knowledge, then ‘The Spectre Garden’ plunged into three poems about encountering gods: ‘The Enochian Angel Of The 7th Aethyr’, ‘The Demon Regent Asmodeus’ and ‘The Deity Glycon’. The final act was ‘The Book of Copulation’, a long poem that built to a crescendo, asserting that we are all – every person, every supernatural entity – aspects of one being. The song ‘Town of Lights’ was a coda, telling us that there are angels within us and Jerusalem is in sight.

  It was performed as part of a three-evening event hosted by Iain Sinclair which attracted a ‘surprisingly small’ audience. A backing tape composed by David J and Tim Perkins played in the background. Perkins didn’t attend, but ‘David J mimed, mummed and performed enigmatic symbols at the stage periphery – Ariel to Alan’s Prospero’. Melinda Gebbie provided the voice of an angel. Moore left the stage to applause from the audience, then circulated to gauge reaction, which was positive.

  A transcript was published in the fanzine Frontal Lobe, and the lyrics for a number of the songs appeared over the next few years in Negative Burn. Shortly afterwards, Moore rerecorded his part in a studio and it was mixed with the existing backing tapes by David J and Perkins for eventual release on CD (2001). A photograph taken during rehearsal that apparently showed a spectral figure standing behind David J, beaming energy or ectoplasm at Moore, was published in Fortean Times, alongside the Rapid Eye interview and on the CD sleeve.

  A little dissatisfied
with that first ‘working’ and painfully aware he was finding it difficult to describe his experiences, Moore ‘switched to a more analytical mode’ and began to assemble a large library of books about magic and the history of the occult, as well as grimoires and artefacts of magical significance.

  But does he really believe that Glycon and Asmodeus exist? Inarguably, we have to accept that they exist inside Alan Moore’s head. And once we’ve accepted that, we can move on to the meat of his argument: psychogeography and veneration of Glycon are methods Moore uses to explore Ideaspace.

  When he first started his research, Moore had been surprised to discover that there wasn’t ‘much of a theory to make sense of any sort of consciousness’. Moore is committed to the scientific worldview. He believes that magicians and occultists have tended to make a fundamental mistake in seeing magic as a rival scientific system with strict ‘laws’. Magic, for Moore, is an art, albeit a ‘meta-art’ akin to psychology or linguistics, and, in his view, virtually all great art has been created by artists with magical beliefs of one kind or another. Science, however, has at least one serious limitation: it ‘cannot discuss or explore consciousness itself, since scientific reality is based entirely upon empirical phenomena’, and so ‘if I wanted a working model of consciousness that would be of any use to me personally or professionally, it became clear that I’d have to build it myself’.

  The entire middle section of Promethea is an extended journey into Ideaspace – called the Immateria in the comic – the ‘magical realm’. The series is essentially a lyceum lecture in which Moore reports on some of the places he’s explored. In #11 (December 2000), the title character’s words can easily be imagined as an echo of Moore’s own thoughts back in the early nineties: ‘I feel a need to take a long journey soon, to find someone. A journey into magic. I’ve read a lot of books, I understand the ideas intellectually, I suppose, but I don’t really feel them … I need to understand it from inside.’ Promethea carries a staff, a twin-snake-headed caduceus (Moore had taken to carrying a walking cane topped with a carved snakehead). The snakes start to talk to her. They are Mack and Mike (short for ‘macro’ and ‘micro’), and she consistently fails to tell them apart. They talk in rhyme, and paint a picture that Moore’s regular readers would recognise from ‘The Hair of the Snake That Bit Me’:

  to enter magic, in a sense,

  means entering our intelligence.

  That record-breaking smash-hit show,

  the theatre of what we know,

  where thoughts parade in fancy dress

  upon the stage of consciousness

  The next issue, Promethea #12 (February 2001) is one of the most extraordinary entries in Moore’s canon. It is a survey of how the history of the universe is underpinned by magic, with an emphasis on the development of human culture. Each page is a variation of the same ornate single panel and each depicts Promethea considering a different Tarot card, each card being drawn as a cartoon character. Mack and Mike give their interpretation of the cards, still talking in rhyme. Scrabble tiles spell out apt anagrams of the word ‘Promethea’ (so the chapter as a whole is called ‘Metaphore’, and on the page where sex is discovered, the tiles read ‘Me Atop Her’). Running along the bottom of the pages, Aleister Crowley takes the whole issue to tell a joke, while we see him age from embryo to skeleton. There are recurring design elements, including a chessboard pattern across the top of each page and a cartoon devil and angel that appear on alternate pages. Moore is never afraid to make it clear how clever he’s being, or of deploying puns. At one point, Promethea is overwhelmed by the mass of information, and in her confusion comments on the joke Crowley is recounting instead of the Tarot card: ‘“railway carriage”, are you sure that’s part of this train of thought?’ – I’m sorry, I’m having trouble keeping the different threads separate. I’m not even sure which of you two is which.’ The snakes on her staff inform her (and us), ‘it’s like a fugue, you have a choice of following a single voice, or letting each strand grow less clear, the music of the whole to hear’.

  Subsequent issues are equally elaborate. As comics critic Douglas Wolk notes, Moore was clearly ‘emboldened by the fact that Williams and Gray’s hands hadn’t strangled him’.

  Moore interprets the universe as a four-dimensional solid containing past, present and future which we explore using our consciousness. Within our heads, we have an individual mental landscape – Ideaspace – that fits together associatively. An example Moore is fond of giving is that Land’s End and John O’Groats are close together in Ideaspace – they are conceptually close precisely because they’re proverbially far apart. Ideaspace is organised into areas governed by certain principles, such as Judgement. The first explorers to discover the ‘shifting contours’ of Ideaspace were shamans, who used hallucinogenic drugs to enter the realm of the imagination and so were able to guide the rest of early humankind. This tradition has continued and developed; in more recent times occultists have drawn up maps like the Tarot and Qabalah which, if used correctly, can function as allegories for the entire possible range of human experience. Moore believes magic is central to art, indeed that language itself was originally a system of signs and symbols designed to explain what the shamans were encountering.

  Some of these symbols frequently recur. The Serpent is one: the ‘lifesnake’, Will, male principle, or phallus – the ‘snake energy’ known to many of the world’s belief systems in the form of snake gods (including Glycon). This symbol is often associated with gold, and is ultimately a representation of the double helix of DNA. Another symbol is the Moon: the imagination, dreams, the feminine principle, often personified as a goddess (like Selene), and associated with silver. The dream world, the underworld and the land of the dead are all the same place, and governed by the Moon. The joining of the male and female principle – will and imagination – is the origin of creativity. Sex is a metaphor/avatar/example of this. The interplay between life and imagination originates the Theatre of Marvels: the universe.

  Moore’s personal experiences have led him to believe his Ideaspace is connected to that of others, so it may be something like Jung’s collective unconscious. Ideaspace is not neutral or inert, there are clear indications it has awareness, an agenda, and a sense of humour. The gods live in Ideaspace, Ideaspace is contained within our minds, so we all contain gods. Angels are our highest drive, devils our lowest impulses. ‘There are angels in you.’

  Moore makes no secret of the fact that his worldview is a synthesis of his research and experience. In Promethea #10 (October 2000), Sophie is given a pile of books to read before her entry into the Immateria (‘Crowley’s Magick Without Tears and 777, plus some other stuff. Eliphas Levi’). Broadly speaking, he is offering a reinterpretation of Crowley’s cosmology, with reference to author and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, and artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare. This is counterbalanced by insights gleaned from a voracious reading of books about quantum physics, genetics, mathematics and computer science by writers like Rudy Rucker, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. The conclusion of the Moon and Serpent performance is almost a direct quotation from Joseph Campbell, who asserted (via Jung), ‘All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other.’ It’s clear from Moon and Serpent that the basics of this belief system had been worked out/revealed to Moore in his first few months as a magician. That said, he has also picked up new ideas along the way. As he wrote in one essay, ‘The Serpent and the Sword’, the idea that snake symbolism in mythology represents DNA came from The Cosmic Serpent, by the anthropologist Jeremy Narby (first published in English in 1998). Moreover, he accepts Narby’s theory that DNA stores information, and believes some DNA – possibly so-called ‘junk DNA’ – acts as a
storehouse of ancestral knowledge which can be accessed using ritual.

  Although Moore might have claimed that his initiation into magic represented (my emphasis) ‘a major sea change. It has opened up different sorts of perceptions. I still have access to all my old perceptions, but I have a range of new ones now as well,’ it’s hard to find anything truly new in his work after his encounter with Glycon. Moore’s Road to Damascus moment didn’t lead to a radical rethink. He did not wake up the next morning, embrace the material, shave off his hair and decide to see the world. Everything that followed can be seen as an extension of his previous beliefs and concerns. His narrative techniques remain similar. The grand survey of human history we see in Promethea is reminiscent of V’s televised address or The Mirror of Love. He’s still telling stories full of symmetries and creating comic strips where the last panel leads neatly back to the first, he’s still making heavy use of puns and similar wordplay, and his writing still has the same distinctive rhythm, what Douglas Wolk called ‘an iambic gallop: da-dum, da-dum, da-dum’. For that matter, the tone of ‘Fossil Angels’, a 2002 essay exhorting existing magicians and followers of the occult to abandon their twee clichés, is very similar to the articles he wrote in the early eighties bemoaning the laziness of comics creators who still relied on Stan Lee’s template. Once again, he sees untapped potential in the medium, held back by nostalgia and by unimaginative people who’ve forgotten the original, primal power of the stories modern practitioners merely ape.

  The message he drew from contact with higher powers wasn’t quite ‘steady as she goes’, but it did act as a reaffirmation of his existing beliefs, giving him new energy to pursue the themes he was already exploring.