“The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.”
― Alan Moore, From Hell
Alan Moore is often described as the greatest British comic book writer of all time. His works, including Watchmen, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have expanded the boundaries of the genre, while inspiring a number of disappointing film adaptations. But his dissatisfaction with the predatory and immature industry has led him to turn his attention to prose instead. After two decades passed between his first novel, The Voice of the Fire (1996) and his second, Jerusalem (2016), his latest two works have just been published weeks apart. While Jerusalem was an expansive modernist masterpiece (and one of the longest novels published in English), The Great When is a highly readable (and surprisingly short) thriller set in 1940s London, and the first of a projected series called Long London. In The Great When, the central character finds himself entering a higher, eternal version of London, in which reality is mutable, ideas can move around as beings, and the great events, people and places of London all exist simultaneously.
However, I’m going to focus here on his second new book, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, cowritten with Steve Moore. Rather than a novel, The Bumper Book of Magic is a compendium of essays, comic strips and allsorts about the magical arts, presented in the style of the annuals that pre-internet children will remember receiving at Christmastime. Not the card tricks and rabbits out of hats type of magic, however, but the kind associated with occultism and paganism. Because Moore is arguably also our most famous magician – certainly the only one to have appeared on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.
Moore was introduced to magic by his co-author, who passed away suddenly at a relatively early stage in its composition. On his 50th birthday, Alan Moore began to practice in earnest, and in the years since he has developed an innovative and modern idea of what constitutes magic, which has informed all his published work since.
Although, as Moore himself writes, we can trace the history of magic back to the earliest evidence we have of human societies (such as the “Dancing Sorcerer”, above), today’s ideas about magic can largely be traced to the mid- to late-nineteenth century, in a movement that is sometimes called the “Victorian Occult Revival”. It was a synthesis of a number of older European esoteric traditions including Christian mysticism, Rosicrucianism, esoteric forms of freemasonry (particularly in continental Europe) and kabbalism, an eclectic tradition mixing Jewish mysticism with Neoplatonic ideas. Figures including French writer Éliphas Lévi, Helena Blavatsky, Samuel McGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley combined and systematised these, adding ideas from places like Egypt, India and China, whose own esoteric and religious traditions were being (re)discovered through translations that were becoming available to wealthier European audiences.
They also added more modern ideas, including scientific methodologies, evolution and particularly Freudian psychological concepts. For many in this milieu, the beings of medieval magic were perhaps best understood as aspects of our own psyche – although often with a Jungian twist that on a certain level, our own psyche was connected to a larger group psyche, or “collective unconscious”. Both Blavatsky and Crowley were explicit that these higher levels and the beings who abide there were explorable using scientific methods. Crowley’s journal, The Equinox, declared on its frontispiece, “the aim of religion, the method of science” (see image). As such, whilst portraying magic as an ancient tradition, all of these figures were actually presenting a brand-new synthesis, incorporating modern ideas as to what was meant by these ancient techniques.
The Victorian occult revival burned out in the early years of the 20th century, and it wasn’t until the emergence of the New Age movement in the late 60s and early 70s that these ideas became popular in the counterculture again. These were very different times however, and a new interpretation of magic emerged that represented the zeitgeist better. “Chaos Magic” in some ways echoed the DIY aesthetic of the punk movement, stripping the ceremonial trappings of Victorian magic away to focus on the practical applications. Much of it however was elaborations of techniques from people influenced by Crowley, for example, the use of sigils developed by Austin Osman Spare, small, improvised glyphs which encoded statements of your will in a graphical format, as well as expanding the idea of invoking gods and demons to invoking figures from fiction popular culture such as the Elder Gods of HP Lovecraft’s fiction, as pioneered by Kenneth Grant. However, it abandoned the psychological explanations of magic in favor of one which drew from the emerging cyberculture of the 1980s (which itself was in some ways a development of the New Age movement) to talk of reprogramming the Source Code of reality, or hacking ones’ own consciousness.
But while Alan Moore is the right age for chaos magic, his interpretation of magic is distinct. For Moore, magic is simply language. To be a magician is to use language (in its broadest sense) to change the world, and to change your experience of it. Magicians, as he points out, casting spells with magic words, are literally spelling. Their grimoires are grammars, used to perform works of (the great) art. In performing incantations and rituals, the magician accumulates symbols that evoke particular ideas, states of mind or ways of seeing the world, as the sorcerer may evoke the gods. In Moore’s model, the collective unconsciousness is the world of ideas, and rather than a byproduct of the physical world, Moore puts it the other way around, with our physical world deriving from the world of ideas. For example, whilst every child recognizes the archetype of a chair or an apple, we will never encounter that exact chair or apple in reality, and yet it existed before us and existed after us and all the earthly versions are but a flawed copy of it. You could say the same about a fictional character like Superman who has been written by so many different people and in so many different ways that it no longer relies on any individual imagination. Moore would go further and argue that ideas like Superman, Azrael or Kali have gained such a complex and consistent set of associations that they actually have an independent existence.
I am struck by the similarity of Moore’s model to the post-structuralist paradigm, or “critical turn” of twenty-first century scholarship, in which concepts like race, gender or even religion are seen as constructed more of language than of matter. Race may exist entirely in language, but the discrimination it produces affects physical bodies nevertheless. Alas, a blog post like this doesn’t give me the space to explore that similarity fully, nor to elaborate on these different understandings of magic.
Instead, I’ll close with a reminder that when we talk about traditions, we often forget that those traditions themselves have a history of interpretation. There can hardly be an idea older than that of magic, and yet we see that even over the last 150 years or so, there have been at least three major interpretations of this ancient tradition, each of which reflects the dominant paradigm of the time. Ancient traditions, even those which may seem to challenge or subvert modernity, are themselves to some degree reflections of the modern world. But one thing that is constant is that we always have the choice to use different words.
(The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic can be bought here, but if you’re interested in learning more about Moore’s ideas on magic for free, you might start with this interview from Arthur Magazine, or this one from Sequart.)