There are also very similar concepts present in his earlier work. Promethea’s Immateria, a glittering web of interconnected life and shared consciousness, strongly resembles depictions of ‘the Green’ in Swamp Thing, both in terms of their conception and in the way Moore represents them on the page. And in Snakes and Ladders, Moore wrote of a second encounter with John Constantine: ‘Years later, in another place, he steps out of the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: “I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.”’ Moore clarified in the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore that this encounter took place during a magic ritual; he either hasn’t noticed, or has chosen not to draw attention to, a scene from the beginning of Book Two of The Ballad of Halo Jones, written fifteen years before, around the time he created Constantine. In it, we learn details of Halo Jones’ epic journey out into the universe (some of which foreshadow events beyond the end of the published series) – ‘she saw places that aren’t even there any more!’ And we learn her most memorable quotation: ‘Anybody could have done it’.
There’s more. When Moore says, ‘I think that if magic is anything, it’s about realising the unbelievable supernatural magic’ – those words being spoken in a stage whisper – ‘is in just the fact that we are thinking and having this conversation. Realising just how magical every instant is, every drawn breath, every thought. Just how astronomical the odds are against it. How wonderful. And following through these kinds of beautiful chains of symbols that can lead to some interesting revelations,’ it’s hard not to hear an echo of Dr Manhattan:
thermodynamic miracles … events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son, that exact daughter … until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold … that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle…. but the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget … I forget. We gaze continually in the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
Moreover, Moore’s observation that ‘if there is truly no linear time as we understand it, then the events that make up the vast hyper-solid of existence can be read with as much validity from back to front as from front to back’, is a lesson Dr Manhattan had already learned. And when he goes on to say ‘our lives are as “true” if we view the film in reverse. In this reading of the world, our inert bodies are dug up from the ground or magically reassembled in the inferno of a crematorium oven’, he is echoing precisely the sequence of events depicted in a 2000AD Future Shock, ‘The Reversible Man’. Back in 1985, he’d even described a method of plotting a story that sounds like Promethea navigating the Immateria: ‘establish your continuum as a four-dimensional shape with length, breadth, depth and time, and then pick out the single thread of narrative that leads you most interestingly and most revealingly through the landscape that you’ve created, whether it be a literal landscape or some more abstract and psychological terrain.’
There is, too, a distinct sense of landscape in Swamp Thing’s Louisiana, and even something psychogeographical in Rorschach’s declaration ‘This city is afraid of me … I have seen its true face.’ But Moore’s ahead of us: ‘One of the perceptions I had bore relevance to my previous work; especially to Watchmen (the Dr Manhattan chapter) and a couple of the time travel stories I wrote for 2000AD. In the burning white heart of the experience, I thought I had a revelation that those stories were premonitions of the state that I exist in now. Time can be seen just as effectively one way as another. The Dr Manhattan material was a “memory” of the state I’m in now in 1994 – a “memory” which persisted until 1985.’
So, what are we to make of all this? It’s paraphrasing only very slightly to say that Alan Moore has consulted the contents of his own head and concluded that everything in our culture, including language and art, arose from bearded shamans who were fond of magic mushrooms and expressed their message in obscure, coded picture writing. Indeed, the world would be a much more chilled place if everyone would just listen to their modern-day equivalents. Oh, and those guys give really great orgasms. Whatever else it is, Moore’s view of the world is inescapably self-indulgent.
Moore the Magus alienates some of his readers, and it’s not fair to dismiss them all as snarky arrested-development types who’d prefer him to be writing Watchmen /Batman crossovers where Rorschach goes after the Joker for crippling Babs Gordon. Douglas Wolk, writing about the stories in Promethea, notes that ‘their ratio of profundity to claptrap varies with the reader’s openness to semi-digested Crowley, and occasionally Moore threatens to sprain an eyelid from winking so hard’, while Moore himself has said that Promethea ‘lost several thousand readers’ over the course of the Immateria sequence, and that people who stuck with it ‘are either dedicated in their resolve, or else have had their cerebral cortex so badly damaged by the last four or five issues that they are no longer capable of formulating a complaint’.
There’s no way of knowing what percentage of his readership think Moore’s beliefs are ‘true’, but when the subject is raised, it’s often framed in terms that presuppose he’s either mad or that even he doesn’t really believe a word of it. While his journey is personal and spiritual, the fact he has made it so public is also clearly, at least in some degree, intended as provocation on Moore’s part. There is a whole spectrum of ways to take all this, and it boils down to the inferences readers make about Moore’s own motives, judgement and psychological state. It involves a decision about where he stands in relation to ‘the truth’, and – as he has been at pains to point out – ‘truth’ is a surprisingly slippery word. It’s natural enough, though, for readers who become aware of Moore’s belief in magic to seek some form of rational explanation.
Moore has been expansive about his magical experiences, practices and beliefs. He has said that ‘what you see is what you get’. Detailed interviews about his magic add little to what you would know if you’d paid attention during Moon and Serpent or Promethea. We don’t have to take him at face value, but if we don’t, then – ironically – we have to enter a personal realm of speculation and imaginative engagement.
There are a number of obvious, dismissive explanations. If you take a hallucinogenic drug, the chances are you will hallucinate. Alan Moore would not be the first person to smoke funny cigarettes with his mates and have an evening where he thought he had discovered the profound secrets of the universe. Moore has admitted this is a possibility (‘bearing in mind that this could be just the product of a lot of psycho-active drugs’, he said in Rapid Eye).
Nor would he be the first public figure to make headlines after a declaration that he had adopted an eccentric spiritual belief system. Moore was horrified in the late nineties that celebrities like Roseanne Barr and Britney Spears were adopting the Qabalah.
There are more cynical interpretations. Is it an act? Well, yes. Moore has never done anything but put his cards on the table when it comes to that question. It’s a ‘theatre of the mind’; it’s all a way for him to practise his art. A more precise question is whether Moore is sincere. Some people have suggested he’s not, that it’s a form of publicity stunt. One of the Image partners, Rob Liefeld, said for example: ‘He once called us up to tell us that he had just been in the dream realm and talking to Socrates and Shakespeare, and to Moses, dead serious, and that they talked for what seemed to be months, but when he woke up, only an evening had passed, and he came up with these great ideas. And I’m tellin’ ya, I think it’
s shtick, dude. I think it’s all shtick. I’m gonna start saying that stuff. Cuz you know what? It makes you instantly interesting. Like “O yeah, last night I was hanging out with Socrates. Came to me in a dream. We played poker. We dropped acid.” That’s the kinda stuff Alan would say all the time.’ Moore laughs off the suggestion that either conversation took place: ‘I’ve never spoken to Rob Liefeld at all in my life … I don’t ever remember ringing the Image office. I have had some conversations with [Image partner] Eric Stephenson, er, but I never had conversations with Socrates, Shakespeare and Moses.’
Moore’s initial declaration, and his explorations of magic, inarguably came at an oddly schizophrenic time in his professional life, when highly personal work that was difficult to pigeonhole had been put on the backburner in favour of the most lightweight material he would ever produce. It’s very tempting to see the magician persona as a reaction against that. It might have been for public consumption, a ploy, to mark him out in a crowded marketplace, or to demonstrate that there was more to Alan Moore than superhero comic hackwork. More insidiously, becoming a magician might have been a way of convincing himself that there was more to him than telling thirty panel stories about demonic clowns.
But such cynical interpretations can be dismissed by noting that, twenty years on, Moore’s still a magician. Drugs wear off. Publicity stunts have very short shelf lives: when Moore started on this path, Madonna was wearing her cone bra; since then she’s engineered dozens of controversies (including her own declaration of interest in the Qabalah). To put things in perspective, Moore has now been a magician five times longer than he wrote for DC. He’s continued to write about magic and continued to practise it. His worldview is clearly elaborate and consistent, not a random outpouring of provocative statements.
Then there’s the most obvious explanation: has Moore just gone a bit mad? It was something that worried him, just as it had worried Steve Moore after his first encounter with Selene. In February 1994, Moore described the process as ‘going completely insane, and at the same time hopefully doing something a little more constructive … if, in five years time, I’m shot full of thorazine and wearing a vest that ties up at the back, then obviously this declaration of magickal intent is going to sound pretty silly.’ He understood how it all sounded: ‘I should imagine that, very reasonably, most would assume that all of this I’ve just spoken of is nothing more than the ramblings of a disintegrating mind, or that it’s just some sort of glorified New Age way of talking about the work that I do, that’s what I would assume if I had heard it.’
When Voice of the Fire was published in 1996, he said again, ‘I continually monitor the possibility that I might be going mad’; reminded of this in 2002 by Times journalist Dominic Wells, he noted, ‘Oh, I’ve gone much madder in the last six years, though my ideas have become more sophisticated. Yes, I was a mere amateur in lunacy then …’ Describing his magical experiences, he’ll say things like ‘I’ll admit to you, this is looked at from an increasingly mad perspective on my part’, and when asked whether the right term for what had happened to him was ‘magical awakening,’ he replied with a laugh, ‘That’ll do. “Mental breakdown” will do if you want. It’s all the same to me.’
As far as Moore was concerned at the time, though, magic had actually helped him psychologically, allowing him to reconcile the various roles he found himself in. ‘I couldn’t think of another system which would get all of my various energies running in the same direction … It struck me that, as an individual, I had too many components in my life that weren’t unified.’ Three years later, he was able to say: ‘These days, after a great deal of hard work, I have refined the Hydra down to one head. I’m Alan Moore when I’m talking to my daughters, or to my eighty-nine -year-old aunt, or to my readers, or to myself.’
And as so often in Moore’s life, it needs to be stressed that however weird or exceptional what he’s doing looks, he’s rarely the first or only person in his circle doing it. Steve Moore, his best friend, had been in personal contact with a divine being years before Alan encountered Glycon. Researching From Hell led Moore to take a fresh look at William Blake, a self-publisher who merged pictures and words and told of ‘demigods with grandiose and punning names that can be viewed as having much in common with … Jack Kirby’, while H.P. Lovecraft was in Moore’s view ‘a visionary – a prophet. He was an American William Blake.’ Moore is aware that science fiction author Philip K. Dick had very similar transcendental experiences to his own, involving ancient Rome, time as a solid state and Asclepius, and that Dick was trying to articulate those experiences in his later work while seeing his earlier efforts as containing ‘pre-echoes’ of subsequent revelations. Golden Age Superman and Batman writer Alvin Schwartz believed he had repeated encounters with a tulpa, or spirit form, of Superman.
It’s equally possible that Moore was looking even closer to home, and was envious of his fellow comic book creator Dave Sim, whose sprawling Cerebus the Aardvark project started at roughly the same time as Roscoe Moscow and in much the same vein of crude parody. After Sim had a transcendental religious experience during a drug trip, however, it mutated beyond all recognition into a 300-issue single narrative that took a quarter of a century to create and served as a map of every one of Sim’s idiosyncratic beliefs, prejudices and preoccupations. According to Moore: ‘Cerebus, as if I need to say so, is still to comic books what hydrogen is to the periodic table.’ Rather than thinking it made him unique, or even peculiar, Moore may well have sought out divine help to make his work more personal, subsume his art into his mystical beliefs, because … well, that was the standard career path of so many of the artists he admires.
Moore’s personal and professional lives are in radically different places to where they were twenty years ago. His magical experiences have had a permanent effect on him. It is clearly something he takes profoundly seriously. His friends and family have consistently told us that he believes what he says; in fact, you sense a little to his chagrin, they were completely relaxed about his new calling:
My mother listened to the first Moon and Serpent CD and that seemed to really affect her. She was saying ‘Ooh, I could have gone’. Gone into the music, something like that, gone into the words. The odd thing was that when I announced I was a magician, it didn’t faze my family at all. My mother really, really liked the picture of Glycon I gave her. And my devoutly Christian Aunt Hilda, her sister, who had a little shrine of religious items in the corner of her living room, she asked if she could have a copy to put on her shrine … I think they recognised that this was something benign. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t want a copy of the Asmodeus picture in the house.
Reading interviews with him, seeing his new work, it’s clear he’s sticking to his story.
In the end, Moore came up with a simple test: did practising magic have ‘demonstrable utility’, did it make him a better writer? Tim Perkins, who has worked with Moore on many of his recent musical endeavours, describes the magical practices as ‘off-the-wall concepts to get your fat arse down the brain-gym’. Likewise, Moore believes magic gave him ‘a new set of eyes to look at this planet through’. He has concluded that ‘as long as the results are good, as long as the work that I’m turning out either maintains my previous levels of quality or, as I think is the case with a couple of those magical performances, actually exceeds those limits, then I’m not really complaining.’
Moore’s ‘Watchmen II’ phase in the early nineties had almost been sunk by highly personal, immersive projects which required him to bite off more than even he could chew. He could toss off scripts for Spawn, but no one could possibly have thought his heart was in it. His options seemed limited either to complex work that would never be finished or commercial work which held little personal interest. Moore had needed something to get him out of the rut, to introduce more vitality into his work, and in 1996 he was given the opportunity to put his new methods into action.
Rob Liefeld, one of the foundin
g partners of Image, asked Moore to take over as writer on Supreme, a series featuring an ‘edgy’ Superman-style character who killed his opponents and was generally something of a bully. Moore was not terribly impressed with the core concept and when he took over Supreme with #41 (August 1996), he retasked Thunderman, one of the many ideas he’d had while brainstorming 1963. Moore wanted to tell Superman-type stories set in the present day, but also include flashbacks to earlier adventures that would pastiche the carefree comics of the Silver Age. But, where 1963 had played the parody so straight that many readers hadn’t spotted the joke, Supreme was framed in such a way that readers couldn’t avoid seeing Moore winking at them.
Although sales rose, they didn’t shoot up, but Moore’s Supreme was an instant critical success, jointly winning the Eisner Award with From Hell in 1997 (Moore had won in both 1995 and 1996 on the strength of From Hell alone). He would ‘have a lot of fun’ working on Supreme and clearly found it rather therapeutic. He was even able to link it to his new worldview. ‘I could parody the various ills of the comic industry and I could play with wonderful ideas, you know? Which was always the thing that Superman represented to me as a child … wonderful ideas, ideas that to me at that age were certainly magical. Where, to me, they provided a key to the world of my own imagination.’
In one of the later issues, Supreme: The Return #6 (published June 2000, written two years before), Moore steered Supreme to a strange realm populated by a diverse set of characters who look remarkably like those created by Jack ‘the King’ Kirby. The comics legend had died in February 1994 and by way of tribute Moore had Supreme meet the ruler of the realm, the Monarch – Kirby himself:
MONARCH:
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 35