Many readers of Alan Moore—the prolific and influential author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Jerusalem, and, most recently, The Great When—are enchanted by the magic of his creative vision. For his next trick, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, Moore would like you to come away with a respect for, and perhaps even a belief in, magic itself.
The 400+ page grimoire, coauthored with the late Steve Moore (no relation) and published by IDW’s Top Shelf Productions imprint, combines a lively and accessible history of ritual magic, practical guidance on how and why to use such techniques as tantra and Tarot, and amusing summaries of the lives of magical practitioners through the years—from Hermes Trismegistus to Alistair Crowley—done as single-page comics. Moore spoke with PW via email about the Bumper Book, magic, superheroes, and more.
You've spent much of your career embroidering the mythology of superheroes in a medium that wondrously combines words and pictures, while also taking a serious and scholarly interest in ritual magic. Do you see those interests as related? If so, how?
My association with superheroes, after starting my career with a few years of humor and science fiction, is largely born of working in the American comics field of the early 1980s, where such characters seemed mandatory; of having a useful prior knowledge of American superhero comics from the age of around five or six to the age of around sixteen; and of it turning out that, arguably, I wrote that genre with more force and purpose than anyone else.
In actuality, I have no special affinity for superheroes and, indeed, over the last fifteen or so years, have come to see them as a kind of spandex blight afflicting our culture, our societies, and even our politics. So, no, I don’t think there’s any meaningful connection between Dr. Strange and Dr. Dee.
On the matter of the comic strip medium and its possible links to occult consciousness, however, I think there’s a much stronger case to be made: I believe it was during the 1980s that a Pentagon study concluded that the comic strip medium’s combination of pictures and words in sequence was the most efficient way of passing on complex information in a way that was likely to be retained. Unsurprised, but wondering why this might be, it occurred to me that the image, being preverbal, is the prevailing unit of currency in what used to be called our right brain, while the word is the prevailing currency of what used to be called our left brain. Might it be that the way we read comic strips engages these two “halves” of our brain on the same task, both at once?
In the Bumper Book, we propose that it was representational markings, or imagery, that gave us the key to written language, which in turn provided the key to modern consciousness, which our gradually dawning minds interpreted as magic. I suggest that the comic strip form, used correctly, can be a near-perfect medium for transmitting magical ideas, a bit like the poetic “language of the birds” that the alchemists construed as the ideal way to communicate concepts pertaining to alchemy. After all, our earliest cave-wall comic strips were probably intended magically.
Historically and even today, most people's conception of magic involves invoking supernatural forces to affect the outside world, and people typically either believe in it credulously or dismiss it as mumbo-jumbo. In The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, you make clear that the purpose and effect of these belief systems has mainly been to transform our inner selves and perceptions. How and why do you think these two distinct ideas got so muddled throughout history? Does magic have a PR problem?
If magic remains misunderstood, then that can only be due to the failure of magicians in their efforts to explain it. Admittedly, it’s only been in relatively recent centuries that practitioners could talk about magic without being tortured and incinerated, but since Francis Barrett published his first publicly available grimoire, The Magus, in 1801, that excuse hasn’t really held water. Later occultists, including some very knowledgeable ones, have perhaps been more interested in their personal image that in genuinely extending humanity’s understanding of what magic is and isn’t, what it can and can’t do. The magicians of the Golden Dawn seemed more concerned about their order’s elitist Rosicrucian trappings—robes and grades and rituals—than they were with magical enlightenment.
Golden Dawn renegade Aleister Crowley, though possibly the greatest occult scholar and theorist of the modern era, was ruinously obsessed with his own tabloid image as “the wickedest man in the world,” to the great detriment of his own reputation and also to that of magic. And, after Crowley, we have seen his name and ideas used as a kind of Gothic fashion accessory by rock stars, directors, or, perhaps especially, by people trying to shore up a dull self-image with a whiff of sex, sorcery, and sinister glamour.
Amidst all this, we felt that any real human importance or social use for magic was being lost in a sea of either fatuous make-believe or Master of the Dark Arts theatrics. So, with the Bumper Book, we wanted to present what we hope are lucid, coherent and joined-up ideas on how and why the concept of magic originated and developed over the millennia, a theoretical basis for how it might conceivably work along with suggestions as to how it might practically be employed—and, perhaps most radically, a social reason for magic’s existence as a means of transforming and improving both our individual worlds, and the greater human world of which we are components. And we wanted to deliver this in a way that reflected the colorful, psychedelic, profound and sometimes very funny nature of the magical experience itself. That, we felt, would be the biggest and most useful rabbit to pull out of the near-infinite top hat that we believe magic to be.
To what extent do you employ the techniques of ritual magic described in the book for your own creative or practical pursuits? Are any of your well known works the product of these techniques?
Since late 1993, my entire worldview and the work that proceeds from it have been increasingly influenced and colored by magic but, that said, relatively little work has arisen from formal magic ritual—which is, anyway, something that I’ve done hardly any of this century, nor have felt the need to, having thoroughly internalized magical ideas to a point where ritual seems redundant.
Works that were directly inspired by specific rituals, with the ritual enacted to inspire the work, would include the first and second Moon & Serpent performances/CD releases, up to The Birth Caul, and also the final William Blake piece, Angel Passage, for which on the altar we had petals found in his christening font at St. James’s Church, and also windfall figs from his and his wife Catherine’s grave in Bunhill Fields.
In terms of my comic book work, I can only think of a single issue that derived directly from a magical working, this being the 32nd and final issue of my since-disowned Promethea series. Immediately after quite a startling magical exercise with my partner in magic Steve Moore, I was visited by the overpowering idea that the Promethea series would end with issue 32, for numerological reasons, and that this issue would contain 32 pages that could somehow be transformed from a linear page-by-page narrative to a double-sided psychedelic poster portraying the central character.
This instruction, which I never questioned, was probably delivered a year or more before that issue would be published. When that time was looming, I sat down with Steve to work out how I could do it, and we found to my dismay that it seemed flatly impossible. Nevertheless, I treated the idea as a direct instruction from the gods or from magic itself, and thus assumed I would not have been given the task if it couldn’t be done.
With this in mind, I persevered and eventually came up with the filigree of narrative figures against a psychedelic pointillist backdrop, coupled with multivalent dialogue balloons, which seemed to do the trick. My point with recounting this is that I see it as a very novel storytelling device which I don’t think could have been arrived at by anyone without a belief in the magical. This, I think, demonstrates that the magical mindset can be hugely beneficial, irrespective of whether the gods, demons, or spirits actually exist.
Talk about your relationship with Steve Moore and your collaboration on this book. How did the two of you influence each other, both throughout your careers and in the making of this final work?
I think throughout my relationship with Steve, I was dazzled by his precise and careful intellect, and he was impressed by my reckless and frankly messy energy. We were wildly dissimilar in so many ways, and I think that each of us found a complement in the other.
With the Bumper Book, I think we worked seamlessly, despite neither of us having directly collaborated with another writer before. We decided early on that I’d do all the actual writing in the book, in order to keep the prose style vaguely consistent, but only after lengthy consultation with Steve, who would also be digging out the necessary research details from his extensive occult and classical library.
When collaborating on our “Lives of the Great Enchanters” [sections], this consultation would sometimes be phrase by phrase, with Steve pointing out that this or that claim was historically unsafe, or at least not conclusively proven, and would require amended wording. We had already worked through several drafts of the book’s concluding essay, with a final session to go, when Steve unexpectedly—and quite eerily—split this drag scene in the March of 2014.
I hope he would have approved of my final version, the only thing in the book in there without his say-so, but I have no doubt that he’d have loved the book as an artifact: it’s every bit the beautiful compendium of useful ideas that we envisioned during those final excited conversations, more than ten years ago. My proof copy, incidentally, was delivered one day before the tenth anniversary of Steve’s departure for a better life on the moon, which seemed appropriate.
Why were you so selective in your use of graphic storytelling in this book, using it mainly for the (often amusing) capsule histories of “mages through the ages,” especially if you believe it will be your final work in the medium?
You have to remember that we conceived of the Bumper Book as a grimoire first, and only decided how the various parts of it would be presented later. Some sections seemed to work best as illustrated text essays, but some of them seemed to call out for a comic-strip realization, such as Steve Parkhouse’s necessarily wordless “In the Morning of the Mind,” which opens the book.
This mixture of text and comic strip features, along with a light smattering of puzzle-pages and do-it-yourself temples, also served to mimic the archaic British children’s annual feel that we were seeking. Ben Wickey’s amazing ‘Great Enchanters’ pages could have come from one of those improving boys’ weekly papers like Look & Learn, while the late, great Kevin O’Neill’s scurrilous “Adventures of Alexander” is from the more working-class tradition of weekly comics like the Beano or Dandy. I should point out, though, that the Bumper Book isn’t and was never intended to be my final work in comics.
My final work in comics, completed in 2018, was the fourth and last volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neill. I’d finished writing all of the Bumper Book’s comic strip material by the spring of 2014, and the whole book by 2015—it’s just taken us ten years to find all the artists and for them to complete the work to such a spectacularly high standard.
There may also be other comic book work out there, as yet unpublished, but volume four of The League was my last comic strip work, and was also, I think, a fond and comprehensive farewell to the medium. The Bumper Book, commenced around 2007, was always seen as a beautiful and accessible grimoire that happened to contain some comic strip material. It was intended purely as a statement about magic, rather than as a statement about comics.
In your earlier work, you clearly visualized how fascism and systems of control could gain traction in societies like the U.K. and U.S. through manipulation of media, technology and psychology. Looking at the state of the world today, are you concerned at how closely you anticipated current developments? Is this book intended to be, in some ways, a manual for escaping the mental prisons of modern, control-oriented society?
I’ve often been asked, by those close to me, why I can’t write presciently about something nice, but I don’t think V for Very Tolerant and Progressive Society would have been anywhere near as commercial. Actually, I don’t make any great claims for my prophetic abilities, particularly in politics, where our current situation has surely been visible on the horizon for decades: a slow train coming, crammed with clowns and decked in swastikas.
But, then, there have been periods every bit as bleak and oppressive throughout our history, and I’ve heard it suggested that it is precisely when the exterior world becomes near unbearable that people are practically forced to discover and make use of their interior landscapes.
In this sense, the Bumper Book is certainly intended as a means to unlock the freedoms of the mind, wherever or whenever the freedoms of the flesh and of the street are being locked down. Just as with the age-old purpose of magic itself, our book is meant as an irresistible and sumptuously decorated mental cake, that has a mental file concealed inside it. This might prove useful for sawing through what William Blake called “mind-forged manacles” two hundred years ago, which are clearly still around today, although these days they’re perhaps more often forged on social media.
