Alan OOre Interviewed | byEddie 2 os ampbell (G Inall of the countries around the world where I have shown, my face in the last couple of years promoting From Hell, { Thave found that the three questions most frequently asked of me are: a) Where do you get your ideas? b) How long does it take me to draw a page? and ) How mad is Alan Moore? Ttella lie; the third usually takes the form of ‘What's itlike working with Alan Moore?” but I know what they really want to hear is one of those anecdotes that make him appear windswept and interesting and just a little eccentric. So perhaps Ill tell them about how Alan's speed of production tends to trail off towards the end of a project so that the artist is receiving the pages one at a time (Dave Gibbons once told me that by the end of Watchmen, in those pre-fax days, they'd artivein ones and twos on the passenger seat of a taxi, all the way from Northampton to St. Albans). Thus, in Chapter Ten of From Hell where Dr. Gull is cutting up Marie Kelly, I was getting the pages one at a time by fax. Alan was sitting with all the forensic reports and diagrams of wherethe body parts were situated and therecameapoint where he realised he had made Gull put the right breast on the bedside table when it really should have been on the bed near the victim's foot, By the time of this realisation, Thad not only drawn it but had drawn several pages pastit, Ie would have been a pain in the arse to redraw a page and it would have spoiled the exquisite pacing o go back and fitan extra one in, Alan's solution was to have Gull rub his chin while looking at the breast, realising it was in the wrong place, and then simply move it In answer to the first query I always refer the reader to Mr. Moore's concept of Ideaspace (which we will hopefully deal with below), and to the last I have for some time been promising an interview with the grand fellow, which is ! | | where we now find ourselves. —o Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell with Leah and Amber Moore, Brighton 1986, Photo by Anne Campbell 1 first mee the remarkable Mr. Moore in 1982, in a pub named the Westminster Arms, the legendary venue for an implausible number of transactions in the early Eighties British comics scene. It was just after the launch of Warrior ‘magazine; Alan’s short bio in that first issue, written by himself, described him as being ‘a bafiling hybrid beeween Renaissance Man and Piltdown man’ and ended with the line ‘Mr. Moore believes himself co be possessed by the demon Pazuzu.’ IF you had told me then that I would spend more than half of the next twenty years working with him con a colossal project I would nor have believed you, since ‘we were at opposite ends of the comic book continuum, but then it has been a period full of astonishing changes. Eddi i's almost ten years now since you decided to becomea magician in November 1993 and I believe it would be interesting to talk through the salient events of your ‘magical career in chronological order. You once described the initiation as vaccinating yourself with a mild form of mental breakdown so that you'd have sufficient antibodies to fend off the greater madness when it comes. In writing about the idea of a midlife crisis (I juse did it myself in Afver the Snooter), we like to imagine that we can arrange everything around a single event. Is this merely a literary conceit? Elsewhere you have said that magic seemed to be what was waiting at the end of the path of writing, and chat art and magic are synonymous, in other words a seamless progress. You had previously created at east two characters that were steeped in magic wich John Constantine and William Gull. Alan: Although in some ways it's accurate to say that involving yourself with magic is a litele like inoculation taking an interest in some of the outer reaches of human sanity before those reaches decide to taken an interest in you... I think chat my early description of magic as an alternative to the less colourful mid-life crisis was probably meant self-deprecatingly, as a way of softening the insane pomposity of declaring oneself to be a master of the mystic arts, Similarly, declaring it on my fortiech birthday was fairly coincidental, but played nicely into the “mid-life crisis” line, (Like you, I tend to think that its absurd to structure anything as big and profound as one’ life around vague psycho-analytical concepts such as the “mid-life crisis”. As Victoria Wood once remarked: ‘In our day we'd just turn the wireless up and get on with it’) It’s difficult to outline what actually led me into magic, as all of the reasons I've given are sort of true in their way. A concise description of my magical trajectory would probably be as follows: the first book I ever chose for myself at the local library, aged five, was something entitled The Magic Island. Even though at the time I still pronounced the word with a hard G, I already knew that the word, magic, was my favourite word and that its presence signalled the kind of story thar I would like, I went on to read fairy stories and junior versions of the Classic, Arthurian and Norse myths and legends, for their fantastical or magical content, and then went on to read American superhero comics for precisely the same reason, Around this time I used to dream prolifically, and gods and other supernatural beings would turn up frequently in my dreams. This was probably because of how much waking.A recent sketch of William Gull by me. time I'd spend thinking about them, although if 'm in the right magical frame of mind and happen to be choosing to believe such a thing at the time, it can sometimes look like evidence of an early calling. Eventually, around my teen years, my love of fantasy elements in my reading material probably was overtaken (although never entirely replaced) by my growing fascination with the actual craft of writing and with the work of various writers who were increasingly not the kind of authors that were generally considered as ‘manufacturers of science fiction or fantasy. This eventually Jed to my becoming a writer, funnily enough during one of my sporadic phases of vague interest in the occult, primarily as background reference for fantasy stories. I was trying to learn the Tarot deck at the time and was still stuck on card zero, the Fool, when I made my at the time foolish leap from steady employment to fieelance cartooning. I abandoned my passing flirtation with occult material after thacbecause I was too busy surviving, but from time to time over the following years it would surface again, notably in my attempts to create a working class wide boy wizard for Swamp Thingin the person of John Constantine (who owes more than a nod to your own Dapper John, by the way). As my life as a writer continued, I searted to notice odd little coincidental connections between my art and my life, but tended tofile these away ina mental drawera itlikea Ripley’ Believe It Or Not Odditorium full of imponderable oddities, small synchronicities, half memories from childhood and the like. Approaching forty, this particular drawer was starting to get pretty full, to the point of overflowing, and Twas also starting to become more and more fascinated by the big taboo question of creativity, which also leads on to the big taboo question of consciousness, namely, “What is ic and how does ic work?” And also, of course, ‘How can I profit from it, move to Peterborough and live like a king?’ Both these issues seemed to me to be pointing to resolutions that were beyond the boundaries of linear and rational thinking, a territory chat I came to label, at least for my own purposes, as Magic. I think the final straw came£0, not 1e Gods: fhe Gods; Desprie thew" fon‘ existence Jf. in materia ers, theyre 0 e3s potent Mo less fernile during Chapter... Four, was it?... of From Hell, where Gull and Netley are enjoying a nice slice of steak and kidney pie in Earls Court and Gull delivers his line about the one abl of the human mind ‘where they are real in place where Gods inarguably exist being within the reaches Il their grandeur and monstrosity’ or somesuch. Having written that and been unable to find an angle from which it wasn't true I was forced to cither ignore its implications or change most of my thinking to fit around this new information, The one place Gods inarguap, exist iqvour finds where they are real beyand LN vile, oad fe] otandevr and N Menstros Gull and Netley are enjoying a nice slice of steak and kidney pie Choosing the la 1, decided on the occasion of my fortieth birthday, which was approaching, to formally announce my entry into this new territory. Having become more familiar with magic, I evencually learned that magic was what Aleister Crowley referred to as ‘a discase of language’ and came to understand that magic is indeed mostly a linguistic phenomenon and was therefore what had been lying at the end of the path beyond mere craft all along, neatly closing the circle with my first copy of The Magic Island. | think that the above is something like the order in which things happened, bu I don't cend ro see things in such linear progressions these days anyway, which makes a chronological accounting something of a problem. Eddies In spite of your hint that my chronological plan, as ‘outlined to you in brief over the phone, does not conform to your current view of the real, I shall proceed with it nevertheless. I thoroughly enjoyed the glee with which you announced yourself ro be a devotee of a glove puppet deity. Do I perceive a certain sleight-of-hand in the assuming of Glycon as your patron, by which all the ridicule that would bly arrive was diverted to a stand-in? When Glycon had absorbed ic all you could then leave the poor animal in quarantine and proceed with your journey. Was this your first magic trick? Alan: I suppose there’s a certain amount of magic trickery... if by that we include attempting to tip people's Alan Moore shinkingconsciousness into new ways of looking at things... in my relationship with Glycon, but probably not in the way that you're suggesting here (Itake it thisis the “cheeky” question you mentioned, you little scamp). For one thing, in ways that ies rather difficult to explain unless it’s happened to you, I have a feeling thar it was actually Glycon who chose ‘me rather than the other way around. Having announced thac I was a magician and being at a subsequent loss to know what magicians were supposed to do or how they were meant to behave, I decided upon a contra-rational approach: 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... thac I should enlist an imaginary playmate as my guide to it. Steve Moore has, for at least fifteen or more years, been a devotee of the possibly pre-Grecian moon goddess Selene, and I found Steve's relationship with the goddess - largely conducted through ritual and dream - to be both interesting and potentially instructive. If one were planning an excursion to the realm of the gods then it would seem only polite and sensible to make their acquaintance beforehand. While I ‘was muddily casting around for a god that seemed to resonate with my personality in Steve's. Steve happed to show me, for entirely unconnected reasons, a picture ae of the sole remaining carven image of Glycon, discovered in a tomb at etal eS Constanta, formerly Tomis, near the ESSE See Black Sea coast. 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 [already knew ic from somewhere inside myself, as pretentious as that probably sounds. On the screngch of this strong and sudden surge of fellow fecling fora badly mutated reptile, I dedicated myself upon the spot o resuming the worship of Glycon chat had been so cruelly truncated in the second or third century with the tise of the Cl about the deity and developed my ideas upon what gods era. As I found out more might actually be (self-referential idea-clusters that, upon broaching a certain frontier of complexity, have become cither aware or apparently aware is my current best guess) I began to realise that Glycon was a near-perfect choice of deity, given my concerns. For one thing, his serpentine nature connected him with all of the other snake entities (and their associated idea-tetritories) that wind through our various myths, and ultimately, at least in my eyes, t0 the spiralling double helix of the DNA which provides the code underlying all life and consciousness, of which we are all experimental extensions, contingencies if you like. For another thing, Lucian’s scornful account of Glycon’s tue origins as a glove puppet struck me as a marvellous way to both, as you say, pre-empt the inevitable ridicule by worshipping a deity that was already established as historically ridiculous and also to illustrate something of my ideas as to the actual nature of gods. It is my belief that all gods are stories, or at least the ideas behind stories, but stories or ideas that have become in some way almost alive and aware, or at least appear to be to all practical intents and purposes. The idea of a god, by my reading, is the god, and if the human handler originally saw fit to underline that powerful idea with trickery, a tame boa constrictor and a speaking tube, that in no way undermines the fact that the central idea behind the deity might be a good or useful one; might indeed be a real, if metaphysical, deity. ‘To my mind, one of the flaws in Christianity is its insistence upon a historical Jesus. What this means is that, in effect, should it ever = be proven incontrovertibly thar Jesus Se = did not physically exist, the entirety of Christianity would collapse, ies <= ZENG pevfectly sound core philosophies included, when there was never any need for such a collapse. Confessing that your god was a special effect from word one seems to me to be a much more honest and perhaps ulcimarely more fruitful strategy. And funnier. Eddie: In previous interviews you have appeared to treat the popular entertainment kind of stage magic of pulling rabbits out of hats and doves out of handkerchiefs as being on a continuum with the presumably higher occult kind of magic. | liked this, Ie’s comparable to viewing comic book art and classical paintingas being ‘choices’ rather than opposing and ‘mutually exclusive concepts. Is this a kind of post-modernist magic? Alan: I don't know if its postmodern or if it’s just me. Certainly, most people in the occult fraternity seem to wish to distance themselves from stage magic, as in the Crowleyan conceit of spelling his type of magic with a Kto distinguish ie from all the doves and coloured scarves (as if all the semen-drinking, goat-fucking and mescaline didn’t make it reasonably distinct already). 1 imagine that the position from the stage magiciani end of things is that since all illusions and effects ean be achieved by skill, cunning and dexterity, anyone who professes to practise a form of magic other than stage magic must be at best a lunatic and at worst fraud, From my perspective, which is more properly prehistoric than post-modern, it seems that both disciplines are concerned with the manipulation of human perception and chus the manipulation of human consciousness. Boys, boys, boys, there’s no need for this unseemly squabbling. I'm sure the punters are carrying enough loose change forall of ws. Eddie: The next significant event, as I see it, was the forming of The Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. You said ‘We wanted something grandiloquent, a bit mad, with More characters _from From Hell an air of fraud about it’. How did you encounter the other players inthis mastergame? Alan: The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvelsisa perfect example ofa truly magical organisation in thac ie doesn't actually exist, or have any members. (Mind you, when dealingwith secret societies, you should remember havin the imperishable words of Mandy Rice Davies: “They would say that, wouldn't they?’) What happened as far as I can recall is that sometime between declaring myselfrobea ‘magician and the pivotal unusual experience that Steve and Tunderwent a couple of months later, on January 7th 1994, I suggested to Steve that we ought to invent a Secret Society so sceret that nobody ever heard about it, or so secret that ic didn’t even exist in any normal sense. After the events of January 7th and the Hair Of The Snake That Bit Me song I wrote with musical accomplice Tim Perkins while still in the daze of that experience, the name “Moon andSerpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels” just seemed to tumble into existence, a fictional freakish sideshow alluded to in the song lyric thac somehow seemed to be begging to be brought to some kind of peculiar life. As for how I encountered ‘Tim Perkins, Dave J, John Coulthare, Melinda Gebbie or any of the other people who aren't members of this non-existent organisation, that would take too long to recount and I'm going on holiday tomorrow. Suffice it to say that with the performances, the CDs, your comic adaprations and various coverage of these things on the Internet and elsewhere, The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels is probably as well known and is producing more publicly available material than any genuine magical organisation in the world at this moment. Which, considering it doesn’t exist, is, you'll admit, a bloody fantastic trick. Eddie: Crucial to all of your performance works is the concept of psychogeography. You said somewhere chat the only lines of energy that link disparate sites are lines of information. To what extent does this leave From Hell in your pre-magic life and to what extent docs it carry ove the new regime? Alan: Doing the open-ended research for From Hell led me (I think via a recommendation from Neil Gaiman) to the work of Iain Sinclair, which led me to Iain’s Lud Heat and his brilliane speculations upon psychogeography. This led me to consider what exactly itis chat constitutes the reality of a place. Obviously, there is more to our experience of a place than the bricks and mortar. Our reaction to various locations seemed to me to be dependent upon the richness of the web oF association that we connected with these sites. A dull terraced street will have much more meaning to you, for example, if you grew up in its neighbourhood and have different layers from different periods of your personal history that you can connect with ie. Similarly, if you know the history of that street from the centuries before you were born, your experience of ic will be proportionally richer and more meaningful. If you are a practising magician or poet and have a web of symbol systems with which to decode even chance appearances and events in that area, then your experience will be richer and more meaningful still. Psychogeography, as a means of divining the meaning of the streets in which we live and pass our lives (and chus our own meaning, as inhabitants of those streets), seemed an appropriate tool to use in From Hell, and my explorations of the subject in that book led me further into the realm of magical thinking and magical ideas, culminating in the steak-and-kidney revelations mentioned above. So From Hell kind of represents a way station approximately on the borderline between my life before magic and my life after Eddie: Your first performance work was The Moon and Serpent, which The Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels staged in July 1994 ac Bridewell Theatre in Fleet Street London, some eight months after your oficial entry into the world of the oceule. Given that there was no previous model for what you do I'd like to ask how this came about? I mean how did you get the show up there? Did you pitch it as a poetry reading, or an art happening? And you actually do some singing in this one don't you? ‘Alan: We didn'cactually need to pitch that frst performance as anything, because it all just sort of worked out, as I'll describe in a moment. As for how the idea coalesced, it all began with the peculiar event which I tend to regard as my initiatory magical experience that happened in January 1994, for the weeks and probably months after that experience was in a sort of productive daze as I tried to assimilate what had happened and process it all in some way. Partly 1 did this through conversation, some prot-acted thinking and farther magical rituals, but as with mest things in my life, my natural tendency is to process experience through some form of creative means. Within a few days of the experience, later in January that year, I wrote Hair Of The Snake That Bit Meand wn of Lights within around a weekofeach other, and also began to develop a strong compulsion to express my apparent magical experiences in some form that other people might be able to understand. I felt as if | were being pushed or guided in the formation of this idea, along certain avenues of thought. It seemed to me that the best possible means of expressing magical ideas would be in some form of performance that included elements to en} all of the senses, a kind of riotous psychedelic mixed media performance with the sole aim of altering che consciousness and mindset of its audience. We put the hour-long initial performance together intuitively, both from pre-existing scraps, which seemed to fit and from new material, which we more or less composed in the studio along wilfully ional lines, At the cime, I imagined chat using this kind of performance to introduce magical ideas to people was 2 brand new idea, but I learned quickly thar Dee, Mathers and Crowley had all tried their hands at performance, and indeed that opera was originally conccived as a mixed: ‘media means of expressing ideas about alchemy, with early operatic pioneers like Monteverdi constructing the form as an outgrowth from his life and notions as a practicing alchemist. While we were putting that first performance ogether, without much notion of where it would eventually be performed, I was invited to contribute something to a three-night event that Iain’ Sinclair and Blast FitstRecords were organising avLondon’s Bridewell Theatre. As it turned, out, the hour's performance I promised lain was scheduled forthe final night, Which was subtitled rom Counter Culttre to Apocalypse Cult and coincided with Comet Shumaker Levy impacting with Jupiter. Melinda gor a rather spiffing ecroplasm photograph of me and Dave during rehearsals, and all in all as an initial foray into magical performa I chink ic went swimmingly well. And yes, I did do some of what might charitably be described/as singing on chat first recording, Eddie: Was this the photo thar when developed revealed a strange spectral veiledfigure moving around in the proceedings that could not have corresponded to anyone who was actually. present? I first saw: it in The Fortean Times. Allan: Yeah, that was sort of interesting. Melinda took it 7 during our Brief rehearsal, when only Dave J and/my had been onstage, with me seated behind a wooden table to the front lefe'of the picturé while Dave stands some yards behind me in the near right background, wearing a white Melinda's rather spiffing photograph which was reproduced on the CD slick ofthe first performance recording face-mask and holding up a small mirror. When the picture came back, there was the ambiguous suggestion of 283 long- skirted female figure behind Dave, holding up one hand from which what seemed to bea length of gauze or perhaps a bridal train billowed forward across the stage as if caught in a strong gust of wind, actually drifting over the front edge of the table behind which I was seated. This foremost edge of the veil or bridal train or whatever it is, is picked our in the same spotlight as myself and the table, and is thus obeying the same lighting conditions as the rest of the objects in the photograph, ruling out simple double exposure. Barring hhigh tech image manipulation carried out for obscure ‘motives by Boots the Chemist's photo department, it would seém to me to be some form of fluke phenomenon that may 6p may not hold genuine magical significance, but which is unusual enough to merit consideration in either instance. If the veil-like image was deliberately produced by some supernormal agency, then what might be the identity of that agency, and what message, if any, might it have been attempting to impart? The fact that the performance took place next to St. Bride's church provided some possible indications as to che nature of this hypothetical force or agency, in that St. Bride's was a focal point for the cul of St Bride or St. Bridget, which I understand to be a Christian resurrection of the cult of a similarly-named Celtic mother goddess. The bridal veil in the photograph might be a reference to this identification, or, on the other hand, mig! be connected to Mary “Polly” Nichols, the first canonical Ripper victim, who had been married at St. Bride's and who was mentioned in the performance text. Another possibilityrelates co some unrealised stage performance ideas that were floating around: in the Spectre Garden sequence, the Angel of the Seventh Aithyr (with its text straight from Edward Kelly's original serying and the vocals provided by Melinda) seemed to demand some sort of ethereal theatrical effect to accompany it. The only idea that I'd had was to maybe get a few yards of white curtain material, rip it up near a powerful fan and beneath a strongultra violet lightand thus at the right moment have diaphanous glowing white lace billowing out across the stage area to accompany the angel soliloquy. I didn’t have time to put this idea together, and anyway decided thar it probably wouldn't be practical, with the noise from the fan motor probably drowning out the words and music that the effect was intended to enhance. So we dropped the idea, and then gor a photograph of how it would have looked anyway. The Angel of the Seventh Achys, incidentally, is alleged to be congruent with the dreadful high female energy that Crowley (and supposedly John Dee) referred to as BABALON. Magically speaking, that makes it more or less synonymous with the mother goddess of the Bride cult, and also relates it, chrough the association of the Whore of Revelations, with Polly Nichols. So possibly all of che above interpretations could be seen, in some synecretic fashion, as correct. Or maybe there was just somebody sitting next to Melinda and smoking a billowing cigar while she took the picture ee eT eT ee Eddie: My attention has been drawn to a website about of Eleusis Crowley's (heeps/ www geocities.com! Athens/Oracle/9276/rrseleusis.html) which I gather were a series of performances designed to “induce... religious ecstasy”. They were held at Caxton Hall, Westminster. Keith Richmond in The Rites of Eleusis, (published by Mandrake Press 1990) wrote: ‘Half a century before the “experimental theatre” of the sixties and the seventies, Crowley and his small band were pioneering a form of theatre with transcendental manipulations and a level of Ahead accordingly suffered the I find this useful in audience involvement until then undreamed of. of its time, The Rites of Eleusi usual fate of the boldly experimental. giving a context to your theatrical excursions. Alan: Like I say, the impulse co put together a mixed media presentation came mainly out of my initiatory magical experiences, and was almost certainly coloured by my background in the Arts Lab, where mixed-media performances were pretty much the norm. It wasn't until later, as I started to get into a more formal study of magic, that I read about Mathers’ Rites of Isis and the later Crowley/Neuberg/Waddell Rites of Elewsis, Maybe there's just something about the magical impulse thac naturally lends itself to this type of production, where all of the senses are involved. I was talking to a friend who'd been in Mr. Black and Mr. White 1998. Photograph by Melinda Gebbie.the audience at the Blake performance, and he said thae the overall effect of the sense and rushing cascade of language, coupled with the intricate music, the synchronised collage of film images provided by John Coulthart and the performance by our dancer and fire-breather, was to overwhelm the normal critical apparatus of the audience, providing chem with far too much information co absorb by normal linear methods. Asa resuleof this, the audience have litele choice but to let the whole experience wash over them, an experience which, as my friend described it, was very much like peak experience with the stronger psychedelies such as old-school LSD, where you'd scem to be receiving different streams of complex sensory information on about sixteen channels at once, far too many to consciously absorb or decode, with results in some ways similar to listening to a complex fugue: only when one gives up on following the individual voices is one able to absorb the overall structure of the fugue. Of course, you could also look to our traditional forms of religious worship for examples of an attempt to induce a kind of psychedelic fugue state by overloading all of the senses at once. The Catholic Church with its organ music, its sonorous verbal incantations, its stained glass window light shows, its sips of wine and its fuming perfumed censers sounds pretty much like a Moon and Serpent evening or an Arts Lab bash during the late Sixties, only with more guile and about two thousand years more rehearsal time. As a sidebar, a lot of interesting composers such as Seriabin would choreograph the burning of certain incenses at key points of the performance (something we did with the first performance at the Bridewell, and also at the Snakes and Ladders event) and would also seem co have had at least a passing interest in and knowledge of the kabbalah (or kaballah or gabala or cobbler). Check out the time signatures on Holst’s The Planets, for instance. After we'd put together our notion of a magical performance out of nothing, as we thought, we discovered a vast array of predecessors who had done pretty much the same things that we had. Except John Dee, who'd outdone everybody with his flying mechanical giant beetle produced for a stage production of a Greek drama. This, incidentally, did more to earn Dee his reputation as a sinister diabolist and model for Marlowe's Faust and Shakespeare's Prospero than any of his later conversations with Enochian spirits ever did... bur I could rattle on abou this sort of stuff for hours, and you probably wane to ask whether I’m really going to be writing The Fantastic Four for Marvel or not. Eddie: The performance itself partly covers From Hell territory as well as introducing new ideas. How do you asses its success from your current vantage point? Alan: Withina month or two of doing that first performance, I was actually rather embarrassed by it, simply because of its lack of polish. My magical ideas back then were pretty much wholesale gibberish. I'd just got back from some very strange territory. I was babbling excitedly and I didn’t have the frst idea what I was actually talking about. Also, since we'd pretty much constructed the entire concept of the performance from a whole cloth we didn’t really have any prior experience or much conscious cluc as to what we were actually doing, Consequently there were rough edges which we refined and streamlined over the following such performances, culminating in the baroque complexities ofthe Blake piece, Angel Pasage, definitely our most complex and flawlessly produced piece to date. Looking back from ‘my current vantage point, however, Thave to admit that the raw spooky power of that first almost incoherent recording has vortiginous lout chat none of our subsequent offerings ever reached, despite their slicker production. I'm currently hoping, with The Moon and Serpent’s performance work on hold for a while, to strip away a lor of what we've learned and try to strike out again for that completely irrational and unknown territory which we plunged into at the Bridewell event with such satisfying effect. Hopefully, the ‘next Moon and Serpent performances will be less polished and more genuinely frightening, which I'm sure is a goal that all performers seruggle towards. Eddie: You wrote: T've attempted to construct a process and a context for performance art and poetry that builds on and makes use of the shamanic worldview to direct the audience ed level of awareness. Each performance that emerges from through a structured mental landscape to a predetermil this process is considered a unique event to be performed ‘on one occasion only, at a specific location that is felt to be appropriate to the work on a specific date to be considered equally significant. Was the idea of making an audio recording and releasing a CD part of the original plan? Alan: No, originally we had no thought of anything beyond the actual one off performance. The idea thar we could actually cut a CD of this material and disseminate it that way, while an apparently obvious one, only came some time later. Eddie: Whose idea was it to make a commercial recording available? Alan: I wouldn't like to swear to it, but I imagine it was probably David J who initially sex the idea rolling. We had the backing tapes that I'd read to at the Bridewell event, and it would therefore only take around a day’s studio time for me to go in and do another vocal performance, giving us a permanent record of what was otherwise a one-off piece of art. The Birth Cau, incidentally, isthe only actual live recording in our repertoire, being the only occasion on which we had the professional facilities to record the actual event set up ahead of time. Everything on that recording is exactly as it was on the night, including the bit towards the end where everything I say sounds like a slowed down recording. This wasn’t an electronic effect, and it hadn't come out like that at our single run-through rehearsal earlier, either. One of che values ofa genuinely live recording, I suppose, when such a thing is possible, is that you capture all of the intense and unrepeatable little flukes and serendipities like the above. On the other hand, one of the advantages of doing a separate recording later is that you don't have to include moments like the one from the Bridewell performance when an aucience member, actually a friend and associate in a state of chemical bewilderment, walked onstage during the reading, poured himself a glass of water from my onstage water jug, stood and drank ic while I tried to say ‘John, get the Fuck off the stage and do it now, right this instant, now. Do it now. Now? Without the microphone picking it up. Not entirely successfully according to Melinda. Alan Moore in front of the doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton. A still taken from Robert Farmer's excellent half hour television documentary: Comic. Tales with Alan Moore, presented in the The Other Side series on Channel Four in the United Kingdom. Eddie: On 18 November 1995, you staged the second performance work, the Birth Casl, This is a work of blinding clarity with no reference to anything that came before. You have stated as a principle of measuring the value of your magic that something is created from nothing. This is certainly achieved with The Birth Caul. Would you agree with my assessment that this one marks a significant advance? Ir’s an interesting example of the choice of a location for the event because, as I seem to remember, your original choice of a venue fell chrough. Can you remind me ofthe details ofthat? It was originally to be performed in a school...?Alan: Originally, when considering oursecond performance, Dave J, Tim Perkins and myself underwent a ricual to tell us, hasically, what we should do nexe. Whae came through very stiongly was a wealeh of intensely powerful memories and Feelings concerning our childhoods and teenage years, ftom. which we deduced thar these: ‘things would: play a large part in’the event as we eventually staged ie, An excellent Newcastle arts funding operation called Locus + had asked us if we could do one of our one-off site-specific peeformances up in Newcastle, and when we'd agreed had said that they'd do their best to find us a suitable disused school or similar location that would have a relationship f the subject matter discussed. They were unable to do this, and the best building chey could come up with was an admittedly stunning Victorian magistrates court, which wwe agreed felc like the right place to do the performance (as yecanwritren at thae point) even though ie didn't seem to have any connection to the piece we were hoping to ‘construct. The event, arranged carly in 1995, was scheduled for November but was still unwritten in August, when my mum died. Finding the birch canl amongst her effects was Jike finding a missing jigsaw piece that was meant to be in wharever our nexr performance turned out to be all along. Ir still: didn’t as far as we knew, have any connection with ‘our court room venue, bur it all felt as if it were working ‘uit correctly. After we'd done the performance, of course, ‘we found out the information about che birch caul being sold to a barrister as mentioned in David Copperfield and thar cauls were apparently as prized by early lawyers as they ‘were by seamen, wearing caulls on theic heads to denote their wisdom and leading to the barrister’s wigs as worn today. As with the initial Bridewell performance, che crick {© these things seems to be to plan as little as possible and ‘rustin the process itself to carry you through to the correct ‘conclusion. Eddie: In reading about the Crowley Rites of Hleusis, noticed thae they consisted of seven pieces concerning the ages of man, arranged under their governing planets, as pet the ancient astrological tradition, buc in reverse order chronologically speaking, Thus they started with Saturn, “the lean and slippeted pancaloon,” of Shakespeare, or sad old age, advanced chrough Mars the soldier, eventually to Luna, the age of childhood and innocence. Ie occurs to ‘me tather late in the day thac The Birth Caul falls into a classical poetic mould, from which ic derives its undoubted power. By substituting the one talismanic caul for the OO ee various planets I'didn't notice what you were up to at first. (Bur you had also sed the idea of living backwards in a Time Taster short story for 2000AD.) Alan: The reason that The Birsh Caul was structured how it-was is something like the following: after completing the Bridewell performance and analysing the results, it scemed £0 me thae pare of the Bridewell work's undeniable power ‘ame from the fact that it took the audience on a mental journey, firseactoss the imaginary spaces of London and into. she web of associated ideas chac isthe Bridewell theatre itself, then onward into increasingly more abstract interior spaces, I didn’t want to repeat chis progression at the Newcastle event, so T decided to ake ita journey through time and the events in someone’ life, rather than through space. As ir as the direction in which I chose to set time's arrow, it just seemed ro make more dramatic sense to work from a presenc back ro past, starting with the then-present moment of everyone sat in this Victorian court on my birthday while [calked about juse char and Tim Perkins performed mimes with a pair of upended bicycles, leading back to the final moments when Tim took down the caul that had been hanging over my head through the performance, allowing ‘me to wrap it around my face for che last few seconds of the show, beneath an ultra-violes light under which the human fat in the membrane fluoresced a faine and unearthly yellow. Eddie: The Birth Caul was the first I that I heard of your magic work, and my first chought was ‘what the hell has been going on here?” I really couldn't see where it had come from. My next thought was that there should be a princed version of the text, and from there it was a short step to envisioning an illustrated version of the work. The first obstacle was that you hadn't kepe a copy of the text, Since you were apparently making up the whole process as you went along, giving no thought ro how ic might be developed, I was afraid that when I proposed illustrating: The Birch Caul thac it might have looked like I was trying to exploit it, especially sitce there was much of a very personal nature in it. Can you comment on that? (For instanee, if somebody else wanted to stage The Birth Caull presume you would say no.) Alan: I honestly dod’ know what I'd have done if anyone else had suggested it. When you yourself made the offer | chink chat firstly [ was very flattered thae you'd liked thework enough to want to devote your valuable time to it, and secondly that I was applying the same criteria chat I'd applied with the entire performance project thus far, namely shat ifa thing ele like the right thing to do, it probably was the right thing to do. Handing The Birth Caul over to you 0 see what you made of it felt like the right thing to do, and indeed curned out co be so. Alan in the cell where the condemned Alfie Rouse spent bis last night. Rouse is the subject of | Travel in Suspenders AD 1981, the eleventh chapter of Alan's novel, Voice of the Fire, Another still from Robert Farmer’s Comic Tales with Alan Moore. Eddie: Your novel, Voite of the Fire, appeared in 1996. Again we see the prerequisite elements of your new work, particularly the geographical scheme. But at che end of the book we have thirty pages of Alan Moore and his world in present day Northampton. I truly enjoyed this unexpected turn co autobiography. Apare from a lightweight page in a mag titled Heartbreak Hotel, and the personal material in The Birth Caul, the only other venture into the realm of the personal was a short piece you wrote for Knockabour in the mid jhties about your childhood, a piece which you declined to allow me to reprint. Do you feel ambivalence about putting yourself on che page unmasked? Alan: Hmm. Yes, I suppose I do feel a certain reluctance to appear on the page myself as I generally have an aversion to authors coyly turning up in their own work I did a piece that was autobiographical for Myra’s self-ticled in some postmodern Martin Amis manocuvre mag, just because she needed it quickly and the incident which I described in ic had happened that very afternoon, which fele sort of natural. The Heartbreak Hotel piece was intended as a postcard from America in comic strip form, and our appearance in Dance Of The Gull Catchers seemed necessary in order not to unfairly spare ourselves the vilification chat we were trowelling onto most of the other Ripperologists therein. With Voice of the Fire, since Td originally planned to have one first person voice in each century and each chapter, with the last chapter taking place in the present day, there didn’t seem to be any way in which could avoid making the last chapter something delivered in my own voice, about real events that had happened co me while 1 was writing the last chapter. If you re- read that chapter you'll pethaps notice the extent of my unease regarding personal literary appearances: the words 1’, “me”, “my” and “mine” are used nowhere in the final chapter. I chink I was originally adopting that device as a way of appearing in my own story without really appearing in it, but as it turned out I quite liked it for the way ic lefe a kind of empty conceptual space at the middle of the narrative for the reader co inhabit and provide their own “I I supposed that really it's just my particular great vanity to try and conceal my great vanity. Please don’t be taken in by ie for an instant. Eddie: Voice of the Fire is a wonderful piece of work that is sadly not well enough known. It sets itself up as a historical chronicle of indirectly related parts, and then the Moore trickery starts to come in and strange connections begin to form between one thing and another. One gets a thrill, as the work seems to advance by more than a page for each page read. One of my favourite chapters is the one which consists of the seventeenth century severed heads on pikes oon the city gate conversing with each other, written with such a light humorous touch that the grisliness oft is never foremost. And the chapter which gets inside che head of the cheeky underwear salesman is that kind of writing that thac we think of as proper to the novel. It creates a completely convincing portrait ofa character drawn from life, but] was surprised to see it come from the typewriter of Alan Moore, comic book writer. Did you feel chat you were entering into a somewhat different discipline with your novel? Alan: Given that I wanted each chapter of the book to be a first-person voice from the period in question, I realised that one of the bigger challenges of the novel would be to stop the interior voice of the Roman tax-collector sounding like che interior voice of John Clare or Francis, Tresham’s severed head or whoever. In order co do this, it seemed to be necessary to let the character's voice come to me rather chan attempt co create it logically. It wasmore like chanfielling than characterisation, although by this T donfe mean to imply that what I wrote in 1 Travel In Suspenders was some beyond-the-grave transmission from the shade of burning car murderer Alfic Rouse, Ie was more like lecting my imagination cune imo different chronological strata of the local mindset and mode of speech butied or vanished voices swimming to the surface. I was pleased! with all of che chapters, although you mention a couple of particular favourites: Confessions of @ Mask, the head-on-a-stick chapter you cite, was a lot of fun to write, although I do remember remarking to Melinda just after starting the chapter that Td only just realised what a morbid work I was engaged in when I found myselfrecording the tortured thoughts of a somehow-conscious although decomposed severed head yvith the awareness that this was intended as the noyel’s Hight relief chapter. “They'll all be rcally miserable after wading through chapters abour murder and madness and martyrdom. Le¢’ cheer them up with a guy whose head's still horribly conscious eighteen months after being removed from his shoulders.’ The idea for making the head the narrator came when I noticed that there was only an eighteen month gap between the head of Gunpowder lot supergrass Braneis Tresham being hung on the town's North gate and the head of Anti-Enclosure Act and Anti- Tresham family insurrectionist Captain Pouch being hung there too. The possibility for conversation between the two decomposed craniums was irresistible, and there was all chae great material like Captain Pouch’stalismanic piece of green cheese just hanging around for the taking, The Alfie Rouse story was, funnily enough, the story that Steve Moore singled out as being more unlike what he'd expect from me than anything else of minc he'd ever read. Tjusc absorbed everything I could about Rouse and tried to get myself into that character, then let the voice come out however it wanted to come out. Some time after writing the story I finally paid a visit to the condemned cell under Northampton’s guildhall, unused and untouched since the morning in 1931 when Rouse was taken out from it and bung at Bedford nick. A very ghostly little space, where I got a sense of waiting rather than a sense of fearful anticipation. I really chink that while they were leading him up the steps of the scaffold he was still confidene that his natural salesman's gift of the gab would somehow finesse him out of the situation. In some ways, writing Alfie Rouse was a lot more of a palpably “evil” experience than writing William Gull. Gull, our Gull, was only ever a fictional construct and as such could behave, think and speak in a manner that was grandiose and dramatic, if thar’s what we wanted. With Rouse, I got a lot more of a sense of the absolute banality of genuine evil, and the character felt a lot more credible to write than Gull had done. While was writing Gull, [could believein him inthe same way that I'd believe in Rorschach or Dr. Manhattan while I was writing them, which is to say as fictions that need have no resemblance to the way in which anyone in the real world has ever thought or behaved. With Rouse, I found myself thinking: ‘I bet if he wasn’t thinking this as he went to court for his trial every day then he was thinking something like this.” Himself as lovable rogue and ladies’ man, The jury would understand. Everyone was like him under the surface, weren't they? All no better than they should be. The trial was surely just a technicality, a chance to strut and show off prior to his inevitable acquittal. Like I say, Voice of the Fire probably represented a refinement and modification of my normal characterisation process (whatever that is), more than anything else, As such, I think I learned a lot from it, and in a couple of years’ time I'd really like to write another novel like it, only completely different and better. Eddie: Magic is prevalent throughout the work, without being the entirety of it. Did your ideas about the subject advance during this work, or has it simply now become the inevitable backdrop to just about everything you do? Alan: Like From Hell, Voice of the Fire was a work commenced well before I made my movement into magic and finished at some poine thereafter. I think I remark in the last chapter that whe I wore thélfigst chapter, Hob‘: Hog, with its scary longchaired local shaman fixing. the town’s identity in words with a songline, I had no idea that by the last chapter this is pretty much whit the author, would have turned into. The symmetries in the work thar result from this were not planned, and emerged purely from che processes of living and writing, As foryour more general question, yeah, thése days magic is Kind/OF permanent background wallpaper to my thinkingi@hd is probably somewhere in the mix of most things that I do, however imperceptibly. Eddie: I hear that our good friends at Top Shelf are doing us the favour of putting Voice af the Fire back into print. Has this involved any fewritingoor rethinking of the work?Alan: Not really. The main benefit of the new edition is thar i's going to have twelve José Villarsubia character portraits, with one accompanying each chapter. Since 'm the narrator of the final chaprer, this means that I get to display my extraordinary physical beauty as a human being in a big full page interior shor, rather than just in a little panel on the back cover where I always look like a sulky crack addict. From what you told me, you're going to be running one of José’s almost phenomenally Now, I know that this will probably bring a lot of feelings of arousing pictures. of me with this article bictemness and jealousy to the fore between us, Ed, all because I've kept my hair colour so much better than you yourself have, but I want you to promise me that you won't do anything childish like draw glasses on the picture with a magic marker or make my eyes look crossed or anything. Please don't hate me just because I'm lovely. Eddie: Ahem!... inestimable Mr... Villartubia to shoot a few of me too. harrumph.l wonder if T can get the (Official fatterer of the stars. It reminds me of the anecdore about the eighteenth century painter to the aristocracy, Joshua Reynolds. A certain duke whose name I forget had just had his portrait delivered, and when he looked at it he remarked ‘When I look in the mirror, I'm a poltroon, but when I look in the picture, 'm a man of quality’ The Highbury Working: a Beat Séance, the third of the performance works, was the next on November 20 1997. ‘This one differs from the ones preceding it in being such a memorable cavalcade of characters such as the first Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, the Kray twins, Jack ‘the Hat’ McVittie, British pop entrepreneur Joe Meek, and of powerful imagery such as the skeleton horse galloping underground. Your voice sounds like you were really enjoying the wackiness of this one. Alan: I think that ifyou catch a sense of gleeful exuberance in The Highbury Working then ies probably less a response to the wackiness of the material than its sheer richness: a response to the vindication of che psychogeographical process that Highbury represented for me. The Highbury's event was arranged by Chris Brook, a friend of Bill Drummond’s whom I'd met when the K Foundation came round my house for a private showing of the film where they burn a million quid. (Excellent, by the way. IF there's cone thing I enjoy in a film it's being able to see every penny of the budget right up there on the screen. As a special effect, burning real money cuss out the middlemen like Industrial Light & Magic and is much more satisfying and less manipulative chan anything in the last ten fantasy blockbusters.) Chris, who'd helped produce the subsequent book-of-the-film, was responsible for a string of club nights, upstairs at the Highbury Garage and asked if we wanted to come along and do one of our one-off site-specific performances. Some of the other acts booked, like Ted Milton from Blurt, were respectable and interesting, so Part ofthe booklet of The Highbury Working CD, designed by John Coutehare, Alan reading, Panta van Wijngaarden dancing Lady, Plats My Skupe aay aye fataait yh neaTagreed to do it on the spur of the moment, secure in my faith chat Highbury would immediately yield a wealth of inceresting material full of ghosts and serial murders and gravitas, as has everywhere else in London that I'd looked at thus far. When I actually started to take a look at the area, however, I was appalled co find that, at least at first glance, nothing very interesting had ever happened there. What if 1 was wrong? What if every single square mile upon the surface of the planet wasn't a wellspring and repository of wonder and revelation? I persevered, however, mostly for a lack of anything else to do, and eventually the information trickled in. Iain Sinclair tipped me off about Coleridge's frequent stumbles down the Holloway Road with a minder to drag him out of chemists’ shops, and also mentioned that the Garage itself; back in the Sixties when it was called the Tempo Club, had been the venue for Jack the Hat’s confrontation with Dorothy Squires. This pointed me to Kray foot soldier Tony Lambrianou's book referring to the incident, which I'd bought a proof copy of some years previously. The Joe Meek connection was probably the most resonant one for me, and 1 remember taking a psychogeographical hike with Steve Moore onc Saturday, walking from Archway down to the bottom of the Holloway Road, making notes of the graffiti (“Vandals For Life”), the hand-lettcred signs in pub windows (“Live Chinese Elvis!”), and takingin sites such as the cycle shop thae used to be Meek’s home and recording studio at the time of the murder/suicide, John Coulthart dug us up a copy of the rare Meck recording I HearA New World, and came within a whisker of locating a tape that Meck himself had made of a cat in Highgate cemetery, apparently talking in human congue (Joe was doing a lot of diet pills around this time). My friend Handsome Bob Goodman — (nectophile-murdered-rapist-bastard-English soldier in the opening scenes of Luc Besson's Joan of Arc) told me about the Highbury Barn with its freakshows and ghostexhibitions, and by actually going out and buying a couple of books on football for the first time in my life I was able to unearth all thar wonderful stuff abour the buried horse and the 1925 Arsenal team. Spotting a reference to Highbury in the index of Aleister Crowley's confessions, I found the stuff about the Highbury printer with the skin condition that Crowley moved in with, and I think chac it was together with Steve Moore, probably after our Holloway Road jaunt, that we checked out Highbury’s more ancient history and found thar it had been a Roman summer garrison, The buried horse at the Arsenal ground, along with all che other stuff about subterranean Highbury that I'd found out about by then, probably suggested the connection between the Underworld and horses, and Steve managed to find some material upon the underworld/ horse-racing goddess Epona (root of our word, pony), quite probably worshipped at Highbury during Roman times. One of Epona’s customary attributes was a key that she hheld in one hand, being che key to the gate of death and the underworld. Since one of the weirder events in the Joe Meck story involved a key held between the pages of a closed Bible chat turned without anyone touching it, I began to get a sense of fragile webs of connection growing together, symbols overlapping, the true identity of the locale being revealed in a fabulous mosaic of strange, sad, funny litele fragments, Add on the material about Holloway Prison chat I turned up and all of the other little details that fell into place (the double-headed underground river, the Hackney Brook, that rises under Highbury, which relates to the literally double-headed Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, who were exhibited there, which relates to non- conjoined twins, Ron and Reg, and their possible over- reaction to a slur on the professional honour of Dorothy Squires) and I think you'll be able to imagine the immense sense of relief and exuberance that went into the finished work. Whatyou hear in the recording is the sound of great slee and satisfaction as something that had initially looked like confounding all my theories of place turned out to be one of the richest and most surprising sites that I'd yet investigated, like striking gold in the carpark of Sainsbury's or something, Eddie: Highbury was the first CD where | really started to feel the musical contribution of Tim Perkins. This is nor to say the music didn't play its role before, but it had been modestly keeping a low profile, dutifully announcing the entry of the different parts like a butler, setting the table for the banquet and standing back while the chef took the credit. But here i is exuberant, galloping with the skeleton horse and reminding me a little of the spirit of ‘For the benefit of Mr. Kite’ when all your characters come back fon stage at the finalé. 1 was surprised when you told me fonee that the writing of the music precedes the writing of the words, Alan: The Highbury Working was the first of our performances or CDs where Tim was the only person responsible for the music, with David having left thecountry by that point, so maybe he felt he was able to bring amore whole and structured sensibility to each track for the first time, rather than providing only ambient atmospheres. As regards the way in which the tracks are put together, it was with the Highbury piece that the construction really started to become comple: \d demanding, Basically, the musical tracks would be completed wich me sitting in and giving Tim guidance where necessary on what kind of mood or atmospherics I thought would be appropriate, leaving Tim to then come up with the finished track on his own. Then I would sit down with a stop warch and record blocks of time... thirty second, five second, twenty. seconds and then there's a crowd-cheer sound effect, thirty seconds and the sleepy Hawaiian guitars come in... until Thad each track mapped out in this way. I would then compose the texts in blocks according to timed speaking lengths, and to fit with the atmosphere of thae particular stretch of music, leading smoothly in to whatever kind of music or sound effect was coming up next, I'd done this in The Birth Caul, and even knew how many seconds cach of my pauses should be, counting in my head while I was doing the reading. For example, during the early stretches of This Present Moment the sounds seem to suggest a petiod of pastoral calm, wich the horns that suddenly come in reminding me of car horns or perhaps factory hooters. Therefore I wrote a timed sequence of mostly pastoral images that end with the words and then, Industry’, just cs a bit of before the industrial-sounding horns come in nightmare getting the timing right on a live reading, but at least with the first two performances they were mostly ambient and didn’t need that many complex, pid shifts in word-tone. The Highbury piece, however, was different in that all ofits tracks were structured song-like pieces, each wich a number of shifts, breaks and changes of tempo to accommodate. The end cffect was incredibly dramatic and polished... those lovely wistful little breaks on the Joe Meek track, Number One With A Buller, see against the deadpan forensic reconstruction of events. ‘Joe’s landlady arrived at just the wrong rime? ... bu the amount of sweat and artifice goes up accordingly wich each newly attained level of complexity in the music, Weiting the words first with something like these performances, though, hat need a high level of integration between words and music, doesn't feel practical to me. I's bie like dancing circus horses, in that the music is actually playing along wich the horse's movements, bue gives the illusion that instead the horses are dancing to the music, Similarly, I want to give the impression that the music has been written wich unbelievable tightness around a spilling, freewheeling text, when actually che reverse is true. It just seems to fit better and work better asa whole that way, although in six months time I may have completely changed my mind about this and will swear by some completely different method. theatrical Eddie: performance, was performed at Conway Hall in Red Lion Snakes and Ladders, your fourth Square in April 1999. With its linked themes of love and death, this one has a very romantic air about it. ‘There's even an affirmation of the importance of Jesus Christ. Wha ’ going on here? Alan: As with all of the site-based works, Snaker and Ladders and its specific nature grew out from my reading nt of Oliver Cromwell and of the site itself. The disinee Elizabeth Siddell; the visionary nature of Arthur Machen’s experiences after the death of his first wife and their relation to the lunar and solar spheres of che Kaballah; the musings about DNA (which is pretty much all about death and reproduction) ... all of these things seemed co have a whiff of resurrection about them somehow, tying them cogerher. Love, death, art, resurrection, dreams, visions, heartbreak, romance ... these seemed to be the predominating colours of the landscape, that gave the place its individual soul and character, I¢s worth noting that the character of nearby Highbury is entirely different: freakish, phantasmagoric, sexu |, drugged, feverish excitements getting outof control and turning to violence, tears before bedtime, addiction, suicide, murder ... Highbury works from a Fauvise rather than a Pre-Raphaelite palette. With Holborn and Red Lion Square, however, resurrection seemed to be a key theme, especially as these events are time-specific as well as site-specific, and the performance took place within a week or so of Easter. As for the reference to and acceptance of Jesus as a perfectly valid spiritual idea, Td have to say that the question probably comes from a perception of Christianity and magical pantheism as being locked in deadly opposition, Certainly, the more vociferous fundamentalist Christian groups labelling anything other than their brand of Christianity as Satanism don't do anything to dispel this notion. On the other hand, middle- class occultists who are rebelling (probably understandably) against their parents’ conformist Christian values by becoming a mirror-image of those values don't help the situation either. For the record, as regards my own position, the figure of Jesus Christ seems as true, as valid, as symbolically powerful and real as any of the other deities that I have limited experience of In some senses, occupying as the figure docs the key Kaballistic position of Tiphereth, Jesus has greater human importance than some of the other, more remote deities. Does this mean that I accept the historical existence of Jesus, born of a virgin, crucified and physically resurtected? Yeah, sure. And Glycon really was a physical resurrection of Asclepius, and his handler Alexander really was descended from Perseus and Zeus. T believe, as stated somewhere in the morass above, that deities are complex clusters of divine ideas that have no physical form or expression save for the Universe itself; hae they are the essence that precedes our form. In that context, Thave the greatest of respect, love, and even adoration for the figure of Jesus, justas I have for Glycon, Selene, Hermes, Aphrodite, Indra, Odin or any of this world’s other deities. I am not a Christian, however, for the same reason that I am not an Odinist, A Rosicrucian, a Muslim or a member of any other religion (Glyconism doesn’t count because there's only me and I'm not looking for members). Basically, che word religion comes from the root word religare, like ligature o ligament, and refers to being ‘bound together in one belief. This religion isn't even necessarily spiritual, and by the above definition Marxism, Republicanism, belief in superstring theory, the Golden Dawn, or the Campaign for Real Ale, are all religions. ‘To me, and T must stress that it's probably just me, this feels kind of wrong. [feel that it’s better for each living entity to come to ‘erms with its unique and personal universe of information in its own way. What I believe may not work even slightly for you or for anyone else, While religions may indeed offer valuable and worthwhile ideas on how one should proceed in one's spiritual journey, there's no obligation to buy the whole package. Take whatever is spiritually useful or sustaining from any system and use it as a building block in the construction of your own, Or at least, that’s my ‘Transcendental Tip for Today. Eddie: One of your most interesting ideas of late has been the one you call Zdeaspace and I'm hoping to get a few words from you on that one. I've leftie till now as I want to refer it to The Moon sequence in Snakes and Ladders. You said you don’t think of chronological connections, so may 1 suggest that rather than advancing in a line from one conception to the next, or to a revaluation or improvement of it, that you are circling the concept, playing variations ‘on it continuously, and finding echoes of i in the visions of other writers, in this case Arthur Machen? Alan: After I'd had a few experiences which I personally. believed to be magical (such as travelling mentally to places which seemed to be objectively real, successfully receiving remote transmissions from other magicians, encountering seemingly intelligent and aware metaphysical entities that appeared to be independent of my own thought processes, and so on), it struck me that it would probably be both natural and useful to ery and work out what exactly might be going on here. In attempting to formulate some sort of theory that would make sense of these new levels of consciousness that I found myself experiencing, I realised that we didn't, asa species, have much of a theory to make sense of any sort of consciousness. I mean, as I've stated earlier, we never experience the material universe directly. All we directly experience is our own consciousness of the universe. Consciousness, this lovely and mysterious gift, is the only thing that any of us truly have or are. Science is Probably the most acute tool that consciousness has developed with which to probe reality, but itonically science cannot discuss or explore consciousness itself, since scientific reality is based entirely upon empirical phenomena thatcan be reproducedina laboratory setting. Consciousness clearly does nor fall into this category, and as such, being annoyingly beyond the province of science, becomes “the ghost in the machine”, Consciousness cannot prove its own existence. The “I” is its own blind spot. Like a ghost,nobody really knows what consciousness is, or where it comes from, and the only tool that we have ereated to test reality is incapable of detecting or measuring it. Worse, pethaps stung by its failure to describe the phenomenon, science has decided to attemptan exorcism of the ghost in the machine by the simple expedient of proving that consciousness doesn’t actually exist. Tt is, to cite one of the more recent theories, entirely af illusory by-product of our biological processes. Or, more trendily at the moment, consciousness doesn't really exist but is instead a drift of memes", viral ideas that are more ot less a metaphysical counterpart of genes. The problem with these attempts to sweep the irritatingly rnexplicable phenomenon of consciousness under a rug of materialist certainty is that they are foredoomed. The attempt, for example, to describe consciousness as a by-product of biology must seem tempting to scientists because biology is @ comprehensible physical science which stands uponva firm foundation of chemistry, the thing chat makes ll chose glands and things that are giving us the illusion of consciousness work in the first place. And chemistry is a reassuringly hatd science because it, in turn, stands upon a solid bedrock of physics, which explains perfectly sensibly how the chemicals behave upon a sub-molccular level. We only run into problems when we start to examine that supposedly solid bedrock of, physics more closely and find that it is entirely founded upon the principles of quantum physics, where everything works according to the principles of Alice in Wonderland and where, we are told, we cannot escape the influence of mind and perception upon the subatomic particles that make up our entire existence. Except that we proved mind not to exist, wv be « by-product of biology, didn't we? And if you want to describe the low of information through our awareness as discrete and parcel-like “memes” then please g0 ahead, but how docs that change anything, exactly, except semantically? Like I say, these attempts to describe consciousness are foredoomsd, or at best hopelessly inadequate when it comes :0 explaining our simplest conscious thoughts and actions, let alone any of the more extreme magical removes of awareness that I personally happen to be interested in. IF wanted a working model of consciousness that would be of any use ro me personally or professionally, i¢ became clesr that I'd have to build ic myself, The idea of adapting a spatial metaphor for the properties of the mind and consciousness grew naturally out of the almost entirely spatial metaphors that we use already when referring to consciousness: we speak of things being on our minds, at the forefront or shoved to the back of our minds: we talk of being in or out of our right minds, even though’our cranium is entirely filled with a kind of pinkish-grey electrified custard in which theres no physical space to be on, in, out of or atthe front and back of. When swe speak of higher consciousness, just how many feet above sea level is that? The idea of conscious awareness occupying some sort of space seems entirely natural to us, so I attempted to hypothesise about the possible nature of this hypothetical “space”, which I labelled Ideaspace. One thing that struck me is that such a space might conceivably be @ mutual space, even though we each apparently possess our own discrete consciousness. Maybe our individual and private consciousness is, in Ideaspace terms, the equivalent ‘of owning an individual and private house, an address, in ‘material space? The space inside our homes is entirely ours, and yet if we step out through the front door we find ourselves in a street . aworld, that is mutually accessible and open to anyone. What ifthat was true of the mind, as well?What if it were possible to travel beyond the confines of ‘one’s individual mind-space, into the communal outdoors, where one could meet with the minds of other people in a shared space? This would at a stroke explain dubious phetiomena such as reported telepathy or knowledge-at-a- distanceybitt would also explain more mundane yet no less incrigating phenomenaas well. When James Watt discovered steam propulsion, for example, there were a number of other inventors who came up with the idea independently in thacsame year yet were unable to beat Wace to the Patent Office (imagine all the little steam-cars competing frantically to get there, like Wacky Races). If Ideaspace doesn’t exist, then these numerous independent discoveries of steam power can only be an almost unbelievable coincidence. If Ideaspace or something like it does exist, however, then one must suppose that actual ideas represent the equivalent of solid objects in terms of chat space. An idea may be a pebble, a rock, a mountain or a whole continent in terms of its stature, but the importane thing is that it exists, atleast metaphysically, as a solid object in this mutually-accessible certain of the mind that I'm describing, just as if ie were a spar of granite jutting from a physical Thus, different “wandering” in their minds, might conceivably stumble landscape. numerous people, all across the same idea almost at ofice, like separate hill- walkers all having happened upon the same distinctive landmark. One thing that became ciear almost immediately is that if awareness were to be considered as a space, then it must have differene rules governing its structure than those which pertain to ordinary physical space. Distances, for example, could only be associational in Ideaspace. Lands End and John O'Groats, while famously far apart in the physical world, are usually ‘mentioned in the same sentence and thus are right next to each other, associatively speaking, One's mind hops directly from one idea to the other. Also, the geography of Ideaspace must therefore either be unfixed, of fixed upon different principles, compared to the geography of the material world. As Rudy Rucker observed in his essay Life is a Fractal in Hilbert Space (as referred to in Big Number), thinking about, say, a cigarette, can lead the mind ina number of directions. You might think about your preference in terms of cigarette brands, or about friends who smoke, or about lung cancer, or about memorable smoking scene in a film that you saw (probably Now, Voyager), or about yout first cigarette under the bleachers of a baseball stadium with a school-friend when you were a __ eleven (these are mostly Rucker's examples, by the way). IF you should choose co chink abous that first cigarette under the bleachers, your next leap of thought could take you to an equally diverse number of areas. You might think about baseball in general, or that particular stadium and its resident team. You might think about that particular schoolfriend, or about school, or about being eleven generally. You might think about some other notable firse” in your life, like first sex or first experience of being blind puking drunk, or, conceivably, both at once. The point is that almost any two conceivable ideas in existence, in Ideaspace if you like, are linked by about six steps, just like Kevin Bacon and any other Hollywood actor that you cate to name. This means that rules of navigation in Ideaspace, are more like the navigational rules of the Incernet, with one idea hotlinked to another, than the navigational rules that are employed on an average car- journey. It would also seem that Time, as a phenomenon, doesn’t apply in the same way to the realm of the mind as it does to our time-locked material realm. ‘We can think as easily about events ten or twenty years ago as we can/about something that happened this morning, 9f we can think about something that might be going to happen tomorrow, or next year, or in ten thousand years time. Idea Space is no more bounded by the conventional laws of time than ic is by the conventional laws of space. If this is so, then this would explain, at a stroke, phenomena such as ghosts, premontitions, apparent memories of Previous lives and even ‘elatively everyday occurrences such as deja-vu. A further notion that came to me was that this hypothetical Ideaspace, where philosophies are land ‘masses and religions are probably whole countries, might contain flora and fauna that are native co ity creatures of this conceptual world that are made from ideas in the same way that we creatures of the material world are made from matter. This could conceivably explain phantoms, angels, demons, gods, djinns, grey aliens, elves, pixies, smurfs and any of the other evidently non-material entities that people claim to have encountered over the centuries, It would also lend a touch of reality to things that might otherwise be seen as mere poetic conceits, such as the idea of Muses, for example, Now, these are all applications of the concept of easpace that are pethaps fairly remote from the everyday experience of ordinary people, but it’s my belief that all of us, probably throughout our entire lives whether waking or asleep, are interacting with Ideaspace to some extent or other. These interactions can either be weak or strong.If we have the idea of drinking a glass of water, then this is an idea, even if it isn't a particularly uncommon or interesting one. Everyday ideas like this could be seen as, common minnows that swarm around the coastal waters of our ocean of Idea Space, easily reached for and caught by anyone. Ideas that are more uncommon are rarer, further out, require a bit more wading or possibly even snorkelling to locate them. Artists and writers and other creators, therefore, tend to be judged upon how far they have travelled in pursuic of their catch. Is their work an original idea that requited a lot of mental travelling, a lot of tracking, in order to bag it? Or did they just pick it up ready-prepared at the delicatessen counter in Safeways, the same as everybody else? Like I said at the Utsetallhof this is hypothetical and speculative, but irs atleast an artemhipt, to come up with a working mail for consci@lstiess thac T personally have found fitful and useful, and which might conceivably be of use t0 someoneleleiwrestling with the same notions. Afid givesthat Ideaspace is a fatty central notion to my €oxiception of consciousness and ereativity, I guess that, yeah, you could say that I've circled the idea in a loc of my work, trying to approach it frei different angles, or trying to make use of the conéépt in formulating new ideas, or usifigicas a theoretic basis to be tested by furcher magical experiments. Ie.Works for méj but whether ics of any practical use to aniyone else, I réally couldn't say. Eddie: There has bezn no audio))yersion of ySnales available? Alan: If this were achat show and I were actually sitting, squirming on a modish leather sofa beneath bright lights and before a studio audience composed of your readership, this would be the point Where I smirk self-deprecatingly and say ‘Well, Ed, it's funny you should say that, but...’ What's happening is that we've rébbrded a finished and mixed version of Snates and Ladders from the)Sriginal masters we used at the performances, with a new vocal. John Coultharéhas done an even more mesmerising jeb on the cover art than he managed for our first ewo beautifully packaged recordings on Steve Severin’s RE: label, and assuming that Severin himself eurns up safely from his recent Banshees reunion tour/marriage/tecording new album (reportedly entitled Fuck! We're Nearly Fifiy! And Have You Scom The Seranglers?}, then 1 believe it should be coming out on RE: sometime this autumn. No doubt musical entrepreneur Chris Staros, the Larry Parnes of comics, will be distributing it through Top Shelf, so anyone who happens to want one for whatever reason should be able to locate a copy. Eddie: Snakes and Ladders leads directly to the comic book in your ABC line, Promethea, which was launched in August 1999. These two works go very much hand in hand, springing as they do from your investigations into the Kaballah and the Tarot. Did you intend for Promethea to plough this deeply when you started it. I get the impression ‘when I look back to the beginning of it that you meant ie to bbe much more of a straight-ahead superhero tale. Did you become more daring in midstream, or was it your intention to hook some excra readers in first before diving to the more profound regions? ‘Alan: As far as [ean remember, the original idea behind Promethea was to eome up with something that worked as a mainstream superhero character, maybe looked a bit like Wonder Woman or Doctor Strange in a weak light, and which would enableme to explore the magical concepts that I was interested in befote a idifistream comics audience that may never have encolintered these ideas before (and may very possibly never have wanted to). It seemed co make sense that we should startat the shallow end, with inflatable arm-bands, so as not to)alienate the readership from the very outset (the plan was to waie for about twelve issues and then alienate them). The first few issues are spent discussing brddidhconcepts of magic and fairly simple but o magical weapons and humafiifgculties that they represent. ‘useful chings like the fur clements and the correspon: ‘They're also spene developing a sefdng connection herween ordinary fiction and fantasy and art ahd imagination, and the realm of magic, which I think is an)important point to establish up front: Magiéisn'some unfathomable and archaic new territory so muich as it’s something which you've been dealing wich all your fif@in various forms, but have Sifiply meyer chosen to see in those terms, With the broad concepts establiahied, we allowed burselves forays into specifie magical territories such a¥ithe outline of Tantric sex im issue ten, which we attempted 16 felate to our brief carlicr outline of the Kaballah in issue five or whenever it was, jst 0 che readers had a fighting chance of connecting everything together in their minds. Specific items like issue AWelve or he|SUbsEREHE EAEHAEA Kaballistic road-movie were not planned specifically at the outset, or at least only conceived as vague and wistful ideas. While the idea ofa kaballistic odyssey sounded very appealing to me from the start, I delayed caking action because I really didn'c think that any of the audience would stay seated for an cleven-issue, nearly-two-year story arc that didn’t build toa dramatic resolution but simply attempted co map a certain kind of territory for the reader. Eventually I decided that the only thing ro do would be to at lease attempt it and lec the chips fall as they may: asie turns out we have lost several thousand readers over the course ofthis saga, not as many as I'd expected, and the ones that remain are either dedicated and firm in their resolve, or else have had their cerebral cortex so badly damaged by the last four o five issues chat they are no longer capable of formulating a complaint, or any other sort of sentence for that matter. And speaking for me and Jim and Mick and Jeromy and ‘Todd, | think we're all rather smug about how well the piece has turned ‘out artistically. The strict Kaballistic colour schemes, as an example, while they looked very dubious and unworkable on paper, have turned up some beautiful and often startling effects in practice. Isue 23, the issue dedicated to Kether, the godhead of the kaballistic system, had a magical palette of four colours, these colours being White, Brilliant One of she Tarot set from Promethea #12. Adam and Eve with the Kaballah as the Tree of Lif TRE PLACE, olay aN BE 2NP ry TERE, Wauive. Wee cain, FAVE, AND TRUST heulet, mnocerb zon Another of the Tarot set from Promethea #12. Harpo Mare as Harpocrates, the silent god, White, White-flecked-with-gold, and most unhelpful ofall, Brilliance. Despite how hopeless this sounded, we decided to stick to our guns and attempr the issue using only white and gold, and apparently the firs few coloured pages do indeed look celestially romethea was always intended as a vehicle, to some extent, for magical ideas, although at the outset I really had no notion that we'd be able to take the strip to some of the extremes that wwe have since managed to accomplish, Alll of these things, ‘man, they have a kind of creepy organic quality, life-like quality, in that if the seed idea is strong and viable enough then ie just grows like Kudzu until ic swallows your entire existence. Eddies I was particularly impressed with your issue twelve, a virtuoso performance by both writer and artist Jim Williams in which you tell the history of the world in terms of the tarot deck. This is one the most of inventive comics Te ever read. How on earth did you arrive at this? And are you allowed to do that? I mean, is there an official magical body out there who ate going to say ‘hold up, you can't do that!” or does this work sit comfortably in traditional ‘magical thinking?Alan: You know, I've been waiting for a couple of years now for someone co ask me how on earth we did Promezhea , just so that I could be knowing and mysterious about it, rather in the style of David Blaine. On the other hand, I think the actual process by which we accomplished it is fairly mysterious even if I explain, step by step, exactly how we did it. The initial germ of the idea was a speci issue of the old Sixties British Underground magazine, OZ. This particular issue, the Magic Theatre issue eschewed the presentation of articles and cartoons in separate blocks of pages, and instead opted for this relatively unique approach where articles, cartoons and other visual progressions of material were strung out through the entire issues, so that you kind of had to read three or four discrete and distinct strands at once, rather than read four linear articles or features one after another, in the usual way. It struck me that it might be possible to do something similar in Promeshea, only much more integrated and structured within that basic framework. I thought that one strand that might be interesting would be to have the logo lettering of the word Promethea rearranging itself throughout the issue to form various anagrams, as long as I could find some thematic reason to justify this. I realised that I had to have other strands, both visual and verbal, running through the