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| Detail from a portrait by Francesca Ciregia. |
Thank you Alan for such a gift and... for your words! Grazie mille!
THE MAGUS IS IN!
A chat with Alan Moore
by smoky man in collaboration with Omar Martini & Francesco Pelosi
Interview conducted in February 2025.
Special thanks to Joe Brown for his valuable assistance.
Let's start with the historical aspect of 'Long London' and The Great When. What reasons led you to choose those specific years in which each book is set? Additionally, will each volume have a main theme, featuring a different author and genre (for example, in The Great When it was literature and Arthur Machen, in the future I Hear a New World we might guess it could possibly be music and Joe Meek, considering its title and the reference in the epilogue to the music producer)?
Alan Moore: What I want to do with this five-book series, overall, is to talk obliquely about our current century and where we are now, by ostensibly discussing the last half of the previous century and where we were then; to offer, if you like, a psycho-historical route-map of how we got here. The ends of decades seemed to provide a good vantage point from which to talk about decades themselves, and so I decided that the first volume would take place at the end of the 1940s – which seemed a useful place to start, with London and England a pulverised tabula rasa after WWII – with the second at the end of the 50s, the third at the end of the 60s, the fourth at the end of the 70s, and then a to-be-explained twenty-year gap before the quintet’s concluding volume, set on the eve of the millennium at the end of the 1990s.
As for your proposed schematic of each book centring upon a different author and a different genre (medium?), I’m afraid that isn’t it at all. Arthur Machen is to some degree the presiding spirit hanging over all five books, simply because of my Other London being an elaborate outgrowth of the hidden metropolis in Machen’s short story ‘N’. And literature will also feature throughout the series, but not as a one-book ‘theme’. The theme of each specific book is simply the era that they happen to be set in, although I’m trying to present those eras by showing the development of the different factors from which each era was composed. For example, in the first book the literature that is perhaps most prominently referred to is George Orwell’s then-just-published 1984. The closest things to popular music and the technology to play it on were ‘The Harry Lime Theme’ and a pub piano. In cinema, The Third Man was probably the film of the year. The state of black culture was best indicated by the new West Indian population of areas like Brixworth and Notting Hill following the recent arrival of the Windrush, or by flamboyant outliers like Ras Prince Monolulu. Gay culture, then illegal, was best referred to by the inclusion of Labour MP Tom Driberg, the state of English art in the late 40s was perhaps best exemplified by Austin Spare, and London crime was dominated by the declining partnership of Jack Spot and Billy Hill. The positions of women and the poor are also addressed. Throughout all five books, of course, we have literal fashion-butterfly Maurice Calendar to keep us abreast of the shifts in youth culture and counterculture.By the second book, set in 1958-59, although Dennis is reading Fleming’s Casino Royale, the book he’s really looking forward to is Mervyn Peake’s concluding Gormenghast book, Titus Alone. Pop music and pop technology have come on quite a bit, being in the thrall of the Rock ’n’ Roll era, as represented chiefly by Joe Meek. As far as cinema goes, Room at the Top and I’m Alright Jack seem emblematic films of the era and are briefly discussed, as are a couple of then-available television shows. Black culture is now expressed via characters like criminal enforcer Michael de Freitas, later 60s radical Michael X, and the race riots in Notting Hill during the August of 1958, Britain’s first. Queer or gay culture, still illegal, is looked at through the lens of Joe Meek or mercurial twilight-world figure David Litvinoff, London art is now chiefly the province of Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud, and London crime is now dominated by Notting Hill property baron Peter Rachman, with the Kray twins coming up fast on the inside. The situation of women or the poor has barely changed.
And so we follow these different strands through the five volumes, sometimes prominently, sometimes as just telling details in the background. On top of this, of course, we have the relevant background news details of the decade in question, to provide a historical context. All this is part of my strategy for examining the late 20th century as a way of talking about the early 21st.
Alan Moore: In From Hell we suggested the late Victorian period, 1888, and specifically the Whitechapel murders as, metaphorically, the birth-cries of the 20th century. Meanwhile, in Lost Girls, Melinda and I posited the late Edwardian era, 1913/1914 and the outbreak of the First World War, I think just as legitimately, as the beginning of the modern world. I suppose the ultimate truth is that every decade, every year, potentially every sunrise is the end of one world and the start of a new one, although over the course of the Long London quintet I want to see what happens when that truism comes up against the currently popular adage that the old world refuses to die and so the new world cannot be born.
As mentioned above, 1949 seemed like a good place to start my book-for-each-decade plan, both in terms of the length of the proposed series – I figured five volumes should be my absolute limit – and in terms of London being to some degree a blank canvas after the war, a place that was shattered physically and psychologically, where, after the science-fiction of the V-bombs, anything might happen. A place where people’s everyday life had just been blown up and set on fire, and where reality must have seemed up for grabs. Certainly, with the bombsite scars not gone till 1998, the 1940s cast a long shadow over England in the decades that followed, making it perhaps the ideal place to commence my fifty-year narrative.
In many of your works, Imagination or the Elsewhere often invades Reality. We see this, obviously, in Long London, Providence, Promethea, the League, the story about Thunderman in Illuminations, and so on. Often the world of Imagination influences or interferes, when it does not directly override, the Real one. Could you elaborate on the interconnected relationship between Reality and Imagination, and how your concept of Idea-Space and Magic is linked to it?
For us, inhabitants of the 21st century with supposedly rational and scientific minds - but this could be easily rebutted, considering all the fake news people seem to believe in, conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, etc... - the concept of Magic seems elusive, often trivialized and relegated to the field of superstition or David Copperfield-style entertainment.
For Steve Moore & you Magic is everywhere and a practical fact. Magic can be identified with (the source of) Creativity, perhaps - I would venture - with one of the founding aspects of Humanity. Obviously, there is an entire book to read and absorb, but... in a nutshell, what is Magic?
Alan Moore: I have to start by carefully defining what is meant by the term ‘reality’. It seems to me that what you most probably mean is material reality. My own position is that while we are indeed apparently part of and surrounded by a material reality (I say apparently because we all compose material reality moment by moment on the loom of our perceptions and are unable to prove that it is actually there, this being the hard problem of consciousness), we are just as evidently part of and immersed in the immaterial reality of our own thought processes. Since material science, which rightly requires empirical testing and repeatable experiments, cannot measure or meaningfully investigate human consciousness, it has tended to argue away consciousness as a ‘ghost in the machine’, and to insist that the only true reality is the material reality for which it has metrics and theories. This has percolated down into the ordinary person on the street’s default worldview, where to say that something is only happening in someone’s mind is to say that it isn’t happening, and by extension that our thoughts and inner workings are not real. Now, thanks to the hard problem of consciousness referred to earlier, while I cannot conclusively state that everybody else’s thoughts and inner workings are real, I can assure you that mine definitely are. In fact, again thanks to the hard problem of consciousness, my thoughts and inner workings are the only things in all existence that I know to be real. The imagination is the sole phenomenon that we know not to be imaginary.
In fact, if we look at material reality more closely, we can see that the greater part of the physical world around us – our buildings, our clothing, our technology, the rooms we’re currently sitting in, the languages with which we think and communicate, the social groups and institutions we belong to – has its origins in the human imagination; in the immaterial inner world of somebody, somewhere, sometime. Thought of in this way, it appears that tangible physical reality is almost entirely founded on the ghostly world of thoughts, concepts and ideas; that this ungraspable phantom territory is the bedrock that our hard and heavy solid world is standing on. This notional world is also, in its own way, more enduring and thus perhaps more substantial that our material realm: the concept of empire has long outlived empires, and if all of the physical chairs in the world were to vanish tomorrow, as long as we retained the concept of chairs, we would not be greatly inconvenienced. It’s only when we lose our ideas and thoughts, as with the library at Alexandria, that we are plunged into a catastrophic dark age for getting on a thousand years.The Bumper Book is a contemporary grimoire guiding us into the world of Magic, in terms of historical, practical and narrative references. Always with a certain amount of irony.
Thus, it is my conclusion that human beings and perhaps all sentient life-forms are in a sense amphibious, in that they live in two worlds at once, these being the material world of the body and the immaterial world of the mind. I further believe that it might be useful to consider these two worlds as two spaces that we simultaneously inhabit, this being the thinking that my hypothetical concept of idea space emerges from. I have held this view for some decades now, have modified my creative processes around it and, as yet, have never encountered any troublesome fact or incisive counter-argument which disproved it. On rereading Machen’s sublime ‘N’, I understood that while his visionary Other London very probably had different intentions and different inflections to my own ideas of conceptual space, in a certain light they could be seen as aspects of the same archetypal realm, a world somehow more timeless, more true and more significant than our own familiar avenues and backstreets. And while I know that this is all an outrageous and hopefully fluorescent fantasy that I’m making up, I feel that, on at least a metaphorical level, every word of it is true.
For us, inhabitants of the 21st century with supposedly rational and scientific minds - but this could be easily rebutted, considering all the fake news people seem to believe in, conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, etc... - the concept of Magic seems elusive, often trivialized and relegated to the field of superstition or David Copperfield-style entertainment.
For Steve Moore & you Magic is everywhere and a practical fact. Magic can be identified with (the source of) Creativity, perhaps - I would venture - with one of the founding aspects of Humanity. Obviously, there is an entire book to read and absorb, but... in a nutshell, what is Magic?
Alan Moore: Well, I’ll try my best, but it will have to be a fairly roomy nutshell. If I understand the subject correctly, magic begins hundreds of thousands of years ago with some clumsiness involving a potato. This hypothetical tuber, accidentally kicked closer to the campfire, was the invention of cookery. This massive leap meant that we no longer needed to waste ninety per cent of our food’s energy value in the act chewing it. This, in turn, meant that we no longer needed the big, wide, grinding jaws that had made room for our necessarily powerful dentition. Across subsequent millennia, we therefore gradually lost a bone that had been increasing the width of our jaws and, as it turned out, limiting the growth of our upper skull. With this bone gone, the tops of our heads could expand, allowing us to develop larger and more complex brains which could do a lot of new and unfamiliar things that our old brains couldn’t do – perhaps the difference was like that between owning an abacus and having a full internet connection. It’s my contention that development of modern human consciousness followed something like the following trajectory: our first breakthrough was in the crucial concept of representation, which is to say art. This allowed us to say that these marks on a cave wall or these phonetic sounds somehow stand for or represent that enormous bison over there. This vital concept permitted the development of spoken and, perhaps more importantly, pictographic written language. Language, modern linguistic theory assures us, precedes consciousness, and so this is the point at which modern human consciousness originates.
Magic, I contend, is humanity’s perfectly natural reaction to this extraordinary new thing that it seemed to have inside its head. Having no theory of mind, where could all these internal voices, images, memories, dreams, thoughts and world-changing ideas be coming from, if not from gods or spirits? Thus, shamanic magic was contrived as an all-in-one technology meant to further understand and mediate with an extraordinary new universe of thoughts and perceptions that was entirely without precedent. And, for those who would point out at these primitive people were not communing with supernatural entities at all, but ‘merely’ with parts of their own newly-forged consciousness that they had not previously been able to access, I would point out that their approach to these new mental phenomena was evidently successful, having gifted us with our contemporary world and most of the things in it, whichever of these two explanations is the truth. Whatever its provenance, their magic clearly worked. It was a magic of existence that included everyone, and at its core was the raw ecstasy of Being itself. Most importantly, with the shaman or shamanka dispensing their visions amongst the whole tribe, it meant that people’s experience of this nominal godhead was direct and not mediated through religion’s endless supply of clerical third parties. This was the origin of all our spirituality and all our culture, two things that were then seen as indivisible.
With its trans-generational observations of the skies and the seasons and the cycles of living things, shamanism was probably what allowed the emergence of agriculture, which led to settlements, which led to the early city-states, which, ironically, led to the slow and implacable dismantling of magic. Essentially, the magical worldview was cannibalised and used for parts in the construction of civilisation. With people no longer required to grow their own food, specialisation became possible. Priests emerged to take over magic’s spiritual role, now divided into numerous often-conflicting religions. Professional artists and scribes hived off the shaman’s role as dispenser of visions, and the rise of viziers to replace shamans as advisors to tribal leaders meant that magic no longer had a political or social dimension. Admittedly, magic still had very important aspects, such as its access to an inner world and its progressive understanding of what would come to be science and medicine under the rubric of ‘natural philosophy’.
However, by the Renaissance, science and medicine emerged as disciplines in their own right, disavowing the crucial magical traditions that had birthed them. This still left magic’s access to an inner world, but in the very early 20th century, Sigmund Freud popularised psychiatry, utilising concepts familiar in occult lodges for the previous couple of hundred years – the term ‘unconscious’ was first coined and used by 16th century occultist Paracelsus – and then, all magic seemed to have left was the hollow ritual and the attendant posturing. Given that all modern culture, including dance, literature, music, art and theatre, has its origins in the shamanic repertoire of trance-inducing performance, it would seem that much of the society surrounding us is in fact composed of the dismembered body-parts of magic.Thinking back to your works and personal journey, we could identify three "pillars": Anarchy in politics, interest in Science and its theories (Eternalism, quantum physics, the evolution of the Universe, AI...) and pervasive Magic. How are they related to each other? Is there a balance? Or a complicated dialectic?
Magic in the present day, perhaps lacking for any apparent utility or purpose, has, seemingly, largely degenerated to an escapist and materialist fantasy, most of which’s exponents appear to view it as a sort of special effect or superpower that will immediately force reality into delivering up anything you require of it, a supernatural extension of Amazon, if you will, less expensive but far less reliable. If that was how magic had ever worked, I suggest we would now be in either a perfect utopia or an Hieronymus Bosch hell-scape. The only thing that magic dependably works on is the party performing it. It does not work directly on the world, but rather can transform the individual into someone who can work directly on the world. And all of his or her magical workings, successful or not, will require a tremendous amount of dedicated work, as one might expect. People looking for an easy life-fix through magic are looking in the wrong place. Magic is not something to materially assist you in your life. Rather, it is something to dedicate that life to, without lust of material result.
In The Bumper Book, Steve and I attempted a definition of magic that seemed much more inclusive of the creative arts and sciences, and less focussed upon the (possibly arrogant) will of the magician: ‘Magic is any purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness’. And that, without taking as long as we did in The Bumper Book, is the best in-a-capacious-nutshell answer that I can offer you at the moment.
Alan Moore: While I agree with your basic outline, and while my political position is indeed an anarchist one, it might be more helpful to substitute ‘politics’ for ‘anarchism’ in your suggested three pillars. Also, I think you should probably add a fourth pillar to stand for my interest in the medium through which I express the other three pillars, which is to say art. All of these things share a common origin in Palaeolithic shamanism, as explained above, but the relationship between them is perhaps best explained by the ideal relationship we suggest in The Bumper Book. A revitalised and reconfigured conception of magic stands at the start of our proposed arrangement. The next step is to connect magic with art – this could potentially enrich both fields, providing magic with a visible result and purpose as in the art of Austin Osman Spare or the writings of William Blake, while potentially infusing the arts with genuine vision rather than their current trend towards largely empty conceptualism. With this accomplished, we next suggest connecting art and science – a linkage which again might benefit both disciplines and a process to some degree already underway, with artists taking inspiration from the breath-taking imagery or concepts of contemporary science, and scientists coming to realise that, say, modernist writers like Woolf or Proust were intuiting things that neuroscience is only now confirming. The final connection in our arrangement is also the most contentious and one least likely to be adopted. We should ultimately connect science with politics, which would allow us the possibility of evidence-based government, and perhaps an end to our surely-deliberate culture of falsehood, disinformation and conspiracy theory. This Magic-Art-Science-Politics arrangement, roughly analogous to the occult notion of Fire-Water-Air-Earth, or Wands-Cups-Swords-Discs, or Spirit-Emotion-Intellect-Materiality, is the way that I feel most things, including myself, work best, and don’t see why this shouldn’t be extended to our social structure.
Alan Moore: My answer is both. Hope is always the only rational position, in that to give up hope of success is to guarantee failure and, in the event that the worst happens, it is surely better to go out knowing that you resisted it and struggled your very best to prevent it from happening. So, yes, there is always hope. But, yes, I fear that the world is inevitably in for a gloomy period, and the hope is that we can survive it and build something better from it.
If we wish to have an inhabitable future for us and our children and their children, then might I quietly suggest we stop electing and tolerating obvious fascist buffoons because we think they’re entertaining characters, as if they were housemates on Big Brother. This isn’t reality TV. This is reality, or what’s left of it. Let us instead protest and rail at these dribbling Nazi idiots to our last breath, rather than beam stupidly as Elon Musk ‘sends his heart out to us’ Nuremberg style. Let us point out that they are suicidal cretins when they insist that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Let us not give these witless fuckers an inch.
And, more important than condemning the forces driving this multi-faceted disaster, let us take responsibility for ourselves and our communities. Let us for God’s sake stop relying on these leaders and their self-serving social structures that lead us nowhere save into the abyss. If we want things to exist – things like proper education, health and welfare services – then let us give our energies, our time, our money, our art, to the numerous community projects that are springing up of necessity and attempting to counteract these privations of the state or the toxic world it has created. Support environmental movements and protests, stand up for the rights of minorities and women at a moment when those rights are being clawed away from them by the horror story/laughing stock currently in the White House, form Arts Labs or start fanzines in recognition of the fact that we should probably think about providing our own art and entertainment too, and do something, some little or big thing to make the world around you more like the world you want to live in. Good luck.
If you like, you can read it in Italian on Quasi magazine, HERE!
