Sabbath on a Rainy Day and the Tree of Life

Art by Émile Bayard

Due to personal issues, I am a bit late with new pieces for the series about The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, serialized on Italian web-magazine (Quasi) .

So, below, you can read the extra info that the great John Coulthart sent me some weeks ago, included in Italian in the last, sixth article posted on (Quasi). Grazie again, John!

Rick Veitch created a bunch of illos for the first part of "Things to do on a rainy day" and for the other parts the graphic side was on you. How did you manage this? How did you pick the accompanying images? Which are you favourite ones? Did you receive any indication from the Moores about that?
John Coulthart: The first Rainy Day section was the only one with any planned illustration, nothing had been decided for the other sections. At the outset I suggested asking Rick to do more illustrations but Alan didn't think it right to continue using drawings of kids in the sections concerning sex magic, drug-taking and so on. So this was another area of the book where I was acting as art director, choosing images with some connection to the contents. The first picture I chose was the full-page illustration of a Sabbath scene by Émile Bayard from Histoire de la Magie (1870). I'd tracked down this illustration several years ago after seeing it erroneously attributed to Gustave Doré and was curious about the origin. Once I'd decided to use this for the Rainy Day sequence I decided to fill out the rest of the chapters with similar antique imagery to give these sections a consistent feel. At the very end everything comes full circle with another picture of two junior magicians which I adapted from an illustration in an old magazine.

What's about the Kabbalah section? How did you approach such a fundamental section? I feel a "keep it simple" approach in terms of the associated images. I really like the change of color to indicate the related Sephiroth in the tree graph...
This was much more like doing something for a text book so the decision was to present the basic elements of the Tree of Life in a clear manner. The full-page illustration is very detailed, and probably rather confusing at first sight for people who haven't seen it before. I created the small single Sephiroth illustrations to go with the text in order to show the very basic arrangement of the ten spheres from each every other part of the philosophy derives. When you're learning about the Kabbalah you have to learn the names and positions of the Sephiroth before anything else. Once their arrangement is clear then everything follows from this. 

(Continua...)