So what we have is a very adult book designed to look like a bit of childhood nostalgia, a time machine of sorts. In sense The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is attempting to induce an altered state of consciousness, a vital trick in the magic arts, right on its initial pages...
In a sense
every grimoire wants to shake you out of your daily consciousness. Books like Andrew Chumbley's
Azoetia attempt it through the
weird, with hallucinatory imagery and text. Others attempt it through the occult, the forbidden, or the taboo. While this can work, it can also have an alienating effect. Crowley's 1904
Goetia, Simon's 1977
Necronomicon, or even LaVey's
The Satanic Bible employ goth aesthetics that induce a mental "head click," but most people are not going to stick around long enough for the magic to happen. Something else is going on in Moore and Moore's grimoire.
Moon and Serpent is inviting you back to Narnia, to Wonderland, to Oz. These landscapes all contains wonders and terrors to be sure, but the thrill of them is as familiar to us as the texture of our old teddy bear. The magic here is not cloaked in Dark and Brooding, but childlike awe and wonder.
A Long Expected Tome
First announced back in 2007 (I could swear I had heard of it even before that, but memory and imagination are both Yesodic and never fully trustworthy), The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic was a collaboration between legend Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, The Killing Joke, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, Lost Girls, and most critically here, Promethea) and his mentor Steve Moore. Himself a practicing ceremonial magician and occultist, Alan Moore had pulled back the curtain on the world of the magic rather extensively in the pages of Promethea, and the idea of him writing a grimoire, a treatise on the arts magical, was a mouth-watering prospect for a thirty-five-year-old version of me fresh in my O.T.O. days and gearing up to attempt the Abramelin. His thoughts on the subject, at least from what I saw of them in interviews and Promethea, resonated with me, and his power as a writer was undeniable. I was ready, and I wanted my greedy mitts on it.
And ye gods...was I in for a wait.
Years ticked by, and in 2014 the death of co-author Steve Moore seemed to make Moon and Serpent one of those dreams (if I may paraphrase Peter Gabriel) not made solid or real. Yet apparently it was still on its way, announced for 2023, delayed a bit longer, and finally released in October of 2024. It took me a couple more months to get a copy, but in the end of 2024--which in so many other ways had been a miserable bloody year for me--the Long Wait was over. Moon and Serpent was mine.
The Name
The title of the tome comes from "The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels," a cabal of sorcerer-artists including Alan Moore, Bauhaus and Love and Rockets bassist David J, and musician-composer Tim Perkins. Together, they released a series of "workings" between 1996 and 2003. These were occult spoken word performances set to music. Chronologically the first of these was the self-titled The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, though it was released on CD after the follow up, The Birth Caul (A Shamanism of Childhood). These were followed by The Highbury Working: A Beat Séance, Snakes and Ladders, and Angel Passage.
If you have heard these Workings, you have a good idea of what to expect of the Bumper Book. For Moore, magic is first and foremost an art, a creative act. The goal of aspiring magicians is to reach certain trance states and altered forms of consciousness similar to those which musicians, writers, painters, and other artists work from. The book advocates using art, any art, to help access magic. Of course, Moore is not alone in this. While Aleister Crowley was a stickler for ritual, particularly in his youth, he was also a poet, prolific writer, and a painter. Liber AL vel Legis and the "Holy Books" of Thelema are phenomenal pieces of poetry, all received in a trance state. His "Rites of Eleusis," seven dramatic performances combining poetry, spoken word, music, and dance, were very much in the vein of the Workings the Moon and Serpent would later perform. Austin Osman Spare, Crowley's contemporary, was another magician artist. And while Moore does not seem to have tremendous respect for the man, Anton Szandor LaVey viewed magic as art and performance as well.
This brings us to the titular serpent.
One of the first things Moore suggests an aspiring magician should do is find a god they are drawn to. Not necessarily to worship, but to act as a patron of sorts as the individual steps into the world of magic. For Moore, that patron is the 2nd century snake god Glycon, but what is telling is his reasoning.
Glycon--at least according to the accounts of contemporary Roman satirist Lucian--was created by magician, con man, and would be prophet Alexander of Abonoteichos. If Lucian is to be believed, Glycon (a serpent with a mane of gorgeous golden human hair) was essentially a sock puppet that Alexander used to get rich and get laid. Now, there are potent occult reasons to select a serpent god as one's patron (see my series of essays posted back in
December of 2016), but Moore has been up front with the fact that
part of selecting Glycon was the absurdity of it, and also that the deity was an artistic creation. Glycon embodies what the magician does, namely conjure ideas into flesh. Whether or not this was the case, Moore
likes the idea that Glycon was a sock puppet. Again, this very much recalls Anton LaVey, who never believed in an actual Satan, yet established a religion in his name arguing that all religion was theater.
Glycon, from the inside front cover.
As an Artefact
Weighing in at 352 pages, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is a hefty tome, with a cover 9.25 x 12.40 inches (23.5 x 31.5 cm). The pages are thick, heavy, and glossy, with a sturdy "lays-flat" binding and a purple book ribbon.
Moore is best known as a comic book author, inarguably one of the greatest, so we cannot be surprised that Moon and Serpent is gloriously and gorgeously illustrated by Steve Parkhouse, Ben Wickey, Rick Veitch, Kevin O'Neill, and John Coulthart. The cover is lettered in gilt.
In short, the book is a work of art, and something not only magicians but fans of comic art and Alan Moore will want on their shelves.
The Structure of the Book, or "What is so Bumpery about it?"
On my first leaf-through, Moon and Serpent reminded me of Starhawk and Hilary Valentine's classic The Twelve Wild Swans. That book talked about using fairy tales and myths to learn and practice magic, and was structured in such a way that a chapter would include a story, then magical instruction, then exercises. You could go through the book just reading the story, or the instructions, or the exercises, or read it cover-to-cover. Much of that applies here.
As mentioned earlier, bumper books tended to include stories, serialized comics, activities, and the like. These were then collected into single volumes. Moore and Moore have done that here. Each chapter contains an essay on an occult topic, an activities section related to that topic ("Things to Do on a Rainy Day"), a serialized history of magic in comic form ("Old Moores' Lives of the Great Enchanters"), and a prose fiction account of a young woman embarking on the path of magic ("The Soul"). This prose story reinforces and illustrates the occult topic and rainy day activities of that chapter. As a teacher, this is all familiar. Instruct. Practice. Provide an example. Produce. There is also at the beginning of the book a wordless comic showing the awakening of consciousness in primitive man ("In the Morning of the Mind") and starting slightly later in the book a second serialized comic, this time following the career of Alexander of Abonoteichos and the creation of Glycon.
In addition to this basic skeleton (words support like bone), other material is scattered throughout the book. In fact, the very first thing the book presents us with is "The Moon and Serpent Magical Alphabet." This 24-letter alphabet is a series of magical sigils, each representing a letter of the English alphabet, a number, a deity, a sign of the zodiac, and for the first ten, a Sephira from the Tree of Life. That it comes at the very start of the book should be no surprise. Human consciousness, at least as it exists today, cannot exist without language. Crowley famously called magic a "disease of language." "Spells" are simply "spelling," and "grimoire" is related to "grammar." Alphabets form the very foundation--the bones--of thought and if magic is the exploration and manipulation of thought, we must start with the basics. In his choices and associations, Moore reveals a great deal about his magical thought. He is eclectic: the deities listed are Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, Hebrew, Thelemic (Nuit), and fictional (Glycon and Cthulhu). They lay out his approach to Kabbalah and the Tree of Life (for example, 11 he gives to Daath, the "false Sephira" of the Abyss and associates with Cthulhu). And they indicate what ideas he finds particularly useful. Later, near the very end of the book, he provides several other magical alphabets (Theban, Celestial, Enochian, etc) and space for you to create your own. Finally, there are several tables of correspondences to the Hebrew Tree of Life, not unlike Crowley's 777, and to my delight, a paper model for you to cut out and assemble your own Moon and Serpent temple.
The book closes out with a 50+ page recap and explanation of each of the book's moving parts. Moore discusses how choices were made, his thinking, and provides context for each. If we think of the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic as an introductory course in the art of magic, then this section is where the instructor pulls back the curtain on why the lessons are presented in the manner they are.
Adventures in Thinking
The book tackles a number of subjects, but before we can discuss any of them we need to answer one important question. When Moore and Moore are talking about magic, what is it exactly that magic means to them?
I opened this post with Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street" because, while "The Rhythm of the Heat" deals directly with the magical experience, those lines from "Mercy Street" capture beautifully what magic is...at least to me and clearly Alan and Steve Moore.
While we as a civilization race towards the edge of artificial intelligence, the truth of the matter is that we still do not fully understand what "consciousness" or "sentience" is. Without getting too far into the weeds, the problem science has with consciousness is the so called "hard problem." The "easy problems," how sensory data is transmitted to the brain, how memories are formed, how attention is focused, are all mechanical and thus easy to study. But the hard problem is the feeling of consciousness...that each of us feels we exist. We are getting to a point where AI convincingly apes consciousness, and might even be able to trick us into believing it is...but does the AI itself feel conscious? And how would we know?
For Moore and Moore--and myself, and arguably many other occultists out there like Lon Milo DuQuette--magic is the art of consciousness. It is the exploration of the phenomenon, the development of it, the manipulation of it, and the application of it.
The mind exists, and our thoughts exist, ideas exist, but not in the same way that chemical compounds, DNA, or forms of energy do. The first step in magic is to accept the notion that ideas are every bit as real as material objects, but that they exist and operate on a very different plane and by very different laws. I cannot defy the laws of gravity...yet in dreams I often fly. In fact right now I can close my eyes and imagine myself doing so. More interestingly, while flight is a simple matter of aerodynamics, the idea of flight is part of an interconnected chain of concepts...freedom, motion, joy, birds, the sky, etc etc. Flight in the physical world is a phenomenon. Flight in the mental world has meaning.
Now, if we can agree that ideas exist, a host of additional questions arise. Where, for example, do they exist? Moore asks an interesting question early on, essentially: does consciousness exist only inside our individual skulls, or is it a world in which our individual skulls are just houses, waiting for us to go out the door and explore? We cannot really answer that until we try. If ideas are real, to whom do they belong? Is my Santa Claus your Santa Claus? Or is Santa Claus--or an innumerable host of Saint Nicks--an inhabitant or inhabitants of this other world? By what laws does this other world of thought operate? Time and physical distances seem meaningless there. Indeed distance seems to be a function of meaning rather than space. For example, "work," "job" "career" and "profession" are all "close" to each other, inhabiting the same little cul de sac. "Hammer" and "philosophy" by contrast seem miles apart. Moore points out that even size operates by different principles there. We talk about "big ideas" and "little problems," indicating that size on the mental plane seems to translate into the effect it has on our lives.
So what we discover then is a mental universe, an "Other Side," people by ideas (spirits, gods, etc) that each of us partially inhabits. But it is amorphous, a perilous and ever-shifting terrain. That makes exploring there tricky.
In this context, occultism and magic become comprehensible. The various "systems" of magic--such as Kabbalah or Enochian--become conceptual frameworks, "maps" by which the territory of the mental Other World can be catalogued and explored. The Tree of Life can be viewed as a 32-drawer filing cabinet into which any single idea can be neatly assigned. In drawer number 4, the Sephira (sphere) known as Chesed, we find gods like Zeus, Odin, Indra, and Orlanth. We find the notion of fatherhood, of the sky, of leadership, etc. When we come across similar ideas, such as Yahweh in his ancient form as a thunder god and war god, we know right where to place him. We can also put his counterpart El--the paternal, patriarch, father god--there as well and this might give us an indication how the two then fused over time into our more modern Jehovah.
The symbol sets (like alphabets) of magic are thus essential tools. They form the basis by which we can begin exploring and manipulating ideas. But why should we wish to?
The answer is "art."
In modern English we tend to think of "fine arts" when we hear the word, of beauty and entertainment. But when it entered English in the 13th century it meant "a skill, craft, or trade," and that is pretty much what it meant in Latin. It's Sanskrit cousin, rtih, means "the manner something is done, how it is done." The Proto-Indo-European seems to mean "shaping things" and the English word "arm," the limb we use to shape things, is cognate.
Art is the practical application of magic. Yes, magic involves crossing over to the Other Side and exploring the vast conceptual territories there, but it also involves bringing things back from the Other Side and manifesting them. All of the buildings, all of the cars...Were once just a dream, in somebody's head... The fact of the matter is that apart from our daily run-ins with mechanical, chemical, or organic laws, very little we experience in daily life is "real," by which I mean to say it is "artificial," created by art. The words we use, the buildings we live in, the cars we drive...our laws, economics, borders, religions...are all products summoned from the imaginary world. We live in a dream made real.
So is one side of magic is the exploration and expansion of consciousness, then the other is the application of it to reshape our worlds. This is a uniquely human faculty, and one that it almost seems a crime (as our birthright) not to explore.
Altered States
In their first "Things to Do on a Rainy Day" section the two Moores touch on magic's reliance on altered states of consciousness. In a second "Things to Do on a Rainy Day" they dig a little deeper.
Because it is useful to think of consciousness as another realm or territory, one that can be navigated and explored, the magician needs ways to step "out" of everyday thinking and cross over to the Other Side. Ideally we want to cultivate mental states that approach lucid dreaming, where we have absolute freedom and authority to reshape mental environments, interact profitably with the idea-entities we encounter there, etc. We want to immerse ourselves in the mental landscape as deeply as possible, but retain control.
There are innumerable ways to do this, from induced physical exhaustion to meditation to the ingestion of entheogens (a term that interestingly enough means "full of god"). The Moon and Serpent covers many of them here. In a latter section the book tackles the more transgressive techniques people have used over the centuries to achieve the same. Ultimately the point is, when you engage in magic, you will want to do so in an altered state of consciousness.
Tree-Climbing
As a practitioner, Moore sits firmly in the Western ceremonial tradition of magic. In preparing this review, I read and watched a few others, and several times heard him referred to as a Thelemite, i.e. an adherent of the belief system promulgated by Aleister Crowley. I see absolutely no evidence of this. Rather, what I do see is that Moore finds a great deal of what Crowley taught to be useful. Chief among these is Kabbalah. After the first chapter of the book introduces the basic outline of what magic is and what to do with it, Moore moves immediately to the Tree of Life.
I talked extensively about Kabbalah back in October of 2016, particularly in this post
here (though the others in the same series touch on it as well). Kabbalah, as mentioned above, is a form of esoteric Judaism that arose in 2nd and 3rd century Alexandria alongside Hermeticism and certain Gnostic traditions. It fuses Pythagorean mysticism with esoteric readings of the Torah. Over the centuries, however, it has been adopted by non-Jews, and a variant form of Kabbalah has come to form the core of the Western ceremonial tradition. It is the skeleton that supports the flesh and blood of that tradition.
At the core of the structure are the ten Sephiroth, each corresponding to one of the numbers of the Pythagorean decade. These "spheres" are linked by 22 paths, each associated with one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and since the 19th century, the 22 Trumps of the Tarot's "Major Arcana." As I said above, this creates a 32 draw-filing system by which ideas may be organized and the Other Side "mapped."
I have read a lot of books on the Kabbalah, including primary texts, and I can say without reservation that this chapter of the Moon and Serpent is a tour de force. It is useful to remind ourselves here that aside from being a magician, Moore is a superb writer, and thus his articulation of this tricky subject matter is a masterclass in clarity and concision. He starts the section by discussing the basic structure of the Tree from the top down, and later how the magician may use the Tree as map to explore consciousness from the ground up ("tree-climbing"). To be clear, Moore's takes are not universal, but they are very provocative.
From the top down, we find Nothingness that gradually evolves into somethingness. Ain, "nothing," becomes Ain Soph ("limitless nothing") and Ain Soph Aur ("limitless radiant nothing"). A sort of critical mass is achieved and the first Sephira, Kether, is born. This is Unity, Oneness. Yet almost as soon as it appears, two other Sephiroth follow, Chokmah and Binah. Together these three are--among other things--the triune godhead. Kether is god above all description. Chokmah is god the father. Binah is god the mother. Geometrically, Kether is the point, Chokmah is the line (two points) and Binah is the triangle (three points and the introduction of the 2nd dimension).
But now something odd has to happen. The highest three Sephiroth are called the Supernals, and they exist beyond a conceptual Abyss. The remaining seven Sephiroth belong to the experiential world, we can know them. But to cross the Abyss and experience the Supernals, we need to obliterate the distinction between subject and object. The Abyss then, is ego death.
Different magicians have wrestled with Abyss in different ways. Som traditions put an 11th, "false Sephira" there, Daath or "Knowledge." Knowledge here should be understood as direct experience...the old Biblical "and so and so knew his wife and begot such and such." Knowledge requires two things to exist, subject and object, knower and known. The Abyss is where Knowledge goes to die. Usually it is not given a number (Crowley argued for 11), but Moore assigns it Pi (3.14159) and associates the fictional deity Cthulhu with it.
There is a certain logic to this. Pi is not a number, it's a constant, in the same way Daath is not a Sephiroth. Cthulhu is a fictional character, Daath is a fiction. And coming down from Daath we come to a fourth point, Chesed. But in Daath the rules have changed. Chesed cannot exist on the same "plane" as the Supernals, because this fourth point opens the 3rd dimension. Indeed, Chesed and the remaining Sephiroth all exist in 3rd dimensional space. Traditionally associated with sky gods, Moore equates Chesed with Space.
The fifth Sephira is Geburah, associated with stern judgement and martial deities. Moore like's to associate it with Kali, and with Time. Crowley might have thought along similar lines, associating Geburah with the tesseract, or fourth dimensional hypercube.
Now, however, the table has been set. We have the highest conceptual triad (thesis-antithesis-synthesis, positive, negative, neutral), Space and Time. So now we bring out the star of our show, literally. Traditionally associated with the Sun, the sixth Sephira Tiphareth in Moore's view embodies consciousness itself and the Will. From here on in, all remaining Sephiroth will deal with aspects of Tiphareth.
Netzach (the seventh) and Hod (the eighth) represent emotion and thought respectively. Hod is the seat of language, reason, and communication, while Netzach (existing before Hod) is the raw emotion of a crying infant or an animal, emotion unshaped by words or thinking. Only with Hod does the concept of "identity" and "individuality" become possible. It may have existed in Tiphareth, but it could not be defined without language.
The ninth and tenth Sephiroth are, in The Moon and Serpent, two sides of the same coin. Traditionally these are Yesod and Malkuth, the "Foundation" and "The Kingdom" respectively. They are associated with the Moon and with Earth. The argument being made is that Yesod is the foundation of Malkuth. Now, Yesod is the imagination, the realm of dreams. Malkuth is generally viewed as the material world, or rather, the world of waking consciousness. Moore argues that none of us have direct experience of the material world. Instead we receive sensory data and construct a holographic experience of it in our heads. In short. the material world is manufactured in the imagination. And as discussed above, much of what we perceive as "real" originated in the human imagination.
But to circle back to art, this interpretation of the Tree of Life now gives us a working theory of magic and art. The base three Sephiroth on the middle pillar of the Tree are Tiphareth, Yesod, and Malkuth, the Will, the Imagination, and the Waking World. Magic--art--is the application of the Will upon Imagination to direct it to create in the Waking World.
As mentioned, the 22 paths connecting the Sephiroth correspond to Tarot Trumps. While a full discussion is beyond the scope of this post, we can see how they reinforce this interconnected web of concepts by continuing this example:
The Path between Will and Imagination is the Trump Crowley called "Art." Art is the exercise of Will upon Imagination. The Path between Imagination and the Waking World is "The Universe," indicating that the Universe is (descending) shaped by the Imagination and (ascending) processed through the Imagination.
Remaining Matters
In good time The Moon and Serpent moves on to discuss the Tarot, using the Kabbalah as a basic for understanding. It is another stunning chapter, making a subject often over-complicated clear.
After, we circle back to interacting with and traveling through the Other Side, using trance techniques previously discussed. The ten Sephiroth are again revisited, emphasizing their importance in the Moon and Serpent stream of magic. Other models or "maps" of the mental realm are then introduced. The Shamanic otherworld, the Indian Tattvas, the Astral Plane, the Visionary Realm, Fairyland, the Alchemical Landscape, the Enochian Aethyrs, and the Witches' Sabbat are all discussed as alternative conceptions of the Other Side.
The next "Things to Do on a Rainy Day" deals with "Imaginary Friends," and the book is bringing us round at last to the concept of spirits.
Moore carefully sets up the question: are these varied entities independent life forms or facets of ourselves? This is something that every practitioner of magic will wrestle with. I have gone back and forth on the matter a dozen times. Particularly in dealings with my Holy Guardian Angel (a topic Moore covers admirably) it is clear to me that if he is not an entity of greater knowledge and ability than myself, then it is a part of myself capable of far more than I usually seem able. But ultimately, the Moon and Serpent argues, it does not matter. Spirits should be engaged with as real and independent entities, otherwise there is nothing to be gained from the interaction. The book goes into detailed and thoughtful methods for contacting these beings and having dealings with them, and discusses separate classes of them: animal spirits, spirits of places, spirits of the dead, gods, the Loa, demons, angels, planetary spirits, Enochian angels, and fictional characters.
This leads into our next "Things to Do on a Rainy Day: Malpractical Magic," the so-called Dark Arts. As it did earlier in dealing with transgressive magic and the use of drugs, The Moon and Serpent clearly has a position on this subject but never descends into being overly moralizing about it (looking at you Arthur Edward Waite, looking at you). The book's entire bumper book approach firmly sets it against the gloom and doom goth vibe of Black Magic, but it is also aware that such arts exist and may have their uses. Nor could Moon and Serpent be the introduction to the world of magic that it is had it excluded such topics.
The book closes with a lovely connect the dots puzzle (Baphomet) and a Sephirioth maze.
What the Hell Can I Say?
I have never waited longer for a book. It was worth the wait.
There are very few books one can recommend as heartily. Crowley called one of his final works Magick Without Tears, but The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic lives up to that title better than the original did. I took up the practice of magic when I was sixteen, and for the intervening ten years (*winks*) have tried to answer a single question more times than I can count: "what is a good book to start with?" I now unequivocally have an answer.
What is magic? How do I do it? Why would I bother? Moore and Moore answer these questions with astounding alacrity and deftness. At no point do they shy away from the thornier subjects, but the subject is kept light, bright, and positive. There is something exhilarating about simply thumbing through the book. It is, in a word, "magical."
No comments:
Post a Comment