The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic: A Look

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid, are the dreams made real
All of the buildings, all of the cars
Were once just a dream, in somebody's head...

...There in the midst of it, so alive and alone
Words support like bone

Peter Gabriel, "Mercy Street"

The term "bumper book" may not be a familiar one to many of my fellow Americans. 

From the mid-1920s up until the end of the 20th century, in the United Kingdom, monthly or weekly booklets were produced for children. These contained serialized comic stories, puzzles, rainy day activities, and the like. Most aimed at being educational in some fashion, and used public domain images to keep costs down. At the end of the year, in time for Christmas, they could be collected and republished in thick hardback books, perfect for presents. It's from these that the term "bumper" (something unusually large) likely gets applied.

British friends--of a certain age--I have spoken with have fond memories of these books, the way I suppose I do of scouting magazines like Ranger Rick or Boy's Life, which were similar in many ways, or Highlights, a staple of visits to every American pediatrician. These magazines were informative, and kept us engaged and entertained in those halcyon days before smartphones and tablets. So it only makes sense to me that Alan and Steve Moore (same surname, no relation) might revive the bumper book for an introduction to magic and the occult.

You see, when you stop to consider it, the bumper book is the perfect way to tackle this rather tricky subject. To learn the art of magic, you need informative articles introducing the subject, brief histories and biographies of great magicians, puzzles to engage the mind and introduce new ways of thinking, and (perhaps most importantly for an Art) plenty of rainy day activities to engage the hand and mind in the production of magical charms and tools. Even better, you need to strip away the conditioned and institutionalized cynicism of adolescence and adulthood that society uses to straitjacket us into commutes, bills, and the almighty alarm clock. You need to take us back to a time when all things were possible, rather than practical. As the man says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." 

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."    

ULYSSES: AKA "WHY HEROQUESTING IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK"

MY FATHER LIKED TO ASSIGN BOOKS for me to read. Then he would quiz me about them at the dinner table. One of my clearest memories is of Jame Joyce's Ulysses, which being a mythology nut I clicked with long before my father thought I would. "What do you think about the title?" He asked me. "Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus. He is basically saying that any man who leaves his wife to go to work every day and manages to come home to her has experienced the Odyssey for himself."

I don't recall getting any bonus allowance but I should have for that answer. Yes, I am being facetious, but the point here is that heroquesting is easier than you think.

Wait...what?

"Heroquesting" is a magical and religious practice in Greg Stafford's fantasy world, Glorantha. I've written about it extensively both in Six Seasons in Sartar, The Company of the Dragon, and as part of the Chaosium team for an upcoming release. It is, basically, a "vision quest" yet also the same thing that the ancient Greeks invented drama for. The idea is a simple one, if you can think like a Traditional person. The problem is, most of us have never been taught to. Quite the opposite really.

In a nutshell: there is the mortal world inside of Time and the immortal world outside of It. Why does it rain? In the mortal world water evaporated into the atmosphere condenses back into water and raindrops form. But this is the effect, not the cause. No. Let me tell you a story. 

Once, the Blue Dragon Vritra swallowed all the waters of the world. Indra, chief of the gods, had the smith god Tvashtr create the "thunderbolt" (Vajrayudha) for him. With it he slays Vritra and releases all the waters of the world from the "blue" sky. In doing so Indra makes himself both the storm and rain god.

Now. In the Traditional perspective, both things could be true. Here inside of Time, water condenses and rains back to Earth. But outside of Time, all this happens because Indra fought Vritra. It formed a pattern, a fact. 

And let me stop you before you utter those poisonous words "that is just a myth." You have, as a victim of the Post-Modern world, been taught that only one thing can be true. In ancient India, they were wiser. They also told a story about Indra and rain that had nothing to do with Vritra.

In this tale, a sage is meditating under a tree. Understand, in ancient India, there is nothing more dangerous than pissing off a sage, because they practice austerities, acts of sacrifice that earn them enlightenment and magical powers. Well, the part I have left out so far is that elephants--the sacred mount of Indra--once had wings. They lived in the sky. One elephant alighted on a branch in the tree over the sage's head, and depending on which version you hear, either the branch broke and the elephant's fall disturbed the meditating sage or (more colorfully) the elephant relieved himself and the sage became covered in elephant dung. Ladies and gentlefolk, if you have seen elephant dung, you will understand the sage's displeasure.

So the sage, quite angry, full of Rune points from his many sacrifices, lets the elephant have it. He curses the elephant and all his descendants to never fly again. This leads however to the widespread Indian belief that elephants bring rain. Why? Allow me to paint a picture...elephants are big, gray, thundering, and shoot water from their trunks. Basically, they are clouds. The idea goes that the sky elephants like to visit their terrestrial kin and bring the rain with them.

So, you that is just a myth crowd, the Indians had two stories about Indra and rain. They considered both true, and at the same time their philosophers knew perfectly well rain occurred because water evaporated, rose up, cooled and condensed, and came down. These people were not stupid. We get chess and the concept of Zero from them. But all of these things could be true. All of these things were true. Because condensation is a fact of the mortal world. Flying elephants and Vritra are facts of the immortal world. Facts of the immortal world are called Myths, meaning a story that is true, but we are only capable of grasping a fraction of. Myths can contradict themselves because each is a facet of the Truth.

Glorantha assumes the Traditional viewpoint is the correct one (except for some of those nasty Malkioni, the Westerners who deny the reality of Other People's Truths and assume they know the One True Way).(1) As a consequence the peoples of Glorantha have a wide variety of myths. Heroquests are when you leave the mortal world, enter the immortal, and experience the truth of it for yourself. 

This brings us back to vision quests and Greek drama. These were both attempts to leave the mortal world and interact with the deeper, richer, immortal one. Playing RuneQuest is another form, leave the round mortal world for the flat immortal one. So at last, we return to James Joyce.

Heroquesting is easier than you think.

People new to RuneQuest often have a lot of trouble with the concept. "Cross over? Cross over to where?" "What does it look like?" "What are the game mechanics?" "What do we do there?" Well I have answered these. Simon Phipp has answered these. Chaosium will soon give a definitive answer to these. But if you are asking "what is heroquesting?" and you expect a rules answer, you are never going to get there.

Heroquesting is a perception. It is the sheer acceptance that everything mundane is also sacred and magical. That everything local is also infinite. That your experiences are the experiences of heroes and gods. That the simple act of going to work and coming home to your wife everyday is the Odyssey.

It is my habit to write in the mornings and then take a walk. Bear with me here.

I live in Tokyo, one of the most urbanized places in the world. Across the street, however, is a river, and across that river is a large park stretching for kilometers along the water. My walks there are heroquests.

1. At a sacred time (my afternoon break) I go to a sacred place (the edge of the bridge). 

2. Before I go I prepare myself. Soma is hard to get these days so I settle with the traditional Orlanthi Widebrew: I have a libation before I set out. This is my entheogen.

3. Fortified I "cross over" (the bridge) to the "Other Side" (in this case of the river. 

4. I follow a Path. This is a path laid out by those who came before me. In this case, a literal one, but in Glorantha, a story or Myth.

5. Now the trick on any sacred journey like this one is to experience it as the immortal world, not the mundane. Everything that happens is part of the Myth. It is all pregnant with meaning. Today, as soon as I had "crossed over" I was set upon by Heler, the God of Rain.

6. Now I was armed against their attack (Heler is non-binary). Having consulted sages beforehand (the weather channel) I knew he was lurking. I had the Sacred Shade Maker and Rain Shield (an umbrella).

7. Still, Heler was right wroth (okay, I am straying into Pendragon territory with the vocabulary there). So I sought shelter amongst the daughters of Aldrya (I hid under trees).

8. I was not alone long in my shelter. Grandmother Mortal (random Japanese pensioner) emerged from the woods to join me. She was not armed against Heler.

9. We spoke awhile shielded by the daughters of Aldrya. I soon realized this was the climax of the heroquest, the supreme test. So I insisted she take my Sacred Shade Maker and Rain Shield. I knew, of course, that all heroquests require a sacrifice after all. 

10. Let before I left, she bestowed upon me a Boon. Grandmother Mortal instructed me on Fate.  "I thought I would be soaked and get pneumonia tonight, but then I ran into a kind young man who helped me. This is what my grandmother taught me. If you have faith in things they usually turn out right." With this Boon I undertook the Return and faced the fury of Heler alone.

11. Finally, the most important part of any heroquest, I came back to share the story with my Tribe.

So you see, when you sit down to write or run a heroquest at your table, don't get hung up on The Myth. There is never The Myth. There are infinite ones. Don't get caught up on the details of the Hero Plane or the gods encountered or the stages of Campbell's bloody Hero's Journey. Like Joyce, just have them go out the door but make the experience mythic. They are already on a flat world shaped by the gods, draw attention to that, make it feel myth, and understand that anything undertaken during the quest has Mythic Import.

Do that, and you have a heroquest.      

(1) Usually I avoid footnotes, but this one is too good to resist. Greg Stafford's cultures all derive from various global myth-types. Orlanthi mythology is built on the old Indo-European model, for example. But the Malkioni, with their One God and their humanistic materialism and their science and their colonialism, are clearly Western mythology...basically Greg's way of saying that our absolute assurance that elephants never flew and Vritra is just a myth is itself just a myth. The God Learners were reductionists like Marx or Fraiser or Freud who thought they could reduce global mythologies to a single theory, and the world destroyed them for it. And like the God Learners, our empire is being threatened by the seas rising from the consequences of our arrogance.

    

  

NEPHILIM, PART TWO

NOTE:  This is the second part of an ongoing series of articles about Nephilim: Occult Roleplaying.  Part One can be found here.

The Hebrew word that is translated as “giants” in the book of Genesis is Nephilim. This word is believed to be derived from Nawphal, “to fall...” Biblical literalists believe that this passage describes a historical event – angels in physical form interbreeding with humans before the time of Noah’s flood...In an esoteric sense, however, these readings are incorrect and miss the point of the passage... The simplest esoteric explanation of the Nephilim story is that it was created to explain the existence of individuals with spiritual or magical abilities...The marriage of Angel and Human that opens the door to greater magical power and understanding...(this) has much in common with a successful marriage, and the “child” brought forth from this union is in fact the magician him or herself, enlightened and perfected...

Scott Michael Stenwick, The Descended Angel

NEPHILIM IS A GAME. This is obvious, but having just spent the previous article showing how Nephilim is a fairly accurate depiction of the Western Mystery Tradition, it needed saying.  A completely authentic game depicting the progress of the Initiate in their quest for gnosis would be monstrously dull indeed!  Thus, while Nephilim's entire core premise--the marriage between a spiritual being and a material one that elevates both--is an honest reflection of Traditional teachings, much of the game arises from the imaginations of its authors and players.

While future entries might further explore the myriad ways Nephilim weaves occultism into its saga of secret societies and elemental entities, I would like here to focus on Nephilim as a game and as, despite what you may have heard, an extremely playable one.  If I have done my work correctly, hopefully by the end you might consider picking up a copy and giving the game a try.

THE MYTHOLOGY

The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars…There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

Following the publication of the first article, a brief conversation with one of the authors of the original French edition, Fabrice Lamidey, confirmed something long suspected and revealed something I had not been aware of.  Namely, that two of the game's literary influences were Umberto Eco's tour de force Foucault's Pendulum, and The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers.  Eco's novel is a favorite of mine; in Tokyo, where space is somewhat limited, most of my novels are now read digitally, but if I turn my head slightly to the right Pendulum sits there proudly beside a few rare others.  It concerns a group of bored Italian editors at a publishing company which opens a vanity press department for writers of occult books.  Reading these insane and conspiratorial manuscripts, the authors start to play a game in which they re-imagine all of human history as a behind the scenes battle between secret societies, and eventually concoct "the Plan," a theory want these societies are after.  The joke is on them, however, when secret societies do start coming out of the woodwork believing these editors have stumbled across their designs.  

I start with Foucault because Nephilim owes so much inspiration to it.  It is, in fact, a game that re-imagines all of human history as behind the scenes battles between secret societies.  Chief amongst these in both the RPG and the Eco novel are the Templars, and in both works the Templar's Plan is strikingly similar.  To set the table for the rest of this essay, then, let's dig into the mythology of the game.

Science is an Illusion, History is a Lie

In the primordial Chaos, the ether, centers of order began to form; the stars.  Our local one was the Sun.  Its life-giving and creative solar energies brought planets into being around it.  Each acted as a sort of lens, transmuting the solar force into something else.  Mercury generated the force of Air; Venus generated the force of Water; Mars generated the force of Fire; Jupiter formed the force of Earth.  Another body, the Moon, generated the Lunar force, and out beyond Jupiter on the edge of the Void a dark force manifested in the form of Saturn.

There are, of course, elements in the classic sense, meaning they have spiritual, celestial, and material correspondences.  Everything in the mythology of Nephilim depends on them.  Certain colors, certain forms of life, certain gems and minerals, days of the week, signs of the Zodiac, etc etc ad infinitum are associated with them.  

The energies of the five planets formed as nexus and a seventh body formed amidst them...Earth.  Too distant, Saturn initially had no influence.  Because the Moon was closest to Earth, the Lunar force was strongest and the dominant life form on the planet was the great reptiles, the Saurian Priest-Kings.  Decadent, alien, sensuous, they created a sorcerous civilization and engaged in all manner of perverse delights.  

Around this time another type of being, formed by conjunctions of the five elemental fields, started to appear.  These were the KaIm, beings of Air, Earth, Fire, Moon, and Water.  When the Saurians conceived of a plan to create a second Moon, a Black Moon that would blot out the hateful Sun and create eternal night for them to bathe in, the KaIm intervened.  The Black Moon exploded, damaging the White Moon so that it would thereafter wax and wane.  Their powers greatly diminished, the Saurian went extinct or into eternal slumber, and the KaIm inherited the Earth.

These beings possessed mastery over the elemental magic fields and could form bodies at will, but they lacked the capacity to evolve, change, and ascend to even greater heights.  This is because they were missing the Solar element.  To rectify this, in their empire paradise of Atlantis they started breeding life forms rich in Solar force.  They had particular success with a species of apes that came to be called "human."

The original plan was to perfect these humans into vessels for the KaIm.  They would fuse their elemental forces with the humans' solar force, uniting higher and lower into a Perfected Being.  Two things went horribly wrong, however.  On one hand, a KaIm known as Prometheus took it upon itself to "awaken" humanity and give them sentience.  On the other, the Black Star fell from the sky.

A comet or meteor from the planet Saturn, it smashed into the KaIm paradise of Atlantis drowning it, and melted into the planet's core.  The dark essence of Saturn infused the metals of the planet, especially iron.  This was a sort of "anti-element" that destroyed the other planetary energies on contact.  The KaIm fell, losing the ability to create bodies and losing their center.  Now subject to mortality, and severely weakened, they called themselves the Nephilim, or Fallen Ones.

Some humans learned how to use the new Saturn-infected metals against the Nephilim, rising up and hunting them.  Some wanted to destroy the Nephilim, others enslave and use them.  Thus the first Secret Societies were born. The weakened Nephilim might have fallen if not for an unexpected and terrible ally...the dread Selenim.

While most Nephilim were experimenting with Solar force and merging with photo-human vessels, a faction led by Lilith became fascinated by the artificial Black Moon element created by the Saurians.  Merging with it and shedding their other planetary energies, they became Selenim, creatures of darkness that devoured living Solar force (just as the Black Moon had been fashioned to eclipse the Sun).  Because the Black Moon was artificial, it was immune to the baleful energies of Saturn.  In the Ice Age caused by the Black Star colliding with the Earth, the Selenim began to hunt humans en masse, ravenous for their Solar life force.  The humans with their Saturnine iron weapons could do nothing against them.

And thus, a bargain was struck.

Humans and Nephilim began to form alliances against the Selenim.  The Nephilim learned how to preserve their spirits in material objects called stases, and could emerge from these to temporarily inhabit specially trained human shamans.  This gave the shamans the Nephilim power of magic, and protection from the Selenim.  In return, periodic incarnation allowed the Nephilim the focus and concentration they needed to pursue spiritual evolution and perhaps escape their fallen state.  Eventually, the Great Compacts was formed, in which the Nephilim were allowed to permanently fuse with certain royal and priestly lines.  These divine priest-kings built civilizations and empires, using their powers to rule over and protect the non-Nephilim human race.  History as we know it began.

Behind the Veil

In Nephilim, all of human history is a secret war between the Nephilim and the secret societies. Every major event veils a "true history" behind it.  The pharaoh Akhenaton, for example, was not a mortal king revolting against Egyptian priesthoods; he was a Nephilim revolutionary who shattered the Great Compact and defined 22 paths to Agartha, the transcendent, perfected state in which the Nephilim reclaims not just the lost powers of the KaIm but access to higher planes of being as well.  He carved these into 22 Emerald Tablets, the Major Arcana of the Tarot, each of which became a society of Nephilim, a tribe.  

Against these are the human secret societies, the most dangerous of which are the Templars.  These are not the crusader knights of human history--that was just an exoteric manifestation--but a society with its roots in ancient Egypt bent on enslaving the Nephilim and seizing control of the magic fields generated at the center of the Earth.  Some societies seek to use the Nephilim, some to serve them, others to bind them...but all are distractions and obstacles on the Nephilim's True Path.

Playing the Game

That "True Path" and the singular focus of the Nephilim is Agartha.  It involves raising one's elemental energies to the highest levels, mastering fields of occult knowledge and magical techniques, and well as completing the fusion of the spirit and the host into a single, united whole.  The few able to complete this find the doors of higher reality opened to them; they become immortal again, with mastery over the magic fields.  This makes Nephilim that rare RPG with an actual endgame.

The heart of a Nephilim campaign lies in getting there, however.

In a typical campaign, you create a character by choosing the spirit's elemental focus--is it an Air, Earth, Fire, Moon, or Water Nephilim--and one or more past lives.  Since their Fall, disembodied Nephilim do not experience the passage of time, have no sense of space, no real "consciousness," and cannot interact with the material world.  Worse, their elemental energies degrade over time until they cease to exist.  Thus each Nephilim needs a stasis, an enchanted artifact or object that holds its slumbering spirit between incarnations.  When the planets are right, it awakens and unites with a nearby human host.  If that host dies of old age or some other cause before Agartha, the Nephilim returns to stasis and tries again later.  These previous attempts are then the past lives.

When the Nephilim awakens again at the start of the campaign, it incarnates in a human host.  This host, the simulacrum, experiences a mystical awakening, a moment of revelation.  John Smith the English banker suddenly realizes he is also Orogariel the Phoenix, a Pyrim (fire Nephilim).  He is still John Smith--he knows his wife Miriam and his two children, he remembers his entire life--but now he also remembers being Memtet the ancient Egyptian charioteer, Iulian the Carolingian knight, and Sir Richard Stone, the student of John Dee.  He remembers their lives and inherits many of their skills and abilities.  More importantly, he remembers how to do magic, and because of his new elemental powers, is able to make it work.

What happens next is up to the player, the GM, and the campaign.  Does John Smith remain with his wife and family, conducting his search for Agartha on the side?  Does he slowly separate from them in an amicable divorce?  Does he simply vanish into thin air?  This is in the hands of the player; only they know if John's love for his wife and children is more important to the new Nephilim that Agartha.  The game does not dictate this.  Each player navigates the dual identities of the character.  

This is not a bug, it is a feature.  It is not unlike a comic book; how does Peter Park balance his relationship with MJ and Aunt May along with the duties of being Spider-man?

The Possession Problem...Again

Ah! Mr. Waite, the world of Magic is a mirror, wherein who sees muck is muck.

Aleister Crowley, The Goetia

Despite the above, there will always be a potential player or two who chooses to see incarnation as "possession."  Initiation is not for everyone, neither is Nephilim.  The world of the occult is a mirror that shows us ourselves.  If you look into it and see evil and the Devil, perhaps what you are really seeing is a Fundamentalist religious background you were raised with.  If you look at the Nephilim and see body-hijacking, possession, and rape...perhaps there are issues you should first deal with that a game cannot cure.

For most players, though, it is easy to get around this.

1. Meet Dax.  Around the same time Nephilim appeared to an English-speaking audience, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine audiences were introduced to Jadzia Dax.  Jadzia was a young woman fused with an alien symbiont, Dax.  Captain Ben Sisko had known Dax before in a previous host, Curzon.  Over the course of the show, we learn all about the symbiont's previous hosts, and see Jadzia die and Dax implanted in a new character, Ezri.  Each host is different, but has all the memories and abilities of its previous hosts.  This complex character is the perfect analogue for how to deal with a Nephilim character.  Have the potential player revisit the show.

2. Meet Castiel.  In the horror-drama Supernatural, protagonists Sam and Dean Winchester ally with an angel, Castiel.  Spirit beings, angels do not have bodies of their own, he has incarnated in a human host, Jimmy Novak.  This is something Novak prayed for, however.  He wanted union with Castiel.  If this helps the player, simply have the Simulacrum being a willing host.  Perhaps they are an aspiring magician who located a Nephilim stasis and awoke the spirit hoping for incarnation to occur.

3. A Second Chance.  Something I have used in previous Nephilim games is incarnation as a second chance.  One player decided his simulacrum was a human on the edge of committing suicide when the incarnation occurred and gave him a new purpose and meaning in life.  Another, and my favorite, was my college girlfriend, who created a simulacrum who was a seventy-five-year old dementia patient abandoned by her family in a retirement home.  Sitting in the same chair alone, day after day, she is reborn when an Air Nephilim comes to her and for the first time in years she gets up and walks out of the hospital.  Incarnation can be a blessing, not a curse.         

4. Feels Like The Very First Time.  Perhaps the easiest way around discomfort is for this to be the Nephilim's first incarnation.  Nephilim are born in the nexus of planetary energies...perhaps a new-formed Nephilim blindly incarnates in banker John Smith.  Suddenly John starts developing weird senses and magical abilities, but has no sense of being anyone else.  There are no past lives to remember.  Eventually he stumbles across the world of the Nephilim, joins one of the 22 Arcana, has his first stasis made, and selects a Nephilim name for himself. 

These fixes should open the game to just about anyone, but there will still be some for whom the human is the end-all and be-all.   Perhaps they can play a human ally of the Nephilim?  Though of this, I suppose Frater Perdurabo would say;

A Sorcerer by the power of his magick had subdued all things to himself. Would he travel? He could fly through space more swiftly than the stars. Would he eat, drink, and take his pleasure? there was none that did not instantly obey his bidding. In the whole system of ten million times ten million spheres upon the two and twenty million planes he had his desire. 

 And with all this he was but himself. 

 Alas!

Crowley, The Book of Lies, Chapter 27

In the next part, we will look in depth at what a Nephilim campaign might look like, and how a typical scenario might go.

IMAGINATION, POWER, AND THE NECESSITY OF CREATIVE PLAY

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real
All of the buildings, all of those cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody's head

Peter Gabriel, "Mercy Street"

THE ABILITY TO REASON, to draw conclusions from observation and experience, has been crucial to the success of the human species.  Of this there can be little doubt.  But the flip side of reason, the ability to see the world "as it is," is the ability to see the world "as it might be."  This power, imagination, is one of our most extraordinary gifts.  It is not merely the source of our arts and cultures, but our technologies as well.  It lies close to the heart of what makes us--for now, at least--the dominant species on the planet.

Despite its power (or perhaps because of it), imagination tends to make people a bit nervous.  Like magic, a word to which it is related, imagination is at turns dismissed, trivialized, and condemned.  There is a sense that it must be restrained, sanctioned, quarantined.  We chuckle at it in children, but expect them to bridle it in adolescence and enter the "real world" (something I have written about here). We could argue this is due to its mercurial nature; imagination is often erratic and unpredictable, acting as an external muse rather than something we switch on and off like a coffee maker.  Imaginative work is a sort of dance, where the imagination acts as an equal partner rather than a subordinate.  As any artist will tell you, imagination needs to be wined and dined.  It can be controlled, but doing so cripples and eventually withers it.  To really let imagination do its thing, you have to be willing to let go. But most people only feel comfortable engaging with imagination in a limited, controlled way--such as by reading a novel, playing a video game, or watching a television program.  Actually unleashing it and allowing oneself to be carried away is usually left to artists...widely considered an odd bunch to begin with.

It's unfortunate that such attitudes exist, that people are afraid of letting their imaginations "run away with them."  It is also completely understandable.  At issue here is the nature of "power," and of society's attitudes towards it.

The beginning of despair lies in being unable to imagine anything better.  That leads to surrender.

There is a deep misunderstanding of what "power" is.  The word comes to us via French from the Latin potis, "to be able, capable," and is cousin to the English words potential and possibile.  There is a hint to its identity in this.  While we are generally taught that power is synonymous with "control," as in power "over" something, true power is the capacity to do and more importantly to create.  On some level we all understand this; Abrahamic faiths often refer to God, the Supreme Power, as the "Creator," and few aspects of human existence are treated with as much awe and sanctity as the power to create new human life.  Paradoxically we look askew at imaginative power, the power to create new ideas.  Indeed, it has often been said that the tragedies of history all stem from a lack of imagination.  It goes back to the obsession with control, and the desire by societies to control, regulate, and dictate the ideas that make up that particular culture.  When we talk about dictators wanting to control what people think, what we are really saying is that authoritarians want to control what people can imagine.  The beginning of despair lies in being unable to imagine anything better.  That leads to surrender.  In the interest of keeping control, those at the top of a society must limit the populace's ability to dream.

So very few of us then allow ourselves the experience of imagination as creative play.  This is tragic, because the imagination--like a muscle--only grows stronger with use.  Many of the same activities that lead to weakness of the body simultaneously lead to weakness of the imagination.  Sitting passively watching the latest big budget superhero film, the new season of Game of Thrones, or playing the most recent release of a favorite video game all seem to be exercises in imagination, but in reality these are mediums where all the imagining has already been done for you.  This benefits both authority and the entertainment industry--which like a drug dealer makes the public dependent on its product for "escape"--but does little to benefit the individual.  This is especially pernicious for children.  Where once they went outside to run and play, making up their own adventures and stories, today they remain indoors spoon-fed someone else's.

We end up in a situation, then, where people require re-education to do what should be completely natural for them.  No, not everyone should have equal imaginative capabilities, any more than we should all be able to lift the same amount or run just as fast, but we should all know at least how to sit down and make up stories, close our eyes and visualize, or engage in creative play without feeling self conscious about it.  Even reading--which like sex or dance is a creative pairing between two individuals, one providing the words and the other painting the images in his or her head--is becoming less common these days.  I have no doubt that this deterioration of imagination lies at the heart of many of the political movements we see these days, and I feel strongly enough about this to write an entire blog about it. 

...the key to a better life, for oneself, one's family, one's society, lies first in the ability to imagine one.

The connective tissue in all that I discuss here is imagination as creative play, a guilty pleasure that so many people have been taught to keep away from.  But the key to a better life, for oneself, one's family, one's society, lies first in the ability to imagine one.  This is the Promethean theft of fire from the gods.  It is the mercurial and awe inspiring heart of true magic. The first step in attaining this power is to allow oneself to go against oppressive norms and prohibitions intended to stifle it.  The road to freedom begins with allowing oneself to engage in the simple magic of childhood, to give oneself time to play.