The full interview, 16,000 words long, appears in The Edge #5, which is available from us at £2.50 including postage and packing. Below are a few extracts.
"There's little reason to linger in Northampton," says the Lonely Planet Guide to Britain. On the surface you can see why: the plastic-hearted clutter of familiar facades and anxious-faced shoppers could belong to almost any British town surrounded by fields.
Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore's collection of interlinked short stories, sculpts a different perception of the area, taking the reader on a journey from prehistory to the "end of history", from Neolithic shamanism to 20th century "word-magic".
With works like V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Swamp Thing and Brought to Light Moore and a handful of artists briefly transmuted superhero/mainstream comics' base matter into gold, in more than one sense of the word. He became well-known, was namechecked on TV, was trendy with students, even achieved immortalisation in a couple of PWEI songs.
But that was all a decade ago, and the territory since is sketchily mapped out. From Hell, his labyrinthine tour of the Jack the Ripper mythos, is now complete. I knew he'd got into magical thinking in a big way, and this permeates both From Hell and Voice of the Fire, but it didn't seem good manners to ask about this at the station. We ambled through safer topics en route to a drinking spot: mass murder, mass hysteria, Iain Sinclair, America, and the history of Northampton. By the time we're settled and the drinks are on the table, we're somehow onto adverts, and the class system follows.
ALAN MOORE: The working class will not exist beyond the end of this century. If it exists at the moment. It's not talked about, but an entire class are being dismantled and siphoned off into doorways.
THE EDGE: Or upwards.
Yeah, or upwards into the aspiring middle class. You have to demonise the working class. These are the people who are coming to steal your stereo. They've got transit vans and rottweilers, tattoos and earrings and they want your stereo.
We've got an underclass who don't work.
The working class are surplus to requirements. It was necessary to educate the working class when we switched from an agricultural to an industrial situation. They had to at least know enough to turn up on time at the conveyor belt; they had to be able to tell the time, to count and understand written instructions – to be educated. Big mistake. I think that at that time we were still working under the idea that there was something genetic in the basis of the class structure – the working classes were like that because they were genetically inferior. The upper class, despite the fact they'd all been marrying their siblings for generations, had webbed fingers and no chins, were in some way the Ubermensch. But when you educated the working classes and gave them free milk they turned out to be dangerously intelligent.
Now we've had another paradigm shift, this time to some sort of vaguely defined post-industrial state; the information economy, whatever. Now what you've got is at least a semi-educated working class who have greater expectations from life, exactly at the moment when any possibility of fulfilling those expectations is being taken away from them.
It's a big difference from when I was growing up in the sixties....
... the working class and the upper class have more in common with each other than they have with this awful, carnivorous, ravenous middle, where all the political power in this country is now centred.
I suppose both the working classes and the upper classes know where they are in relation to each other and within their crap little worlds, while the middle classes are all about movement and encroachment.
They could destroy everything. They seem to be amoral and directionless.
But very moralistic at the same time.
Very moralistic while being amoral at the same time. They moralise constantly. Both the working and upper classes are conservative in that they conserve, which has got nothing to do with 'Conservative' as in the party. I mean, as someone famously pointed out, Mrs. Thatcher was not a Conservative, she was a sort of 19th century Liberal. She conserved nothing. Free market? What's that got to do with conservation? She was a radical.
...Briefly, when I decided to become a magician...
It suddenly struck me that at least my family, and probably a lot of working class families in this town, were not anywhere near so far away from the idea of sorcery as we might suppose at the end of the 20th century. And the way that most of my family have treated me since, it's unspoken, but it's almost like they're thinking every couple of hundred years one turns up. That's just the way it goes. You suddenly realise that, at least for a certain class of people in this country, the past is not so far away. There's a kind of recognition that this is not something new and 'New Age' that I'm involving myself in. This is very old and traditional and people around these parts have been involved with it, to some degree or other, for a long time, which is comforting.
...I've got a pretty shotgun approach to magic, in that I'll try anything and see if it works. Which is also practical; if it doesn't work, if I'm not getting results, then I'm not interested.
Voice of the Fire took me 5 years to write, beginning in '91 or '90. I had no idea at that point about becoming a shaman or getting interested in magic. This was a sudden decision on my fortieth birthday at the end of '93. And it first really happened for me in the January of '94. That was when I suddenly got it – the big mad vision. I actually feel as though I've got some personal experience at this shit. There aren't that many shamen attempting to use a kind of language-magic, to create the songline that will bring Northampton into being. I didn't realise that by the end of the book I was going to be – I knew I would be narrating the last chapter – but I didn't know what I would be saying. Could have been a conventional ending but I didn't realise that by the end of the book I would be a self-styled Northampton shaman ... who would be using a kind of language-magic to create a songline in the form of a novel that would, at least in terms of its magical intention, hopefully spark something in the mind-space of people about the places they live. In that sense it's not even about Northampton, it's about the place we live. I could have written about anywhere.
Do you think that the outside landscape shapes the landscape of your mind?
Yeah, this is the whole thing about Voice of the Fire. I'm not saying this is the truth, this is the model most useful to me at the moment. Magic to me is about a more dynamic relationship with our own consciousness, a more dynamic way of understanding it; what consciousness is, what thought is. Because thought is the blind spot of science. We cannot talk in terms of Cartesian logic and empirical experiments when you're talking about the mind – it's all unprovable...
...I was thinking maybe you need a different model of consciousness. I came up with this model and I'm not claiming it's new. It's got a lot of similarities with various things, from Jung's mass unconscious to Karl Popper's World Three and things like that, but it's the idea of the Idea Space. To judge thought spatially. For the sake of argument we can imagine that our thoughts occur in some sort of medium which we will call Idea Space. That our personalities, the things we call ourselves might be a kind of travelling nexus in this Space, that ideas or concepts are solid forms or the equivalent of solid forms within this space. How this space differs from our space is, firstly it isn't a space – space does not actually exist there. The distances are associative like in the real world Land's End and John O'Groats are famously far apart but you can't think of one without thinking of the other – so in Idea Space they're next to each other.
Therefore the streets of Northampton are very close to the murders that happened years ago.
Yeah, there's no time either. There's no space and there's no time. It's just as easy for you to think about what you were doing this morning as Victorian street scenes. You can go there instantly. You can imagine a scene from ten years in the future. Time is not the same. Time does not really exists other than to the conscious mind, that's what I believe. Our perception of linear time is purely a construct of the conscious mind....
...Your mind is not bound in time the way your body is, it's certainly more fluid – there's not really a time barrier in the world of the mind. Now it struck me that a good model might be, we've all got our own Idea Space which is individual and unique to us. This is like having your own house. We've all got part of our unconscious in the back garden but the back gardens all lead onto the same street. In another model you might say there's all these little individual inlets of consciousness, but they all connect to the same central ocean.
... Interestingly, when James Watt did discover the steam engine there were about six other people in the same two or three month period who, completely independently, also discovered the steam engine. Charles Fort, who documented much of this, said, in his special whimsical way, "I guess it was just steam engine time."
This certainly happens with novelists, it takes two years to get out and –
Someone has got a film out with the same idea. And it's tempting to think that the idea could either have been a solid thing floating in a mutually accessible space you happened to come across, and so did somebody else. When we say things are in the air, what do we mean? What air are we talking about? We all know that phenomena, you have a word explained to you, and within the next three days you hear it three times...
I don't think I'm saying a lot here that hasn't been suggested by people like Jung and Plato before me, where he talks about his world of essences. I'm coming up with this theory to explain things that seem to have happened to me.
...A magician has a framework, so this information doesn't spill out and overwhelm them, which I think it does with schizophrenics.
...if you allow that mind is a space – then it would seem that ever since mankind's inception, the key thing is how deeply we interact with that space. For most of the time, for most of us, we don't interact very deeply, we can function perfectly well without thinking very much at all. Most of our actions can be done unconsciously. Yet once you've had that idea to have a cup of tea, you aren't actually thinking about going out to the kitchen and filling the kettle, you're thinking of something else. Five minutes later you'll be sat down with that cup of tea with the milk added, but you won't be able to remember getting the milk out of the fridge.
Now if you allow this space, which we all interact with on a weak level all the time, then throughout human history there have been certain techniques evolved in order to interact with it more strongly. I'd say any creative work, writing, drawing, composing, puts you in trance. Any deeply creative work – there's a kind of Zen part to any human activity where you're concentrating your mind in a certain way and all of a sudden you're in a different space. You're not thinking in the same rational way you think when you walk down the high street or make a cup of coffee. You're somewhere different. So you could say any creative act, carpentry included, science, all of those things involve deliberately working yourself into a different mind state.
Dancing.
Exactly. That is one of the classic shamanic forms. Dancing would do it, drumming would do it, drugs would do it.
What about TV, though?
...There's all these different ways of interfacing – there's a nice 'cyberword' – more deeply with mind-space...
... you can draw some broad conclusions from these apparent encounters. For instance, if these encounters are taking place in Idea Space, then what kind of entities could be in Idea Space? Well, you're in Idea Space when that happened to you, so there's one ... it would seem to be possible for human minds to project themselves into this conceptual space.
Now if I'm right about there being no time in this space, we would have to include human minds from the past and from the future, theoretically. If I'm right about there being no space in Idea Space, this might include, hypothetically, the possibility of encountering the projection of some physical life that exists elsewhere in the universe, or that has been existent somewhere in the universe, or will be.
But is Idea Space bounded by your perception? So if you had no knowledge of alien beings, could you encounter them?
No, it's not bound by your perception. There's the possibility that you may have alien minds in Idea Space, there is also the possibility of a kind of fauna native to Idea Space that is made entirely out of Idea stuff, that is indigenous to this realm. So if they're made of this stuff, what are they and all the other forms made of? We've got to make up a word: ideoplasms. There's the Idea Space, there's the ideoplasms that it's all made up of – the stuff of ideas, the medium. Now in my experience of this stuff, this plasm, it seems to be mercurial and reflective in that, say that hypothetically I believe myself to have encountered a number of demons mentioned in various grimoires going back to biblical times...
... I think we clothe these idea forms. They kind of have a symbolic form, which we dress up in our expectations.
These things are a kind of language. A pure language. They are communicating inscrutability. The demon Asmodeus that I saw appeared to me as a web of spiders that kept turning itself out into a dimension we don't have, into a web of lizards, and then back again. The immediate impression I got was it's trying to tell me it's good at maths.