Why did Alan Moore decide to become a magician?
The following quotes are taken from an interview by Matt Brady on The Mania website:
"There was too much there to simply dismiss, along with accounts from well-known and respected individuals who've taken up serious studies in what the world sees as 'occult' knowledge, I had begun to realize that as a writer, magic had begun to creep into my life more and more."
"I've realized that you have to be careful what you say and write, There is something spooky about writing. I read an interview with [cartoonist] Carol Lay recently where she mentioned that she had to take care not to draw anything too negative in her scripts because it would probably happen. Robert Crumb had agreed with her on this. He said that it's really a kind of mind over matter thing, you draw something and then it happens, which is why Crumb always draws his sex fantasies. You'll find yourself writing about events that haven't happened yet, and at the same time, you'll also find all kinds of eerie feedback between your text and life. When I started to notice that sort of stuff becoming predominant in my work, I realized I had a choice - I could either ignore it and assume that it is a product of my overtired perceptions, or I could explore it and see if there is anything interesting there."
"At the same time, I found that I couldn't progress any further with writing by strict rationality. If I wanted to go further with my writing, make it more intense, more powerful, make it say what I wanted it to say, I had to take a step beyond technique and rational ideas about writing, into something that was trans-rational if you will, this being magic."
"The first people to have written a visual representation of something would have been seen as magicians, Think of the setting - one man or woman conjures the image of a bison on the wall of a cave. To an audience that didn't have the idea of visual representation, the creation of that image would have been seen as an incredible magical act. The first people to have language, in a world where most people are without, would be as inexplicable as telepaths would be today. The fact that you could actually convey your thoughts to another person, record your thoughts, and understand the passage of time all would have been seen as magic."
"On that birthday I stated that I had become a magician, I just made that resolution so I couldn't back out of it. Let me warn you though, you shouldn't say these things unless you know what you are really getting into. I made this announcement and turned my attentions towards magical readings for the next couple of months. Less than two months after that I had what I consider to be my first magical experience. It was during a ritual with a friend of mine. Something happened to both of us at the same time. It felt like an extraordinary intelligence passed through both of us. It didn't feel like anything that was of my volition. I was quite prepared to admit that this may have all been complete hallucination, except for the fact that I had somebody else with me who was experiencing the same things. Logically it makes sense to say that I choose this, I chose to be involved in magic, but at that moment, it felt like I had been chosen by something else entirely."
"Exploring these kinds of things has taken up a lot of my time, It has certainly changed my perceptions of a lot of things. Since I've seriously embraced it, I've tried to measure how well it's going. Obviously if I was just going mad I'd be the last person to notice, so when I set out to do this thing, I set myself a standard, which was: if I am being as creative and as functional as I was before I began my investigation and experimentation, then it's okay. Even if my ideas about this were completely wrong, then I wasn't hurting anything. Not that I think that the standard of the work is better, necessarily, It's a way of understanding your creativity. The question that everybody asks writers is: 'where do you get your ideas from?' It seems like a banal question, but it's the only important question: where do ideas come from? For me, getting into magic was just a way of answering that. First, there's nothing there, and then there's a vague unformed idea in the mind of the artist or writer. Then the idea takes on a little more form, and then, suddenly, it's a finished script or a finished drawing. Something has come into being out of nothing. It's the rabbit from the hat. That to me is the definition of magic. It covers a lot of other ground in that everything anyone has ever said about magic is true, it's a very rich landscape to explore and it certainly has an effect in some way or another on everything that I do."
"I stayed in touch with Tim Perkins, a brilliant composer and instrumentalist, who was one of the mainstays of The Emporers of Ice Cream, Tim and I started working together with Dave Jay of Love and Rockets. This was about the same time that I was really getting interested in magic, and started to see in a certain sense that all creativity can be said to have a certain magical aspect to it. From there, I reasoned that it should be possible to combine ritual magic with performance, which is what we began working on."
"There were all sorts of artists, subterranean actors and performers there, we closed it out on Sunday with a piece of performance reading against a taped background of what we'd composed and put together. They are very singular, we only do them once, sort of eschewing the usual rock and roll formula of writing a couple songs, doing an album and promoting it and playing the same songs every night - all the time hoping that you can find time to write some new songs for the next album to begin the process over again. We'd rather go for a policy of conspicuous waste, where we do a brilliant piece of music, write heartfelt words, do one terrific performance and never touch it again. That seems to us to be a more powerful way of working."
"I should imagine that, very reasonably, most would assume that all of this I've just spoken of is nothing more than the ramblings of a disintegrating mind, or that it's just some sort of glorified new age way of talking about the work that I do, that's what I would assume if I had heard it. To those, I would offer The Birth Caul as an opportunity for people to read a reportedly magical work. It's something that I would say is one of my magical works, and this at least gives an opportunity for people to look at it and make up their own minds about it, if it's magical or not, which is all I can really ask for."
"I'm a lot stranger than what I've just said, I'm just giving you the quick, commercial, acceptable outline. I've still got me secrets."