Part I: Comedy in comic books

Alan Moore sinks into a chair behind the coffee table in his home, an unassuming terraced house in Northampton. Bookshelves, tables and parts of the floor overflow with impressive looking volumes and occult paraphernalia. Comparatively, the kitchen – into which we follow him, tape recorder in hand, at several points during the afternoon – is like any you would come across in Midlands suburbia. Moore himself is a similar contradiction: he cuts an imposing Rasputin-like figure, impressive of hair and beard, with snake walking cane and skull-ringed fingers. But his manner is extremely warm and his Northampton accent belies a massive intellect. And boy, can he talk...

Do you see humour primarily as a tool for developing character, as comic relief, or simply for its own sake?

I see it as an invaluable tool, as all of them are. It's one of the notes on the piano that I've got to play on. If you've had a really horrific scene, then to strike a note of humour at exactly the right point without diffusing the horror can give it an entirely new contrast. I mean, some things I like to do just because I think they're funny.

Jack B Quick is the thing which, since Bojeffries, made me laugh the most when I was writing it. There's a story called I, Robert where he comes up with an artificial intelligence which is just a scarecrow, a tape recorder and some junk in a wheelbarrow. But it passes the Turing test authentically, so these things are mass-produced all over the world and eventually they take over. Even though they're just a scarecrow. So eventually Jack comes up with the solution as to how to overthrow the robots – the ‘Roberts' – which is: if we just stop pushing the wheelbarrows... they'll be helpless (laughs). When I wrote it I thought, actually I've just said something profound there. Probably the answer to all mankind's technological problems; if we just stop pushing the wheelbarrows, they'll be helpless.

So in some instances I just want to do comedy for its own sake, but comedy can also make people think about ideas in a different way. Most things benefit from a little touch of comedy here or there. Except perhaps funerals. Wait, no! I went and did the reading at my great friend Tom Hall's funeral. One of the finest musicians Northampton's ever produced. The best funeral I've ever been to at the time, and I got some great jokes into my reading. There was another guy I knew that ran a local heating company, The Dimmer Brothers. At the end of his funeral his brother said, “Trevor chose this piece of music because he wanted to be remembered for his contributions to the plumbing and heating industry”. And as they went out the church, they were playing Rawhide. Because he was a cowboy. Everybody was walking out of the church laughing and weeping. That's gotta work. Everything benefits from a bit of humour.

I mean, this is probably a bad thing to say to someone from a comedy magazine, but I don't like genre. I think that genre was something made up by some spotty clerk in WH Smiths in the 1920s to make his worthless fucking job a little bit easier for him: “it'd be easier if these books said what they were about on the spine”. My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel.

In my new novel, Jerusalem, there's an awful lot of funny stuff, and there's supernatural stuff; there's stuff in the prologue that as good as Stephen King and it's just a description of my brother walking through a block of flats. It's horror. And there's social history, there's political stuff. Why not mix it all together? Because that's what life is actually like. We laugh, we cry, you know, we buy the t-shirt.

Humour is greatly aided by the occasional touch of horror. Otherwise Jam, or a great deal of Chris Morris' other stuff, wouldn't have been as effective. Juxtaposing these elements makes each shine all the brighter.

People often focus on the depressing, horrible stuff I've written, but I actually started with humour strips, like Maxwell the Magic Cat in Sounds, or a lot of the Future Shocks for 2000AD. There's always been a strong dark element in my writing, but also a strong comedy element.

I found your editorials at the start of Dodgem Logic very funny.

I'm glad! I had chuckle over a few of them myself. I tell you what, the indicias, were where I did most of my best comedy writing on Dodgem Logic. But it was too small for anyone to read, which is the nature of indicias I suppose.

Yeah, I loved those. In Mustard we do something similar, with little running gags in the page footers, although few people notice them.

But it's worth it isn't it?

Sure.

Dodgem Logic was a lot of fun, because I could do anything that I wanted with those articles. Astro Dick was very liberating. When everyone's taking you very seriously, I advise doing a comic strip about a penis in a space helmet. It kind of presses the restart button of your prestige.

I'm friends with several comedians, like Stewart Lee and Robin Ince. I was talking to Stew recently, asking him if he was going to spend the rest of his career using lazy pun-based titles for his shows. “When will it end? ‘Alice Stew The Looking Glass'? ‘A Room With A Stew'?” And he said “Ooh, ‘A room With A Stew' – I like that. Because it is a room with me in it.” So now he's lowered himself to using my intentionally sardonic title for his new show. And I can do nothing about it.



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Part II: Comics and movie adaptations

Which of your works do you actually have the rights to?

Kevin O'Neill and I own League, which is why I was able to take it away from DC with such a flourish when they offended me over the V for Vendetta film. For the other ABC titles we still get royalties, but we don't own them, because when I made that non-creator-owned deal it was with Jim Lee, who's an officer and a gentleman. And then Jim got bought out by DC.

There's a brilliant book that I'd advise you to get called Men Of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones. Rick Veitch turned me on to it, saying, “this explains why everybody at DC acted so fucking weird when we worked there in the mid 80s.” I'd always known that Harry Donenfeld, the man who put DC together, was a confederate and a close associate of gangsters. But which gangsters was a surprise, because it was Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel!

You know, I love the comic medium. It is one that I shall never abandon. But the industry – in fact, increasingly all forms of industry – it's dark satanic mills. And in all my experiences of them, these people are gangsters by any other name. They might not be Meyer Lansky or Bugsy Siegel, but they are gangsters and I don't see why we put up with them, why we don't just take them out and shoot them. Is that a bit extreme?

I love the comic medium. It is one that I shall never abandon. But the industry, increasingly all forms of industry; it's dark satanic mills.

Several of your comics have been dumbed-down for movie versions. There seems to be a kind of dumb feedback loop in cinema; most films have so little depth that people lose the ability to watch anything more complex...

I agree, except that I would probably have a bleaker view; that it has already been going on for a couple of decades, and is now so entrenched that there does not appear to be any possible hope of a cultural recovery. It's an extreme view, it's cranky and it is kind of born of my problems with the movie industry that led to me quitting DC comics in a snit forever – which was great, very liberating and I feel fantastic about it – but which also really got me thinking about films.

Back at the start of my career, I met with Terry Gilliam to talk about the Watchmen film, and he said “How would you make a film of Watchmen?” And I said, “Well, frankly, if anybody had bothered to consult me, I would have said ‘I wouldn't'.” And I think he eventually came to agree.

I'd written Watchmen expressly because, on one level, I was a bit tired of this easy analogy between comics and movies that some of the most intelligent people in my medium still trot out without really thinking about. I mean, undoubtedly, someone who understands cinematic storytelling is going to be a better comic writer or artist than somebody who doesn't; Will Eisner went to see Citizen Kane 30 times, that's all fine.

The problem is that if comics are always seen in terms of cinema, then ultimately they can only be a film that doesn't move and doesn't have a soundtrack. With Watchmen I wanted to find those things which were unfilmable, that could only be done in a comic. So, for example, we had split-level narratives with a little kid reading a comic book, a news vendor going into a right-wing rant next to him and something else going on in the background in captions, all at the same time and interrelated.

These are things which you can do in a comic, but not even the greatest director in the world could manage, not even if they cram the backgrounds with sight gags, like Terry Gilliam, who would in many ways have been the best director for Watchmen. It's not the same as reading a comic, where you can flip back a few pages and look at a detail that Dave Gibbons put into the background to see if it really connects up with that image that you remember from a chapter or so back.

Whenever I read a film review where the critic has exhausted their repertoire of things that are nasty to say about a film, they'll accuse it of having a 'comic book plot', or 'comic book dialogue', and I think “by that, do you mean illiterate? Is that the subtext there?”. Because you need to be quite literate to read most of the comics that I write, or that I'm interested in. Whereas, actually, you don't need to be literate to watch a film.

This is not to say that there haven't been wonderful films made. What was it that was on the other day? Orphée – one of my favourites, Jean Cocteau. Now, there's special effects. He wants to have somebody walking into a mirror, so instead of throwing a million dollars at CGI, he fills a tray with mercury and turns the camera on its side. It must have cost him about five quid! I adore that. That's magic, the magic of cinema.

So, I started to think about films and why don't I really enjoy very many of them. One thing is, I think that the medium has had certain flaws since its inception. Not the industry, the medium. Cinema is technologically, and therefore financially, intensive. So inevitably you end up with accountants making the decisions rather than creators. Sure, occasionally a good film will slip through the net, but that still leaves you with a medium where 99% of the product – particularly in these Hollywood-governed times – is shit.

My daughter was saying the other day, “Yes, Dad, but 99% of everything is shit. It's Sturgeon's Law.” And I quite agree. There are plenty of shit comic books, novels and record albums – but they don't cost 100 million dollars to make. And when you're talking about sums like that, which is probably, what, the food or education budget for an emerging Third World nation? That's where it starts to cross over a line from being a little bit distasteful, to actually being evil.

I also don't like the immersive quality of film. In nearly every other medium, the audience is in control of the way in which they experience the work. At an art gallery, you can just glance at a painting, or stand there for a quarter of an hour, or come back to it. If you read a book and you're feeling a bit tired, you can put it to one side, you can read at your own pace. But with a film, you're dragged through the experience at an unvarying 24 frames a second.

Everything is being done for you: there's no space for the imagination. In a book, you have to create the smells, the sounds, the people's faces, their voices, the whole ambience, all from the code of printed words on a page. That's wonderful: you're having to do a little bit of work. And I think that the little bit of work is what most of us, in truth, genuinely enjoy about good art. But now we have this spoon-fed culture, which movies have got to take an awful lot of the blame for.

Watchmen wasn't about a bunch of a slightly dark superheroes in a dark version of our modern world. It was about the storytelling techniques.

Can I play Devil's advocate and ask if there's any upside to the Watchmen movie?

Well, Warner Brothers behaved, in my opinion, appallingly badly, even by their standards, by putting pressure on me indirectly via my late friend Steve Moore, a man to whom I owe my entire career and who was at the time coping with a terminally-ill brother. They'd offered Steve the job of writing the Watchmen film novelisation; he'd done a great adaptation of V for Vendetta and they knew he was the only person that I'd give the okay to. This looked like a ray of light in a very dark time for Steve, as he hadn't worked for years.

Then they announced they were going to bring out Tales of the Black Freighter as a full comic, a facsimile of the one the kid reads in Watchmen. I didn't think it was a very good idea, as it's a bit like taking all the counterpoint out of Mozart and releasing it on its own record. But Dave Gibbons wanted to do it, and he's a lovely man who I have a lot of respect for, and I know he'd got a completely different approach to this film than I had. So I said it was fine and Dave said, 'yeah, DC Comics said you'd be quietly compliant'. And I said, 'why did they say that? Have they forgotten who I am?' (laughs) He said he didn't know, that it was a cryptic comment to him.

I said it was fine, as long as my name's not on it. Dave said 'don't worry, they're going to use the fictional author's name from the book'. Then I thought, hang on, if nobody's name's on it, how will anyone know who wrote it? I said to Dave, can they put a note on the inside cover saying 'Alan Moore is not participating in this project?'. He said that sounded reasonable.

I heard shortly thereafter that it wouldn't be going ahead. Then Steve Moore heard out of the blue from Warner Bros that they weren't going to do the novelisation, he wouldn't be getting the work, and I realised what they meant by 'quietly compliant'.

As you can imagine, I was quite cross. I wouldn't put my name to their wretched little side project, so they took it out on my oldest and best friend.

At that point I spoke to Dave Gibbons and said that, previously, I'd been quite prepared for this wretched film to come and go because they had at least taken my name off it. But in their treatment of Steve, I feel that all bets are off, and I'm at liberty to say what I actually think about it.

It's a completely pointless idea, because Watchmen, at least in my mind, wasn't about a bunch of slightly dark superheroes in a slightly dark version of our modern world. It was about the storytelling techniques, and the way that me and Dave were altering the range of what it was possible to do in comics; this new way that we'd stumbled upon of telling a comic book story.

The plot was more or less incidental. All of its elements were properly considered, but it's not the fact that Watchmen told a dark story about a few superheroes that makes it a book that is still read and remembered today. It's the way that it's told and how it made ingenious use of the comic strip medium.

From everything I've heard, the director belatedly realised that, no, he couldn't handle the Black Freighter narrative in the film, because that's an example of me doing something that can only be done in a comic. He also realised he couldn't include the back-up material. So they ended up releasing animations of The Black Freighter and Under the Hood separately. Now, I'm sure that's terribly clever, but I can't help think that me and Dave were able to make this as one coherent package, 25 years ago, using eight sheets of folded paper and some ink. It was a completely thought through, coherent package in its most perfect realisable form.

Sure, I've heard it's great seeing Dave Gibbons' images reproduced on the big screen; “they're exactly the same as in the comic, but they're bigger, moving and making noise!” Well, putting it cruelly, I guess it's good that there's a children's version for those who couldn't manage to follow a superhero comic from the 1980s.

It's the same with Will Eisner's The Spirit, surely one of the greatest comic strips of all time, which was butchered and made into a ridiculous film by Frank Miller, where he fell back on similar visual techniques of Sin City, as if that's all he knows. He produced a film about a character that doesn't look like The Spirit, doesn't occupy a world that's recognisable as Eisner's, has none of the charm of Eisner's story, and which seems to think the whole point is a story about a crime-fighter who lives in a cemetery. The whole point of The Spirit was the way Eisner told the story in the comic book form.

So, when that business with Steve Moore happened, I cursed the film and pretty much everything to do with it. And I use the word 'curse' in a very professional sense.

About a week later I heard about the lawsuit between 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros over the rights to make the film. On Christmas Eve, as a special present just to me, the judge awarded the case to Fox and now Warners will have to give them a chunk of the money. Apparently, it will now have to do as well as The Dark Knight for Warners just to break even.

And the ruling has also suddenly opened up the whole chain of ownership issue. Comic creators who had their work made into film or TV series may well bring lawsuits against the film makers and comic companies. And it serves them right. They've all been making money out of the work of people who weren't credited and who never got more than their page rate for creating these characters. Comic book films are based upon a theft. Hollywood may regret basing such a lucrative industry on such a shaky premise.

In a nutshell, that's how I feel about the Watchmen movie. I don't think any good will come of it. I wouldn't like to claim that my curse brought any of this about, but it gives one a warm glow to think my diabolical powers may have triumphed. (chuckles)



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Part III: Drugs as a writing tool

What effect have drugs had on your writing?

I started smoking dope around the age of 15 and acid around 16. Had a biiig year of taking acid a couple of times each week. I'd done about a hundred trips, and this was when acid was acid, let me tell you – this was 500 mikes, 1,000 mikes a tab. I've never really taken acid since. I've confined myself to an enormous amount of hash, which I do 24/7. It doesn't seem to turn me into a shambling pothead, either. I use it to work, always have done, it gives me kind of an edge.

There was a physicist who was accepting the Noble Prize for Physics some years ago – I think it was for molecular biology. During his acceptance speech he thanked Mum, Dad, all the rest, but also said: “I feel that I should mention the enormous contribution that psilocybin has made to my research. I'd be sitting down there on molecules, watching the particles go by and understanding the way that they fitted together. And psilocybin gave me that ability.” I've also heard another scientist comment that “caffeine science is very different from marijuana science”.

So, yeah, I still take mushrooms. I haven't done so for several years now, and even then, always as part of a magic ritual. I don't take anything purely for entertainment's sake, which I think is perhaps my saving grace. We are certainly not the first culture to use drugs, but we may well be one of the first to have a drug problem. I think there is a place for drugs in society, but it's a shamanic space that we don't really have anymore.

Robert Graves noted that a lot of cultures' names for mushrooms are 'snots' or 'shits', things like that. He says it's like telling a child 'kaka – poison', sort of dirty, because the mushroom is taboo, which is not the same as just being dirty. Taboo is, yes, profane but it's also sacred. The mushrooms were sacred at one point, which meant you weren't supposed to eat them unless you were properly initiated in a tradition; you'd done your Eleusinian Mysteries or whatever.

And that's part of the problem: in our current society, the only context we have to take drugs in is a leisure context. Which a lot of the time is disastrous. Something I noticed when I was about 16 was the difference between drawings inspired by LSD and drawings attempted while under the effects of LSD.

With a lot of those Promethea issues, especially that kabbalistic run, I was doing magical rituals that often – not always, but often – involved drugs, in order to put myself in those spaces so I could write about them. I think it was issue 23 – the one that was the second sphere of the Kabbalah, the grey, sort of pearly place – I'd had Steve Moore up, we'd had this incredible magical experience, then he went home. I was still sitting down here, buzzing with the mushrooms, and I suddenly thought, right, Promethea: I know exactly how I'm going to do this next issue that I'm gonna start tomorrow, I know that the series is going to last until issue 32, because 32 is a good number – this has just been revealed to me. I know that the last issue is going to be some kind of incredibly weird comic book that somehow unfolds into a marvellous psychedelic poster, and great, well that's the rest of Promethea sorted out, so I'll go to bed now.

The next day I laid out the entirety of issue #23 in four hours, every page. It just came in this incredible burst of energy. It then took me 15 hours to write, lay out, dialogue and type the entire issue. And then two years later I finally got around to issue #32 with the giant poster thing.

So, yeah, those are instances where I didn't try writing anything in the surge of the drug rush, but the next day I'd got all the information there. It's important to have a channel, I think. If I was just taking this stuff purely for entertainment, then I wouldn't have anything to do with that energy. And it is an energy, which I can direct. I can ground it in this huge variety of works that I'm doing at any one time.

It works great for me; I think I've probably been more creative – my output's certainly been higher – since I formally took up magic. And that was one of the big proving points of it: I'd said to people, if I become less productive or if the work turns to shit, then pull me out, because I might not know. But that hasn't happened, in fact generally quite the opposite.

Mushrooms are the only psychedelic drugs that I take, and I don't take them very often. But I would trust them. Once you've done them a few times it's very easy to feel a sense of entity. You can feel that there is a characteristic in this level of consciousness which almost seems... playful? Or aware, or sometimes a bit spooky. I know that is probably something which I am imposing, or that other people have imposed upon the experience, but you get the impression that they're probably called magic mushrooms for a reason. And given that these have been the shamanic drug of preference since Neolithic times, Paleolithic times, then we've got quite a good history of a relationship with mushrooms that goes back quite a long way, and they seem to treat us alright.

I want my work to be acting like a drug, as near as I can manage. If you put the words in the right order with the pictures you can create a psychedelic state, a fugue state.

Have you ever considered a work detailing your insights into drug use?

Well, probably not, because I actually tend to think of drugs as an implement and a tool, rather than a thing that is interesting in itself. I'm reminded of that wonderful Spacemen 3 song: Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To. Which is a pretty good description of my working methods. I'm kind of taking drugs to write comics to take drugs to. Most of the psychedelia, I want it to be there on the page in the writing. I want my work to be acting like a drug as near as I can manage. I'd like to think that if you put the words in the right order with the pictures, you can create a psychedelic state, a fugue state.

With my performances, I have a dense monologue going on: complicated music at the same time as a film show or fire breather or ballet dancer, so that you're overloading the audience. It's a technique people have used since time immemorial; the Catholic Church has its stained glass window light show, incense, incantations, sonorous music, beautiful architecture – trying to push people into this peak aesthetic experience, which I think is very close to the psychedelic state, which is very close to the magical state.

One of the best letters from a fan I ever got – which I lost and wish that I could write back, so if she's reading this, get in touch! – was about what Watchmen had meant to her when she'd read it at 13. She said she was just coming to the conclusion that the world wasn't as straightforward and linear as she'd been told, when she'd discovered Watchmen.

She was with a load of girls playing softball, in New York in the late 80s. She'd been sent as an outfielder, where you don't get much to do, right at the edge of the park, near a little old guy on a bench watching them play. She glanced over at him and realised he was masturbating, watching all the 13-year-old girls playing softball. She was standing there thinking “What?!” when he looked up at her, this old man with his cock in his hand, he looked up with a wretched expression, and said, “Fuck off and leave me alone! Everybody's been here before me!” And at that moment the softball hit her on the back of the head.

And I thought... “everybody's been here before me”, it's like 'everybody's been me'. Everybody's been a lonely old man masturbating on a bench at a softball game. 'You've all been me – stop pretending that I'm outside the human circle'. Something like that.

Are you still using drugs in your work?

I haven't done any of the hard-core ritual stuff for some years now. I had one experience early on with my magic stuff where, just for a few seconds, I was a boy of about 17 and I was dying in a trench just outside Ypres. It was the small hours of the morning – that grey bit just before dawn when the birds are singing. I was lying on my left side up against the side of the trench, because my right foot was infected with maggots. It didn't hurt, but it itched. Unbelievably. And there were other kids, teenagers, slumped up against the other side of the trench and some of them were asleep, I knew, and some of them weren't. And I'd never had sex with a woman in my life. The woman I had the closest relationship with emotionally was my sister – I don't really have a sister – who I was missing profoundly, and wishing I could see her one more time.

Me and Melinda were doing the working together, both on drugs. She'd seen me lay back and close my eyes, and noticed that my eye sockets were full of cobwebs and there was blood and worms in my hair. And she thought, “Eurgh, that's horrible. I wonder if I should wake him up and tell him? No, I don't want to impose my bad vision.” At that point I sat up, said “Jesus Christ!” and burst into tears. I'm normally not terribly emotional, but I couldn't get myself under control for about three-quarters of an hour. I couldn't stop crying, because I'd just suddenly realised that the First World War had happened.

And my immediate feeling was, 'Was that me? Was that a previous life I'd had, like Shirley MacLaine tells us?' And I thought no, I'm not convinced of that. The feeling that I have is more, 'Was everybody everybody?' Which again ties back to 'everybody's sat here before me'. Is there some huge commonality? Are we all the same person? Is this all God talking to itself?

Back in the early stretches of my magical career, the first few years, that side of magic was much more important and necessary to me. I needed the spectacular experiences to convince me that there was anything of worth in magic. These days, my magical practice is more about trying to make sense of the intense information that was contained in those early experiences.

Working on The Book Of Magic has been mine and Steve's only magical practice for some years. But that was certainly more than enough.

Crowley said that there isn't a lot more to magic than writing about it. Which isn't quite true, but I know what he meant. And certainly disseminating these ideas, polishing them, presenting them in a form acceptable for an audience, took quite a bit of work. To explain what we mean by magic exactly, to put it into a historical context, and provide practical information so as to tell the reader how they might approach the same subject.

That has been a lot more demanding than taking a bunch of drugs and having a psychedelic rollercoaster experience for five or six hours. It's taken years of sustained work. There's deeper issues that need investigating. So it definitely changes.



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Part IV: Magic and the occult

What was the reaction to From Hell in occult circles?

Foolishly, I'd gone to some kind of occult forum. I'm interested in the subject, but not the scene. Some of those people creep me out. This guy came over and said “I've psychically confirmed that the things that you said in From Hell were what happened”, and I said: “well, that's lovely, but I made it up”.

I've had people ask me if the pentacle over London is real. Well, you know, those points are in those places, and you can draw lines through them to make this kind of wonky pentacle. But then, with a city that has a concentration of historical stuff like London, a small enough map and a thick enough magic marker, any three points are in a line. You know, you shouldn't get fixated on all the DaVinci Code stuff. It's easy to make meaningful patterns from a field of noise. It's one of our great human talents that we can look at a Rorschach blot and we can see something in it. But don't mistake that sort of tendency for genuine insight.

The Birth Caul performance is your only autobiographical work. How did you decide on this subject?

Dave Jay, from Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, and Tim Perkins came over and we did some magic mushrooms. We asked, 'what should our next performance be about?'. Which is one of the great uses for magic: you don't even have to think up the ideas yourself. And we then had an experience where for the whole evening, instead of talking about angels and demons and all the stuff that had been on the previous CD, we found ourselves talking about our childhoods – me in particular, I was just spewing out all of this stuff. So we thought, right, so this is about childhood.

Then me Mum died and, going through her effects, we found the birth caul, which I've still got over there somewhere.

We were trying to set up the performance in Newcastle. They said, “Where do you want to put this event on?” I said, “How about an old infants' school?” They couldn't find one, but they did have a lovely old Victorian magistrate's building, which we loved as a venue, even if it hadn't got anything to do with our subject.

So I wrote the whole thing and we did the event, then afterwards I found out that it wasn't only sailors that used to prize the birth caul, it was lawyers as well – in fact, it's the origin of the barristers' wig: they used to wear a birth caul on their head to denote wisdom. On the first page of David Copperfield, his birth caul is advertised for sale and it's bought by a solicitor. So when we'd done the performance in the courtroom, it'd been perfect all the time.

What advice would you give to someone who's starting out in magic?

Hrrrrmm... alright. Fill your head with any old shit that you come across and then rely upon developing a sense of discrimination, so that eventually you'll be able to sort out the stuff that is rubbish – which is a lot of it – from the stuff that makes some sort of sense to you.

Look at the lives of people like Aleister Crowley and Austin Spare, read two or three biographies of these people. Especially Crowley. Opinions tend to vary. Ask yourself if you really think there is anything in all this. Ask yourself how you think it works.

I approach magic the same way that I approach writing – no one taught me how to do it, I just thought: let's take a look at this from outside, see if I can figure it out and come up with my own approach from there. Y'know, magic is an art, so I approached it the same way I would any art.

I mean, for me, the whole turning-point in my thinking about magic was when I realised that the only place this has to happen is inside your head. And that doesn't mean it isn't real. I think we have a problem in that we live in a materialist society – I don't mean “everybody's a bread-head, man”, I mean that we believe that the material world is the only one that's important, the only one that exists. Despite the fact that believing that requires thinking, and science can't actually explain how we think. It's the ghost in the machine, forever outside the province of science. You can't reproduce a thought in an empirical laboratory experiment, so you cannot properly talk about thought. Thought is a supernatural event which we all experience every minute of the day.

The world of ideas is much more important than the material one. I mean, what's more important, the reality of a chair or the idea of a chair? I'd say it looks like the physical world is actually predicated upon the intangible world of ideas and the mind. It looks like that's the more important territory. Okay, so let's treat it literally as a territory. There might be ways to explore it, ways since time immemorial that people have used to explore it. Drugs. Meditation. Some unpleasant ones like scourging and fasting, which never sound like much fun to me. Lots of ways that people have found over the years to get themselves deeper into this mental space.

There's also books written by people who have been there before you. Kabbalah could be seen as one of the maps of this imaginary posited space that you can explore with your mind, and which does appear to be inhabited. The Enochian system of John Dee is another map of an imaginary space, one that has some correspondence with Kabbalah but seems to be a completely different universe.

And then the best way is experiment. Carefully. Realise that most magicians end up mad, or dead, or worse in some way. That doesn't mean that all of them have to. It means that most of them do. Ask yourself how much you really want to know. It sounds very good doesn't it, conjuring demons, or stuff like that? It sounds kind of cool, a bit X-Files and very romantic. Do you really want that? Make up your mind before you go in the door, because that's the thing about magic being something to do with language; you have to be very careful what you say. All words are magic words, and you can find them coming back to haunt you. And in my experience, magic always gives you exactly what you ask for.

In practical terms, I'd say my chosen methods, obviously, are drugs, and creative work itself. If it's drugs, it should be a drug that you're comfortable with, that's not addictive and that won't send you mad. Something like psilocybin. In whatever dose you're comfortable with, and then something to focus your mind, a ritual. Make it up yourself, or borrow it from a book. Doesn't really matter, but frame your intention in a little ritual. Burn a certain sort of incense that you associate with the subject of your enquiry. Have a certain colour around that you associate with it. This is where Kabbalah is quite useful, because it's a huge chart of correspondences, so you can theme your rituals with a nice book on Kabbalah.

And may I please stress that when I say the word 'Kabbalah' it means something very, very different to when Guy Ritchie's ex-missus talks about it. You will notice I don't have any bits of fucking red string and I just drink water out of the tap... it's good enough for me.

One of the books you're going to use the most is Aleister Crowley's 777, which has got tables. You don't have to read all the essays, you won't understand them and he was slightly mad anyway. There are simple tables that tell you all you need to know about the Kabbalah. Get yourself a good tarot deck or some other divinatory tool – they're quite good as a way of getting into magic. I'd recommend the Thoth tarot deck; other people prefer Waite. Whichever works best for you. And then try it out, play around with it and you'll start to notice that it's changing the way you think, it's giving you a different language of symbols to work with. And having a different language is the same as having a different consciousness. It's a linguistic phenomenon.

And the first time one of these things sits up and answers you, don't freak out. You're not going mad, they're not that scary, really. Respect them. Treat them as you would anybody. Don't go 'aaaaargh' when you see them, because that would offend anybody. Just treat them as you would any sort of imaginary entity from ancient Persia that you happen to find yourself talking to and you'll be fine.

It doesn't matter if they are only some sort of externalized part of your own personality, as long as they give you accurate information. That is the key criterion. If they tell you all the stuff that they apparently tell David Icke, you should perhaps ask yourself whether this is a decent source of information. If it seems to be morally and intellectually and emotionally true, then I'd say that, even if it is a hallucination, it's as good a source of information as any.



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