Crosstime: The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels Bumper Book of Magic

My icon for as long as I've been on Blogger. Taken from John Coulthart's cover art to The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels' Bumper Book of Magic was announced when I was an adolescent, young enough to believe that it would change the world and open the 32nd Pathway to all of humankind. Now, as an arthritic soul twisting its way through a decidedly banal world, I can still feel that fantastical hope within me. In a month, we will see the release of this long awaited book, now with a shorter title. When Tom Jackson sent me the announcement, I was coming home from school and it felt surreal. It is happening, and no matter what it is, it will affect me. In many ways, the past sixteen years have felt like a fuse leading to this pure exposition of magic by my living hero. (And another dead hero, who was the living one's mentor.) My mentor who, despite understanding his deep antipathy towards fannish sentiment, I regard as an intellectual father. Whether it was intentional or not, Moore shaped who I am in a way that I don't think I could ever shake. In his own words: "It's not in magic's nature to let anybody go..."

One of the authors is departed for another realm, one I would wager is bathed in moonlight. Steve Moore introduced Alan Moore to magic and Robert Anton Wilson and was his partner on the evening of January 14th 1994, when the roof came off and the two found themselves confronted by the alien-divine intelligence of Glycon and found themselves in a room full of dead magi, outside of time. The night that Moore the Younger decided that there really was something to magic. It was only a couple months before that experience that he declared his intent to become a magician, after imbibing too much Carlsberg. Steve Moore released his masterpiece Somnium in 2012, after years of working on it as recorded in Alan's Unearthing. Not long after this book, the "herald of the Qoph path" as I thought at the time, Moore the Elder went ahead and died in 2014. We were treated to a posthumous publication of his intricately beautiful Telguuth stories the same year that Alan released his magisterial Jerusalem. To me, the apocalyptic nature of Jerusalem, in the truest sense of the word, indicates an association with the Shin path. With two paths opened, leading to and from Malkuth from the higher spheres, it is time for the third and most powerful...the Tau path. (It should also be noted that another posthumous publication of Moore's Selene, a nonfiction incredibly in depth study of the titular God, has been released and further opened the lunar-back-of-the-head path.)

To go ahead and give some credit to my earlier, obsessive self, I'm going to simply reprint a detailed prospectus of the book based on interviews given by the magical Moores about what is (in some cases was) expected to be in The Bumper Book. 

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The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic Prospectus 

“Alan and I tend to see all this as an ongoing process, somehow. Somnium, the non-fiction Selene book, Unearthing, Alan’s forthcoming novel Jerusalem, The Bumper Book Of Magic… they all seem to be part of some sort of vague, barely-defined Moon And Serpent project to provide an alternative view to simple materialistic reality. We’re willing partners in the project, but control’s been delegated upwards. It all kicked off with that ritual in October 1976, but where it’s going from here… well, I guess the gods know!”- Steve Moore

The Contents

• “ a beautiful eight-page Steve Parkhouse strip that opens is, a silent little eight pager from me and Steve Parkhouse”

• “Adventures in Thinking”- The keynote essay that will provide “reliable advice as to how entry into the world of magic may be achieved. There is an article on the theory of magic, as we understand it, a practical theory of magic.

• “Things To Do On a Rainy Day”- Illustrated by Rick Veitch; will describe “activities such as divination, etheric travel, and conjuring of spirits, deities, dead people, and infernal entities from the pit, all of whom are sure to become your best friends”; Veitch on Moore’s pieces in this setting “I'm happy to report [they] are hilariously brilliant.”; “It's divided up into a number of different areas where we tell them how to get into the magical state, or at least ways that people have done in the past, where we've been pointing out the potential dangers, as well as the potential benefits, of any of these particular methods that we're talking about. We're not advocating any of them, we're simply saying, "This is how people have done it in the past, this is what we think about the techniques, these are some potential dangers you might want to watch out for."; “Once the magical state has been attained, we are talking about things that can be done including mentally projecting into real or otherworldly mindscapes, contacting people at distance, scrying the future, divining, conjuring entities, invoking or evoking.”; “We talk about the important of art and magic, considered in union, and we propose a very artistic form of magic that will actually get some results that you can show other people.”; “We also talk about "old school" magic like how to conjure a god, how to conjure a demon, things that might go wrong with it.”

• “Old Moores’ Lives of the Great Enchanters”- “history of magic from the last ice age to the present day” consisting of pictorial, one page, biographies of fifty great enchanters; “we just come up through all of the important magicians, fictional, real or otherwise, the ones that you can't decide about, whether they were real or whether they were a heavily romanticized version of a real person, or whether they were a complete fantasy. The thing is that they're all important in that they added to the ideas about magic.”; in the style of Ripley’s Believe It or Not

1. the Dancing Sorcerer from the Trois Freres cave in France- “the picture of the guy with antlers prancing around – it’s the first representation of a magician”

2. Persian Magi and Zarathustra- “after the Stone Age shamanic period, that is the first record of actual magic”

3. King Solomon 

4. Circe

5. Medea- “Medea flies through the air and she works her magic using the cauldron, so that's obviously where a lot of the ideas about the contemporary witch come from, like the witches from Macbeth stirring their cauldron.”

6. Apollonius of Tyana

7. Simon Magus- “Simon the Gnostic, the head of Gnosticism, basically a rival religion to Christianity, and it's conflating him with Simon the Magician, who was traveling charlatan and magician, who was allegedly invested in a magical competition in front of the Emperor Nero against St. Peter”

8. Sosipatra- “very definetly a kind of magical figure in her own right”; “the sort of second-century Alexandrian period female magician we settled upon”; [“we had to rule out Hypatia, strictly for reasons of space, but also because she was a Hermetic philosopher rather than an actual magician…so we give passing reference to Hypatia”] 

9. Merlin- “he never existed, but that’s not really important. He was the first Christian-approved magician.”

10. Roger Bacon

11. Dr. Faustus- “Here we've worked out the tangled web of Georgius Sabellicus Faust, the child molester and “Fountain of Necromancy” as he styled himself, Johannes Faust, who was the completely blameless doctor of divinity at Heidelberg University, who was known as the “Demigod of Heidelberg”, and we've worked out how these two got mixed up together by people who were just confused by all these Fausts and that even Georgius Sabellicus Faust, in the first reference to him, he refers to himself as "Faustus Secundus," and we were looking at this, and I said, "But that makes 'Faust Second,' and this is the first Faust that we've ever heard referred to" — he's refered to by Johannes Trithemius — so we thought, "Who was Faust the first, then?" And Steve looked up in his Latin dictionary, and the word "faustus" means "fortunate, lucky, prosperous, auspicious," so it would have been a great generic name for a sort of generic folkloric magician, like we might say, "Oh, he was a bit of a Merlin," and they were saying, "He's a bit of a Faust, he's a lucky man,"”

12. Paracelsus- “We also found out that Paracelsus invented modern medicine.”; “What we happened to notice was that Paracelsus had actually created something called the "Alphabet of the Magi" which in some places looked similar to Dr. Dee's Enochian squiggles and, more importantly, it was used for writing the names of angels, backwards apparently.”

13. John Dee [Edward Kelley]- “Also, for our money, probably the greatest magician of all time was John Dee. No one else comes close.”; “who was a flat-out necromancer”

14. Emanuel Swedenborg

15. William Blake

16. Aleister Crowley

17. Austin Osman Spare

18. Jack Parsons

• “The Adventures of Alexander”- “There's a little comic strip by Kevin O'Neill, I think there's about eight one-page chapters in it, and it's done in the style of old British radio fun, or film-fun comedy comics of the 1940's and 50's, { “a Radio Fun kind of thing”} and this is the adventures of Alexander, and it's account of the life of Alexander of Abonuteichos, the charlatan who created Glycon, who is the deity I am personally attached to, and that's very funny and very scurrilous, but it's got an awful lot of important factual material in it as well.”

• “helpful travel guides to mind-wrenching alien dimensions”- “We’re currently stumbling through a series of pieces on ‘magical landscapes’ that can be visited in trance or by ritual, each of which is being compressed into a single page.”;

• “profiles of many quaint  local inhabitants”- “There’s this bestiary of demons and gods and other things that you might be lucky or unfortunate enough to bump into.”

• “The Soul”- a decadent pulp tale of the occult; illustrated by John Coulthart; set in the 1920s; Coulthart on the story “This evolved from a comic strip idea which would have originally been published in one of the ABC titles to a text-story-with-illustrations, which is how we now intend to do it. One part of this has already been completed for the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic which Alan is writing with Steve Moore. In all there should be six parts, presented across the book. The idea is quite a simple one, taking the old idea of the “occult detective” but twisting it slightly by having a female character.”; “This is a fictional story, but it basically contains real magical information that we couldn't contain in any other way. One of the main things about magic is that a lot of magical experiences happen entirely within the mind of the magician.”; “So personal experiences that me or Steve might have had, it's not really proper to talk about them in the factual parts of the book where we've been very careful to give a logical account of magic that is actually very rational, where we're checking all of our facts,…that stuff we're working into the fiction which, we think, will give a lot of the flavor of what it is like to approach magic without actually saying, "We did this, I did that, this is how it happened," without making any claims that people might justly argue with. There's that running story.”

• “a full set of this sinister and deathless cult’s Tarot cards”- collaboration between Alan and Jose Villarrubia; “We've also got a complete set of tarot cards which we are designing ourselves and I believe that me and José are going to be... me and Steve, I mean, I will probably be coming up with most of the design ideas, but I shall be consulting with Steve. It's just that I happen to know more about the tarot than Steve does; he's more of an I Ching man. But Jose has said that he would very much like to do this tarot deck, so that in itself will be a huge job, but yeah, they'll be a complete set of all 78 tarot cards with a book or instructions for their use and interpretations.”; “It’ll be a Tarot deck that will be included in the Bumper Book with cut-out cards, but we probably will be bringing it out in a separate deck as well for people who don’t want to cut up the Bumper Book.”; “has to be as good as Crowley’s, that the standard to meet”

• “a fold out Kabalistic board game”- “There will be a Qabalah board game where the winner is the first person to actually achieve enlightenment as long as they don't make a big thing out of it. We've got that kind of half-designed, but we're still having some trouble fitting it even onto a fold-out board. We think we've got the main, the way in which you play the game, pretty much sorted out.”

• “pop up Theatre of Marvels that serves as both a Renaissance memory theatre and a handy portable shrine for today’s multitasking magician on the move”- designed by Melinda Gebbie (hopefully); “pop-up is one of the most magic things there is as any sort of six year-old would tell you.”

• “a matching pair of lengthy thesis revealing the ultimate meaning of the Moon and Serpent”- “makes transparent the much obscured secret of magic, happiness, sex, creativity, and the known Universe”; “at the same time explaining why these lunar and ophidian symbols feature so prominently in the order’s peculiar name” 

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Now, with the current press release, it seems we might have missed out on the Tarot deck, the pop-up Memory Theatre and the fold-out Kabbalistic board game. (Edit: on seeing a flip through there seems to be something the reader can choose to cut out and assemble.) These were all incredibly ambitious undertakings and it is more than understandable that they weren't realized. A recent review from Library Journal assures us that the book is full of "an array of puzzles, mazes, and connect-the-dots activity pages strewn throughout." (The review also notes that the authors' passion for the subject shines through and makes a convincing arguement for the importance of mystical and magical thought throughout human history.)

Some materials, that may preview what will be in the Bumper Book, have been released over the years. Along with the aforementioned Somnium, Selene and Jerusalem, (one should also mention Alan's Illuminations and the works of John Higgs) we have:

• The various Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels recordings including: The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, The Birth Caul, The Highbury Working, Snakes and Ladders and Angel Passage.
• "Between the Angels and the Apes" by Alan Moore in Strange Attractor #4: Moore's fantastic, unfinished libretto for a proposed opera concerning John Dee
• "The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theater of Marvels" by Alan and Steve and "Beyond Our Ken" by Alan in Joel Biroco's Kaos 14
• Promethea: A now-disowned comic series by Alan Moore that lays out a lot of magical theory and concepts.
• Somnium by Steve Moore: a novel inspired by Steve's love affair with Selene that contains a lot of autobiographical magical information. I'd also check out his nonfiction study Selene, but it is a very in depth historical survey more than an occult text.
• "Unearthing" in Ian Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances or the LP: Alan's biographical work on Steve Moore which houses a lot of intimate magical information.
• Jerusalem by Alan Moore: Moore's opus that contains a lot of the magical energy that will be in The Bumper Book.
• "Fossil Angels:" an essay by Moore written at the beginning of the century about the then-current state of magic. Eventually published in The Gnostic #1 and was originally intended to be illustrated by Kevin O'Neill.
• "Magic, Running Through the Gutters Like Lightning" from Dodgem Logic #3 which is probably the most practical and explicit published piece on magic by Alan Moore.
• "Life On Another World" from Dodgem Logic #6 where Moore outlines the possibilities of new modes of living, including acknowledgement of our imaginary habitats.
• "Show Pieces" and The Show: Occult cinema by Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins. I anticipate that Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, Cameron and Harry Smith will be in Old Moores' Enchanters.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: I have always maintained that this is as intrisically, if not as explicitly, magical as Promethea. Especially everything from The Black Dossier onwards. Some of the references to the British comics of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's (along with Steve Moore's) childhoods in showcased in Tempest and seems to be making a reappearance in the Bumper Book.

So, you have a month to review these works if you're so inclined. We also have the first Long London novel, The Great When, by Alan Moore coming out the first week of October. Magic is afoot.

Consider Alan Moore, the closest we're ever going to get to Merlin or Prospero, upon his mouldering isle. Consider where we are and open yourself to the possibility of "real" magic. Things can only get better. 

The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Steve and Alan Moore, along with artists Kevin O’Neill, John Coulthart, Steve Parkhouse, Rick Veitch, Melinda Gebbie, and Ben Wickey, releases on October 15th. 

Major Edit: If you've found any interest in this post, you really need to read John Coulthart's write-up on The Bumper Book. It is a much more interesting take than my own and Coulthart contextualizes a lot of the material I have here. He is a floating member of the Moon and Serpent, after all, and designed the most excellent symbol below.