Real people, even if they’ve been the subject of special rendition and are currently receiving electric shocks to their genitals somewhere in Egypt, are not in a horror story: they are in the same ordinary reality as you and I, which we are all a part of and which we all, by our actions and inactions, help to create. “It’s really only fictional people that live in horror stories. If you happen to live within a worldview that supposes our entire neurological reality to be made up of words, and happen to believe that certain intense forms of language might therefore be capable of altering that neurological reality, then picking up a pen or sitting down at your keyboard feels like a very different proposition.” This is not a way of saying that magic is a lesser thing, that it is ‘only’ art at the end of the day, but instead of saying that art is a far, far greater thing than its currently degraded state as a commodity or as simple time-filling commodity might lead us to suppose. Basically, I have understood that art and magic are precisely the same thing.

I will be bringing as great a weight of magical consciousness, perception and concentration to a chapter of Jerusalem or Providence as I would have done to the rituals that resulted in The Birth Caul or Angel Passage. Whereas in the beginning there was a great deal of ritual and serious magical experiment, both because this was the only recommended way to go about things and because it was a very exciting and pyrotechnical experience, these days I have internalised my ideas on magic to the point where anything creative that I do is perceived as a magical act.

“As regards how I use magic in my work, this has changed significantly in the twenty years or more since I took up the practice. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)Īlan Moore Q&A on Goodreads, selected hightlights. “Alan Moore – Cambridge, UK – March 2012”.

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