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trumanbuckley's point is interesting indeed, especially if we consider the theory that the events of Moore's recent Promethea-Cabala storyline amount to Moore's 'coming out' as an ipsi - ipso - that stupid word to describe incredibly powerful magi which I can never be arsed to fucking spell. Because it means, you see, that either Moore is actually shit hot to the max at the old magickal jiggery-pokery, or he's lying about either (a) his abilities or (b) when he got started, or the Promethea storyline does not necessarily amount to a declaration of hippopotamus-ness. Allow me to explain:
In various interviews with more mainstream publications, e.g. the Guardian, the Big Issue, and the Idler for example, Moore has basically asserted that he became a magician almost by accident after writing some lines about the existence or non-existence of gods in one panel of From Hell in around 1995. This led Moore off on a whirlwind tour of magick, mostly in the Enochian/Thelemic/Golden Dawn mode, which resulted in him doing all sorts of cool magickal rituals as performance pieces, acquiring a prodgious collection of 'significant' jewellery, holding forth upon John Dee and Aleister Crowley for channel 4 during that absolutely shit 'Masters of Darkness' series they did, and amassing a library of cool, leather-bound occult texts the likes of which one rarely sees outside of the magick box in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All this in eight years, while at the same time creating America's Best Comics - quite a feat.
Now, if we assume that the culmination of this was his achieving ipsidooda status (which technically he would have to have done, I'm guessing, sometime in 2001, given the schedule he's on writing Promethea and the other ABC stuff), this means that Moore has basically reached the highest grade of magick recognised by the western initiating orders in less than a decade, while holding down a job as a funnybook writer and underground superstar. By comparison, Morrison claims to have undergone his own abbys-crossing transformation only after 20 years of magickal practice - which means he got started a lot sooner than AM.
Now, granted, Morrison is kinda lazy and foppish, and prefers to experiment with a more varied magickal diet than Moore, so it's possible that, with dedication and perseverance, Moore could have became an ipsissisimus(?) in the seven years or so between 1995 and 2002. But as I recall it took even Crowley a long time to reach that level, and arguably Dee never even got there, so we'd have to assume that Moore is actually a better magician than Crowley or Dee. And you could make a case for that - Moore's certainly been smart enough to avoid any Cefalu-type scenarios, but then again he hasn't invented his own magickal order, either (and technically Crowley could be said to have created not just one but two orders, given that he ghost-wrote most of Gerald Gardner's wicca stuff).
Or, he could have been lying about when he got started. I'm inclined to place more credence in this theory - there's been a lot of shamanic/magickal stuff in Moore's work long before 1995 - if you don't believe me, check out the LSD-trip sequence in V for Vendetta, or Jim Gordon's crossing of the Abbys in The Killing Joke. I don't know what reasons Moore would have for making a story like this up - perhaps he finds the subject still a little embarssing to talk about, perhaps (like a lot of magicians) he just enjoys throwing the mundanes a red herring - but doing so seems more likely than Moore reaching kether-level status in less than a decade.
Or Moore may be lying about his abilities - a hypothesis which I, not being sufficiently advanced myself, can't really test, I suppose.
Or - and this is just possible - maybe Moore never actually said he was an ipsissimus, and we're reading too much into his last Promethea storyline.
Y'know. I mean it is just possible that we may be doing that. |
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