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Magic of Consciousness symposium

August 25, 2007 / Klint Finley

A story about the annual meeting of Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, which included a special segment on stage magic:

Secretive as they are about specifics, the magicians were as eager as the scientists when it came to discussing the cognitive illusions that masquerade as magic: disguising one action as another, implying data that isn’t there, taking advantage of how the brain fills in gaps – making assumptions, as The Amazing Randi put it, and mistaking them for facts.

Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.

‘In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,’ he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. ‘If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.’

[…]

He left us with his definition of magic: ‘The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that – in our hearts – ought to.’

Full Story: New York Times.

Phil Hine interviews Ramsey Dukes

July 31, 2007 / Klint Finley

I think I’ve read this interview before but this is more or less how I feel about the occult and magick right now:

The trouble with successes in magic is that you can look back and describe some things that happened and they are so amazing when that when you tell them to people they think you must be the world’s greatest Magician if you could do things like that. But you know that actually they didn’t happen in the way magic ought to – ?I just want this to happen and I make it happen’. Very little have I managed to achieve in that way, life has a habit of springing surprises however hard you try to direct it. Some of those surprises are uncannily close to what you asked for, and yet they have a way of occurring which is not what you expected. I am very much aware of what is happening to me and it’s a sort of theme which occurs in fairy stories; the wish is granted but it doesn’t work out the way it was meant to. I think it must be a cosmic law that that should happen.

Are you still involved in the occult for the same reasons or have they changed?

That’s a difficult one. I can’t give a tidy answer to that. It’s very much my nature to be involved in the occult and that hasn’t changed. Involvement carries a certain momentum – the friends one has made, the practices I am performing and so on, all that adds up to a reason to stay with the occult. Yet I realise I am looking for different things now than I was earlier on. But those reasons are fairly superficial. It really is just curiosity about life and that is the strongest motive and that, in a sense, has not been changed.

[…]

Why do you think that people are still drawn to mysticism and the occult when the terrain is so obviously dominated by frauds, wastrels and knaves?

Now that’s a bit like saying why are people still interested in sex when obviously the sex industry is so full of corruption and sleaze. I think for some people there is actually a fascination in the sleaze, fraudery and trickery, which actually adds to the subject – sex is actually more intriguing because of the aura of sleaze about it. I’m not sure if that is so for me, but I think the occult too is something which you can be put off by the sleaze of it or actually you can find that as a rather intriguing element in it. One of the ideas I was putting forward in ?The Charlatan and the Magus’ (in ?Blast….’) was that maybe existence itself is sleazy, and that mankind’s instinct always attempts to eliminate sleaze, which is as misguided as swallowing a load of antibiotics, which although they may kill the germ, they kill off certain other things in your gut which then has to recover; or as misguided as trying to make a clean compost heap by putting a lot of disinfectant on it which actually would stop the composting process. In other words, sleaze is itself inherent. The universe itself has a strong element of sleaze in it and it’s part of the nourishment of life. We need to work on our own exaggerated concepts of hygiene.

Full Story: Phil Hine’s web site.

Alan Moore interview on art and the occult in Arthur Magazine

May 14, 2007 / Klint Finley

Arthur: Of course the other aspect of magic that separates it from most religions is that it’s not based on faith, is it?

Oh, no. No. Faith is for sissies who daren’t go and look for themselves. That’s my basic position. Magic is based upon gnosis. Direct knowledge. It’s a kind of ‘I’m from Missouri. Show me’ approach, if you like. [laughter] I think that gnosis it’s probably the original form of spirituality in mankind. If you look back at the old Gnostic religions that proceeded Christianity, what they depended on was direct knowledge of the Mysteries, or the ideas being talked about. If you look at the early Christians, the people that were allegedly around Jesus, then you can’t get much gnostic than St. Thomas. [chuckles] He has to stick his hand in the wound before he was convinced! Or you’ve got the Essenes, with John the Baptist-they were certainly gnostics. Back then, everybody formed their own relationship to the godhead, which was seen as being inside them, as much as anything.

This is true of the old shamanic religions, that were the forebears of all kind of spiritual and religious thinking. The shaman didn’t so much act as a middleman between people and the gods; he showed them how to get there. He told them how to make their own journeys into the Underworld. I get the impression that the shaman in an ancient tribe would have had the same sort of position as a plumber or an electrician. [chuckles] A plumber is a guy who just knows about plumbing and doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty when he’s unblocking your S-bend or whatever. A shaman is a guy who knows about traveling to the spirit world and doesn’t mind vomiting because he’s taking poisonous drugs, or getting the horrors of going to hell. It’s a community thing.

The later idea of magic, which probably sprung up when people started burning witches and magicians, when it became dangerous to be a magician. Which would probably have been around the ooo, what, the 3rd century, 4th century? When Christian mobs started putting Gnostics in hermetic scholars to death, Around that time there were Christian mobs that were putting to death hermetic scholars like Hypatea. We mention her in the first issue of Promethea. She was real. She was, I think, skinned alive by Christians. And so at that point, this is where you start to get the thing of secrecy and magic, which carries on from that point up to the present day. ‘If you’re a magician, don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell them and don’t tell them any of the visions you’ve had or give them any of the information that you struggled so long to accrue. Keep it to yourself.’ And that seems very elitist to me. I’d rather disseminate any information I’m getting by one of the means that are open to me. And I’m lucky in that I have several quite excellent means [chuckles] to disseminate information that are open to me. Comic books, CDs, things like that.

Full Story: Arthur.

Alan Moore: Comic Book Genius Turned Magician

August 17, 2000 / Klint Finley

Alan Moore is the author of such acclaimed works as The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and is a magician to boot.

Initially Moore worked as both a writer and an artist on a detective strip called “Roscoe Moscow,” but he decided he was a poor artist and decided to focus on writing. From there he went on to work for 2000 AD and Dr. Who Weekly (as many British comic authors did…) and eventually began working on the anthology Warrior.

It was here that Moore created two of his most seminal works: Marvelman (later called Mircleman) and V for Vendetta. The former would be reprinted and continued by Eclipse, the latter would be reprinted by DC (it is now part of the Vertigo imprint).

Moore was then hired by DC to write Saga of Swamp Thing beginning with issue 20. Moore continued working for DC and produced Batman: Killing Joke and most notably, The Watchmen.

The Watchmen was a politically savvy and realistic portrayal of a super hero universe. Along with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons revolutionized comicsand paved the way for future mature readers series (such as The Sandman, The Crow, Preacher and many more).

However, disputes over the royalties of the Watchmen caused Moore to leave DC and vow never to work for them again. He then began his own company, Mad Love Publishing. Under this imprint he published two issues of Big Numbers. Around this time he also began two series for Tundra’s anthology Taboo: “From Hell” and “Lost Girls.” From Hell continued as a graphic novel series published by Eddie Cambell Comics.

Moore began working with rogue publishers Image Comics in 1993 and where he created 1963 which was cancelled due to low sales. Moore also wrote Wild CATs and a large amount of Spawn related material, including WildCATs/Spawn

Moore then began his relationship with Rob Liefeld and his Image off-shoot company Maximum Press (later Awesome Comics) where he worked on Supreme, Warchild, Judgement Day and other titles before Awesome comics went bankrupt.

After Awesome went under, Jim Lee’s Image off-shoot company, Wildstorm Productions (now an imprint of, ironiccally, DC Comics) offered Moore his own imprint. Moore accepted and America’s Best Comics was born. Moore has continued to write a number of books under his own imprint as well as other titles under the Wildstorm banner.

Alan Moore Fan site good starting point.

Twilight of the Super Heroes a rejected series proposal to DC by Moore

D.R. and Quinch scan page tribute to Moore and Alan Davis’ 2000 AD stories. Includes scans of an entire segment.

Alan Moore @ comicon.com lots of info and a small collection of works. Includes some performance art stuff.

Italian page a page dedicated to Alan Moore’s music, in Italian

Salon Books: From Hell an excellent article on Moore’s From Hell

V for Vendetta Shrine V for Vendetta fan site

Alan Moore interview an interview from Another Universe

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen review

Watching the Detectives illustrated annotations.

1963 annotations

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen annotations