The Author Who Tried to END The World (Watchmen / Alan Moore) – Wisecrack Edition

Hi Wisecrack, Jared again, and today we're talking about everyone's favorite drug addict Gandalf: Alan Moore. Alan Moore is the

author

of many of the most acclaimed comics of all time, including Watchmen, Miracleman, and The Killing Joke. And like the Joker and Batman in that story, Moore straddles the fine line between genius and madness. "I decided it might be more interesting to terrorize them by driving them completely crazy and declaring myself a wizard." He calls himself a ritual magician, not the kind who pulls rabbits out of hats, but the Steven Strange kind who consults grimoires and conjures demons.

Oh really. At first glance, much of what Moore means by magic seems more like the superstitions of a man who hits his magic corncob pipe too hard. But if we take Moore seriously for a moment, there's a pretty fascinating philosophy at play here. So what can we learn from a guy who claims he

tried

to end the

world

? Well, we're going to have to dive into a little-known and even less understood occult tradition known as Hermeticism. Welcome to this Wisecrack

edition

on the philosophy of Alan Moore. Today's topic: Is magic real? There's a lot more to cover, though, so if you want Moore, let us know in the comments.

Moore is a student of Hermeticism, which is less a religion with established doctrines and more a set of interrelated practices and principles. The objective of hermeticism is to seek understanding of the

world

through three methods: alchemy, astrology and theurgy. The first two are quite familiar, but the third, theurgy, is basically the process of achieving spiritual perfection with the goal of getting closer and closer to God. Hermeticism largely bases its teachings on the Corpus Hermeticum, of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. He is a mix of Hermes and Thoth, the Greek and Egyptian gods of language and wisdom, respectively.

For Moore, this mix of language and understanding is the heart of the magic. In his upcoming magic book The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, Moore defines magic as “a purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness.” So what the fuck does that mean? Basically, Moore is saying that what we call reality can be divided into two categories: the material and the immaterial. The material is everything physical: matter and energy, space and time, fundamental forces, all that. But we never experience those things directly. Photons hit our retina, pressure waves impact our eardrums, those signals are sent to our brain, and based on that limited sensory information, the brain creates a mental model of how it perceives the external world.

That mental model is the immaterial. To understand how the material and the immaterial affect each other in profound ways, consider Watchmen. Moore had a fleeting idea in his head for the story, but it wasn't until artist Dave Gibbons gave shape to that idea by drawing those panels in pencil that it came to fruition. Moore's intangible thinking had a tangible effect on the arrangement of atoms that became Watchmen. The opposite also is true. You are imagining Doctor Manhattan's statuesque, uncensored blue phallus in your mind, simply because I mention it, the physical sound of my voice has altered your perception.

By evoking that image in your mind, I cast a genuine spell. For Moore, that's all there is to magic. Magic bridges the gap between the material and the immaterial. Art, language, symbols: these are the real magic wands. According to Moore, "...magic is intrinsically connected to art, language, and consciousness to the point where these four things almost become different aspects of the same phenomenon." This same principle is seen in the rabbit-duck illusion. At first glance, you see a rabbit or a duck. Just because someone's mind initially interprets it as "hanging" doesn't mean the meaning is fixed. All it takes is for someone to tell them that he is also a rabbit and suddenly he changes before their eyes.

It's telling stories like a spell. Just as storytelling can be used to generate illusions, it can also dispel them. As an anarchist, Moore counts money among the most destructive illusions that have ever distorted the collective consciousness of humanity. When Miracleman sets out to make Earth a utopia, one of the first things he does is abolish money, suddenly announcing: “Money is a promise, to redeem each bearer's cash for its value in gold or goods. An empty promise. If we all immediately demanded the exchange of our currencies, we would learn that such wealth does not exist. Money is imaginary.

Real if we believe in it... When summer comes, money will not exist. But he never did.” This method of magically altering something by changing your way of thinking is seen most clearly in Promethea. A notable example occurs when the protagonist Sophie has a rematch with the demon king Asmodeus. Initially, Sophie and her company are determined to kill Asmoday in anger, but it is only when they accept that so-called demons are just a part of human nature (the worst parts) that Asmodeus' appearance changes to that of a human. He explains: “Approach us with fear, with hatred and repulsion, and we will be fearful, hateful and vile.

Approach us with humanity and respect, and we will be humane and respectable.” For the magician, expectation creates perspective... Even Doctor Manhattan is a magician in this sense. He outwardly appears as an ageless aquamarine Adonis with alopecia solely because that is how he perceives himself internally. So if a sufficiently compelling story can “magically” change our perception of a single phenomenon, what happens if we tell a story that attempts to account for all the phenomena that exist? Moore does exactly that in Promethea: telling a story about everything as a spell to change our perceptions about everything. Of course, we will never be able to understand the infinite expanse of all space-time.

But it is not necessary. One of the most famous principles of Hermeticism is something called macrocosm and microcosm. Expressed in the maxim “As above, so below,” this principle assumes that each level of reality reflects each other, like an infinite fractal, or how everything bad about YouTube can be summed up as Logan Paul and all the worst things. on YouTube. Logan Paul is repeated on other YouTube channels. Being able to understand a part of the pattern allows you to better understand the whole and, in turn, move from lower levels to higher levels. With Promethea, the entire structure of the series is deliberately based on a specific structure that repeats at macrocosmic and microcosmic levels, from the entirety of existence down to each individual soul: the Tree of Life of the Khabbalah.

For Moore, the Tree of Life is the roadmap to all of reality, including our inner life. On the last step is mere perception, seeing the rabbit or the duck. Above that, there is imagination, the ability to create mental models of things that we do not directly perceive with our senses. Above that is our capacity for art and language, the ability to link ideas with sounds, symbols, images and stories. And above that, our capacities for emotion and reason, respectively. At the macroscopic level, the physical universe is the most basic sphere of the world soul. Above that, there is everyone's collective unconscious.

And at the top of the Tree is what the first Hermetists called the All. The only. God. That is why Promethea has thirty-two numbers, corresponding to the sum of the ten Spheres and the twenty-two Paths of The Tree of Life. The story itself ends in issue #31, so she wrote a thirty-second issue, thirty-two pages long, each expounding one of the Paths. Thus, the theme was a deliberate microcosm of the series as a whole, and the series, a macrocosm of the theme. Or: “As above, so below.” Another hermetic principle used by Moore is Solve et Coagula, "Separate and combine." Basically, breaking a thing down into its components to better understand how the whole fits together.

Doctor Manhattan's arc in Watchmen is about him learning Solve et Coagula. When we first meet him, he expresses an understanding of the first, separate half better than anyone else. He is alienated from humanity because he has mentally broken humans down into their basic components, not unlike what his father did with clocks. His big breakthrough on Mars is learning not simply to decompose humans into abstract arrangements of atoms: "In my opinion, the existence of life is a very overrated phenomenon." - but rather recombine them conceptually and perceive them as holistic four-dimensional objects. Solve et Coagula is seen even more clearly in the sixth issue of Promethea.

Sophie finds herself within the collective imagination of humanity and confronts the writer Marto Neptura, the pseudonym of a writer of the character of Promethea. As a writer, Neptura's power in the field of fiction is almost absolute. Sophie is only able to defeat him by realizing that Neptura was the collective pseudonym of several novelists reduced to their separate unique styles. So if a compelling story can change one's view of the world, what happens when a story is such a complete blueprint of the world that it changes the perception of our entire species? For Moore, when the way everyone sees the world one way ends, the world ends.

In Promethea, this is exactly the task Sophie is given. Margaret, one of the Prometheas before Sophie, explains: "Humans are amphibians... that means they live in two worlds at once: matter and mind." "Promethea makes people more aware of the vast immaterial realm. Perhaps it will tempt them to explore it. Imagine if many people followed its path? It would be like the great Devonian leap from sea to land. Humanity, slipping from the beach, from one element to another, from matter to mind." Moore believes that it was through a similar leap from matter to mind that our ideas about the world began: "Representation... allows for the origin of verbal language, with this sound or this collection of marks somehow also representing that." buffalo there... language is the necessary precursor to our apparently unique form of consciousness... humanity's first 'purposeful engagement with phenomena and possibilities of consciousness'...

From this commitment arose, almost in its entirety, the totality of human culture: writing, painting, song, music, theater, science, medicine and even politics." And so, in the same way What this idea of ​​“the world” began, also ends: in the penultimate issues of the series, Sophie manages to bring about the Apocalypse by explaining to everyone the same hermetic principles that we have been talking about. Now everyone perceives the immaterial and material worlds as equally "real." But while Promethea brought about the end of the world in the comics, Moore contemplated how our world will end in a similar way.

In the twelfth issue, Moore uses the Tarot to trace the history of the world back to the initial quantum vacuum and God. The Big Bang of the universe into existence, until the next leap into expanded consciousness. Moore places his own Doomsday Clock fairly close to midnight, as if his Rorschach character was holding a sign that read, "The end is near." How close? Writing that number in 1999, Moore predicted that the end of the world as we know it would occur in 2017, when the sum total of our knowledge would double at a rate of every half a second. , our old ways of understanding the world could not keep up and naturally we would need new ways of understanding the new world.

Those of you who lived in 2017 will remember that the world did not, in fact, come to an end. But before the year arrived, Moore himself attempted, like his character Promethea, to announce the Apocalypse at the hour he had appointed. In September 2016, on the eve of the prophesied end of the world, Moore released his masterpiece. , Jerusalem. If Promethea was a spell he cast to magically change the minds of individual readers, Jerusalem was the ritual he performed to bring about the world-wide Revelation. As Moore himself attests: "Rather than performing a ritual to produce a successful book, the book itself is the ritual work of ten years intended to have a certain (hopefully beneficial) effect on the consciousness of its readers.

Jerusalem seems to me to be my most sophisticated and complex magical work yet, and certainly the most ambitious in its aims." "Ambitious in its aims" is an understatement. Moore writes in such a way that the reader experiences the higher states of consciousness that the narrative describes at the same time, not unlike the way the Heptapod's language in Arrival profoundly affects Lois Lane's perception of Time. This is especially evident in a chapter told from Lucia Joyce's perspective during her confinement in an asylum and employing the same linguistic style as her father's novel Finnegans Wake, replete with puns, acronyms and neologisms, to replicate Lucia's Condition.

Moore explores how those who exhibit certain forms of madness might be more closer to perceiving external reality than those who consider themselves "sane." In Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan perceives every moment of his life simultaneously, a perception very different from that of individuals.“sane,” but Moore, like Einstein, regards time as “a stubbornly persistent illusion,” so the fact that Manhattan is not fooled by this illusion of time makes him more sane, not less. It is we who are deficient in perceiving only the now, instead of being able to contemplate the past, present and future as we would with a three-dimensional plane.

With the habit of perceiving dimensions that we may not initially perceive, Moore employs Solve et Coagula on language itself, separating the written word into its basic components, separating phonetics (how vocalized words sound) from graphetics (how written words appear ). He writes the dialogue as a series of words that sound like gibberish, but when read phonetically, make sense. Moore forces the reader to read multiple layers of meaning in each word. For example, read aloud, you get the phonetic dimension: His father, in his time, maintains that we are in a universe composed of four dimensions, of which only three are naturally visible.

This phonetic dimension is only one side of the text, and if it is the only part we observe, we see that other possible meanings are lost. The "gibberish" is full of double meaning, as orthographic dimension in a way that resembles "dementia" or "universe" in a way that resembles "crazy." Moore teaches us to read with more dimensions than we normally perceive in a text about how the universe has more dimensions than we normally perceive. It is explanation and example at the same time, magically changing the way our mind models the world by changing the language with which our mind constructs that model.

Of course, even if everyone, if the entire world, read Jerusalem and Moore expanded their minds, it does not necessarily follow that we would make the great leap from the murky waters of matter to the solid land of Ideas and Imagination. While Moore may not have made the breakthrough in 2017, given his status as the most influential writer in comics history, his literary efforts will likely remain influential for centuries. So is magic real? If Moore is right, it is at least as real as our imagination. This is Promethea's world-ending Revelation, speaking not to any of the characters in the comic, but to you, the reader: “I am an idea, but I am a real idea.

I am the idea of ​​human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be sure is not imaginary... Look, I am imagination. I'm real and I'm the best friend you'll ever have. Who do you think got you all this cool stuff? The clothes you wear, the room, the house, the city you are in. Everything in it began in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your entire world. “All made up… There’s nothing here but a fun little twist of amino acids playing a wonderful simulation game.” To that list of interesting things that imagination has given us, we can certainly add the highly imaginative works of Alan Moore.