CABALA : Led Zepplin occulte - Pacôme Thiellement (ed. Hoëbeke)

"Il y a un pan de la personnalité humaine qui d'une certaine façon sent que là où la vérité cosmique peut se trouver, il n'y a pas de place pour A, B, C et D, expliquera Stanley Kubrick à la sortie de 2001. L'homme a toujours répondu à son appel. La religion, la mythologie, les allégories ont toujours touché une corde sensible en l'homme. Avec le rationalisme, l'homme moderne a tenté de l'éliminer, et a réussi à porter un coup fatal à la religion. Dans un sens, ce qui se passe désormais dans les films et dans la pop music est une réaction aux limitations du rationalisme. Il s'agit de sortir de ce qui est clairement démontrable mais presque insignifiant, inutile ou peu inspirant pour l'homme, et dans lequel personne ne ressent qu'une très grande vérité puisse être contenue." comme le 2001 de Kubrick, l'objectif de la musique de Led Zepplin est de transformer de fond en comble la perspective de son public, de modifier les présupposés de son regard, et de franchir les frontières habituelles de sa conception du monde pour le confronter à l'inconnu.

(P. Thiellement in Cabala - Led Zepplin occulte)

 

 

La magie selon Alan Moore

Alan Moore (interview réalisée Matthew de Abuitua) :

It started about five years ago when I decided to become a magician. It was largely to begin with me and Steve Moore, no relation, he's a long-standing editor on Fortean Times, he handles Fortean Studies, which is the academic part of it. He used to be a comic book writer, friend of mine since I was fourteen, fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society. He's a heavyweight intellectual, Steve, with an interest in gods, magic, and we initially formed a secret society of two. Within which context we could discuss our emerging ideas of magic, language, consciousness and art. As these developed, we found ourselves discussing them with other people, it started to expand into this loose-knit cabal, which now includes various artists and musicians that I've worked with, various occultists that each of us have been in contact with - it's the idea of all of us having our different areas of speciality, our different talents, but all of us being able to call upon the information, knowledge or talents of the others, should we need to extend ourselves into that area. This has led to some interesting performances with me and Dave J from Love and Rockets, Bauhaus. Dave is somebody who is very definitely part of the cabal that we generally refer to as The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. Just 'cos we thought it sounded like a good name. We just wanted something grandiloquent, a bit mad, with an air of fraud about it. An air of charlatanry, mountebanquery, because there is a certain amount of sham in shamanism. There is a certain amount of theatre. It's as loosely knit as that. We're sort of coming out of the closet a bit more over the next couple of years. We're going to be bringing out - manifesto's too pushy a word - if it's a theatre of marvels, we're bringing out a theatre programme in the next couple of years. We're working on it at the moment - our unified field theory of spookiness where we try to explain everything from language, consciousness, grey aliens to Rosicrucianism or whatever. It is a grand, mad theory which I'm working my best on at the moment to make it rational. It is an anti-rationalistic theory but I'm trying to couch it in rational terms so that it is not as insular as a lot of magic stuff. I understand that the word 'occult' means hidden, but surely that is not meant to be the final state of all this information, hidden forever. I don't see why there is any need to further obscure things that are actually lucid and bright. Language and strange terminology - to keep them as some private mystery. I think there is too much darkness in magic. I can understand that it is part of the theatre. I can understand Aleister Crowley - who I think was a great intellect - that was sometimes let down by his own flair for showmanship but he did a lot to generate the scary aura of the magician that you find these sad, Crowleyite fucks making a fetish of. The ones who say 'oh we're into Aleister Crowley because he was the wickedest man in the world, and we're also into Charles Manson because we're bad. And we are middle-class as well, but we're bad'. There are some people who seek evil - I don't think there is such a thing as evil - but there are people who seek it as a kind of Goth thing. That just adds to the murk to what to me is a very lucid and flourescent subject. What occultism needs is someone to open the window, it's too stuffy and it smells. Let's get some fresh air, throw open the curtains - I can't go for that posturing, spooky guy stuff. When they wanted me to do Fortean TV it became apparent that they wanted me to be Spooky Bloke. But I'm not actually trying to look spooky. I dress in black because it makes me look less fat, it's as simple as that. It's not a gothic flourish. I don't want to be thought of as a figure of mystery or a master of the occult, surely this is about illumination, casting light on things. I'm an illuminist, that'd do for me (...)

To me, consciousness, the mind, language is the prime channel - part of this thing I am doing with the Moon and Serpent, this theory with Steve Moore, is any nascent consciousness, whether you are talking about an emerging culture or a single human infant, what they first have to do is undergo a process of discrimination when they are trying to come up with a worldview. What you have to do first is separate yourself from the world, most new-born babies don't see any difference between them, their playpen and their Dad. It's all them. Only after a little while do they start to realise that it's not all me, just this bit is me. So by the invention of something similar to the word or concept 'I' we separate ourselves from the universe. Then we start to separate up the universe. We will divide sky from ground, the organic from inorganic. Looked at like this, doesn't it provide a literal interpretation of the Biblical Creation story. If you take the idea of God in the Bible as a metaphor for any nascent, formative just-created intelligence, is that not how we all create the universe. We divide the firmament up from the waters of the abyss, and the key to how to do this is in the first line: in the beginning, there was the word. By giving sky one word, the ground into another, we break the universe down into manageable things that we can interact with through language.

MDA: That's very clear in what Adam does: he is standing there pointing going 'sheep' 'cow'.

AM: He is almost creating them by pointing. It's a process of finer and finer discrimination. In the beginning, there is just universe. There is no us. There is just God in His or Her universe. Then we separate God from the universe until we are trapped in it, in the universe we have created.

MDA: So how does this relate to your practice as a magician? My understanding of magic is that through words you can create events, if events are a consequence of perception and perception is composed of language, then language can change perception and therefore change events.

AM: Here I think we are getting down to the difference between traditional perceptions of language and one that I would be comfortable with. The traditional definition of magic - and I think this comes from Crowley who laid down a lot of the ground rules - he defined magic as bringing about change in accordance with the will. I'm not sure about that. It's certainly part of it, but to bring about change in the universe in accordance with your will seems to me to be misunderstanding the relationship between the individual and the universe. In my relationship with the universe, I do tend to see myself as very much the Junior Partner. I don't want to impose my will on the universe, I'd rather the universe imposed its will on me. I would rather that what I wanted was more in tune with what the universe wanted. So my definition of magic is a bit less invasive and intrusive.

MDA: It's less of a power fantasy than Crowley's?

AM: It's more exploratory with me. I see magic as a vantage point from which one can look down on the rest of consciousness. It's a point outside normal consciousness from which you can look at normal consciousness, it's a point outside beliefs from which you can look at beliefs. All beliefs are reality tunnels, to use Anton Wilson's phrase. There is the Communist reality tunnel, the Feminist reality tunnel, all of which seem to be the whole of reality when you are in the middle of them. The whole universe is based on Marxist theory if you're an intent Marxist. Magic is having a plan of all the tunnels, and seeing the overall condition in which they all work. Being aware of different possibilities. If the universe is as a magician sees it, then there are wider possibilities. For example, do I believe I can raise the dead and talk to them? Yes, I do. Not in any physical sense because that would smell. I don't see any point in that. You don't want a maggot bag walking around your living room. But could I re-animate the idea of a person in the useful sense and be able to communicate with that person - or, at least, to believe that I was communicating with that person to such an extent that the information I received was as good as if that person was talking to me? Yes, I do. Most of the effects described in classical magical tradition I believe I can duplicate with art, possibly drugs - or some other means of integrating myself more deeply with that sort of reality, that sort of consciousness - I believe I could do most of the things that are described in traditional magic. This opens up wider possibilities. It also enables me to understand myself on a deeper level. By accepting the idea of endless pantheons of gods, I somehow accept these creatures as being distinct and separate from me, and not as being, to some degree, higher functions of me. Iain Sinclair was asking me about this: he asked me 'do you think they are inside you, or outside you?' The only answer I could come up with was, the more I think about it the inside is the outside. That the objective world and the non-objective world are the same thing, to some degree. Ideaspace and this space are the same space. Just different ends of the scale. That's not a very good explanation, but the best I can come up with so far. All of these things are exploratory, they are exploring me, exploring the world of ideas, attempting to contact what I believe may be potent forms of energy. Like for example, I might do a work to put me in contact with the god Mercury. If the information I get from that is valuable to me, and new enough, it doesn't really matter whether the god Mercury is there at all, does it? There is a channel that I have called the god Mercury, some sort of information source I have named.

MDA: I can understand that on an abstract level. If the information provided is useful, why question the actual existence of whatever is providing that information. But on a personal level, if you were receiving information that you couldn't immediately attribute to as coming from yourself, wouldn't you feel absolute terror?

AM: In my own experience - and this is where we get into the complete madness here - I have only met about four gods, a couple of other classes of entity as well. I'm quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That's the logical explanation - that it was purely an hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience however, and the fact that having had some experience of hallucinations over the last twenty-five years or so, I'd have to say that it seemed to me to be a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once - it is everything you'd imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is late Roman snake god, called Glycon, he was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. Which is a lousy name to go into business under. He had an image problem. He could have done with a spin doctor there.

Anyway, the False Prophet Alexander is a Moon and Serpent hero, a saint if you like. He was running what seemed to be a travelling Seleni medicine show, he would do a performance of the mysteries of the goddess Soi. The only reference to him is in the works of Lucien, who calls him a complete charlatan and fraud. At some point, Alexander the False Prophet said he was going to preside over the second coming of the god Aeschepylus, the serpent god of medicine. He said this is going to happen at noon tomorrow, in the marketplace. So everyone said 'sounds good' and they all went down there. After a little while, they said "come on, False Prophet Alexander, where is the second coming of Aeschepylus?" At which point, The False Prophet Alexander bent down, reached into a puddle at his feet, pulled up an egg, split it with his thumbnail, and there was a tiny snake inside, and said "Behold, the new Aeschepylus", took it home with him, where over a week it apparently grew to a prodigious size until it was taller than a man, and had the head and features of a man. It had long blonde hair, ears, eyelids, a nose. At this point he started to exhibit it in his temple, providing religious meeting with this incarnate god. At which point Lucian said, it was obvious, I could have done that. Lucian is another James Randi, you know, I could have done that, he got the snake's head under his arm, speaking tube over his shoulder, child's play. And he's probably right, that's probably how he did it. If I'm going to adopt a god, I'd rather know starting out that it was a glove puppet. To me it's a real god, there's nothing that precludes a glove puppet from being a real god. How else would you explain the cult of Sooty? But a god is the idea of a god. The idea of a god is a god. The idea of Glycon is Glycon, if I can enhance that idea with an anaconda and a speaking tube, fair enough. I am unlikely to start believing that this glove puppet created the universe. It's a fiction, all gods are fiction. It's just that I happen to think that fiction's real. Or that it has its own reality, that is just as valid as ours. I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction - before there was the table there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That's the world where all this starts. So I had an experience which seems to be an experience of this made-up, Basil-Brush type entity. It was devastating.

MDA: This was the pivotal experience. You were forty when you had this occult Road to Damascus.

AM: Yes. On the day I was forty, I decided I was going to become a magician. That was on November 18th. On January 7th the following year, that was when all of a sudden the lightning bolt hit. It all got a bit strange. For a couple of months after that, I was - looking back - probably in some borderline schizophrenic state. I was very spaced out - godstruck, you babble for a while. It's a natural response. Babble like an idiot. I'm surprised that - when I look back at what I was saying - that so much of it at least makes a fragment of sense because I was in some divine haze. "I see it all now", you know, I must have been unbearable for two or three months. I've integrated that now into the rest of my life. Now I can deal with functionality on a practical level. And I still have this relationship with this imaginary snake. My imaginary pal. If I'm going to be dealing in totally imaginary territory, it struck me that it would be useful to have a native as a guide. So I can have my imaginary conversations with my imaginary snake, and maybe it gives me information I already knew in part of myself, and maybe I just needed to make up an imaginary snake to tell me it.

MDA: Do you have a ritual during which these various conversations take place?

AM: Increasingly, with that particular god, it becomes more casual. It will be talking to the giant imaginary snake god much in the same way you talked to God when you were six, in the quiet silence of bed. If I wanted a full-scale manifestation, one that was apparent to other people, then I would do a ritual. I have displayed the snake god to other people. Or I have consciously hypnotised them into accepting my psychotic belief system, given them drugs, and made them think they are having the experience I have. Whatever you want. I'm not fussed (...)

MDA: So you organised a ritual with them in which you said, "well, let's find out".

AM: I went through it with numerous friends. Most of which seemed to experience something, something they had never experienced before. It got very weird. It's surprising, you don't have to believe in this stuff very much to get extraordinary stuff out of it. I was surprised by how easy it was to reproduce these effects for other people to experience. I remember one guy - I hadn't even told him the details of what I believed - he didn't particularly like the mushrooms so he only took a couple. I did the invocation and he got a bit giggly. He said "I'm trying to listen to what you are saying but I've got this Hanna Barbara cartoon in my head, a sort of Jungle Book type animals, and there's this one thing..." And I said "Can you describe these Jungle Book animals?" And he said "Well, it's just cheap animation that I can see, it's just cartoons. There is nothing mystical about it. There is this one particular animal, it's a snake, but it's got a tea towel over its head." And I drew a snake, drew the tea towel, and I said "does it look like this?" And he said "Yeah, like that." Then I pulled out this picture I had done - one I had drew earlier - a fully rendered crowned drawing of the snake as I saw it, with the long hair. He went "Oh Jesus Christ". I said, "Don't worry about it, this is the snake god, this is Glycon, he's in your head now talking to you. Don't worry about it." Yeah, so it was that sort of thing. It's proven very easy to work with, frighteningly easy. All you have to do is take that step from "this can't possibly happen" to "oh, maybe it could happen".

Also, I can understand why magicians have such a high insanity rate. We don't end well, most of us, it has to be said. Paul Daniels might escape the worst effects, but the rest of us are pretty obviously doomed. Once you step over that line, you are in danger from a lot of stuff. Delusion, obviously, being the main thing. When I started to get into magic, I said to a lot of friends "well, I'm not going to know if I go mad, am I?" So let's think about this. I want you all to keep an eye on me. If I am happy, that in itself is no indication of not being mad. You can be drawing pictures on the wall in your own shit and be completely happy. The only thing I can use as a yardstick is if I am happy and functional and productive. If I am producing more work than I did in the past, then that's a good sign. And if it's better work. Madness and insanity are two terms that are so vague and relative that you can't really apportion proper values to them. The only thing I can think of that has any use it functional and dysfunctional. Are you working as well? In which case, it doesn't matter if you are mad. So it was quite an experience. I was also surprised to find out how frightening it was for everyone else. How much powerful the magic has got when we were all, officially, not supposed to believe in it anymore. But if you start saying "Actually, I've become a magician" there is a look of terror on people's faces, which I understand. You can divide them into two categories. There were some people who had fear and worry on their faces because they were afraid I had gone mad, which is understandable. Then there were the other people who were afraid that I hadn't. Who were faced with a dilemma because they were faced with somebody who seemed relatively articulate, relatively sane, and who they respected, intellectually, who was suddenly saying they were a magician and talking to a snake, an imaginary snake. I can see why that would worry them because they are faced with a choice. Either they have to decide I am deluded, or if I'm not deluded, then that opens up a whole can of worms - or snakes - because they have to re-adjust their view of the universe to include that possibility. If I realised the power of magic to worry and terrify people before, then I certainly would have used it before. Everyone freezes before it for different reasons - perhaps because it means madness to them, or because it means opening the door to a whole lot of stuff that the Age of Reason should have firmly bolted the door upon. A lot of concepts that we got rid of a long time ago that would be a bit creepy to have them back.

MDA: The reason why I'm interviewing you on this subject, in very straightforward terms, is that a lot of the questions it raises are cropping up elsewhere, in other more 'respectable' fields. It is serendipitous or fortunate that your declaration has come at a time when a lot of people are considering the idea that things are other than what they seem, or other than what we have previously believed them to be.

AM: If there is an ideaspace, then there is no serendipity. I know exactly what you mean. Aren't we all creatures of our times? If there is an overlying mental space in which we all exist, then presumably it would have its own weather, weathers of ideas that just blow in. Certain storms of ideas - the renaissance, things like that. It would be only natural that any mind that is actively involved in trying to find that frontier should not be surprised if it suddenly has luminous snakes thrumming into its head. I think that we are approaching a kind of event field - fifteen years, twenty years up the road. There is a big event in the future and because time is not what we think it is, that event radiates in all directions. We are entering its field and have been for hundreds of years. We are starting to approach the core of it.

MDA: We were discussing madness, and why I don't think you are mad. A friend of mine once described the insane as giving off a high-octane whiff like cat urine. Which I don't pick up from you. AM: I've known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that. Just after I became a magician, the son of a close friend of mine - who was a kind of rave culture casualty - had quite a powerful and florid breakdown. Very grim, I was going to visit him every day in the local loony bin - I wouldn't dignify it with the term 'mental home' - and his florid beliefs, his messianic fantasies, and I was listening to him and thinking "well, he's putting it in different terms, but this is pretty much what I believe." Where are we going with this? I cannot I stand here with my hand on my heart and say that my perceptions of reality are any madder than his, or less mad, what's this about? The best description I could come up with was that somebody had said "all of us, as human beings, through our accumulated perceptions, that could be considered to be our window on reality - what we perceive. We know that it is limited, what we perceive, but it is still our window upon reality. Just as if you are looking out of a window from your house, you can see a little bit of the houses across the street, a little bit of sky - you know there is a whole universe out there, but the limits of your window just show you that view. What the magician is attempting to do is alter the dimension or the angle of that window, broaden it perhaps, tilt it so it can see different things. The schizophrenic has had their window kicked in, the magician has got a body of law - probably most of it bollocks, it doesn't matter. The magician's got a system into which the alien information that will be pouring into him or her will be fitted. They've got a filing cabinet, like the Qabalah, which is a filing cabinet for ideas. It divides the whole universe up into ten drawers. Any experience can be passed into one of the drawers. The schizophrenic is probably having exactly the same experience as the magician but has no context in which to understand it. If I see some particularly florid vision, I can think 'right, Qabalistically, because I saw this number of flying talking fishes, then this number relates to here on the Qabalah, the fact that they were fishes would mean they tend to relate to this, and I can start to make sense of this apparently incoherent vision. The schizophrenic can't. They get the same feeling. The schizophrenics I have known, the most evident thing about it is the interconnectedness of everything. That's standard lunacy, it's also standard magic. But with one of them, it is uncontrollable, you are lost in a world in which everything is obviously connected by symbolic threads. That is what the magician is seeking, to see these threads that connect things up. If you've got a system - even if it's a completely made-up bogus system - then you've at least got a filing cabinet to sort this stuff into, you don't have to get crushed under it. It's like what we were saying earlier about signal and noise. In linguistic terms, there is this weird paradox that I think Alfred Kazinsky pointed out. Ironically, something that is pure signal will have almost no information content. Pure signal is a Janet and John book. Something that has got noise, up to a certain level, like a page of Ulysses or a page of Iain Sinclair, when you look at it it makes no sense whatsoever, but has actually got an incredible amount of information in it. Information is a product of noise, to some degree, as much as it is of signal. It just depends on whether you've got a decoding mechanism. This is why a lot of people don't get on with Iain Sinclair's books. The stuff he is talking about is so far outside their grasp of reality that it is noise, noisy babbling about these churches, these Sixties film makers, these historical figures - it doesn't make any sense. But if someone takes it as signal, sees the point of how one thing connects to another, then they are going to get a wealth of information out of it. The same thing goes for magic. If you've got a decoding system, the manual, the information can flood over you in a tidal burst and you won't drown.

Bonne année à tous !

Lewis Carroll - encore !

Lewis Carroll

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