[Opinion] "Fossil Angels"

[Xenophon]

OK, let's get the legalities out of the way. I know this is discussing written material, but 14 pages in a Word document isn't a book, right?

I'm soliciting comments on Alan Moore's "Fossil Angels." On this forum's Robert Ramsey's recommendation, I looked it up. I'll spare you all my minor quibbles and get to the gist. Moore has a delightfully snide discussion of the detritus present-day magick can run to. Though, yeah, he overdoes it opining that's all it is. His main point---and it is an important one---is in asking what of intellectual, artistic, or spiritual significance has present-day magick achieved since the 19th century revival. He contrasts this with the tradition down through the Renaissance and into early modernity.

That can be and ought to be a daunting question. What am I, we, actually accomplishing besides a grave and serious version of D&D? His answer is "Not much."

Still, in his scarcely concealed haste to eschew anything traditional, conservative or rightist---he tends to conflate these--- Moore fails to connect the dots. One feels, after a few pages, that he's like the guy carping because slow pitch softball falls short of MLB. Which affords us the clue he persistently misses. Magic today tends to mediocrity because it, like all else, has been democratized. What the Menschenmenge co-opts, it refashions in its own image and catering to its own tastes. Whether this is deplorable or not is not really the point. Mass-magic, like mass-media, debases itself and those whom it touches. Moore zeroes in on the cosplay, but fails to really appreciate how its exact counterpart exists in chaos magic's trendy pointlessness, which he dismisses in some bemusement.

On the whole, he is correct: magick is nothing much to crow about presently. He does not seem to appreciate this is a direct result of its mass availability. Voltaire wrote that the price of a great poet is putting up with 10,000 bad ones. So too magick in these times. In a way, perhaps, this is to the good. "The mediocrities are the sea; the few magi, the fish." (And no, I'm not putting on airs. I am a duffer.)

 

[stalkinghyena]

Moore fails to connect the dots.

I agree. I don't have time to pick apart his "fossil" or delve into the gleaming sparkles of his hipsterisms and historical misperceptions, much less to make this comment. But I can say of what I have read that he seems fail to appreciate a fundamental fact that has established itself in our modern age through centuries of repression, oppression, dismissal and misunderstanding. And this I can sum up in two words:

MAGIC WON.

Those two words I actually culled from Sledge, and from what I can see it's true. This is the great achievement of our age - that the "democratization" of magic is really an expression of the survivability of what Frazer dismally called "proto-science, proto-religion" in spite of all the lack of its aesthetic appeal in mass marketing. In the 19th century, with all the pseudo-masonic clowning and Theosophical reframing, serious study of the occult arts in the realms of higher learning was considered taboo because it was all in of the trash bin of history. This carried over into the 20th century, even with the publication of the volumes of Thorndike (who is not friendly to his subject in spite of decades of research) until Yates finally presented her cases in an appealing form.
But the cockroaches of magical literature have always been running about regardless of cultural appeal of "achievement". Sure, we don't get to see in our day the equivalent impressive heroic dramas of Pico della Mirandola challenging all of Europe to hear his "theses", the explosion of art encoded with sinister cabalisms, or wander in suffering with an Agrippa or Paracelsus in the face of hateful authorities, or sit with Dee and Kelley in "innovation" outside of our imaginations based on the data given. That last one, by the way, as characterized by Moore made me twitch - Dee was very much seeking the past, he being on the tail end of the "pristine theology" movement initiated generations before. His innovations could be thought of as clarifications of a knowledge which is eternal and thoroughly discussed and encoded by the likes of "Hermes Trismegistus" and delineated in the Books of Enoch. We don't experience these the same way because all the barriers have collapsed - there really is nothing to stop magic from spreading, even if most of the books out there are junk (see: Sturgeon's Law) and most people don't do jack with it.
The Victorians with their "colorful humbug" (as per Scholem, who was being nice) were actually trying to explore, but one could argue that they were walled in by the Positivism of the age. This can also be framed that they were arguing for legitimacy in the face of the mechanistic and yet improvable view of the world that found its virtual death knell with the effective introduction of the machine gun and poison gas on the fields of Flanders.
That's just my impression of traipsing through several paragraphs of Moore's thoughts. I have to stop there, but I'll trail off with Crowley's observation (or assertion) that magic(k) is fundamentally anarchistic. If I were to pick one cultural thing magic in our era did achieve over and against the past, I got two more words:

HEAVY METAL

 

[Robert Ramsay]

There's no "bravo" reaction emoji so I'll just say it
I love Alan Moore to bits, but by God his prose overcompensates for having to restrict himself to little speech bubbles for most of his career.
I am especially impressed that you mention heavy metal, because after he's finished slagging off Western ritual magic, his suggestion towards a solution is that magic and art should be welded together; the method of art, the aim of religion, mebbe
I know that Alan doesn't access the Internet (he has people to do that for him) but for someone whose research is normally deeper than the Marianas Trench, it surprises me that he hasn't seen this alteady. Admittedly this essay was written quite a while ago, so he may have modified his position by now.

 

[Xenophon]

There's no "bravo" reaction emoji so I'll just say it
I love Alan Moore to bits, but by God his prose overcompensates for having to restrict himself to little speech bubbles for most of his career.
I am especially impressed that you mention heavy metal, because after he's finished slagging off Western ritual magic, his suggestion towards a solution is that magic and art should be welded together; the method of art, the aim of religion, mebbe
I know that Alan doesn't access the Internet (he has people to do that for him) but for someone whose research is normally deeper than the Marianas Trench, it surprises me that he hasn't seen this alteady. Admittedly this essay was written quite a while ago, so he may have modified his position by now.

The piece struck me as a bit dated, yes. He writes as if Golden Dawn and its offshoots were still the going thing, as if Osman Spare were still the begin and end-all of chaos magick. Maybe a net connection would help Mr. Moore. On the one hand, I can understand his exasperation; on the other he might be focusing too much on the trees and not---as Skull Train hints---the fact that magick has gone from grove to forest.

Post automatically merged: May 29, 2024

All this being said, the piece did upset my apple cart and knock my ducks out of their row. Moore does put one on the spot: am I doing magick or just burrowing down under downy folds of comforting ritual? Last week someone in another thread said s/he was distressed and anxious when not doing magick. My advice was (and remains) to confront the anxiety as itself a sort of potentially magick work. Indeed to get out and court uncomfortable feelings as magickal Urstoff.

After that avuncular exercise it has been dawning on me I have not been doing that very thing much of late. E.M. (Ere Moore), my day was pretty rigorously laid out as to which rite when (and a full day each was.) What has been arguably lacking is, well, reality. The magickal equivalent of what Kaczynski's Manifesto styles "primary activities." So now I find myself retooling, remodeling. What magickally ought I to be doing when? As a working title, call this "kairos magick."