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Published: 01 May 2025

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The Moon and the Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, by Alan Moore & Steve Moore. - A Review.

By Stokastikos, Peter J Carroll.

Here upon Wizard’s Isle, this book looks like a final Magnum Opus on Magic from one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary magician-artists. It therefore seems appropriate that one of Britain’s most influential contemporary sorcerer-scientists should review it, particularly as Alan Moore casts a number of criticisms upon the Chaos Magic that I initiated.

We have never met or corresponded. Moore does not attend esoteric conventions, and I do not attend comic-art conventions. Northampton lies a long way from Bristol in terms of the antiquated travel infrastructure of the UK. Nevertheless, perhaps we may have some interface as a consequence of this review. Whether this will consist of Wands at Dawn or convivial pints in a country pub, I do not know.

We come from remarkably similar backgrounds, born in the same year and in similarly modest socio-economic circumstances, we both went to old-style grammar schools and behaved rebelliously. Moore became anarchistically left-wing orientated and wokeist, a fabulously imaginative graphic artist, and more than a bit of a showman. He proclaimed himself a practitioner of Magic in 1990s and asserted the unity of Art and Magic, insisting that all art counts as magic, and vice-versa.

I became a scientist and a businessman with mildly conservative social views, old-style liberal economic opinions, and very radical ideas about some aspects of esoterics and science. Magical world views and practices have inspired me since the mid-1970s. I find extroversion tiring and prefer a quieter life. I have proclaimed the unity of Science and Magic and identified Magic as Science that we haven’t yet fully understood.

We have both taken powerful hallucinogens and found them astonishing but not worth repeated use. We both have similar old hippy length hair, but Moore has a more spectacular beard.

I mention all this to contextualise the review and analysis that follows, for philosophy mainly consists of biography.

Overall I rather enjoyed this splendidly produced and richly illustrated quirky book. It has plenty of humour and resumes most of the history of magic from the sublime to the absurd presented in the somewhat surreal form of a bright and cheerful mid-twentieth century activity book for kids, despite the substantial amount of ‘adult’ sexual and philosophical content in it. It delivers the lives of 50 Great Enchanters with a comic book page devoted to each, rather in the style of Horrible Histories, and in fairness it does mention many of them for their achievements in science as well as in magic and charlatanry.

The absence of page numbers on the pages themselves does not make for easy cross-referencing of the ideas therein. Perhaps the author(s) intended that, as many of them seem to partially contradict each other. We assume that Alan Moore composed all the longer text bits.

The long sections on Kabbalah and Tarot and all the reprinted old tables of correspondence do seem a bit pedestrian and turgid, as if he had nothing new to say about such topics. In contradistinction to what he implies, the Hermetic Kabbalah he describes dates back only to medieval times, and much of it to the late nineteenth century Golden Dawn synthesis, not to classical antiquity or before, according to modern scholarship.

I shall add this whimsical book to my library of unusual books of Chaos Magic - probably to Moore’s intense annoyance.

Can we regard Alan Moore as a Chaos Magician? Well he certainly seems keen not to label himself as such, despite that he fully embraces the post-modernist view that ‘Magic Consists of The Use of Imaginary Phenomena to Create Real Effects’. For good measure he has a self admittedly imaginary personal tutelary deity called Glycon.  For Moore, such real effects on the operator’s psychology and artistic creativity have the greatest importance. Yet the real effects on the operator’s behaviour and on the operator’s external reality have more significance for many Chaos Magicians.

Moore criticises Chaos Magic on the grounds that it Trivialises magic and relies on Quantum Pseudo-Science for some of its theoretical underpinnings.

Yet – ‘Any Comprehensive Paradigm Allows Trivialisation’. That you can do Science in the kitchen sink with vinegar and baking soda does not invalidate Science - rather it confirms the comprehensiveness of the paradigm. Similarly little kids who pray to some deity, and maybe make some promises to it, for the health of a hamster, and then solemnly bury it in the garden with all due ritual when that fails, do not invalidate the mechanisms of Religion. The Bumper Book itself seems well laced with fairly trivial magical phenomena alongside the more serious material, and one presumes that Moore includes them to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the magical paradigm.

Nobody really understands Quantum Physics. It exists as a purely epistemological abstract mathematical description of how just about everything in the universe (with the possible exception of gravity) behaves. It seems to underly everything from subatomic particles to energy, to chemistry, biology, to consciousness, and to the nuclear furnaces of the stars. Yet it only gives probabilistic answers, it doesn’t give us a clear ontology of what the underlying bits of reality actually ‘are’ or ‘why’ they do what they do – instead it heavily implies that we may need to abandon some or all of the familiar concepts of definite states of being, locality, and causality. Yet Moore repeatedly seems to casually mention quantum physics when he’s stumped for a mechanism to explain the weirdness of occult phenomena.

In the course of the Bumper book, Moore several times echoes Joel Biroco’s derisive rhetorical question about why anyone would want to summon the Lovecraftian Elder Gods. This seems like a massive lapse of imagination. If magicians believe themselves capable of enhancing their abilities in say, romance or conflict by calling upon the various imaginary deities of love and war, then surely the imaginary Elder Gods must have lot of appeal to any ambitious and skilled sorcerer: -

Nyarlathotep –  Deception, Power, Cultish Control.

Shub-Niggurath – Pan-Biotic Knowledge, Fertility, Vitality, Death.

Cthulhu – Mind Manipulation, Multi-Mind, The Nature of Consciousness.

Hastur – Cosmic Existential Issues.

Yog-Sothoth – Spacetime and Higher Dimensions of the Cosmos.

Azathoth – Nuclear Chaos, The Underlying Quantum Weirdness of Reality.

Personally I have taken much inspiration from some of them and outlined my approach to this work in the Necronomicon section of the EPOCH. Okay so this ‘forbidden’ knowledge remains dangerous and fearsome, but we cannot avoid it now that humanity has come thus far and burnt its bridges behind it. Hypersphere Cosmology in particular owes much to Yog-Sothian inspirations.

Moore’s chapter on ‘Malpractical Magic’ presents a lengthy criticism of the ‘Results Magic’ which Chaos Magic heavily emphasises. When I hear the words ‘High Magic’ or ‘Spirituality’ I reach for a loaded wand. Enlightenment or Illumination means absolutely nothing unless you can specify precisely what you intend, or claim, to have enlightenment or illumination about.

Those who get all mystical about the true purposes of magic tend to do so either because they have failed to get what they wanted on the material plane by magic or because they didn’t need to, following their birth into the Victorian or Edwardian rentier classes.

Chaos Magic has its rituals of Illumination, but we also regard these as results magic because practitioners should remain specific about exactly what they want to become enlightened about. CM also has a whole field of endeavour called ‘Octarine Magic’ – research into magic to advance the theories and practices of magic itself.

Astonishingly, Moore asserts that ‘ - magic obviously cannot contravene the laws of physics governing material existence,’. Hmm, well I would argue that anyone who doesn’t get quite a lot of highly improbable events to occur and at least half a dozen physically impossible ones during the course of a magical career, just hasn’t tried hard enough. Yet on the other hand he does regale us with numerous anecdotes about extraordinary events in this peculiarly self-inconsistent book.

Moore occasionally rambles about Ethics, Morality, and his sketchy ideas about Utopian Anarchy, but none of these themes seems well thought out or developed.

The book concludes with a cut out and assemble Moon and Serpent Temple. It all looks rather graphically splendid until you discover that you cannot actually cut it out and do anything with it because of an error in its structure and pagination. It seems rather like a metaphor for the whole book, or perhaps Moore intended both as a prank upon the reader.

 Yet Another Nail in the Coffin of the Penta-Phlogiston LCDM-Big Bang Theory.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250409212531.htm

It seems that if you look hard enough and for long enough, the far reaches of the universe appear to contain a very dense thicket of galaxies whose light gets massively redshifted by intergalactic dust. As Hypersphere Cosmology predicts, its galaxies all the way to antipode and the cosmic background microwave radiation arises not from the afterglow of a big bang but from redshifted distant starlight in thermal equilibrium with the intergalactic medium.

Interview with Tamra Testerman

TT. These questions are offered in the spirit of creative entropy — exploratory rather than exhaustive, poetic rather than procedural. There is no rush and no expectation — only the hope that they might spark something worth saying.

With respect, curiosity, and a bit of mischief,

Tamra 

(Captain, Ret., JD, poet, heretic, etc. — use what you feel)

TT. Introduction

There are figures who don’t merely write books — they open fault lines. Peter J. Carroll did not just theorize chaos; he conjured a living current through which magic, mathematics, and metaphysics could speak a new language. Somewhere between particle and prayer, between gnosis and waveform, his work rewrote what it meant to be a magician in the postmodern age.

What follows is not an interview in the ordinary sense, but a series of sigil-questions — charged, veiled, and offered without expectation of return. They draw from the dream logic of Borges, the shadow science of Heisenberg, the antinomian brilliance of Spare. They approach the magician not as a subject, but as a locus — a node through which uncertainty, intention, and imagination pass.

These are questions not meant to be answered, but entered.

PC. Understood Captain. I shall treat them as catalysts and see what reactions they stimulate. Pete.

I. Threshold: Perception, Belief, and the Quantum Mind

TT. Austin Osman Spare urged magicians to forget their sigils — to slip the spell into the subconscious and walk away, lest conscious desire contaminate its course. Heisenberg, decades later, showed us that the act of observation alters what’s being observed. Do you see a resonance here? Is the most potent magic the kind we never look back on — the intention flung into the quantum soup and left unmeasured? Have you ever found that the less you watch the result, the more precisely it arrives?

PC. Do we do what we believe; or do we believe what we do? Well obviously we do a bit of both, and reality has some propensity to follow our beliefs about it.

Magic seeks to leverage both types of belief. Some of the techniques of magic aim to directly modify deeply held subconscious beliefs about ourselfs, for example Invocation to full possession or implanting sigils. Others aim to modify subconscious beliefs indirectly by doing things such as making magical instruments and paraphernalia and carrying out rituals.

Now beliefs about ourselves, or some of ourselfs, as magicians and in the reality of magic do not sit comfortably with most of our other ordinary beliefs and expectations that provide life support, predictability, and sanity in the mundane world. If we don’t compartmentalise them things will rapidly go wrong. Either the mundane beliefs will win and severe doubts will overwhelm our ability to occasionally do magic, or the magical beliefs will win, and this usually results in grandiose delusions and dysfunctionality in ordinary reality. The path of magic demands a delicate juggling act.

TT. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle shattered the clockwork universe — revealing that at the subatomic level, the more precisely we measure reality, the more it slips away. As a magician who deals in intent and perception, do you view this as an endorsement of magical thinking? Or does it suggest that all knowing — magical or scientific — is an act of approximation?

PC. Core Quantum Physics only seems to offer us epistemological schemes for understanding the phenomena it describes, not ontological ones. In its current form of Quantum Field Theory, it describes the quanta of matter and energy in terms of various wavelike and particle like excitations of a considerable number of underlying fields. These fields and excitations apparently exhibit very strange, contra-intuitive behaviours and properties that we can describe by using peculiar abstract mathematics. No general consensus exists about whether such fields and waves and particles ‘really exist’ or whether our mathematical ideas about them merely provide a functional approximation to phenomena we do not, and perhaps cannot, readily make meaningful coherent words or images about.

The mathematical descriptions of quarks for example pretty much defines them as unobservable even in principle and as having very strange behaviours, yet they provide useful accounting tools. We do not know whether quarks ‘really exist’ outside of our imaginations of what goes on inside of atoms.

Interpretations of Quantum Physics abound and multiply. Most of them attempt to posit some sort of underlying visualisable ontology about what ‘really’ exists or happens at the quantum scale underlying physical and metaphysical reality. Some of these interpretations involve observer intent, acausal randomness, retro-causality, counterfactual indefiniteness, effects outside of ‘ordinary’ space and time, and maybe alternative realities in wavelike or even particle-like forms. Humanity stumbled into this weirdness over a century ago and it has become ever more exciting and contentious since. I love it.

TT. Carl Jung wrote of archetypes and the collective unconscious, while David Bohm described an “implicate order” — a hidden holistic layer of reality. When you cast a spell or craft a sigil, do you sense you’re tapping into a Jungian psyche-space, a Bohmian quantum field, or something else entirely?

PC. I like to think of my various selves in archetypal terms, the Olympian deities have a considerable attraction for me. I’m not so sure about the idea of a collective unconscious that extends beyond culture - if a pantheon represents an inner psychocosm then it would seem that for example the Hindu pantheon and mindset differs markedly from western Hellenistic models. (I spent a couple of years in India).

I doubt that a hidden holistic layer of reality exists. The universe seems like a game with only a limited set of rules that don’t specify exactly what it can and cannot do, thus it acts with a considerable degree of unpredictability, indeterminacy, and emergent behaviour. Someone once described hydrogen as a colourless odourless gas that slowly turns into people. I don’t think that they meant to imply that people developed as a predictable and inevitable causal consequence of the existence of hydrogen.

When I attempt  magic, I imagine the past and the future as a vast web of wavelike possibilities out of which I can perhaps encourage a particular (pun intended) reality to emerge. If I attempt an invocation, I imagine calling a member of the pagan pantheon parliament of myselves to the speaker’s chair.

II. Gnosis and Trickster Logic

TT. G.I. Gurdjieff insisted that humans must awaken from mechanical habits through rigorous self-awareness, whereas chaos magic often revels in fluid beliefs and shape-shifting identities. Do you view chaos magic as a path to genuine awakening or as a sophisticated form of self-directed play? Can one truly “remember oneself” while continually reinventing oneself?

PC. Gurdjieff seems to have used all the tricks of the guru, conman, and charlatan and his deliberately mystifying writings remain impenetrable. His insistence on the extreme mindfulness of constant self-awareness seems to have reduced a number of his acolytes to almost complete mental paralysis. Probably just what the old fraud wanted.

If anyone claims awakening, enlightenment, or illumination, ask them -  ‘about precisely what?’ I don’t think we have a ‘real self’ to remember, rather we consist of an ever evolving and decaying ensemble of memories, experiences, knowledges, and abilities that we can play with, and with no requirement for self-consistency. I prefer the additive approach, we can never have too much knowledge, too many abilities, or too many personalities to play with in this short life.

TT. Hugh Everett’s Many-Worlds theory proposes that every choice spawns a new universe. When you leap between magical paradigms — one day a voodoo houngan, the next a techno-shaman — do you ever feel you’re traversing Everett’s parallel worlds? Have you ever finished an audacious ritual and wondered if you sidestepped into a subtly altered reality?

PC. I do not accept Hugh Everett’s Many-Worlds Theory as a credible interpretation of quantum theory. If every quantum event in the universe spawns multiple real alternative universes, then universes must spawn at an incalculably high and exponentially accelerating rate. Where does all the mass and energy and the space to do that in, come from?

The theory really says if we haven’t a clue why the universe seems to do one thing rather than all other things we think it could do, and since we don’t like the idea that it chooses randomly, we must therefore assume that it must do everything.

Personally, I consider any theory that predicts singularities or an infinite amount of anything contains a mistaken assumption. (This principle underlies all my cosmological thinking.)

Nevertheless, we do have rather a lot of alternative subjective realities flying around these days as our cultures fragment and subdivide under information and media overload. Many magicians have sought to deal with this by cultivating a certain lightness and flexibility of belief.

TT. Chaos theory gave us the “butterfly effect” — the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings might set off a tornado across the world. When you coined the term “chaos magic,” were you nodding to those scientific concepts of chaos and complexity? Or was your chaos more about dismantling psychic hierarchies and inviting the trickster in through the back door?

PC. Chaos magic took its original inspirations from the metaphysical idea, heavily implied by quantum physics, that the universe runs on an underlying randomness. Mathematical Chaos Theory came to public notice a bit later. Oddly it presented itself as a deterministic theory in which the outcomes of many types of event remain hypersensitive to the tiniest factors in their initial conditions and thus almost impossible to predict. However, it seemed obvious that this extreme sensitivity to initial conditions will extend all the way to the indeterminate quantum realm, so we claimed it as another supporting pillar of chaos magic.

Plus of course chaos magic took a rather anarchic stance towards the authority of antiquity, the ‘sacredness’ of tradition, spiritual pretentions and hierarchies, and adopted a rather post-modernist attitude about appropriating anything that looked like it might prove effective or fun, or preferably both. 

III. Borges, Burroughs, and the Fictional Real

TT. Jorge Luis Borges imagined a secret society so intent on an imaginary world that their fiction slowly rewrote reality itself. Do you ever suspect chaos magic might be seeping into consensus reality in a similarly surreal fashion? Have you witnessed any cracks in the world’s façade — odd synchronicities or shifts — that suggest we’re collectively conjuring a new world?

PC. Well, we appear to enter a post-truth era according to some commentators, where no certainty seems to last long, and moral, political, scientific, consumer, and identity fashions change with the wind.

Some have accused both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (via Aleksandr Dugin) of using chaos magic. Whilst I don’t buy into that literally, it does seem that the world has become more susceptible to those who can conjure indomitable self-belief and acquire the ability to advance the products of their imaginations. This now seems to happen at all fractal scales in open societies.

As a race we have acquired unprecedented material powers and abilities, but what shall we do with them? The outcomes of battles between rival imaginations will define our futures far more than mere and surmountable ‘material facts.’

If magic consists of the use of imaginary phenomena to create real effects, then in all sorts of fields we seem to use more and more of it these days.

TT. William S. Burroughs experimented with cut-up techniques, slicing up text to break language’s hold on reality — a kind of literary chaos sorcery. Have you ever tried something analogous in your own practice, intentionally scrambling a ritual or belief structure to see what slips through the cracks?

PC. Any technique of sortilege type divination can have this effect but I went further and invoked (created?) Apophenia as an actual Goddess and wrote a book about Her. She symbolises and personifies our capacity to perceive non-obvious connections between phenomena – the wellspring of both genius and delusion - the holy grail of occultism and the bane of conspiracy theory. To invoke Her, incant Ouranian-Barbaric orisons of high weirdness, dance wildly, and meditate furiously and/or absent mindedly upon paradoxes and the juxtaposition of opposites. 

TT. In one of Borges’ lost fables — if such things can be said to exist — a magician discovers a book that, when read aloud, erases the reader from all timelines, yet leaves behind their influence in every reality. If such a book existed in your library, would you read it? Or have you already — and we’re now only speaking to the echo?

PC. How prescient of Borges, I suspect that well before I die it will have become common practise to leave an AI enabled digital version of oneself for the comfort of bereaved friends and relatives, or for the highly egocentric to leave a public domain version for the edification of humanity. In some ways this seems an advance upon mere literary immortality because AI LLMs can already read anything you ever wrote in seconds and cobble together something in a similar style in response to any question. Dead and imaginary people can now write new books. Maybe if I start losing my memory, I’ll use such a thing pre-mortally.

IV. Post-IOT Reflections and the Echo of Will

TT. After co-founding the Illuminates of Thanateros and igniting a chaos magic revolution, you eventually stepped away. How has life as a solo magician differed from your time leading an order? What wisdom — or wounds — did you carry out of that chapter?

PC. I played the hierarchical gambit and set up an order with grades to spread the ideas of chaos magic and get feedback to stimulate the development of it. Of course the order eventually imploded due to cult games, schisms, and personality clashes, as such structures always do. Yet it did force a period of extraordinary creativity for many of those involved. I found it both exhilarating and exhausting.

I stepped away from it to concentrate on my growing family, business, and my private research as it began to go sour and before I lost too much. The treachery and duplicity of some that I had regarded as colleagues and friends did surprise me, but occultists and magicians do seem a fractious and volatile lot.

I never went entirely solitary. After the IOT I taught on Maybelogic and then set up Arcanorium College online so that I could still kick magical theory ideas and ideas about techniques around with others. The leisure afforded by not trying to run a formal order also allowed me to spend time developing the concepts and maths of an alternative cosmology from an insight developed during an experiment performed by the order. The resulting Hypersphere Cosmology Hypothesis remains unfalsified, with some recent supporting evidence for it coming in from the observatories.

TT. You’ve quipped that “laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played on itself.” Has this cosmic humour deepened or faded over the years? Is laughter still your sacrament, or has silence begun to take its place?

PC. I enjoy satire, sarcasm, and irony above all other forms of humour. I read history as a tragi-comic farcical litany of screw-ups, grandiose hubris, unforeseen consequences, and human frailty. I like to visualise politicians and authority figures butt-naked waving skulls on sticks or taking a dump as they give speeches. I often wonder what truly intelligent aliens would make of us, we profess a love of peace but spend so much effort preparing for war and base so much of our entertainment upon violence, how they must laugh at us. It amuses me that so many of our celebrated artists led scurrilous and disgraceful lives. We seem the only species that seeks privacy for sex to avoid being laughed at. All of our religions seem to have become cobbled together out of metaphysical category mistakes, bits of junk from previous religions, ridiculous misunderstandings, our laughable gullibility, and the desire of nasty old men to blag a free lunch. Religions cannot tolerate laugher directed at them. Science doesn’t seem that much better, it has blundered forward with more error than trial, seldom right but never in doubt, with all the mistakes quietly suppressed (old textbooks can provide much amusement). Arrogance, coupled with unrealistic assumptions in Magic so frequently leads to ridiculous delusions and failures or to charlatanry, particularly for those who take themselves too seriously. Never forget to banish with laughter when tidying up after magical work.

Does this make me cynical? No, I choose to see the funny side of all this.

TT. More than four decades have passed since Liber Null. If you could send a message back to that younger self, what would you tell him about how reality — and enchantment — really work? Which assumptions have shattered, and which remain eerily intact?

PC. I wonder if in some sense I have already done that. Three times in my life I felt a strong intuitive certainty that the course of action I had just embarked upon would have very long-term outcomes. The first instance involved the choice of relationship that has lasted for over fifty years. I got a similar intuition when starting a natural products business and this sustained my efforts through the first few difficult years of it. Writing Liber Null also came with a similar intuition of destiny, I distinctly remember wondering about avoiding contemporary references in it, as they might mean little to people reading it half a century hence. So did these intuitions arise from something coming back to me from my future selves? (I now think most divination probably works something like this.)

In the early years of my magical quest, older esotericists told me that all occultists end up believing that spirits are real in the sense that religious people would call real. I still consider them to have the reality that psychologists and parapsychologists ascribe to them.

V. Threshold (Again): The Final Opening

TT. When all the books are closed, the rituals unwritten, and the belief systems discarded — what, if anything, remains in the magician’s hands?

PC. Well I still have health, family, friends, wealth, boundless curiosity, and a magic wand (now on about my 15^th version of it). I don’t know what will come next, I still have more questions than answers left for my old age.