A Conversation with Alan Moore about the Arts and the Occult

A Conversation with ALAN MOORE about the Arts and the Occult

by Arthur

Crowley lamented that he wasn’t a better visual artist. I went to an exhibition of his and well, some of the pictures work just because they’ve got such a strange color sense, but…it has to be said that the main item of interest was that they were by Crowley. But yes, there’s that whole kind of crowd really: Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Harry Smith. And if you start looking beyond the confines of self-declared magicians, then it becomes increasingly difficult to find an artist who wasn’t in some way inspired either by an occult organization or an occult school of thought or by some personal vision.

Most of the Surrealists were very much into the occult. Marcel Duchamp was deeply involved in alchemy. “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors”: that relates to alchemical formulae. He was self-confessedly, he referred to it as an alchemical work. Dali was a great many things, including a quasi-fascist and an obvious scatological nutcase, but he also was involved deeply in the occult. He did a Tarot deck. A lot of the Surrealists were taking inspiration from alchemical imagery, or from Tarot imagery, because occult imagery is perhaps a natural precursor of a lot of the things that the Surrealists were involving themselves with.

But you don’t have to look as far as the Surrealists, really. With all of those neat rectangular boxes, you’d think Mondrian would be rational and mathematical and as far away from the Occult as you could get. But Mondrian was a Theosophist. He [borrowed] the teachings of Madame Blavatsky–all of those boxes and those colors were meant to represent theosophical relationships. Annie Besant, the Theosophist around the turn of the last century, published a book where she had come up with the idea, novel at the time, that you could represent some of these abstract energies that Theosophy referred to by means of abstract shapes and colors. There were a lot of people in the art community who were keeping up upon ideas from the occult and theosophy, they immediately read this and thought, Gosh you could, couldn’t you? And thus modern abstract art was born.

It seems a rather stretched argument, trying to tie terminology like occult and magic into art. I think it's fair to say that any art of merit arises from some inner vision, something beyond rationality and moving into the realm of the spirit.

I'm a rather poor amateur musician, but sometimes I seem to play (measured against my own level) extraordinarily well. During my playing I seem to go on an inner journey, sometimes almost literally as well as metaphorically, one evening I crossed at least a whole continent and a good stretch of ocean during a session. Other times it is exploring feelings of pain or joy, which emerge in the expression of the music, this too can be a wild ride, a journey within. I don't describe this as occult or magic though.

Perhaps the author simply meant that there are things both hidden and mysterious, that the terminology isn't specific to art, but applies to all of life itself.