Alan Moore interviewed. I’ve got half a dozen interviews with him and conversations about magic bookmarked, actually, mostly because my own approach to magic agrees in different ways with both his and Grant Morrison’s ways of looking at things. From what I’ve read Alan seems a lot more structured, which I’m not so big on, but at the same time, there’s a grace to it I respond to, while Grant’s seems much more freeform in a lot of ways, which works better for me, but at the same time, seems oddly sharp and harsh in places, a lack of subtlety that I’m not so fond of, although this may be just the fact that he’s kind of aggressive about it, whereas Alan seems more humorous about the whole thing, I suppose.

But anyway, the stuff that was the stand out bit for me in that interview was this bit:

“One way to look at it is to say each religion is a language, and magic is . . . linguistics. For a linguist, then, there’d be no such thing as a ‘false’ language. It’s not like, ‘Oh yeah, French is good, but Russian is not a real language.’ I mean, there are words in German for which we don’t have a concept in English, and vice versa. So the thing is, you have to accept all religions as being . . . they’re all true languages! I need to understand the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Gnostics, of the Christians, of John Dee, of current occultists, of the Hebrews, of the kabbalists. To some degree I take the quantum position that in order to see truth, you have to consider a lot of different possible positions and hold them all to be true in some mysterious way. Magic is moving between those different positions, studying them, seeing what information there is to be gleaned from each of them, seeing how they connect up. How a story in the New Testament seems to connect up with an ancient Egyptian legend. And how this in turn relates to one of the Tarot cards. Which gives it a certain position on the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. And if you follow through these chains of ideas long enough, you start to get a different set of synaptic connections in your brain, different pathways. You start to see things in a different way.”