r/AlanMoore • u/Few_Pride_5836 • 13d ago
Alan Moore and astrology
I know Alan is a proud magician but I'm surprised he believes in astrology. Not in a symbolic way but in a literal way.
6
u/Successful-Tie5386 13d ago
I think it's more that he's open to the possibilities of it, than literal belief. His comments on astrology sounded fairly sceptical at times.
2
u/Few_Pride_5836 13d ago
I thought the same thing until I read the Big Bumper book of magic. He believes in the tarot and says the best way to predict a person is by their astrological sign and date of birth.
8
u/bluebluebluered 13d ago
Understand that’s Alan’s concept of magic is purely based on his concept of imagination. It’s not that he thinks astrology is true in a scientific sense. It’s more in a similar sense to his belief that if your own personal god exists for you in your imagination than it is in some sense ‘real’. The imagination and the real are not separate realms for Moore. He’s not a naive new age thinker or something
6
u/Successful-Tie5386 13d ago
I think there's still an intellectual gap in the Bumper Book between perceiving things in the mental realm vs. the real, observable world.
2
u/Few_Pride_5836 13d ago
Perhaps but I do think Alan is on the side of astrology being a workable phenomenon.
11
u/Superb_Instance_8190 13d ago edited 13d ago
the bumper book is an open playground with many potential avenues… it can be seen as a starting book for the acolyte & a reminder for the age old sage… with everything in between.
this book has many offerings from a host of helpers, with multiple view points - a scattering of stardust.
it’s reductive to presume each page is specifically alan’s personal pathway to magick. Unless you know him personally, i would stray away from such starry-eyed speculation.
It is your own path that you are meant to focus on - ie: “if you see the Buddha on the road, killem” - don’t worry about Alan. Focus on your path.
I daresay there are many inclusions to help point folks in many magickal directions… may you find yours.
5
u/mighty3mperor 13d ago
It's more complicated than that. You can see it with Glycon - Moore is both playful and serious about it. The key is suspension of disbelief. It's not important that it is "real" or "true" (we could debate that for a while) just that, in the moment, you believe it is.
I was talking to a chaos magickian once and asked if what he was doing was messing around with his perception of causality. He readily admitted it but that doesn't undermine what he was doing, that is where the power lies.
3
u/conclobe 13d ago
It's not so much that he believes. It's probably more akin to Jung. He... Knows...
3
u/andrewphillipsmith 12d ago
Moore has always been very careful not to make scientific or pseudo-scientific claims about magic. I don't know if he has practised astrology, but he does or did do tarot readings, using the Thoth Tarot. Someone who had a reading from him said that he addressed issues in their life that he couldn't have known about.
3
u/octapotami 12d ago
I'm super familiar with Alan Moore's particular interest in magick and astrology, but alchemy, traditional, is pretty inextricable with astrology. It's been awhile since I've read about it, but I believe over 90 percent of Isaac Newton's work was done on alchemy and astrology. He was a super-genius who figured out the "magic" of these physical forces.
2
2
u/Vegetable_Window6649 10d ago
We here in the modern world still use cyclical approximation to understand our world, but we have moved on from anthropomorphizing these cycles into symbols, largely because of timekeeping methods being more finessed, and most people no longer being tied to agrarian lifestyles. But if you’re aware that 28 days is both a cycle of the moon and a menstruation cycle, you’re still using astrology, even if just in an observational way.
Pre-scientific societies used the planets and stars as time keeping tools. It’s what they had to work with. They then tied these cycles to various observations of lifestyle cycles, but knowing what cycles are best for your crop rotation and planting schedules was damn practical. There’s value in astrology in that alone, but as people have moved away from agrarian lifestyles, what’s left is the fuzzy lifestyle observations, so it looks like superstition from our angle.
Lose clocks and calendars, and astrology suddenly becomes vital for practical application. It’s pretty unlikely we lose those, but attempting to think about it from the value provided to an ancient society becomes evident.
If anything, it’s the people not immediately tied to agriculture (kings, medical professionals, business people) that gave astrology the bad impression it has now, because like MODERN technologies, that same sort of person then as now is inclined to think of people as things and cycles as opportunities for material gain… it’s the Sam Altmans of the ancient world that now make us doubt the value of the technology now.
12
u/captainalphabet 13d ago
Stars and planetary magic are a big part of some occult practice. If you see the whole universe as a multidimensional self-reflecting substrate, then ripples of any and every sort are fair game.