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Alan Moore (Saviour of Brazil) On Magic, Fascism & What We Can All Do

Recently, Alan Moore held an audience with the Scottish Book Trust, hosted by Heather Parry. And talked about magic, fascism and Brazil.

Recently, Alan Moore held an audience with the Scottish Book Trust, hosted by fellow author Heather Parry. They talked about everything from cabbages to kings, from Star Trek to satire, but also that this was the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Which meant it was thirty years since he declared that he was a magician. And Heather wondered how his attitude to magic and creation had changed in those three decades.

Alan Moore, thirty years a magician

Now, before I get into the transcript, and there is a lot of it that's relevant, I do ask you to take things in context. Alan Moore is a fine practitioner of spoken irony, on a number of levels, and one of those is to say something outrageously conceited, but in a self-derogatory way, he is mocking that anyone, especially him, could ever say such a thing. It's obvious when you see him in person, it's less obvious when transcribed, but it's clear if you bear this in mind. Onwards. Alan Moore told her that;

"it's become more sophisticated, I don't really do much of the ceremonial bit these days. That was probably when I started out as a magician and needed to convince myself that this wasn't all delusional, that it did have a kind of practical application in the real world and I needed things to convince me. These days I am convinced of magic and it's a world view that I have internalized and which affects pretty much everything that I do. It's got more acute but I still hold with almost everything that I said back in my frankly delusional first couple of years of magic, especially the thing about the equivalence between magic and art. These days I'd say that representation or art, and consciousness, and writing, and magic probably are all part of the same thing and all arose at the same time. So I believe that any artistic expression potentially is an act of magic. You're using your consciousness in a purposeful way to have an effect that is beyond the frontiers of science. To explain you're trying to affect other people's mind and their reality in the way that they see the world, is a big thing. You're trying to conjure things into being into tangible and visible being for your readership."

"I remember always that back in the tradition of magic, if you offended a magician they might put a curse on you and your hands might be funny for six months. If you offended a bard they might put a satire on you which would make you ridiculous in the eyes of your contemporaries in the eyes probably of your family, of yourself and that would probably endure if it was a good satire. People after you were dead would still be laughing at you. This is why people were terrified of bards much more than they were terrified of warlocks or witches. And this is what I would like to see. I would like to see people terrified of writers… well not terrified but actually thinking of themselves as something more than entertainers. I would like to see writers and artists and musicians and everybody thinking of what they actually are, not what they've been corralled into being part of an entertainment system.  I think that people probably put limits on themselves. One of the things that becoming a magician did for me was to remove those limits. So if you're going to declare yourself uh as a magician when you're really, really drunk and celebrating your birthday in a biker's pub then you can really pretty much write your own rule book after that. Because the power of declaring something and sticking to it is also large and we end up being what we pretend to be."

"I think that's probably true of most of us. We invent a personality for ourselves when we were about 12 or 13, when we realized that the personality that got us through our first 12 or 13 years of life isn't going to work when it comes to our puberty and adolescence so we start to borrow bits from fictional characters from friends that we admire, and we put together this Frankenstein personality which, after a few years, we forget that we put it together and we assume that it's us. We probably stay with that for our entire lives."

"I think that the whole point of magic is not to acquire physical results or everybody would be doing sigils to end fascism forever. You change your consciousness, that's all that you have power over. That's all you can do and if you can do that   then you make yourself into the kind of person that could end fascism forever."

How Alan Moore saved Brazil from fascism

We needed an example of course and Alan Moore was happy to give us one.

"Can I brag here a little bit please? Exactly a year ago. my daughter sent me a letter that she'd had from a Brazilian journalist um saying that the elections were just coming up and it was Bolsonaro against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro was a complete fascist, he was on his way to completely destroying the Amazon and displacing all these indigenous people and everything like that and this journalist was saying that I do have apparently quite a big following in Brazil. And would I write a letter explaining why everybody should vote for Lula rather than Bolsonaro to end fascism in Brazil forever? Uh.. you've got five days. I stayed up really really late one night and I wrote this letter that started dearest Brazil and I really wrote my heart out. I was a bit tired by the time I'd finished but it was some good writing and apparently he sent it to da Silva and da Silva posted it to the electorate of Brazil and got in by a very very narrow margin. So now I know that that wasn't necessarily because of the letter that I wrote but I'm definitely going to claim it and if people would in the future… I never had any academic letters after my name but if they want put "Saviour of Brazil" in brackets then that that would suit me very well you know. So yes you can actually have an effect just because you've altered your own consciousness and that's the way to do it and that is the way that magic could still affect huge changes in the culture that we've been saddled with and you to could end up saving Brazil as well. Although I have pretty much got that covered."

"I was talking with some friends the other day  we were talking about ways that capitalism could be dismantled and things like that and then one of them there's still the problem of all this popular fascism and I said I think you can leave that to me, everybody don't worry about it, I've got it."

Remember what I said about layered irony? Well here, reproduced in full, is that letter, written by Alan Moore.

Dearest Brazil,

We are fast running out of last chances to save the planet and its peoples. Our world is changing, faster than it's ever changed before, and forcing us to adapt more quickly if we are to survive. From hunter-gatherer society to agriculture, from agriculture to industry, from industry to whatever is taking shape now — this new condition that we do not as yet have a name for — humanity has seen these kinds of monumental shift before, although not often. These transitions are not caused by political forces but by the unstoppable tidal movements of history and technology, which is a tide that we can either steer our vessels to take advantage of, or we can be washed away by. The Earth is turning, turning of necessity into a new place, and we can only turn with it or else lose the biosphere that sustains us forever. Most people, I believe, know this in their hearts and feel it in their stomachs.

And yet, over this past five or so years, we have seen across the globe a ferocious resurgence of exactly the political and economic ideas that led us into this clearly disastrous situation in the first place. The unconcealed aggression of this extreme right advance seems to me so forceful, and yet so disconnected from any reality, that it can only be born of desperation; the hysterical fear felt by those most invested in the power structures of the old world, who know the new world can, ultimately, have no place for them. Afraid for their very existence, for the existence of the worldview from which they benefit, they have crowded the world stage over this last half -decade with increasingly loud, overblown and blustering pantomime characters, for whom no course of action is too corrupt or inhuman, and no line of reasoning too blatantly absurd.

Unashamedly monstrous, these have persecuted racial and religious minorities, or their native peoples, or the poor, or women, or people of different sexualities, or all of the above. During the still-evolving pandemic they put their political posturing and their financial doctrines before the safety of their populations, presiding over hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths; hundreds of thousands of devastated families, devastated communities. With their nations on fire, or flooded, or parched by drought, they insisted that climate change was a leftist hoax to inconvenience industry, and branded environmental or social protestors as terrorists. Adopting the fascist circus-act style of Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, we have had the dangerous insurrectionary theatrics of Donald Trump in North America, and the ruinous indignities of Boris Johnson and his understudies in the (at present) United Kingdom. And, of course, Brazil has had Jair Bolsonaro.

Although we in the Global North obviously contribute much more than our fair share of horrifying political figures to the world's situation, I don't know anybody with an ounce of conscience and compassion who isn't appalled by what Bolsonaro, riding into office on Trump's bow-wave, has done to your huge and beautiful country, along with what he continues to do to our relatively small and somehow-still-beautiful planet. We've watched despairingly while, singing from the same hymn -book as his North American inspiration, Bolsonaro has railed against Brazil's indigenous people, its homosexuals and the rights of its women to safe abortions, fuelling an uncontrolled bonfire of hatred as a distraction from his social and economic agendas, while simultaneously flooding your culture with guns. We've seen him attempt to swagger his way through the pandemic by spouting his anti-vaccination idiocy, and we've seen Brazil's increasing acreage of hastily-prepared graveyards; those pigeonhole grids in grey soil with here and there dead flowers or painted markers as a drip of colour.

We've also looked on while he responded to the prospect of new international environmental laws by simply speeding up his suicidal destruction of the rainforest, choking our communal atmosphere with burning jungle, displacing or dispatching people who had lived in these regions for generations, and seemingly colluding with or turning a blind eye to the murder of journalists investigating this brutal ethnic cleansing. A respected British science magazine that I subscribe to, New Scientist, has recently described Brazil's imminent elections as a potentially crucial point of no return in our
species' life-or-death battle with the climate catastrophe we ourselves have engineered.

Simply put, Jair Bolsonaro can continue, profitably, to please the corporate interests that support him, or our grandchildren can eat and breathe. It's one or the other.

As an anarchist, there are very few political leaders that | could completely tolerate, much less endorse, but from all that | have heard or read about him, Luiz da Silva, Lula, seems to be one such rare individual. His policies appear to be fair, humane and practical, and, as I understand it, he has promised to reverse many of Bolsonaro's most disastrous decisions.

Repairing the damage of these last five years would surely not be easy or without cost, and da Silva would be inheriting a badly disfigured political landscape. At the very least, however, from this distance, he at least has the look of a candidate who acknowledges that mankind is going through one of its infrequent seismic transformations, and realises that we must change how we live, if we are to live at all. He seems a politician committed to the future, with its hard work and its just and wonderful possibilities, rather than the flailing and destructive death-throes of an unsustainable past.

Brazil's forthcoming election is, I'm told, balanced on something of a knife edge and, as discussed above, the whole world is riding on it. lf you have ever enjoyed any of my work, or have felt any sympathy with its humanitarian leanings, then please go out and vote for a future that is fit for human beings, for a world that is more than the golden latrine of its corporations and their puppets.

Let's put the iniquities of the last five, or perhaps the last five hundred years, behind us. With love, and trust,

Your friend, Alan Moore x

General elections were held in Brazil in October 2022. As no candidate for president received more than half of the valid votes, a runoff election was held four weeks later. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva received the majority of the votes in the second round and became president-elect of Brazil. Bolsonaro requested the courts invalidate electronic votes. The court rejected the request and fined the party $4.3 million for bad faith litigation. During the inauguration, pro-Bolsonaro protestors stormed the government and court offices, and the Presidential resident, though unsuccessfully. Maybe Glycon was watching.

Since 1998, Scottish Book Trust has been delivering world-class programmes across Scotland and working with partners from small community groups to the Scottish Government. As a national charity, they believe that reading and writing for pleasure have the power to transform lives and everyone should have access to their benefits. You'll find the Scottish Book Trust in schools and libraries, at community events, in towns, cities, and isolated rural communities, bringing books to life for children in care, families living in challenging circumstances, people living with dementia and people in prison.

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