On the sanity of worshipping sock puppets
On madness, the place that the gods can be said to inarguably exist, and the value of praying to a sock puppet.
In 1968, Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “a sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” A few years earlier, in his acclaimed book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, the philosopher Michel Foucault argued that what we view as insanity is often a social construction. He was coming at this from a place of deep personal knowledge — Foucault was a homosexual in a time when it was still deeply taboo and treated in many places as a mental illness.
From this vantage point, Foucault critically reviewed the history of mental illness, and found that in some cultures, afflictions that today are seen as something that needs to be “cured” were instead viewed as prophetic gifts. Epileptic seizures were seen by the Greeks and other cultures as an instance of spiritual possession, or as communications with the gods. The visions that epileptics would sometimes emerge with were often seen as being divine messages, which is why epileptics were often employed as oracles and shamans. Shamans or spiritual figures who weren’t epileptic would often find a way to simulate the altered states that epileptic seizures brought on, this madness that brought wisdom, through the ingestion of psychedelic substances.
One of the most famous philosophers in history was Diogenes of Sinope1, who lived in a giant ceramic tub in the marketplace, made friends with the local street dogs, and shouted at people walking by. When Alexander the Great visited him and offered to do the great philosopher a favor, Diogenes said, “You’re blocking my light. Move.”
It is virtually impossible to imagine a modern leader consulting an unhoused eccentric, let alone putting up with an open insult, but Diogenes’ legacy is clear: the philosophical school he helped found, cynicism2, remains influential to this day, and Diogenes himself is an enormous figure in philosophy.
I am making a point of this because we’re about to spend several weeks looking at the ideas of Alan Moore, and Alan Moore famously worships a sock puppet. So I feel that the nuances of “madness” are perhaps something we ought to understand.
The madness of Alan Moore
If you have only heard a little bit about Alan Moore, then it is likely this: In the 1980s, comics, long derided as a childish or illiterate art form, grew up and went through a period of intense creative flourishing, spearheaded by underground “comix3” creators like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman (of Maus fame), as well as newcomers like Frank Miller (Sin City, 300, The Dark Knight Returns), Neil Gaiman (Sandman), and, at the top of the heap, Alan Moore.
Moore’s most famous work was Watchmen, the subversive superhero yarn that would be the only comic included on Time Magazine’s 100 Best Novels. But that was far from his only acclaimed work: he became renowned in the same time period for his dystopian anarchist comic, V for Vendetta, for his engagement with environmentalism, ecology, and psychedelia on Swamp Thing, and for his legendary Batman story, The Killing Joke, which would become a key influence on Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie as well as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and in turn every single “dark and gritty” superhero that’s been churned out since the 80s. Moore’s works were noted for being adult-oriented, elaborately structured, and minutely detailed.
For many comics fans, this is the only period of Moore’s work worth paying any attention to, because in the late 80s and early 90s, Moore appeared to go completely off the rails. He regularly got into extremely public fights with his publishers, eventually refusing to work with both Marvel and DC (the two dominant comics companies), disowning his most acclaimed stories, and insisting that his name be taken off any movie adaptation of his work. This last move has cost him, in his own estimation, millions upon millions of dollars.
Weirder, on his 40th birthday in 1993, he declared that he was dedicating his life to the pursuit of “magic,” and, a few months later, he began telling interviewers about his preferred deity: a snake god named “Glycon,” who was at the center of a popular cult in 2nd Century Rome. The satirist Lucian unmasked Glycon as actually being a hand puppet manipulated by the false prophet who led the cult. None of this seemed to dissuade Moore.
After these announcements, Moore’s work began getting increasingly esoteric and niche: he produced a comic that served as a guide to his occult beliefs called Promethea, he created a series of one-off, in-person “magical” performances, and a pornographic comic set in the opening days of World War I and featuring the sexual awakenings of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Alice from Wonderland, and Wendy from Peter Pan.
For a certain set of comic book fan, Moore has largely squandered the good will he built with his gritty 1980s masterpieces with all of the esoterica, magic, and infighting with his publishers and collaborators. The fact that he frequently takes jabs at adult fans of superheroes for being infantile proto-fascists, the fact that every time someone tries to adapt his comics he publicly berates them in the press, and the fact that some of these adaptations, like V for Vendetta or the Watchmen TV show, are quite critically acclaimed, has served to marginalize him from the mainstream as a possibly insane crank and recluse.
The work he’s produced since then — such as an old school, low-circulation zine that financially tanked quite quickly, a sexually violent deconstruction of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, and an experimental novel that’s longer than the Bible — has only seemed to further relegate him to the margins of the comics world.
The sock puppet snake god
The problem is that Alan Moore is only insane from a distance. Look at him any closer, listen to him in his own words, and he starts to make sense. I am not kidding when I say this is a problem, because when Alan Moore makes sense, you have to shift your entire worldview to accommodate what he’s said, and when you do that, you inevitably fall down a rabbit hole and end up worshipping strange gods.
Let’s take the sock puppet god: In the early 90s, Moore was coming off of a rough few years. He and his wife had expanded their relationship to include another woman, and the throuple, which lasted for several years, collapsed with the two women leaving Moore and taking his daughters with them. At the same time, Moore was beginning to realize that DC Comics had successfully swindled him out of his rights to the characters he’d created for Watchmen. He got bogged down in battles over free speech and censorship, threw his weight into fighting against an AIDS-panic homophobia campaign spearheaded by Britain’s then-leader, the far-right shitheel Margaret Thatcher. It was, per his account, a generally bad time.
So he had a proper mid-life crisis and declared to his friends and family that he was now a magician. (“He wasn’t of course,” his daughter Leah once quipped4, “he couldn’t even do balloon animals.”)
While he’d always been interested in the occult, the thing that piqued his interest in magic was his own writing: In the early 90’s, Moore was deep into the production of his acclaimed Jack the Ripper comic From Hell. While working on it, he wrote the following line:
The line, which had slipped out of his brain seemingly of its own accord, made him think: “Having written that and been unable to find an angle from which it wasn’t true,” he said later, “I was forced to either ignore its implications or change most of my thinking to fit around this new information.”
He chose, characteristically, to change most of his thinking, and the method he chose was the study of magic. This is not magic in the “pick a card” balloon animal sense, nor does it mean Moore believes he can “manifest” his destiny by beheading a chicken or putting pictures on a vision board.
In at least one sense, Moore still to this day could be said to be an atheist — his From Hell epiphany was that one does not need to believe in the material reality of gods to believe in them. One simply needs to divide the world in two: there is the objective material world, which can be measured and explored with science, and the subjective world of imagination, which can be explored with what Moore calls magic. (His understanding of magic is the subject of next week’s article, but for now, it’s worth noting that he does not see any serious difference between what he calls “magic” and what most people call “art.”)
In the realm of imagination, Gods inarguably exist, but can be seen not as physical forces so much as agglomerations of ideas, symbols, stories, and myths. One could choose a god to worship based on how one identifies with its stories, with its symbols, and with its values. It also occurred to Moore that if he wanted to explore the imaginary realm, it would be helpful to have a guide.
His friend and mentor, Steve Moore (no relation) had helped Alan get into the field of comics, and now helped get him into magic. Steve Moore worshipped Selene, the Greek personification of the moon, and in his explorations of the world of the subconscious5, she served as his guide, the Virgil to his Dante. Alan Moore wanted a similar guide, and while Steve was showing him photos of his moon goddess, Moore’s eye was drawn to a photo of a statue of a snake with a fabulous head of hair. He thought the snake would be an excellent guide, and, with some research, found that its name was Glycon. He arranged to meet with his god in person so as to devote himself to it.
It is worth noting here: Alan Moore has been a user of psychedelic drugs since his teenage years. He was in fact expelled from school at age 17 for dealing acid: “The problem with being an LSD dealer, if you’re sampling your own product, is your view of reality will probably become horribly distorted… and you may believe you have supernatural powers and you are completely immune to any form of retaliation and prosecution, which is not the case.”
In order to meet Glycon and explore his new understanding of magic, Moore underwent a number of magical rituals with Steve Moore and other friends that involved ingesting a fair amount of psilocybin mushrooms.
Here’s the explanation Moore gave to BBC Radio 4:
I worship a second century human headed snake god called Glycon, who was exposed as a ventriloquist’s dummy nearly 2000 years ago. Famed throughout the Roman Empire, Glycon was the creation of an entrepreneur known as Alexander the False Prophet, which is a terrible name to go into business under.
… I’m interested in the snake god purely as a symbol, indeed one of humanity’s oldest symbols, which can stand for wisdom, for healing, or, according to ethno-botanist Jeremy Narby, for our spiraling and snake-like DNA itself.
But I’m also interested in having a god who is demonstrably a ventriloquist’s dummy. After all, isn’t this the way we use most of our deities? We can look through our various sacred books and by choosing one ambiguous passage or one interpretation over another we can pretty much get our gods to justify our own current agendas. We can make them say what we want them to say.
The big advantage of worshipping an actual glove puppet of course is that if things start to get unruly or out of hand you can always put them back in the box. And you know, it doesn’t matter if they don’t want to go back in the box: they have to go back in the box.
Atheistic worship
On a personal level, I was thunderstruck the first time I read Moore’s take on Gods. I have been an atheist since I was about 15, and I feel pretty comfortable about my decision to leave behind the repressive, regressive Catholic Church. But I also felt that, by leaving behind religion, there was a whole realm of the human experience — particularly things like communal singing or the comfort of prayer — that I was abandoning.
What’s more is that I have, occasionally, enjoyed partaking in psychedelic drugs, and used to come out of those trips with experiences that could only be expressed through the language of religion. I didn’t think I’d “seen God” while high on mushrooms — it struck me as more probable that what I’d experienced was a hallucination brought on by the copious amount of hallucinogens I’d just ingested — but I’d had an experience that was worth trying to understand.
Moore’s “Gods” distinction is extremely simple (some might even say self-evident) but it solved all of the major problems that I had with religion:
It doesn’t make any supernatural claims about material reality: in this conception, science is still the best way to explore the laws of the universe and of nature. This means we can remain skeptics when it comes to some of the more wild claims that religions and spiritual movements make. But unlike the dry, objective version of reality put forward by people like the New Atheists, it still leaves space for religious experiences. We can still have intense feelings like awe, wonder, or cosmic oneness, but we don’t need to cast about the material world for an explanation.
It does away with the need for priests or gurus — while there are people I can learn from (like Moore), none of them have any real authority over what I choose to believe and do. This means spirituality can be truly personal in a way that’s tricky within the context of organized religion.
Because it places God and spirituality within the mind and not out in some other realm (whether that’s blowing in the breeze or judging us from on high), it frees us up to not take our beliefs so seriously. It allows a sort of playfulness that most religion, with its doctrines and hard rules, totally forecloses. The day our gods stop being helpful we can, as Moore suggests, put them “back in the box.” This feature, I would argue, also makes it less easy for us to talk ourselves into doing heinous shit in the name of our God.
This approach has allowed me, for the first time since I was 15, to have what most people would call a “spiritual” life. For my part, I do not like the word “spirituality,” because I do not believe in a “spirit” that is separate from the human body. Instead, I, like Moore, prefer the word “magic.”
But more on that next week.
Coiner of the phrase, “I am a citizen of the world,” among other things.
The root of the word “cynic” is the Greek kynos, which means “dog.”
The final “c” in underground comix is usually replaced with an X as a way of showing that the material was more adult oriented. Some (but by no means all) of these comics were indeed openly pornographic.
From her intro to George Khoury’s The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore.
Conducted either through ritual (aided by psychedelics) or through methods like lucid dreaming.