The Mindscape of Alan Moore

I was in my late teens when I first came across the ideas of Carl Jung.
The Austrian psychoanalyst, anthropologist, archaeologist, mythographer, pal of Freud and general Renaissance man, appeared to have the answer or answers to life, the universe and everything.

His works, which were so rich and dense with symbolism, metaphor and hermetic undertones and overtones, genuinely opened my awareness up to so many new areas of human history and thought - areas that had earlier remained for me the province of stuffy scholars or anoraked geeks.

I remember reading a large, heavily illustrated 'coffee table' book of Jung's theories called 'Man and his Symbols' and experiencing the sensation of interconnection with everything, or what Freud called the "Oceanic feeling".

Reading that book was like floating in a warm amniotic fluid of my rightful inheritance, an inheritance that I felt had been stolen from me at an early age by chronic materialists, shit teachers and the blunted narrowness of my everyday existence for so many years before.

Above all - to paraphrase someone - Jung made me think much more deeply about who I am, where I came from, and where I'm going, physically, spiritually and psychologically. He also made me appreciate and understand a little more, how the culture I live in now is not privileged above those of the past, but is still controlled by a the same symbols and myths that shaped our ancestors.

It took me a while to understand Jung's theory of archetypes, and the idea that what the ancient alchemists were attempting to do by turning 'base metal into gold', was a spiritual transformation rather than a physical one.

In this documentary, Alan Moore, the Northampton Magus of the arcane and postmodern describes his own particular hermetic mindscape, which has more than an echo of Jungianism about it.
Moore specifically talks about the history of 'magic' as essentially being the artist's search for his/her deepest soul via the transformative properties of sign and symbol interpretation and integration through artworks.

What Jung called 'Individuation' is I think what Moore is talking about when he discusses magical practices as a medium by which the person may become fully whole and, thereby, themselves a magician.
Moore also discusses Rupert Sheldrake's theory of 'Morphic fields' - how animals and plants appear to manifest new developmental behaviours and ideas collectively at a certain point in time that defies physically causal relationships - which is similar to Jung's interpretation of what he called 'The Collective Unconscious'.
Moore develops Sheldrake's theory to propose 'idea fields' woven out of space time.

Its worth a watch for many reasons, even if for just a tiny glimpse into the wild Moorian imagination.