'There's little reason to linger in Northampton,' says the Lonely Planet Guide to Britain. On the surface you can see why: the plastic-hearted clutter of familiar facades and anxious-faced shoppers could belong to almost any British town surrounded by fields.

Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore's collection of interlinked short stories, sculpts a different perception of the area, taking the reader on a journey from prehistory to the 'end of history', from Neolithic shamanism to 20th century 'word-magic'.

With works like V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Swamp Thing and Brought to Light Moore and a handful of artists briefly transmuted superhero/mainstream comics' base matter into gold, in more than one sense of the word. He became well-known, was namechecked on TV, was trendy with students, even achieved immortalisation in a couple of PWEI songs.

But that was all a decade ago, and the territory since is sketchily mapped out. From Hell, his labyrinthine tour of the Jack the Ripper mythos, is now complete. I knew he'd got into magical thinking in a big way, and this permeates both From Hell and Voice of the Fire, but it didn't seem good manners to ask about this at the station. We ambled through safer topics en route to a drinking spot: mass murder, mass hysteria, Iain Sinclair, America, and the history of Northampton. By the time we're settled and the drinks are on the table, we're somehow onto adverts, and the class system follows.

ALAN MOORE: The working class will not exist beyond the end of this century. If it exists at the moment. It's not talked about, but an entire class are being dismantled and siphoned off into doorways.

Yeah, or upwards into the aspiring middle class. You have to demonise the working class. These are the people who are coming to steal your stereo. They've got transit vans and rottweilers, tattoos and earrings and they want your stereo.

The working class are surplus to requirements. It was necessary to educate the working class when we switched from an agricultural to an industrial situation. They had to at least know enough to turn up on time at the conveyor belt; they had to be able to tell the time, to count and understand written instructions - to be educated. Big mistake. I think that at that time we were still working under the idea that there was something genetic in the basis of the class structure - the working classes were like that because they were genetically inferior. The upper class, despite the fact they'd all been marrying their siblings for generations, had webbed fingers and no chins, were in some way the Ubermensch. But . . .

It's a big difference from when I was growing up in the sixties. . .

They could destroy everything. They seem to be amoral and directionless.

Very moralistic while being amoral at the same time. They moralise constantly. Both the working and upper classes are conservative in that they conserve, which has got nothing to do with 'Conservative' as in the party. I mean, as someone famously pointed out, Mrs. Thatcher was not a Conservative, she was a sort of 19th century Liberal. She conserved nothing. Free market? What's that got to do with conservation? She was a radical.

. . . when I decided to become a magician . . .

It suddenly struck me that at least my family, and probably a lot of working class families in this town, were not anywhere near so far away from the idea of sorcery as we might suppose at the end of the 20th century. And the way that most of my family have treated me since, it's unspoken, but it's almost like they're thinking every couple of hundred years one turns up. That's just the way it goes. You suddenly realise that, at least for a certain class of people in this country, the past is not so far away. There's a kind of recognition that this is not something new and 'New Age' that I'm involving myself in. This is very old and traditional and people around these parts have been involved with it, to some degree or other, for a long time, which is comforting.

. . . I've got a pretty shotgun approach to magic, in that I'll try anything and see if it works. Which is also practical; if it doesn't work, if I'm not getting results, then I'm not interested.

Voice of the Fire took me 5 years to write, beginning in 91 or 90. I had no idea at that point about becoming a shaman or getting interested in magic. This was a sudden decision on my fortieth birthday at the end of 93. And it first really happened for me in the January of 94. That was when I suddenly got it - the big mad vision. I actually feel as though I've got some personal experience at this shit. There aren't that many shamen attempting to use a kind of language-magic, to create the songline that will bring Northampton into being. I didn't realise that by the end of the book I was going to be  I knew I would be narrating the last chapter  but I didn't know what I would be saying. Could have been a conventional ending but I didn't realise that by the end of the book I would be a self-styled Northampton shaman . . . who would be . . .

Yeah, this is the whole thing about Voice of the Fire. I'm not saying this is the truth, this is the model most useful to me at the moment. Magic to me is about a more dynamic relationship with our own consciousness, a more dynamic way of understanding it; what consciousness is, what thought is. Because thought is the blind spot of science. We cannot talk in terms of Cartesian logic and empirical experiments when you're talking about the mind - it's all unprovable. . .

. . . I was thinking maybe you need a different model of consciousness. I came up with this model and I'm not claiming it's new. It's got a lot of similarities with various things, from Jung's mass unconscious to Karl Popper's World Three and things like that, but it's the idea of the Idea Space. To. . .

Yeah, there's no time either. There's no space and there's no time. It's just as easy for you to think about what you were doing this morning as Victorian street scenes. You can go there instantly. You can imagine a scene from ten years in the future. Time is not the same. Time does not really exists other than to the conscious mind, that's what I believe. Our perception of linear time is purely a construct of the conscious mind. . .

Your mind is not bound in time the way your body is, it's certainly more fluid  there's not really a time barrier in the world of the mind. Now it struck me that a good model might be, we've all got our own Idea Space which is individual and unique to us. This is like having your own house. We've all got part of our unconscious in the back garden but the back gardens all lead onto the same street. In another model you might say there's all these little individual inlets of consciousness, but they all connect to the same central ocean.

This certainly happens with novelists, it takes two years to get out and -

Someone has got a film out with the same idea. And it's tempting to think that the idea could either have been a solid thing floating in a mutually accessible space you happened to come across, and so did somebody else. When we say things are in the air, what do we mean? What air are we talking about? We all know that phenomena, you have a word explained to you, and within the next three days you hear it three times.

*

A magician has a framework, so this information doesn't spill out and overwhelm them, which I think it does with schizophrenics.

*

Now if you allow this space, which we all interact with on a weak level all the time, then throughout human history there have been certain techniques evolved in order to interact with it more strongly. I'd say any creative work, writing, drawing, composing, puts you in trance. Any deeply creative work - there's a kind of Zen part to any human activity where you're concentrating your mind in a certain way and all of a sudden you're in a different space. You're not thinking in the same rational way you think when you walk down the high street or make a cup of coffee. You're somewhere different. So you could say any creative act, carpentry included, science, all of those things involve deliberately working yourself into a different mind state.

Exactly. That is one of the classic shamanic forms. Dancing would do it, drumming would do it, drugs would do it.

. . . you can draw some broad conclusions from these apparent encounters. For instance, if these encounters are taking place in Idea Space, then what kind of entities could be in Idea Space? Well, you're in Idea Space when that happened to you, so there's one . . . it would seem to be possible for human minds to project themselves into this conceptual space.

No, it's not bound by your perception. There's the possibility that you may have alien minds in Idea Space, there is also the possibility of a kind of fauna native to Idea Space that is made entirely out of Idea stuff, that is indigenous to this realm. So if they're made of this stuff, what are they and all the other forms made of? We've got to make up a word: ideoplasms. There's the Idea Space, there's the ideoplasms that it's all made up of  the stuff of ideas, the medium. Now in my experience of this stuff, this plasm, it seems to be mercurial and reflective in that, say that hypothetically I believe myself to have encountered a number of demons mentioned in various grimoires going back to biblical times . . .

I think we clothe these idea forms. . . The demon Asmodeus that I saw appeared to me as a web of spiders that kept turning itself out into a dimension we don't have, into a web of lizards, and then back again. The immediate impression I got was it's trying to tell me. . .

As I see it there's a glossary of imaginary beings. My experience with demons suggests they are a very different category of being than gods. It's something to do with complexity, and it's something to do with emotions. The demons that I have seemingly encountered, and this is probably complete hallucination, or schizophrenic episode, whatever, have recognisably human traits. They were different to us and Other than us. But you could see that they liked to show off, had vanities, rage, closer to us than the couple of gods I seem to have encountered, which are a different level of complexity and have no recognisable human emotion at all. They are more complex, they are higher. Some entities I've encountered seem to be completely stupid, they're like astral fish. Spectacular, but they're not there for much. Not very intelligent, they have their properties and peculiarities but they're not that interesting. . .

. . .they're us unfolded in some way. I don't know what I mean by that. In a sense, they are all, for want of a better word, God. . .

So that's a rough mapping of how it seems to me. That there is this rich world of the mind, and also one of my nuttier ideas, I mean so far as this waffle about Idea Space is still fairly within the bounds of sanity, I'm just talking about the possibility of an imaginary space, but I also suspect that ultimately this space we are in now and Idea Space are the same space, it is just that. . .

Everything we're wearing, sitting amongst, had its origins in this nebulous and, according to science, non-existent territory of the human mind. It's what Koestler called the ghost in the machine. Now I've entered a real problem. You can see how much of a problem it is when you look at people like BF Skinner, the father of Behaviourism, who managed to explain away consciousness by saying we're not really thinking, aren't really conscious, it's all done by a vibrational by-product of the vocal cords. What a contortion to have to go through, to explain this bothersome numinous conscious-ness of ours.

To me magic is a very political thing, it's ultimate politics. You're not just questioning how the state is governed, you're questioning reality, the rock that it's all standing on, dangerous shit like that, but necessary at this juncture, at the end of the 20th century, when we have been removed from. . .

As I understand the original Gnostic Christians, 'gnosis' means 'to know'. You don't want to be told, you don't believe in anything, you don't have faith, you know because you've seen it. Doubting Thomas, my favourite Apostle, sounds like he comes from Northampton, he's like, 'I want to stick my hand in here, this could be a hologram'. I can respect that. What happened with the invention of Christianity, which as far as I can see was the invention of Constantine and his advisors, they needed a composite religion to solve the political problems in ancient Rome. That was invented out of a blend of other beliefs and all of a sudden it was no longer required that you have a personal divine vision, they're saying 'Come to us'. In fact they're saying it doesn't even matter we haven't had a divine vision, we've got this book, and this book is about people a long time ago, and they had divine visions and we'll read to you about them. In effect it's putting a dam between people and what you might call the godhead, their personal power.

Getting past the priests, getting past the middle men who are the problem with everything. Look at Karl Marx, those who control the means of production will inevitably control the society, and he'd never heard of the middle class. It's those who do the paperwork that will control society and the same is true of spirituality, the middle men, the agents, the ones who can get between you and your personal idea of God. If you get in the way of their fear-based virus ( 'If you don't believe this you're going to Hell' ( this idea virus based upon fear. And just as it turns out Christianity was designed to solve a political problem ( the first thing Nicodemus did, the second Christian Emperor, was to have all the tax papers, the census that related to the Galilee area during the first century, brought to Rome and burned, because they were in the business of setting up some kind of myth; a useful political myth. The Ten Commandments were built into it, social controls. . .

What it seems we have to do now most of us have been disenfranchised from any sort of power, whether material or spiritual, is to find a way to connect back with the source of our personal power. I do not believe that is to be found in religion or mass movements. Power has to be personal, the only form of power worth having is personal power, any other form is poisonous. Power over someone else is poison. To get that personal power we need to connect personally. That doesn't mean joining a cult, it means, and to me this is the definition of shamanism, we are first individuals and we must reconnect with something that is a personal truth. Something that we knew when we were five and were then tricked out of in some way, or led or bullied out of.

Now, on a political level. . .

. . .of course history, as with any fiction, like the story of Superman, can be revised endlessly. We suddenly find what we had taken for three separate Egyptian dynasties was in fact one Pharaoh with two nicknames. All of a sudden 120 years collapse into 40 and we shift everything around accordingly.

It struck me when I got around to the London pentacle [in From Hell] and I actually had people saying, 'Is that real?' And I was saying yes and no. Those sites are really there, they do line up like I say they do, they do have the significance that I apply to them. Do I believe that a group of Freemasons got together to map London into the shape of a diabolical pentacle? Of course not. I don't believe bollocks like that. Do I believe that the pentacle has meaning and relevance? Of course I do.

All points in the past, whether they're so-called history or so-called myth, are points of information like the stars are points of information. We cannot reach out and touch them but we can see them, perceive them. We look at the stars and we say, Oh well, that group of stars look like a hunter, hey, we're on drugs, we're pissed. Now they only look like that from here, the three stars that are so neatly lined up in Orion's belt are light years away from each other except from here, where they're all in a neat little line. Just as we might say that pentacle does not exist apart from here, from Alan Moore, and from bits of Iain Sinclair that I've borrowed. So these constellations aren't real, we've created them with imposed patterns, but we can use those patterns to navigate, which has changed the entire human history. So even though the stars are untouchable, unguessable, they've changed the course of history.

...There was a good article in The Independent, I say it was good because it was very flattering to me. It said that the Booker Prize is not the salvation of British literature but the wake of British literature. These traditionalist confines, you know, are the very antithesis of what living British literature is about. This article cited people like Moorcock, Ballard, the New Worlds school of sf, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair. This is the life blood; Iain Banks, Irvine Welsh, etc. On her death bed, everybody was thinking wouldn't it be nice if Angela Carter got a Booker, but I doubt she would have bothered for a moment, she always talked about 'shortlist victims'. Good phrase. To me British culture is always happening at the margins. This is not approved, this is not within captivity.

I know you based the first story in Voice of the Fire on aboriginal language, but what I both liked and found frustrating was the way you had almost half sentences/half meanings, so the reader got a world through a language that seemed half formed, catching glimpses of the world, but never quite its totality.

Well that's the thing, you were half removed because of the language, but it's because of the language you were even halfway there. Half removed is better than completely removed. I take your point, and it's a true one. It seems to me now that it was an experiment.

When I did 'Hob's Hog' I wanted a distinct voice for each chapter. Now that's okay up to recorded history, when you've got recorded history you know pretty well how these people thought up to a point, and how they spoke. If you go back beyond the Romans into prehistory, you don't know these people thought or spoke, and if you go back to the Stone Age there's no written language. So what I thought I'd have to do was come up with some kind of make-believe Stone Age tongue, based upon English but following certain rules I applied. . .

If this seems hard to believe you only have to go back as far as the early part of this century, to Winsor McCay, who is generally recognised as a great cartoonist, but also as the father of animation. Now he did some early animated films, one of which was Gertie, the Dinosaur. He was a clever bastard. It was early animation, simple black and white lines, but he used to go around with the film when it was showing, to give a little talk while it was going on. He had structured it so he could appear to give questions or commands to Gertie and she would obey him. At one point he would walk offstage and then walk back, or an animation of him would walk back on and interact with the dinosaur, ride on her back, stuff like that.

The dinosaur is in a landscape that includes a lake or inland sea, distant mountains. Now the people in that theatre knew it only went back a hundred yards and then there was a wall. However, when they came out, all of them, without exception, believed they had seen a real dinosaur on stage. They did not have the concept of animated film. Even though this meant they somehow had to block their logic and assume you could fit a mountain range and a lake into a space they knew was a hundred yards deep.

. . .the idea of satire as a vent of anger, that prevents true rebellion.

That's satire in the modern sense, what satire has been diminished to. I'm talking about satire in its old magical sense. A satire was feared because it would destroy you in a way that a bullet couldn't. . .

To go back to satire, when you did Watchmen, which is a satire of sorts on superhero comics, was your aim to kill something?

So now, would you think you have more of a choice of media to work in? Would the idea dictate the medium?

To some degree. The two CDs that I've done, which I'm very proud of. It's not the same as the music I've done, I mean, I've been in bands and written some good pop songs, but at the end of the day they're good pop songs  the world's got enough good pop songs. But this new stuff, spoken word, where we're breaking into something which I feel is new, that really excites me. It's almost like the idea of, 'Hey, let's do a CD', then that generates the content to some degree. That opens the idea up.

. . .And then Dave Gibbons said, 'Do you want to do a CD ROM?' My first thought was. . .

It's like our original mythic landscape, all myths whether you're talking about Gilgamesh or Arthur or whatever, what they do is have this mythic landscape full of monsters, mythical places, gods. All of which mean something, they are all forms in the human psychosphere, they're all messages, and important ones. Then you invent your hero, your Gilgamesh, your Arthur, as a kind of Everyman, the projected astral body of the people listening to it, the point of identification. They travel round the world of the Odyssey with Ulysses as their astral body, their virtual body. That is the mythic landscape. We enter into the mythic landscape through the tales of heroes or gods or whatever. Strikes me with this CD ROM stuff you've got the potential to actually open a doorway to the real mythic landscape in a much more encompassing sense, and see what kind of experiences people have. My ideas are still formative but that's an example of how having a new form of technology opened up and created this rich web of possibilities.

. . .I don't really want to restrict any avenues of communication. They've all got something interesting about them. The CDs were purely out of magical experiences and I'm as proud of them as I think I am of any of my comic work. . .

[Brought to Light]

The best compliment that I got was passed to me by a guy from Hollywood who phoned up. He might even end up doing some of the From Hell stuff, but he phoned mainly because he's involved in making a film about American covert activities based upon the writings and confessions of this spook who was in the Agency for 30 or 40 years, whatever, from the end of the second world war, and was in on all of this stuff. He ordered the executions, he trafficked the drugs, he made the cash payments to the opium warlords. This guy who phoned me had given this spook a copy of Brought to Light. The spook, well, first off he was stunned by some of the things we knew. . .