LWIA 4.3: What doth the Lord require of thee?

In which I hit a beat I've been working towards for twelve years.

This is the last part of Act II. I'll get an omnibus out shortly, but I'm traveling over the weekend so may not get to it until I get back and dive straight into the beginning of Act III, which is probably going to be much more crunchily focused on the actual comic than the first two acts have been.

Thanks for all the support. It feels really good to have finally done this bit.

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This proved apt. From the start, Moore had recognized that what he was trying to do with “What doth the Lord require of thee?” was going to be ambitious, and more to the point was going to ask a lot of Eddie Campbell. He admits as much at the start of the script, saying that “In terms of sustaining a conversation over thirty odd pages, I think you’ll agree that it presents some potentially serious storytelling policies,” musing over a variety of devices like flashbacks that they might use to enliven things before deciding “’naah’. The best way to do this story, I’ve concluded, is absolutely straight, without embellishment, rather like a dry vocal mix in a recording studio as opposed to lots of echo and reverb and whatever. Of course, this will also be the most difficult way to do the piece.”

Campbell and Moore decided to solve the problem by leaning into the length of Gull’s required travels through London, which went through a sufficient number of stops in the course of its pseudo-masonic pentagram that Moore took the trouble of going to London and travelling the route, noting in the appendix that “While I admittedly made the journey by car, giving me the advantage, Gull and Netley didn’t have to contend with twentieth century traffic congestion or bewildering one-way systems.” Campbell, accordingly, structured the issue around the passage of time (further emphasized by an eight page rainstorm in the middle of the issue), taking his cues from his childhood love of “Impressionism, with its focus on the optical appreciation of the contemporary world, the way light falls upon objects and landscapes and cityscapes, and the way smoke and rain and other atmospheric effects tend to obscure detail. I started on this chapter with a thrill of anticipation.”[1] He ended up further bolstering his approach with subtle touches like adopting a convention of having Gull and Netley face right when traveling east and left when traveling west. His attention to detail was so thorough that he ended up catching a historical error in Moore’s scrip, in which he sent Gull and Netley over the still under construction Tower Bridge; Campbell fixed the error by spreading the dialogue out over an extra page and taking a longer route, but not before teasing Moore with a photocopy of the under construction bridge featuring Gull and Netley plunging to their deaths off of it.

(Moore eventually returned the favor in the course of his lengthy interview with Dave Sim, repeatedly mocking Campbell for an inking error in the final issue that resulted in a panel in which Abberline’s head is inexplicably missing, including a riff on how people complain about his lengthy scripts, but just look what happened when he cut the bit specifying that “INSPECTOR ABBERLINE'S HEAD IS STILL ON HIS SHOULDERS DURING THIS PANEL. IT HAD NOT RETREATED TORTOISE-LIKE INTO HIS NECK, NOR HAS IT IN SOME FASHION MANAGED TO REFRACT LIGHT AROUND IT LIKE A KLINGON SPACESHIP SO THAT THE INSPECTOR RESEMBLES SOMETHING OUT OF MAGRITTE WITH HIS BOWLER FLOATING THERE SUSPENDED ABOVE THE EMPTY COLLAR OF HIS COAT,”[2] before finally paying off the bit with the anecdote of the bridge error and a complaint about how “It's not big to make fun of people's genuine and inadvertent mistakes like that; it's just childish.”[3])

The centerpiece of Campbell’s structure, however, was simply Hawksmoor’s churches. He reasoned that “the visually repetitive traveling sequences that Alan worried about are strung between a series of large open architectural studies that, if drawn in great detail, I felt would create a pattern to hold the reader’s interest in the chapter.”[4] And so, with the help of his then-assistant Steve Stamatiadis, Campbell embarked on a series of large panels, generally occupying two thirds of the page, in which the churches and a smattering of other major locations like St. Paul’s are rendered in all their monolithic weight, ensuring that Moore’s psychogeography remained well anchored in the city’s embodied corpus.

As for the actual lecture, the crux of Gull’s issue-long villain monologue is the idea that London is, on a structural and architectural level, a prison constructed by the male solar deity (who Gull identifies syncretically, naming him as, among others, Helios, Baal, Apollo, Lud, and Christ) to imprison the lunar feminine. The solar, in this account, is represented by obelisks, including Hawksmoor’s steeples, forming a “pentacle of Sn Gods, obelisks and rational male fire, wherein unconsciousness, the Moon, and Womanhood are chained.” Gull’s plan is thus to use his commission to silence Marie Kelly and her co-conspirators as an opportunity to ritually sacrifice them in order to reinforce the structure and keep women subjugated for eternity.

This advanced what was, for Moore, one of the major conceptual themes of From Hell. It is worth recalling that his initial interest in exploring a murder stemmed from conversations with Debbie Delano, whose own interest in true crime was heavily rooted in the sorts of feminist concerns that would eventually animate her novel The Saddest Sound. As Moore put it, the Ripper murders were “interesting because they were such terribly misogynistic acts.”[5] He was fascinated both by the wave of fake letters from the Ripper, noting the “men all over London that weren’t Jack the Ripper, but who wished they were,” and also the way in which sex workers in the East End “would apparently talk with a sort of glee about their prospects of being the next victim.”[6] And so this sexuality—implicit and indeed inextricable from the murder of several sex workers—became the conceptual center of Gull’s masonic ritual.

Gull’s monologue is, however, quite lengthy, and necessarily makes several digressions. Throughout the lecture Gull returns to the notion of religious visions, starting when he brings up William Blake, noting Alexander Gilchrist’s observation that it’s only “comparatively recently that seeing visions would call into doubt a person’s sanity.” He discusses the two hemispheres of the brain, associating the rational left side with the solar and the imaginative right with the lunar, declaring Blake “the voice of our Right brain, the mind’s Atlantis, singing over Bedlam’s clamour, where Blake claimed, the mad had locked away the sane,” and discussing his own vision of god, which he freely admits was a hallucination caused by his stroke. “I saw God,” he says. “I knelt before him and he told me what to do. And Gull the doctor says ‘why, to converse with Gods is madness.’ And Gull, the man replies, ‘Then who’d be sane?’” (“Most people,” rued Blake in a 2025 seance.)

It is in the course of these observations that Gull offers another one of the book’s seismic moments—the key thing that Moore made up only to have come true. The moment comes as Gull and Netley break for lunch and Netley, not unreasonably, asks Gull what all this stuff about solar gods has to do with the job Queen Victoria just asked them to do. Gull warns Netley not to scorn the gods, explaining that “The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.” As Moore tells it, “I wrote that, and thought, ‘That’s ringing and resonant,’ and then I thought, ‘Oh Christ, that’s true, isn’t it? I can’t think of a way around that, so for the sake of this little speech balloon I’m going to have to change my entire life, aren’t I?’ I’m going to have to transform because it was true. I’d accidentally written something true.”[7] And so he did the only sensible thing and became a wizard.

The problem—and the reason the line does not ultimately challenge the one that prefigures it for the title of the most consequential Moore wrote—is that this story isn’t entirely true. For one thing, it contradicts the other story Moore likes telling about his magical awakening. In that one, “I was turning 40 and thinking, Oh dear, I m probably going to have one of those midlife crisis things which always just bore the hell out of everybody. So it would probably be better if, rather than just having a midlife crisis, I just went completely screaming mad and declared myself to be a magician. That would, at least, be more colorful. So, I announced, on the night of my 40th birthday party, probably after more beers than I should have had, that, from this point on, I’m going to become a magician.”[8] But Moore’s 40th birthday came in November of 1993, whereas “What doth the Lord require of thee” was published in November of 1991, and Moore mentions Campbell was drawing it in an interview conducted in 1990[9], so it was plainly several years before.

This is not a case of Moore changing his story. His earliest account of the birthday story dates to a 1994 interview with Rapid Eye, while he first relates the “grandeur and monstrosity” story in a 1995 interview in Hero Illustrated, and he has relayed both anecdotes repeatedly in the years that follow, sometimes in the same interview. In one, he describes the “grandeur and monstrosity” line as “the beginning of a chain of thought which, as I say, led me to a very serious immersion in what I suppose would largely be referred to as magic[10],” a chain of thought that culminates on his fortieth birthday.

But even that story elides the basic fact that this chain is some three years long. Clearly there are further details to be gleaned. Crumbs of these exist in other interviews—one where he describes how “I found I couldn’t progress any further with writing by strict rationality. If I wanted to go further with my writing, make it more intense, more powerful, make it say what I wanted to say, I had to take a step beyond technique and rational ideas about writing, into something that was trans-rational if you will, this being magic.”[11] Elsewhere he remarks that becoming a magician was “something that had been coming for a while; it seemed to be a logical end step in my career as a writer.”[12] And the seeds can certainly be found in his early interest in William S. Burroughs and the cut-up method, which was, after all, developed as a magical practice.

What all of these accounts omit, however, is the role of Steve Moore in the decision to become a magician. Writing together on the subject of their magical order, the Moon and Serpent Grand Egyprian Theatre of Marvels, the Moores place the earliest event in the chain of circumstances leading to its founding as “Steve Moore’s seemingly spontaneous adoption in the middle 1970s of the Greek Moon-goddess Selene as a personal deity,”and describe how “through almost the next two decades as the pair frequently fraternised and worked on projects either separately or together, a slowly-evolving theory of the occult, divination systems, dreams, unusual phenomena and similarly liminal concerns would gradually congeal.” It’s also notable that in 1992 Steve Moore was affiliated with Peter Carroll’s Illuminates of Thanateros, although the association was brief and unfruitful. Writing about it in Unearthing, Alan Moore recounts his compatriot’s asking why the order used black ceremonial robes, only to be told that “it shows colossal ignorance to even ask. God, what if everybody questioned the most basic principles of ritual like that? It’d be chaos.” Presumably some poetic license is being employed, although one still suspects that his compatriot’s negative experience in the IOT formed part of Moore’s rejection of his great rival’s preferred system of Chaos Magic. The more interesting detail comes slightly later, as Alan Moore enters his own narrative to admit that “in the early 1990s with a three-lane pile-up of a marriage still receding in the rear-view mirror, following him into magic seems a good idea, a way to steer the vehicle of writing off the speedway of career into fluorescent wasteland. His forays in organized contemporary magical society, all his New Cross necromantic nights, are watched with interest.”

This, rather than a drunken decision at a party or a startling reaction to a line of dialogue, seems the most plausible account of Moore’s magical turn. His best friend and closest colleague was growing more involved, and Moore ultimately decided to follow suit. By and large, this wasn’t a process of paradigm-shattering revelations; those would come later. His bon mot about gods and demons undoubtedly stuck with him and developed into further thoughts, but he did not sit bolt upright from his typewriter sometime in 1990 and realize that he needed to become a wizard any more than he had a magical awakening at his 40th birthday party. His thought just developed inexorably in the direction it had always been progressing until it reached its inevitable destination.

On the other hand, that isn’t nearly as much fun. Perhaps best to go with the birthday story then. It’ll come true eventually.

In any case, none of this undermines the idea that the “grandeur and monstrosity” line was important. Indeed, much of “What doth the Lord require of thee” straightforwardly prefigures Moore’s openly magical work. He would return to the psychogeographic template repeatedly over the next quarter century. Gull’s musings on the interplay of biology and mystical experience would be reflected in Moore’s own scrupulously rationalist approach to magic. And when it comes to gods and demons, as Moore’s repeated hyping of the line suggests, his thought did continue on those exact lines, arriving at the firm belief that magic is a phenomenon of consciousness. The chapter may not document the sudden moment of transformation, but it still shows Moore nearing a boil, his thoughts clattering forth like hoofbeats on Victorian cobbles as the wellspring of magic begins to burst forth.

[1] Eddie Campbell, From Hell Companion

[2] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell,” Cerebus #217

[3] Dave Sim, “Correspondence From Hell Part 2,” Cerebus #218

[4] Eddie Campbell, From Hell Companion

[5] Gary Groth, “Last Big Words,” The Comics Journal #140

[6] Gary Groth, “Last Big Words,” The Comics Journal #140

[7] Interview with Paul Gravett at the Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8DL76WL6JY and subsequent videos

[8] Nisha Gopalan, “Q&A: Watchmen creator alan Moore,” Entertainment Weekly, https://ew.com/article/2008/07/21/qa-watchmen-creator-alan-moore/

[9] Published in The Comics Journal #140

[10] Alan David Doane, “Alan Moore Interview,” archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20040402035134/http://www.addblog.com/archives/2004_02_29_archive.html

[11] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore, Practicing Magician,” transcript provided privately

[12] DeZ Vylenz, The Mindscape of Alan Moore