The Dream Quest of Steve Moore
BOB RICKARD celebrates the rich dream life and literary legacy of his old friend, Steve Moore.
Last issue’s Moon- and Selenerelated stories set up a poignant banquet that deserved a guest of honour. Sadly, Steve Moore, who died on the afternoon of 14 March 2014, could not attend, but he is very much with us in spirit. Let me tell you why.
I had known Steve since 1967. That was when he, the comic writer-artists Steve Parkhouse and Barry Windsor Smith and I, began corresponding after they saw a fan-letter of mine in a Marvel comic ( Daredevil no 25, Feb 1967; see FT372:2). At that time, they all lived in London while I was a product design student in Birmingham. Our letters were wild, surrealistic and inventive – for example, I tried typing mine on the inside of envelopes. Eventually, Steve P and Barry went off to the USA to work on Marvel’s Daredevil and Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, while Steve M developed his master-disciple relationship with a young Alan Moore (no relation). As I kept very busy with the early FT, Steve regularly visited me in Birmingham. Throughout nearly five decades, by phone and letter (no Internet in those days) he was FT’s attentive midwife; but best of all he was the best kind of friend and colleague I could have ever hoped for. It was not until after his death (see my obit, FT314:2426) that I realised he was so much more than that.
Steve was one of those divinely favoured creatures, an autodidact, with no university degree and no tutoring by academics, just his voluminous correspondence with those he regarded as friends, colleagues and fellow travellers. He was modest about his accomplishments. Those who know him only as a writer of comic strips may be surprised
He awoke to a voice whispering in his ear: “Endymion”
to hear that he devoted years to mastering Greek and Roman mythology, the literature of the late-19th century Decadent movement, Elizabethan culture, and a variety of systems of magic both ancient and modern.
To this he added a profound knowledge of the I Ching and Daoism. He tutored himself in written Mandarin, and became an expert on interpreting the
I Ching ( Yi Jing); eventually editing a specialist periodical and contributing to a well-received annotated bibliography.
He built up an extensive collection of Chinese movies (matched only by his brother Chris’s Japanese movie library), and could recall the plots and actors from most of them. With Alan Moore he raised the bar on comic and graphic novel writing. With me, he’d discuss the work of Charles Fort and helped the evolution of the Fortean Times, not forgetting his many valuable contributions to it, including the Herculean drudgery of compiling indexes to its first 117 issues.
With Mike Crowley, he explored the mysteries of soma (an elixir which bestowed immortality upon the Hindu gods); and pursued China’s mysterious Queen Mother of the West, Xi Wangmu – a shamanic figure possibly older, even, than the Greek deities – on her journey from the mists of antiquity into Daoist legend (she is credited in places as the original author of the Dao De Jing).
What is relevant to us here is that Xi Wangmu, a primordial immortal female, is also said to have had an intimate relationship with a number of China’s early historical emperors and kings. She would visit them in dreams and is even said to have materialised or incarnated as
their consort. Steve found other such relationships – between a divine lover-tutor and a mortal man – in his reading of Græco-Roman mythology, but the one that struck him most was that between the Moon goddess Selene and the shepherd Endymion.
As Alan Moore relates, in his ‘Afterword’ to Steve’s last great work, Selene (published a couple of months ago by Strange Attractor Press), 1976 figures as the year Steve began his serious endeavours. Steve told Alan that it was his spontaneous purchase of a Chinese magical ‘coin sword’ around this time that triggered events. As the weighty shadow of his future loomed before him, he had performed a simple ritual, pointing the sword to the cardinal directions and asking the Fates for some guidance. That night his sleep was dreamless, but in the hypnopompic dawn, he awoke to a voice whispering in his ear: “Endymion”. From then on, the Moon Goddess became an increasingly important part of his life.
Towards the end of his life Steve appointed Alan Moore and me as his executors. I had long known Steve kept a dream diary, but it was only when I began packing up his library – three metric tons of it (mainly books) – that the extent to which he did this religiously became clear. His regular dream record, made over decades and running into many volumes, is now in Alan’s care. It is a unique resource and deserves its own study. Steve had developed a remarkable level of recall and control over his dreams; once confirming to me that he was able, at times, to become conscious within them and direct them to some degree. We had been talking about his attempts to ‘travel’ in a dream – what used to be called ‘astral projection’ – but in retrospect I realise that he was more interested in the creative potential of dreaming, both as inspiration for his story-telling, and – of greater importance to him – as a medium in which he could communicate intimately with his Goddess.
It was only when I read Peter Kingsley’s In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999) that I realised the full importance of this Goddess invocation. Briefly, Kingsley reconstructs the legacy of the Pythagorean philosopher Parmenides, who flourished in southern Greece around the sixth century BC. The Pythagoreans valued quiet and solitude highly, and many of their hero-shrines had within their precinct a quiet place (often a cave under the shrine or on a nearby mountain), where, after appropriate rituals the ‘temple sleep’ began. Supplicants slept in the hope of receiving in their dreams divine guidance or healing (see FT178:30-35, 291:36-39). As Kinsley shows, this ‘incubation’ was not simply to obtain healing or oracular guidance – those were ordinarily practised widely. Certain people, called wisdomseekers ( kouros), used this method specifically for meditation, inspiration and direct intercourse with the gods.
On each of my visits to Steve’s hilltop house – once a family home, then shared with his
brother, but in the end a refuge for its sole occupant – the earthly traces of a stellar intellect were plainly evident. His small office and bedroom were lined with sagging shelves, teetering stacks of ring-binders and file folders, each dedicated to some aspect of his research projects. Each stuffed with his Internet and other research, printed out and carefully filed. Uncovering earlier folders behind or beneath those was a kind of literary and philosophical archæology, the inky tracks of where Steve’s curiosity had run far and wide, but always towards his Goddess.
Steve’s book-lined bedroom was the quiet place in which his daily acts of worship were devoted to illuminating the celestial entity in all her aspects. It was an analogue of Endymion’s cave – a sacred place where the boundaries of this and another world blurred; a temenos into which he placed his incubatory bed. He had crafted an icon of Selene and kept it close to where he laid his head, gazing at it as he drifted off to sleep and hopeful dreaming.
Steve’s simple hermetic lifestyle (which included a few essential clothes and a regular vegetarian diet) also conformed to the Pythagorean formula. A chief characteristic of the wisdom-mysteries, as the Ancient Greeks knew it, was kourotrophos: the milieu in which initiates, kouroi, were brought into contact with the gods as living entities. Although the modern use of the term kouros applies to Greek statuary depicting idealised youths, its more archaic usage, especially among the Pythagoreans, described any aspirant – even to aged philosophers like Parmenides and heroes like Herakles (as he prepared to enter the Underworld) – who quested, or stood before a teacher, or lay down before a divine image, and opened their innermost selves in quiet anticipation. Steve, it is plain to me now, was a kouros in spirit and deed.
His last gift to me – his library – is in my basement, alongside some of the equally bulky library of the late Peter Rogerson (see obit FT366:26). As a researcher into a rare subject – levitation and related phenomena – I could not be more fortunate, having to hand the libraries of two of the greatest fortean minds of my time. Most of the very books I need are literally within my reach. As satisfying as this is, it is of Steve’s presence that I still feel the most loss. I used to pester him for odd things – mentions of ‘magical flying’ from the legends of the Eight Immortals, or what the name was of Hermes’s winged sandals – and he would always come back with exactly what I wanted. Now, as my research wanders further into the territories Steve knew best, causing me, more than ever, to miss his knowledge and guidance, his faint ghost, which is never far away, simply points to my cellar.
Steve’s humble yet gloriously rich example and his unconditional friendship inspired and encouraged me to never feel daunted by the difficulty or exclusivity of a subject, or to worry over the opinion or approval of professional academicians as long as we aim for authentic scholarship – principles we try to apply in FT’s editorial policy. It is there, behind the scenes that Steve’s legacy is very much alive. Follow your hunches; don’t make a fetish of conventions; pay attention to detail; and always include your sources. Don’t forget to have fun.
All this he displays in full measure in Selene. As Alan records in the book’s ‘Afterword’: “[O]n that unusually balmy Friday afternoon… Steve had concluded work on his completed manuscript and risen from his chair.” The heart attack was immediate and Steve died precisely at the moment his earthly work was done, flying, I hope, to the waiting arms of his Goddess. Vale kouros!
Adapted from Bob Rickard’s foreword to Steve Moore, Selene: The Moon Goddess & The Cave Oracle, 2019, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2019.
2 BOB RICKARD started FT in 1973 and was its co-editor for 30 years. He is the author of numerous books and articles on forteana and strange phenomena.