Fossil Angels was written by Alan Moore in December 2002 it’s an essay that was to appear in KAOS #15 which never actually appeared, and the piece has been without a home since then. (More information about KAOS and why this wasn’t published there in this article on Bleeding Cool.) Mad thanks to Glycon for sharing this masterpiece.
First brought to our attention via Brian Shaughnessy
An excerpt from Fossil Angels pt. 1
“…it was this moment in the history of magic, with content and function lost beneath an over-detailed ritual veneer, all mouth and trousers, which the later orders chose to crystallize about. Without a readily apparent aim or mission, no marketable commodity, the nineteenth century occultist would seem instead to lavish an inordinate amount of his attention on the fancy wrapping paper. Possibly unable to conceive of any group not structured in the hierarchical manner of the lodges that they were accustomed to, Mathers and Westcott dutifully imported all the old Masonic heirlooms when it came to furnishing their fledgling order. All the outfits, grades and implements. The mindset of a secret and elite society. Crowley, of course, took all this heavy and expensive-looking luggage with him when he jumped ship to create his O.T.O, and all orders since then, even purportedly iconoclastic enterprises such as, say, the I.O.T, would seem to have eventually adopted the same High Victorian template. Trappings of sufficient drama, theories intricate enough to draw attention from what the uncharitable might perceive as lack of any practical result, any effect upon the human situation.
The fourteenth (and perhaps final?) issue of the estimable Joel Biroco’s KAOS magazine featured a reproduction of a painting, a surprisingly affecting and hauntingly beautiful work from the brush of Marjorie Cameron, scary redhead, Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell’s housemate, putative Scarlet Woman, top Thelemic totty. Almost as intriguing as the work itself, however, is the title: Fossil Angel, with its contradictory conjurings of something marvellous, ineffable and transitory combined with that which is by definition dead, inert and petrified. Is there a metaphor available to us in this, both sobering and instructive? Could not all magical orders, with their doctrines and their dogmas, be interpreted as the unmoving calcified remains of something once intangible and full of grace, alive and mutable? As energies, as inspirations and ideas that danced from mind to mind, evolving as they went until at last the limestone drip of ritual and repetition froze them in their tracks, stopped them forever halfway through some reaching, uncompleted gesture? Trilobite illuminations. Fossil angels.”
—Alan Moore ©
Glycon was lucky enough to be given a number of Alan Moore’s scripts by Alan himself a few years ago, and this was amongst them. Glycon asked if he could publish it and, when another publication which it was slated to appear in folded, Alan told Glycon he was free to go ahead. So, he is very proud to be allowed to present this piece here on Glycon for its first publication anywhere. This is, and remains, the sole property & copyright of its creator, Alan Moore.
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