Diving deep into Alan Moore’s “The Great When”
A Study Guide
Alan Moore’s The Great When feels like the spiritual successor to his Providence cycle from 2003–2017. Like Providence, we follow a character who we don’t know and who doesn’t know much about the world that they’re getting into, but this time, instead of interacting with the 1920's New England of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, we’re stumbling through the late 1940's London of occultist Austin Osman Spare and horror writer Arthur Machen. There is tangential connection between Lovecraft and Spare via occultist Kenneth Grant, while Machen was one of Lovecraft’s influences. What a magical web we find ourselves in!
Weaving the Web
When an author puts so much work and research into a book, the reader should be prepared to dedicate the same amount of effort if they want to get the maximum effect from the book. Alan Moore mirrored this sentiment in a recent interview about The Great When:
Now 70 years old, Moore is “making more of an effort to conjure this spell of words to involve the readers, to make them feel like they are viscerally there, like these things are actually happening to them in a vicarious sense”. But he expects the same effort in return: “I’m depending upon readers to do at least part of the work, because I think that the more work they do, the more they will enjoy it.”
Aside from its stylistic relationship with Providence, The Great When also shares a connection with Alan Moore’s epic 2016 book Jerusalem. In both books, Moore uses the concept of a multilayered metaphysical reality of a specific place as a literary device. In Jerusalem, he was exploring the psychogeography of Northampton and now in The Great When, he’s exploring the hidden layers of London. By slipping between these two realities, we as the reader can get a spiritual sense of what motivates the place, behind its purely physical experience. As Moore says in the book, If this London is what they call the Smoke, then that place is the Fire… I think this type of symbolic exploration must be deep in the mechanism of Alan Moore’s magical process.
Just like he did in Providence and Jerusalem, Moore peppers the story with real life occurrences, which has the reader pausing the novel to look up and confirm facts about the life and work of Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant, Arthur Machen, Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, and more. I love how deep Alan Moore‘s research goes, because it makes his stories that much more real, which I think must be the grounding and manifesting aspect of his magical working, rooting his fiction into our shared reality.
“Find out about place. Enrich places with their meaning because meaning is the most important currency. It’s the thing that we lose when we decide not to have mythologies anymore, because mythologies led to Stalinism and fascism. When we don’t have mythologies then the meaning bleeds out of everything. It’s like a half life. Meaning has a half life and eventually you’ll be left with dull, inert lead.” — Alan Moore, from a conversation with Adam Curtis in May 2018
The Great When has a much more tangible occult vibration than Providence did, with Austin Osman Spare obviously being an occultist and working with magical intention, whereas Lovecraft in Providence was only ever an occultist in Kenneth Grants eyes. In real life, Lovecraft was a sober materialist who never believed in any of the supernatural elements that he wrote about, so in Providence, the characters can’t directly work with the occult forces, but must have the forces work through them, which is part of the plot device in Providence. In The Great When, Moore is free to do and talk about occult and magical practices directly.
I’m wondering if we can draw some sort of occult trajectory starting with Moore’s 1999–2005 highly occult Promethea graphic novels, and continuing on through all of his work since then. That magical influence would either be an instruction manual for us to follow on how to perform the kind of occult acts that Alan Moore likes to do (playing with the relationship between language and reality) or a progress bar for how good Moore is getting at doing these types of works: The intersection of real life fact, abstract internal occult life, and fictional life, blurred and swirled and mixed into a magical spell. What the function of the spell is, I have no idea, but I hope that it’s working on me deeply. Moore even comments on this mixing of realities in the afterward of the audiobook.
Time to Go Deep
Just as I advised in my Providence study guide, after finishing the book, it’s time to follow the breadcrumb trail that Moore has left for us, so that we can gain all the insights and revelations that The Great When has to offer.
To fully understand the world that The Great When plants us in, there are several figures that we need to understand.
Alan Moore
Since this is a magical work, it would be good to understand how Moore sees himself as a magician, as well experiencing some of his related work:
The Mindscape of Alan Moore documentary helps to explains Moore’s transition from celebrated comic book author to magician-writer. I think this detail is important because part of the journey of unpacking his works involves understanding how Moore builds his fictional worlds as magical constructs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moRkHk-q9Rg
What Magic is This podcast. In this 2020 episode, the podcast explores Alan Moore’s magical practice and his works from an occult perspective: https://whatmagicisthis.com/2020/04/30/the-marvellous-magical-world-of-alan-moore/
According to a Guardian book review,
Alan Moore hit the heights with his 2006 essay Unearthing, a tribute to Steve Moore, who created the UK’s first comics fanzine. Here he describes his mentor’s home in Shooters Hill as part of “dreaming London”, a place where “residues of fossil night-sweat crown the tumulus”, a “life-sump for the Neolithic swill to fill, the pallid Morlock scum”.
This is Alan Moore in full-on psychogeologist mode, envisioning deep time — with its glowering, mesmerising violence — beneath the surface of everything that masquerades as the present day. It gives a V-sign to literary realism, to the twee cosiness of much modern landscape writing. This London is both hyperreal and fugitive, populated by rogues and occult reprobates, littered with the residue of pulp publishing. And the language! Steve isn’t born; rather, he unwinds from “the luminous coelenterate complexity that is his mother”.
In many ways Unearthing reads like an extended prologue to The Great When, the first volume in a planned “Long London Quintet”, its title a pun on pamphleteer William Cobbett’s belief that the early 19th-century English capital was becoming a “wen” — a boil, a sebaceous cyst. It’s set in the year that Steve Moore was born: 1949.
You can listen to Unearthing on Spotify.
A series of interviews with Alan Moore, talking about The Great When:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFrXudWFbJ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4cQ3RO1fXs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8067aKqPu0
https://youtu.be/pVwl7m2xg6M?si=Bx0AkLdg99JRcagD
https://www.writersbone.com/podcastsarchive/2024/10/14/alan-moore
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/534026/alan-moore-on-life-nuclear-war-and-the-coming-ai-apocalypse
Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre — The Highbury Working. The second track — A Skeleton Horse provides answers as to who the lady is who rides the bone horse while clutching a key in The Great When. The entire album could be seen as exploring the Great When of Highbury. (Thanks to reddit user geckodancing for this suggestion) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W8VAcJ8sXk
Austin Osman Spare
Occultist, Artist, Writer, and a sort of magical guide in The Great When:
A 23 page primer on the life and work of Austin Osman Spare, which includes quite a number of things that we read about in The Great When: https://thelasttuesdaysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Spare-BROCHURE-low-res.pdf
A video of Moore reflecting on Spare’s life and works from 13 or so years ago: https://youtu.be/rlzEdlpigvk?si=ZBaouxzZEDRf9y9A
What Magic is This podcast. In this 2021 episode, the podcast explores Austin Osman Spare’s legacy as a magical practitioner, writer, and artist from an occult perspective: https://whatmagicisthis.com/2021/01/07/austin-osman-spare/
The definitive biography of Spare is by Phil Baker and can be found here, as well as an audiobook version here.
A few pieces of artwork that were on display at the art show that we attend in the book:
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6011332
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6237624
The surrealist cards that are mentioned in the book : https://www.weiserantiquarian.com/pages/books/49918/austin-osman-spare/surrealist-racing-forecast-cards?soldItem=true
A few good youtube analyses of Spare’s life and work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsVOFdRvziQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jdy0yUQ-34
This isn’t mentioned in the book but I found it really interesting: a rare deck of tarot cards made by Spare that have recently been reproduced for sale: http://strangeattractor.co.uk/news/austin-osman-spare-tarot/
Arthur Machen
A Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction:
Hermitix podcast episode that presents an overview of the life and works of Arthur Machen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToqxY0C7O_0&t=16s
A short background on Arthur Machen and his relationship to Lovecraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhWb9K_5ojc
An audiobook version of the Arthur Machen’s story N, which was heavily referenced in The Great When:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcc3jFdq2J8
A short analysis of N: https://marzaat.com/2018/05/15/n/
An essay on the occult aspects of N: https://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/volupte/article/view/1507
The Joy of London, a 1914 article by Machen, in which he portrays London as a space of endless occult discoveries through the symbolic and material incorporation of its colonial frontier, and the spatial architecture of the city: https://darklybrightpress.com/the-joy-of-london-i/
Green Round, the other Arthur Machen novel that contains the fictional A London Walk book, also referenced in The Great When: https://archive.org/details/greenround0000arth/page/n7/mode/2up
Kenneth Grant
London occultist and writer who was friends with Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, and who wrote at least one book about the work of Lovecraft, asserting the belief that the Old One’s of Lovecraft’s fiction were real and could be summoned through occult rituals:
A Wikipedia article on Kenneth Grant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Grant
Prince Monolulu
A horse-racing tipster, regularly providing information on the likely outcomes of sporting events, and something of an institution on the British racing scene from the 1920s until the time of his death in 1965:
A short video about Prince Monolulu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE403Izubxc&t=45s
Prince Monolulu on You Bet You Life, 1957, Pt 1 (Starts at 16:07):
https://youtu.be/xzj9y95b7bI?si=MoI3qgcxMQHd8ada&t=967
Prince Monolulu on You Bet You Life, 1957, Pt 2 (Starts at 3:57):
https://youtu.be/0n8dI8F2H10?si=it5CQTFmVHpxBDmh&t=237
Joe Meek
Famously bizarre 1960’s record producer who makes a small appearance at the end of The Great When, but who will appear in the second Long London book:
The Wikipedia article about Joe Meek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Meek
A BBC Documentary about Joe Meek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2hD5iIbts
About the Author
Justin K Prim is not a Moore scholar, but he does appreciate his work immensely. Justin is an American gemcutter and gemologist living and working in Lyon, France. He has previously published an article on the history of gemcutting in London, which covers the Blitz and other events in the 1930s and 40s, which nicely overlaps the events of The Great When. Justin works as a Lapidary Instructor as well as writing articles, producing videos, and giving talks about gem cutting history.
