Selene: The Moon Goddess & the Cave Oracle

by Steve Moore

Forthcoming from the MIT Press.

Genres: Mythology

365 pages, Hardcover

Published December 25, 2018

About the author

Steve Moore was a British comics writer known for his influence on the industry and his close connection with Alan Moore (no relation). He was instrumental in guiding Alan Moore early in his career and collaborated with him under pseudonyms in various projects.
Moore contributed extensively to British comics, particularly in anthologies such as 2000 AD, where he helped shape the Future Shocks format and wrote for Dan Dare. His work extended to Doctor Who Weekly, where he co-created Abslom Daak, and Warrior, where he revived Axel Pressbutton. His involvement with Marvel UK included writing for Hulk and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D..
Outside of comics, Moore had a deep interest in Chinese history, mythology, and the I Ching, which influenced much of his writing. He edited Fortean Times and contributed to works on the unexplained. His novel Somnium explored his fascination with the moon goddess Selene.
Later in his career, Moore scripted Hercules: The Thracian Wars, which was adapted into a film in 2014. He ultimately retired from mainstream comics to focus on non-fiction and research, maintaining his lifelong engagement with esoteric studies.

Reviews

[Eric Hoffman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steve Moore was a man of many accomplishments. He is certainly well-known to the Fortean Times audience—he was the magazine’s editor during its early days, spear-headed the indexing of its first hundred or so issues, edited several of its reprint volumes and anthologies, and later edited its academically-inclined sister journal Fortean Studies. He was a prolific comics writer: in 1971, he created the first UK comics fanzine Orpheus. He scribed several of the most memorable serials for 2000 AD, including 'Hollow World,' many of the long-running Future Shocks, and the more recent 'Red Fang.' He wrote for Doctor Who Weekly and other numerous titles for Marvel UK, and contributed to the now legendary anthology series Warrior. He also wrote stories for Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales, one of frequent collaborator Alan Moore’s line of America’s Best Comics. At the time of his death, he and Moore were co-writing The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, a modern-day grimoire, yet to be published. Steve Moore was a noted authority on, and practitioner of, the I Ching. His I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography (2002) is a now-classic text on the subject. He was inducted into the Royal Asiatic Society as a Fellow, and from 1995-2002 he edited The Oracle, The Journal of Yijing Studies. He also wrote fiction, most notably the fantasy stories Tales of Telguuth and the novel Somnium: A Fantastic Romance (2011), both published by Strange Attractor Press.

Somnium takes place in The Bull Inn, an actual inn located at the summit of Shooter’s Hill, a district in South East London where Moore lived a near-hermetic existence, occupying, along with his brother, his childhood home. The novel, which concerns a young man’s attempt to write a romance based on the relationship between the Moon Goddess Selene and the mortal Endymion, was in part autobiographical, as Moore spent decades researching the history, mythology, and literary and representational depictions of Selene. His researches began in October 1976 when, after an improvised magic ritual for guidance, conducted with a recently-purchased Chinese coin sword—Moore was an avowed admirer of Chinese swordfight films—he awoke near dawn to hear a voice speak the name ‘Endymion.’ Thus, Moore, who was born during a full moon, had a crescent-shaped birthmark, and lived atop a crescent-shaped hill composed primarily of the mineral selenite, came to identify himself with the sleeper Endymion, Selene’s forsaken lover. Subsequently, lunar references began to appear in both his comics and fiction. Alan Moore, in his biography of Moore, Unearthing, first published in the Iain Sinclair-edited anthology, London: City of Disappearances (2009) and later reprinted as a standalone volume, describes a later event wherein S. Moore successfully conjured the physical form of Selene, an event that A. Moore claims to have witnessed. S. Moore’s biographical details are recounted in this present volume, Selene – The Moon Goddess and the Cave Oracle, in both the introduction by Bob Rickard, and the afterword by A. Moore.

Regrettably, the extra-textual details that concern Moore’s unearthly, occult relationship with Selene are absent from his text. As a result, it is difficult to parse from his densely conveyed yet orderly and cohesive work of scholarship the passion that led to this project, whatever its strengths as academic research. While the lack of a firsthand account of its background must remain a missed opportunity, Moore probably assumed that such decidedly occult circumstances would be a difficult sell for more serious scholars. Perhaps Somnium already adequately covered this territory, or perhaps Moore, who expressed reservations about the attention given to his private life that occurred in the wake of Alan Moore’s biography, wanted the focus of attention here to be on Selene herself. Indeed, what Steve Moore is most concerned with in Selene is the origin and development of the Moon Goddess in myth, literature, and iconography. His mastery of the material is evident throughout: for example, one does not feel the weight of the research as one normally does in more pedantic compilations, where factual and interpretative information are stacked upon the reader haphazardly, with little guidance from the nuanced hand of a skilled interpreter.

Nevertheless, from the material Moore has assembled, Selene remains a rather unfixed figure; the myths and legends that sprang up about her are comprised of many variations. At times Selene almost seems to consist of a multiplicity of identities, with no definable set of characteristics or attributes, not even a consistent name. Rather, the Moon Goddess represents a syncretic cluster of correspondences, mythological resonances whose obtainment of a distinctive identity depends greatly on a variety of cultural and historical circumstances. Thus, Moore is troubled to confidently determine just who Selene is, apart from a variety of interpretations and representations. Historical research demands hard, solid evidence, insightfully and incisively—which is to say “professionally”—interpreted. Yet what Moore has bravely and somewhat poetically concluded in light of his studies (for example, he gives the fanciful Robert Graves a well-earned knocking), is that Selene, just as she physically appeared to Moore at his home on Shooter’s Hill, must finally remain a vague, indeterminate spirit. Much like the ancient world from which she sprung, Moore’s Selene is not entirely present or entirely absent.

Strange Attractor Press is to be commended for their publication of Selene. This work deserves attention if only to celebrate Moore’s obsessive pursuit of a subject and an acknowledgment that, no matter what the vintage of the materials at hand, ancient or recent, there remains fresh evidence to be unearthed, tidbits of buried information that, once the dirt and dust has been wiped away, captures the imagination with the radiance of a jewel made brilliant by pressure, time, heat, and darkness.

Review originally published in a truncated version in the Fortean Times 387, Dec 2019. Review by Eric Hoffman © 2019 Eric Hoffman

[Alex Sarll]

An odd time to read this, perhaps; her solar brother is on the rampage, and we've just finished pondering the half-century since we briefly collapsed a metaphor and then, after a few hops and golf swings, scuttled back down the gravity well, uncertain what to do next. But the goddess of the Moon is in many ways an uncertain figure, and much of Moore's project consists in disentangling her from syncretism (ancient and modern) and awkward rationalisations (likewise) to deduce what can be said with any confidence about the cult specific to Selene. The answer, inevitably, is 'not much'; if nothing else, the book serves as a reminder of how little of the classical world survives to be known, and how far that little is from agreeing on much. Still, one certainly ends the book feeling one has come to know Selene better which, as the afterword by Alan Moore (no relation) reveals, may have been a large part of the point. Because this was not just a work of scholarship, but a worshipper's devotional - and more even than that, a love letter, Moore having embarked on a relationship with Selene during its long gestation. Or, a possibility he was too sensible not to entertain, gone absolutely potty. Still, it does seem that in accordance with a prior agreement between the pair, his heart stopped pretty much the instant he finished revising the text. This making it all the more remarkable that, reading the book proper, you'd never deduce that it wasn't the work of a simple gentleman scholar, but instead of a man who, whether you believe his story or not, was either way a literal lunatic. Conceptually, probably the closest parallel would be Graves' White Goddess, whose wild conjectures come in for frequent kickings in these pages, and into whose dense prose I've been making very occasional forays for well over a decade, as against the speed with which I zipped through this lucid, meticulous, but never obscure account; think a more rigorously focused, and thus less forbidding, Ronald Hutton. A monument worthy both of the goddess, and her Endymion.

[rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

sad. the scholarship here is on point, but it feels like a LONG list of footnotes. i wanted a narrative, something inspiring that connected me to moonworshippers of the past. this is greece/antiquity only and while judging it for being what it isn't seems harsh it is at least fair to say its incomparable to someone like eliade, for better and worse. steve moore is a great writer in his own ways and so its disappointing that he himself doesn't come through much. this is a book of indexing, not tales, and should be kept on the indexing/reference shelf. dnf.