Promethea: Book Four by Alan Moore

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The weakest of the series. Upon my most recent re-reading, I actually couldn't make it through much of this book. It was simply too boring. Those parts that deal with the crisis on earth are still entertaining, but the cosmological/spiritual kabbalistic allegory is just... well, stupid. This is all the more tragic given how inventive the layouts are in this and the last volume. Moore and Williams play with shape, color, perspective... they manipulate the design on the page so as to create multiple, interacting timelines within one set of images... it's really a tour de force. Anyone interested in design should be required to study these texts. But anyone interested in philosophy or thoughtful verbal storytelling should stay far away.

One example of the ridiculousness of Moore's occult system: he seems to believe that hermetic magic is an authentic school of thought from ancient Egypt, and much of his schematic understanding of the allegorical significance of various elements, objects, archetypes, etc. rests upon its ancient authority, within which he subsumes Judeo-Christian and other European systems of occult philosophy. But, it's been known for a few hundred years at least that hermetic magic was a construct of early Christian mystics, an attempt to create some sort of ancient source that pre-figured and predicted the rise of Christianity as the "truth". Hermeticism coincides with so much Xian and Judaic mystic thought because it was created to do so. D'oh.



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