Alan Moore

On his fortieth birthday, in November 1993, Moore announced that he had become a magician. He has practised and written about it openly ever since, and the deity he says he worships is Glycon — a snake-god of second-century Roman Asia Minor whose oracle was exposed in its own century by Lucian of Samosata as a puppet: a tame snake with a false human head, worked by hand.

⭐⭐⭐ THE BEST NODE IN THIS WING FOR WHAT THE WHOLE APP IS ABOUT, AND IT IS NOT AN ACCIDENT THAT IT IS A COMEDIAN'S ANSWER. Moore knows Glycon was a glove puppet. He says so, cheerfully, unprompted, in interviews. He worships it anyway — on the reasoning that a god is a creature of the imagination and that this makes it no less real, and rather more honest about what it is.

⚠ Set that against everything else on these three benches. Wing J and Wing L are full of people who needed their material to be ancient and were prepared to shave the dates to get there — Kircher's chart sold as the Tree, Lévi's 1855 table sold as Egyptian, a manuscript nobody could produce. Moore is the one figure in the whole annex who took the provenance problem and solved it by refusing the premise. He does not need it to be old. That is either the most sophisticated position available here or a very good joke, and he has declined for thirty years to say which.