It is also the home of a working magician decorated with ritual wands from the Golden Dawn falcon

It is also the home of a working magician, decorated with ritual wands from the Golden Dawn, falcon masks and the haunting art of the occultist Austin Osman Spare. This makes for an appropriately strange setting for the recluse whom Iain Sinclair has described as “the last sane man in England”.”Magic and Art are the same,” he affirms “Which is why Magic is referred to as The Great Art. They are both technologies of Will, both about pulling rabbits out of hats and creating something where there was nothing.” Moore and the artist J H Williams have just published the fifth and final volume of Promethea (America’s Best Comics/Titan, £24.99), which is partly a superhero comic about a young woman coming into mystic power at the end of the second millennium, and partly a course of instruction in magic and the occult. It is funny and exciting, and somehow you don’t feel quite the same after reading it; it’s a book that leaves you with a sense of the connectedness of things. A bestselling piece of commercial art, Promethea is also as much Moore’s grimoire as the two CDs of his ritual performances, The Highbury Working and Snakes and Ladders.”Books of magic are always written in high metaphor,” he explains.

“They are about our relationship to consciousness and how we construe it.” Consciousness is the hole in rationalism. You cannot reproduce it in a laboratory, which is why some rationalist philosophers like Dan Dennett try to deny the shared experience of knowing that there is a “how” to how we feel. For Moore, magic is a way of breaking the paradigm, of making sense of our lives as we live them.He is distrustful of many things about magic and the occult: “When I talk about Kabbala, it is a coherent system for organising our understanding of things and the connections between them, not wearing a red string on your wrist or drinking expensive bottled water.” One of the most beautiful sections of Promethea is a prolonged wander through the Sephirothim, the realms of reality described by the Kabbala, which are cognate with the planets of non-predictive astrology and with the effects of colour on our moods. Thus, one issue is largely green and discusses that oceanic feeling of belonging and being nurtured that is associated with Venus; it is also Williams’s tribute to the swirly softness of Alphonse Mucha and much Underground art of the 1960s.Promethea was also about setting himself and Williams challenges. After the episode in which they had presented the history of the world as a tarot deck, it had to be a matter of ever-escalating virtuoso explorations of different styles of comics and of occult art. The last issue, for example, in which everything we have learned about magic is recapitulated, is designed both page by page, and to fold out as two large posters of Promethea.”One of the problems with the occult is the vested interest of most occultists in obfuscation,” says Moore.

The Iceman now resides in the South Tyrol Museum in Bolzano, where he earns millions of dollars a year in entry fees The Simons fought for years for a share of that money. The Italian authorities were convinced that his grave lay inside their border and, after the establishment of a boundary commission, he was repatriated over the Brenner Pass under armed guard. Initial assumptions that it was a modern corpse – that of a hiker who had struck misfortune, for instance – were overturned, amid high excitement Italy, however, was determined to claim Oetzi for its own. He didn’t keel over, although he was probably tired, exhausted and hurt like hell.” Controversy surrounded the cadaver from the start. After the Simons found it in the melting glacier, its head and shoulder protruding from the ice, the Austrian authorities took it to Innsbruck for examination.

Dr Loy concluded from blood samples on an arrow that he might have killed two of his assailants and retrieved it to fire again. In an interview a few years ago, he said: “On the basis of all my examinations, Oetzi’s speciality was hunting the high alpine passes for ibex [wild goat] and possibly chamois, which would have taken him into boundary conditions where other people would have disputed the territory. “I suspect that as he realised his life was ending, he stopped, put his gear down, stacked it neatly against a rock wall and lay down and expired. Dr Loy was on the brink of completing a book about his work on Oetzi, according to colleagues. His studies had enabled him to piece together a version of events leading up to the Stone Age man’s death. Oetzi was shot in the back with a flint arrow; he also had cuts on his hands, wrists and rib-cage. Spindler had scoffed at suggestions of a curse, declaring: “I think it’s a load of rubbish It is all a media hype.