Born in 1886 in London, in the area near the Smithfield market, Austin Osman Spare showed great artistic skills from an early age, which ensured his entrance to the evening course at the Lamberth high school, despite being significantly younger than the rest of the subscribers.
During his adolescence he developed a high interest in occultism, initiated into the magic by the figure of Mrs Paterson: an elderly lady, who called herself a descendant of the witches of the village of Salem; she was the one to teach him the basis of witchcraft and he called her his "second mother".
The relationship between Spare and his real mother was conflictual since pregnancy (his mother confessed that the gestation was "a hell") and, during childhood, she was very strict with him and punished him often, so much to cause in him such a level of frustration that lead him to suffer from a real psychosis, being unable to distinguish reality from the imagination. This taking refuge in his own world, however, enabled him to experiment more with sorcery and his spirituality.
Over the years he went further and further with the study of the occult, reading books by Eliphas Levi and the grimoires of Cornelius Agrippa, but he remained deeply fascinated by the writings of Madame Blavatsky, very fond of the concept of Theosophy, which then introduced him to the study of ancient cults and oriental philosophies. In fact, he deepened his studies with Buddhist and Hindu ideas, in particular the concept of karma, reincarnation and astral travels.
Everything he learned about the occult world, Spare poured it into his art; his works were filled with sexual references and grotesque figures; fascinated by the cult of Pan, he painted the members of the English lower class, representing them as Satyrs and Fauns, all enriched by sigils and magical symbols that he created himself.
Alan Moore in an interview about Spare, states:
"I think magic offers the artist a new way of looking at their awareness and find new ideas.”
It is thanks to his art, in combination with his stubborn esoteric research, that Spare will become one of the biggest occultists in the United Kingdom.
In 1904, at the age of only 17, he obtained a scholarship at the Royal Academy in London and one of his drawings was selected to be exhibited at an official exhibition, becoming the youngest artist to exhibit his works at the academy.
The esoteric contents of his works drew the attention of the most avant-garde art critics of London, who even preferred him to the more famous Aubrey Beardsley, comparing him to great artists of the past such as Albrecht Dürer and Michelangelo. The attention the press gave him made sure he knew the famous occultist, poet and artist Aleister Crowley in person. He met him at the Burton Gallery and the first thing Crowley told him was that the two of them, Crowley through poetry and Spare through painting, were messengers of the divine.
The two shared a lot of interests and consequently they began a frequentation that made Spare's art even richer in esoteric meanings.
Spare, however, did not agree with many of Crowley's ideas (especially regarding ceremonial magic and hierarchies of esoteric orders) because he distinguished himself for his eclectic and personal style of magic, which was defined by his friend Kenneth Grant "Zos Kia Cultus", therefore, never wanted to be officially initiated as a member of the Argenteum Astrum order, despite Crowley himself wishing it.
Anyway, the two artists collaborated for the publication of "The Equinox" by Crowley, containing four illustrations of Spare.
In 1917, during the First World War, Spare, discarded as a soldier because he was considered mentally unstable, served as an ordinary of the army's royal medical corps in London hospitals and was later hired by the army as a war artist in France.
In 1920 he returned to his homeland and, despite being considered a very talented artist, practically lived his life as a recluse, in an apartment in East London. Because of the bombing, London was filled with stray cats, fleeing houses destroyed by bombs, frightened by loud noises. Spare begins to adopt one after another, animals that he treated as familiars, creating a real colony in his own apartment.
His numerous works full of magical eroticism aroused the disapproval of the critics. He resisted all the clamor that the press gave him, also because of his scandalous lifestyle for the time (given that he preferred to surround himself with homeless people, prostitutes and people from the lower class of society), becoming famous for him was more a stress than a pleasure, also because of his being an introvert person, for this reason he chose to live in solitude. He lived on the proceeds he made by making portraits of the working class people, asking them only the equivalent of £ 5 and exposing them to the unofficial exhibitions held in his studio or in the pubs of the area. Spare felt disgust at the thought of selling his works at high prices, which he could easily afford.
His innate passion for occultism made him pursue his esoteric research, relying primarily on oriental philosophies such as Taoism, pre-surrealism and witchcraft teachings, which, to say of Spare, gave him Mrs. Paterson at a young age.
Whether Mrs. Paterson is really existed or not, we still don’t know. The doubt arises spontaneously since, as we have already said, he did not properly distinguish reality from the imagination, and furthermore the researches carried out on the existence of a lady named Paterson which corresponded the descriptions he gave, lead to poor and questionable results. There is the possibility, therefore, that he created a kind of spirit guide that instructed him in the magical arts, and that, according to him, was made of flesh and bone.
Precisely, referring to her, Spare stated that:
"She used to read me the future when I was very young. She never accepted money. She was so precise and so detailed in her predictions that everyone was amazed. She was married to a doctor but had gipsy blood flowing through her veins. She was full of love and kindness towards anyone, she was like a little girl. She lived in a very dangerous neighborhood, but even the most difficult people respected her.”
He later reported that he had brought Mabel Beardsley (sister of the famous artist Aubrey Bearsley) to Mrs. Paterson for a reading. Mrs. Paterson looked worried but only told her to pay attention to her health; then in private she spoke with Spare and told him that Mabel had only two years more to live. Mabel became ill and died of cancer two years later.
Mrs. Paterson taught a lot of things to Spare: she instructed him in the technique of "thoughts projection", which consisted of concentrating in a trance state and, fixing a dark corner of the room, it was possible for her to evoke her own thoughts in that darkness. , materializing it; she also taught him to use automatic writing. Spare, a keen supporter of reincarnation, began to use this technique to find out more about his past lives, creating drawings while he was completely in the dark at midnight, drawings he made without ever removing the pencil from the paper, each figure, therefore, was represented through a single stroke.
He began to take an interest in topics such as magic, tarots, alchemy and sigils; he created his own style of magic, totally personal, and even conceived a technique of his own to create magical sigils that influenced the elements and matter, a technique that, even if slightly readjusted, we still use today.
ZOS - KIA CULTUS
Spare based his personal worship on sexual magic. He created "The Alphabet of Desire", a magical alphabet composed of emblems representing sexual principles, each of which, if used for ritual, is able to awaken dormant layers of the human psyche. Once visualized, the sigil is able to bring out old memories from the mind, and in so doing it is able to project real images into the conscious mind.
To achieve the required result, however, oblivion is necessary.
According to Spare, the desires formulated in the conscious mind take a long time to manifest, while the subconscious ones manifest themselves very quickly; for this reason, once the sigil has been drawn on the parchment and imprinted in the unconscious through a ritual of sexual magic, the parchment must be destroyed and the sigil forgotten.
According to Spare's magic system, Kia is the fundamental principle of life, "the atmospheric self" or "the cosmic self", which manifests itself through Zos, the physical body, the medium through which we perceive sensations.
According to Alan Moore, the word ZOS was coined by Spare himself taking inspiration from his initials; while AOS is the representation of his physical person, the alpha, ZOS is the transcendent expression of his existence as a human being, the omega.
Kia, on the other hand, is a more complex idea, Spare sometimes speaks of it as a sort of universal mind, like a divine spark, which he represented on an altar like a vulture, but which is actually impersonal, it is pure cosmic void.
In the human being, Zos and Kia are artificially divided, because of reason and conscience; it is in the subconscious that the two principles come together and the magical power reaches its peak.
To cancel the effect that the reason has on Zos and Kia, Spare uses the technique of the sigils he devised, together with a variant of Crowley sex magic. The sigil must get all the attention of the magician in the moment of the ecstasy, without the slightest distraction. To make this happen, he consumed sexual intercourse with old and unattractive women, or practiced autoeroticism.
In a variant of the ritual, masturbation was used through the "clay virgins".
These consisted of containers of phallic shape, created with clay or ceramic, specially consecrated, in which was affixed the seal created by the magician, who later performed the practice of masturbation inside it, the container was then buried in midnight (which was considered a sort of "threshold" time) in the right moon phase, based on intent.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
The unconscious was another of the themes to which Spare was passionate about, and he himself elaborated theories about it, almost simultaneously with Freud's work (which, however, had not yet been translated into English, consequently Spare must have arrived at the his conclusions by other means).
Many of the scholars of the time, including Spare, agreed that many psychic experiences of psychics, such as those who claimed to be possessed by the spirit of Shakespeare or Beethoven, concerned not just the alternation of their personality with another , but an alternation of conscious and unconscious state; both states coexisted in the same person's mind, with the difference that the unconscious was harder to bring it out.
He applied his theories on the unconscious even to magic.
"The magical obsession" states "is the state in which the mind is illuminated by the subconscious activities, voluntarily evocated, to obtain inspiration, it is the condition of the Genius."
In his opinion, one could not have magic and conscious mind at the same time, in fact for this reason he despised all the Symbolism used by Crowley.
For him, the conscious state did nothing but increase its frustration, focusing on what was desired without getting it, “Conscious desire is like the watched kettle that never boils".
He brings the example of bats:
“A bat first free wings and of the proper kind, by its desire being organic enough to reach the sub-consciousness. If its desire to fly had been conscious, it would have had to wait till it could have done so by the same means as ourselves, for example by machinery”
THE “DEATH POSTURE”
As we have already said, Spare believed in his theory of "Zos and Kia", the bodily self of ZOS and the non existence of the higher self of Kia.
One of the methods devised by Spare to bring to the union of Zos and Kia was “The Death Posture".
Probably the name derives from the Yoga position "Shavasana", also called "the position of the corpse".
The method consisted of fixing one's own reflection in the mirror, until reaching a state of semi-trance, in which the perception of oneself is blurred. Then, he closed his eyes, staring at the concentration on the third eye, while doing this tension and contracting all the muscles of the body (with the purpose then to have a great level of relaxation when released), clasping the hands behind his back, stretching up his chin and began to hyperventilate (a technique known in Yoga as "breath of fire"). Once you reach a suitable level of tension, suddenly release all the contractions of the body and abandon yourself on the bed.
Spare claims to have achieved excellent results with this technique, including the ecstatic pleasure and the achievement of the astral plan. In this way, in fact, the threshold of attention is lowered, the barrier of the conscious is overcome to plunge into the unconscious.
While lying in the Death Posture, it is the ideal moment to release a sigil in our unconscious and then forget it once awakened.
♄Unornya
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Sources:
”Austin Osman Spare; The occult life's of London legendary artist.", Phil Baker, 2011.
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