Austin Osman Spare

I first came across Spare in the early 90s through a couple of bands who were influenced by him  - Coil and my favourite band Fields of the Nephilim who even have an album named after Spares first publication “Earth:Inferno”. At the time here in Aotearoa New Zealand, much like in most of the world, we had no home internet access – in fact I don’t think I was even aware of the internet at all until around 1994 when the central library allowed members to book time slots on their single connected computer. When I could I’d go into the library and look up music I liked, I think the first non-musical search I did was for Austin Osman Spare. There was also little ability to get unusual books from overseas. But while I was at University I had a part time job in a boutique bookstore which gave me access to their catalogues and I was able to order in occult books, but sadly there was nothing available from Spare. Once interest grew in his work so too did facsimiles and retrospectives, which I was able to buy many years later when I was in London.

 When looking at the work of Austin Osman Spare  you’ll probably notice that it is so varied in style it’s amazing that it all came from the same artist. From detailed black line drawing, to fluid water colour, to occult instructional pieces, and to the rather grotesque caricatures of Borough denizens, his distinctive personality is undeniable in all of his creations. In his early artistic life Spare would have been exposed to the many interesting creative currents that were moving through Edwardian Britain  - with Eastern mysticism finding a home next to western occultism, theosophy, spiritualism and new advances in scientific thinking, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution. All these ideas shaped Spares thinking, his theories and practices  -  both those he chose to express in his creative output, as much those he chose to reject.

Spare was born in 1886 in Snowhill, east of central London to a working-class family, moving later to Smithfields and then across the Thames to Kennington. His were not impoverished by any means, but they certainly weren’t wealthy. He showed early artistic talent and won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art when he was 13, with a growing reputation of being a young prodigy and likely to take the whole art world by storm. He was influenced by various artistic movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau. As he grew into adulthood these movements were  falling out of favour in the art world, much like any art movement that becomes seen as old or stale to replaced by new thinking. Spare was a flamboyant and handsome young man with an eccentric streak even in his youth, combined with his out of fashion artistic interests and spiritual leanings he didn’t fit in well with the academic establishment and ended up leaving art school to pursue his own ideas.

Here he is as a young man, well presented, the picture of an artist at his easel. And here as an old man, living in poverty surrounded by the stray cats he loved and cared for.

Spare is often lionized as the classic outsider artist, living in poverty in the South London district of Borough with nothing to his name save his artworks and his cats  - but this version of Spare didn’t manifest until his later years. Plus he was never an outsider from the art world. In Spare’s youth his social circle comprised creative thinkers, writers, poets and artists – many of whom were of a social class above Spares own. This meant he was moving in wealthier circles and, through his friends, renting living quarters in better parts of London. It seems that he might have felt out of place among his new friends. It appears that he felt more at home among the poor, and found inspiration in the lives and characters of the people around him when he moved to south London.

 His early work was remarkable for it’s classical understanding of form and the technical prowess in his draftsmanship. Initially creating very beautiful figurative drawings that could have been done by one of the old masters, he later moved towards a style of black line drawing which was likely influenced by Art Nouveau luminery Aubrey Beardsley. But as he experimented with style he never relinquished the classic training which stood him in excellent stead no matter what he chose to do. Of course the most notable aspect of his work is the influence the occult played upon it, with his art and magickal system being inextricably entwined. For Spare, art and magic developed together and it was through art that he was able to express his magickal ideas. His was a primal magick based upon obsession and ecstasy, with none of the trappings of ceremonial occultism and none of the niceties of polite society.

Having met famous occultist Aleister Crowley in the early 1920s Spare was introduced to Ceremonial magick, which he ended up rejecting to develop his own very personal spiritual system. Spare was initially friendly with Crowley but became highly critical of him later in life for unknown reasons – well, unknown apart from feeling Crowley’s esoteric practices were full of pointless theatrics as well as thinking Crowley behaved too outlandishly. Crowley, in contrast, continued to hold Spare in high regard, although feared that he had become too inward-focussed and had fallen off the path to divine realisation through his narcissistic obsessive practices.

It’s important to note that Spare may have comprehended the terms ‘self’, ‘obsession’ and ‘narcissism’ differently in regards to his magical practice, but personally I wonder if Crowley wasn’t entirely wrong. But who knows it certainly seemed to work for him.

 Much later, in 1949, after he had moved to Borough, Spare was befriended by Kenneth and Steffi Grant – both accomplished occultists who also had close links to Crowley. The Grants had their own ideas around magickal practice and were immediately impressed by Spare, taking the older, rather impoverished man under their wing. This was a pivotal time for Spare because the Grants were able to promote and preserve his work in a way that Spare was not want to do himself.  After initially being part of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis as a young man and working as the elderly Crowleys secretary, Kenneth Grant started to move in new directions. These were pretty far removed from Crowley or indeed anything else seen in western occultism at the time. His work took on a distinctly extraterrestrial flavour that involved a magical current emanating from another planet. He became interested in exploring the reverse or dark side of the kabbalistic Tree of Life while also incorporating author HP Lovecraft’s interdimensional monstrosities into his magical pantheon, believing the fiction writer was in fact tapping into something important.

I think there is a distinct change in Spare’s output around the time that the Grant’s began helping him with his writing and the exhibition of his works – you can see the influence of Kenneth Grant particularly in the naming of Spares artworks.

The Grants took note of all Spare’s stories, many of which were  enthusiastically retold by Kenneth Grant, who appears to have taken them all onboard without the slightest skepticism. There may be elements of these tales that are exaggerated or fabricated by Spare to retroactively fit with his own narrative. He paints himself as a voracious lover from a young age, with a sexual appetite that encompasses women of all ages and levels of attractiveness. Most notable is the legendary Mrs Patterson – or the witch Patterson – as Grant describes her. An old woman, practiced in witchcraft, who could turn herself into a nubile young girl to seduce the young Spare for sex magick purposes and induct him onto the path he would follow for the rest of his life. There isn’t any real historical evidence of a Witch Patterson or even an older woman seducing the young Spare. For all Spares stories of life-long debauchery it’s not clear whether he was sexually active with that many human women, or whether his multitude of partners were on the astral plane, so to speak. For example he was married for many years without any obvious records of extramarital dalliances and it is suggested the marriage came to an end due to HER adultery, but there are other hints it may have been him that was unfaithful.

Although Spare's system of magic may at first glance appear very different from that which Crowley and other occultists were engaging at the time, like with any mystic or esoteric practice it’s coming at the same goal from different angles. How successful it is I think depends on the practitioner - and a system like that developed by Spare is really very particular to him, although it certainly influenced the Grants and played a significant role in the later development of Chaos Magick.

His thinking is at the same time both stripped back and deceptively complex. The main drive for Spare was to unite what he called ZOS – the fleshly body, with KIA – the primal void and wellspring of all existence. I believe the reason is very much the same as any mystic or magickian; to apprehend primal creativity, a union with the void, dissolution in the infinite  - in a word to touch the divine.

He has a number of methods to do this but the one I will elaborate upon is called the Death Posture.  I especially love this instructional illustration:

This image is from his 1913 publication “The Book of Pleasure (Self Love)” which also showcases his beautiful linework. Spare used a form of sigil making in which words of the desire are distilled into letters, then the letters turned into a geometric aggregation or glyph which then helps to solidify the desire in the subconscious of the practitioner without the conscious apprehension of the desire “getting in the way”.

The sigil becomes a graphical representation of one's desire rather than a blatant written intention. In The Book of Pleasure Spare states:

“Sigils are the means of guiding and uniting the partially free belief with an organic desire…Sigils are monograms of thought, for the government of energy relating to Karma; a mathematical means of symbolising desire and giving it form that has the virtue of preventing any thought and association on that particular desire… escaping detection of the Ego. So that it does not restrain or attach such desire to its own transitory images, memories and worries, but allows it free passage to the sub-consciousness.”

 He has also uses here a selection of characters from his Alphabet of Desire which he created as a form of living or sentient symbol. On the bottom right is the description “The whole body becoming a KA in the posture” which suggests he’s alluding to the astral body talked of in ancient Egyptian religion.

The unity of Will, Desire and Belief creates the state allowing access to the Kia - which Spare describes as Small belief . We might consciously think this is unenergetic and unvital with no power, but Great belief springing from the unconscious is a vital force of eternal desire commanded by will.

An interesting side note is the similarity between the naming of Spares Death Posture and yogic shavasana or corpse pose. Shavasana is a supine posture of complete surrender often practiced at the end of a series of asana when the physical body is exhausted. Spares posture seems to go past that state to a further level of exhaustion and release. He describes gazing into a mirror until his perception of his own self was blurred, then closing his eyes and looking inwards. He clasps his hands behind his back and stretching upwards, hyperventilates until he falls into a swoon. There are some more links to yogic practice here: the adoption of a twisted and locked posture, or yogic banda and the the panting pranayama that perhaps resembles kupulabati or the bellows breath.

Of course Spares interest in the magical potential of sex is likely to come into play here as well. He spoke often and openly about his enthusiasm for the pleasure obtained through self love in both the mystical and masturbatory sense, so his death posture could undoubtably be achieved through orgasm. He does state that it can be anything that facilitates an exhausted swoon, even something like extended ecstatic laughter!

I love the image on the far right of the body in the Death Posture. It showcases Spares artistic ability by brilliantly articulating the utter exhaustion of the body falling as a boneless form.

Spare described his experience of uniting ZOS with KIA through the obsession of SELF by saying “A mystic is one who experiences more of himself than he can articulate”. I think that is an illuminating statement. It  suggests his pure self being opened, unfolded and then dissolved in the primal void. His lower self is given up to his higher self which can then perhaps tap into the limitless creativity abundant in the KIA.

It’s also important to note that this idea of SELF is not related to EGO, self is not in Spare’s case ‘selfish’ as we might understand the word. This unbridled creativity that Spare tapped into led to some confusion  in the very early 20thC artworld. One critic stated of an exhibition of work in 1911:

“Of Mr Austin O Spare’s drawings in the end room, it is difficult to speak without dragging in questions which are beyond the range of legitimate art criticism. Blake’s most fantastic inventions are sane, normal and bourgeois beside these irresponsible wanderings of an over-heated imagination” but then he goes on to say “Every scribble of his pencil is informed with style. And the pen-work of the highly finished ‘The Psychology of Ecstasy’ is a marvel of incisive clearness, crispness, suppleness and richness. To find the equal of its line one has to fall back upon Durer’s etchings.”

Contemporary art critics had no idea where to place him; his technical ability was impressive, but his subject matter baffled and horrified them..

 Here are 2 images are worth looking at that showcase the combining of his classical style of draftsmanship with sigils, geometric diagrams and the warping of figurative form. I’ve found it challenging to get correct titles and dates for all of his works. In general you can tell when a work might have been created by the artistic style and likewise the titles often give a clue.  Spare generally had little initial interest in titles  - most works being called things like “nude torso” or “portrait”, but after Grant became involved the artworks took on far more baroque names. For example the drawing on the left from around 1920 bears the title “Nude” and the one on the right which is from later in his life is apparently called “Aerial Vampire”. I don’t believe Spare would have picked that name earlier in his carrier.

 These are quite different images from later in his life that I particularly like which depict unsettling alien landscapes. On the left is the pastel work “Astral body and Ghost” from 1946 and on the right  “Traverser of the Aeons (Ego)” 1955 – that second title is definitely from the era of his friendship from Kenneth Grant

 Spare experimented with artistic style throughout out his life. A body of work that I had initially dismissed as being too pretty has come back to be one of my favourite eras of his practice. These are portraits of beautiful women he either knew or had seen in the movies. He collectively called these “Experiments in Relativity – on the principle of space bending”. In this image we see a work entitled ‘Green Sidereal’,  in the centre actresses Joan Crawford and Mary Pickford, then on the far right his friend Steffi Grant. Sidereal means ‘astral’ or of the stars, but Spare used it to mean something unreal or seen from an unusual sideways angle. The subjects are stars themselves, Hollywood icons living on a different plane, in another shifting world. Years ago when I saw one of these images for the first time I thought that the book published had rudely squashed it to make it fit on the page! Now I can see them for the unearthly luminous portraits they are.

A concept called ‘The new Sexuality’ sprung out of Spares ideas around libidinous energy as a creative force. It appears that this sexuality was a melding of the self with the whole of life  - possibly without the need of an ordinary sexual partner – in order to manifest a kind of oceanic oneness with existence. He speaks of a state known as the ‘neither neither’  - a liminal place of being not one thing or the other, not the Zos or the Kia, not the conscious or the subconscious. Becoming curious about evolution, which was fairly new to the public sphere, Spare was especially fascinated with the way, over long periods of time, one creature could evolve into another. He was fascinated to find that we as humans could have other creatures in our evolutionary tree, but Spare took this a step further and imagined that the ancestors available to us as humans could be drawn from other evolutionary trees to be recalled from our unconscious. To Spare evolution was not a passive process that occurred over millenia by exposure to environment, it was a process that could be willed and instigated through the force of libidinous desire. This concept, which he named atavistic resurgence, became a core part of his practice. In his book of automatic writing, Anathema of Zos, he states:

“Fools, Ye have made vital the belief the Ego is eternal, fulfilling a purpose now lost to you.
All things become of desire; the legs to the fish; the wings to the reptile. Thus was your soul begotten.
Hear, O, Vermin!
MAN HAS WILLED MAN!