Spare, Austin Osman

Austin Osman Spare

Artist, Sorcerer and Forerunner of Chaos Magick

Austin Osman Spare was an English artist, occultist, writer and visionary whose strange and frequently unsettling images seemed to emerge from the deepest regions of the unconscious mind.

His exceptional talent as a draughtsman was recognised while he was still a teenager. He could have pursued a conventional and potentially prestigious artistic career, yet increasingly devoted himself to the depiction of spirits, demons, dream figures, monstrous forms and what he called atavisms: primal intelligences drawn from forgotten layers of human consciousness.

Spare developed an intensely personal system of magick based upon desire, sexuality, automatic drawing, sigils and the direct communication between the conscious and subconscious mind. His methods later became a major influence upon modern chaos magick.

He remains one of the most original and enigmatic figures in the history of British occultism.

His Correct Birth Date

Some older occult encyclopaedias list Spare’s birth as 31 December 1888. More reliable biographical and institutional records, however, identify him as having been born on 30 December 1886 in the City of London.

He was the son of Philip Newton Spare, an officer in the City of London Police, and Eliza Ann Adelaide Osman.

The National Portrait Gallery and Art UK both catalogue him as an artist and occultist who lived from 1886 to 1956, while the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives his birth date as 30 December 1886. (oxforddnb.com)

An Artistic Prodigy

Spare demonstrated remarkable artistic ability from childhood.

He left ordinary schooling at approximately thirteen and worked for a time at a stained-glass factory. He also attended evening classes at the Lambeth School of Art.

His drawings attracted the attention of influential artists, and he was recommended for a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in South Kensington.

In 1904, while still a teenager, one of his drawings was accepted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This brought him considerable publicity and established his reputation as a young artistic prodigy.

By 1909, Spare was enjoying professional success as an illustrator and artist. His extraordinary command of line led some critics and fellow artists to describe him as a genius. (Fulgur Press)

The Rejection of a Conventional Career

Spare’s technical ability might have secured him a comfortable place within the British art establishment.

Instead, he became increasingly dissatisfied with conventional artistic expectations. He had little interest in producing safe, fashionable work merely to satisfy wealthy patrons or critics.

His images became more visionary, erotic, grotesque and occult.

Spare painted recognisable portraits, but he also created works populated by hybrid beings, satyrs, spirits, shadowy faces and entities that seemed partly human and partly animal.

His art was not simply inspired by occult ideas. For Spare, drawing itself was a magical act capable of opening the mind to realities ordinarily hidden from conscious awareness.

Mrs Margaret Paterson

Spare claimed that one of the most important influences upon his occult development was an older woman named Margaret Paterson.

According to accounts attributed to Spare, they met around 1902, when she was working as a fortune-teller in London. He later referred to her as his “witch-mother”.

Paterson claimed to be a hereditary witch descended from women who had escaped execution during the Salem witch trials of 1692. There is no reliable evidence supporting this ancestry, and the claim is generally treated as part of the mythology surrounding her.

Nevertheless, Spare believed her abilities were genuine. He described her as an exceptionally gifted diviner, medium and magical teacher.

The Witch-Mother’s Powers

Spare claimed that Paterson could materialise spirits and project her thoughts into visible form.

When giving divinatory consultations, she allegedly caused scenes from a client’s future to appear within a darkened corner of the room. Spare maintained that the visions she produced later came true.

He also said that she possessed the ability to alter her appearance.

At times, Paterson appeared as an elderly woman. At others, she supposedly transformed herself into a beautiful and seductive young woman. Spare is said to have drawn or painted her nude in both forms.

Whether these accounts describe literal paranormal experiences, visionary states or stories developed later by Spare remains impossible to determine.

They nevertheless became central to his personal mythology.

Dreams, Spirits and Elementals

Paterson reportedly taught Spare how to visualise and evoke spirits and elementals.

She also encouraged him to work directly with dreams. Rather than treating dream images as meaningless fantasies, Spare learned to give them artistic form and bring them into conscious awareness.

This process was sometimes described as reification: giving an apparently concrete form to something originating within imagination, dream or hidden consciousness.

Paterson’s teachings encouraged Spare to treat the unconscious mind as an independent magical world populated by its own beings, desires and intelligences.

His later automatic drawings may be understood as attempts to allow these hidden presences to reveal themselves without being controlled by ordinary conscious thought.

The Witches’ Sabbat

Spare claimed that Paterson initiated him into a witches’ sabbat.

He did not describe this as an ordinary physical gathering. Instead, the sabbat supposedly took place in another dimension or visionary plane of existence.

Spare spoke of impossible cities constructed according to an unearthly geometry. Their forms did not obey the familiar laws of physical space.

He claimed to have attended these sabbats on several occasions.

Some of the visions carried him into states he could describe only as “spaces beyond space”. Despite his artistic ability, he sometimes found language inadequate to explain what he believed he had encountered.

Black Eagle

A spirit known as Black Eagle was closely associated with Paterson.

In some accounts, Black Eagle was described as her familiar and as a source of information transmitted through dreams. Following Paterson’s death, the spirit was said to have passed to Spare.

Later practitioners associated with left-hand-path and vampyric traditions have described Black Eagle as a vampyre spirit inhabiting the dream or astral plane.

The entity is said to manifest in different forms, including bestial, shadowy and demonic appearances. It is supposedly approached through an intense concentration of belief, desire and will.

These descriptions belong primarily to occult tradition rather than verifiable biography. Nevertheless, Black Eagle became one of the many spiritual figures woven into the legend of Spare.

Spare and Aleister Crowley

Spare became acquainted with the writings and magical philosophy of Aleister Crowley.

He was briefly connected with Crowley’s circle and contributed illustrations to The Equinox. Crowley initially recognised Spare’s unusual talent, but the relationship between the two men did not remain close.

Spare rejected the elaborate structures, grades, ceremonies and hierarchies associated with much ceremonial magick.

He sought a more immediate form of sorcery.

Rather than invoking power through lengthy rituals and complex divine names, Spare believed that the magician could work directly through desire, imagination, sexuality and the subconscious mind.

His system shared certain concerns with Crowley’s work, especially the importance of will and sexual energy, but developed in a radically different direction.

Zos and Kia

Two important concepts within Spare’s philosophy are Zos and Kia.

Zos may be understood as the living body and the total field of individual experience. It is not merely the physical body considered as flesh, but the body as desire, sensation, memory, instinct and magical possibility.

Kia is more difficult to define.

It represents a state of consciousness beyond ordinary duality, fixed identity and rational definition. It is the unconditioned awareness behind the individual personality: neither this nor that, but the source from which distinctions arise.

Spare’s magical system attempted to unite the instinctive power of Zos with the limitless potential of Kia.

The magician did not conquer the unconscious. Instead, the conscious mind learned how to communicate with deeper levels of being.

The Power of Desire

Spare believed that a deeply felt desire possessed enormous magical power.

The problem was that conscious obsession often prevented the desire from reaching the deeper mind. Anxiety, doubt and continuous mental repetition interfered with its fulfilment.

The magician therefore needed to encode the desire, impress it upon the subconscious and then release conscious attachment to it.

Once forgotten, the desire could operate below the level of ordinary awareness.

Spare sometimes described this hidden creative force as the “god within”. It worked most effectively when the conscious personality stopped interfering with it.

This principle became the foundation of his sigil method.

The Alphabet of Desire

Spare developed what became known as the Alphabet of Desire.

In its simplest and most widely repeated form, the practitioner begins by writing a statement expressing a specific desire.

Repeated letters are removed. The remaining letters are then combined, overlapped and transformed until they form a unique symbol resembling a monogram.

The resulting sigil no longer looks like an ordinary sentence. Its meaning has been concealed from the conscious mind while remaining symbolically connected to the original desire.

The magician concentrates upon the sigil until it is strongly impressed upon the subconscious.

The original intention is then deliberately forgotten or released. The hidden mind is left to pursue the desired result without obstruction from anxiety or conscious doubt.

More Than a Letter Monogram

The familiar method of removing repeated letters is only one expression of Spare’s sigil practice.

His complete Alphabet of Desire was more complicated. It included personally created glyphs associated with emotions, instincts, sexual forces and recurring states of consciousness.

A magical alphabet was therefore not intended to be universally fixed.

Each practitioner could develop symbols arising from personal experience. Over time, these signs formed an intimate language through which the conscious and subconscious mind could communicate.

The sigil was not powerful because of its appearance alone.

It became powerful through desire, concentration, emotional intensity and the state of consciousness in which it was activated.

Charging the Sigil

Spare used several methods to bypass the conscious mind and charge a sigil.

These could involve prolonged concentration, exhaustion, trance, emotional intensity, sexual arousal or what he called the death posture.

The aim was to reach a moment in which ordinary thought became temporarily silent.

At that instant, the sigil could pass into the subconscious without being examined, questioned or weakened by the rational mind.

Later chaos magicians adopted and adapted these methods, often presenting Spare’s ideas in simplified and more practical forms.

His influence can be seen throughout modern sigil magick, even among practitioners who have never read his original writings.

Sexual Energy and Magick

Sexuality occupied an important place within Spare’s magical worldview.

Biographical accounts describe him as possessing a powerful sexual nature, while his writings and artwork frequently connect desire, ecstasy and magical transformation.

Spare did not treat sexuality merely as physical pleasure. He regarded it as one of the strongest forces capable of overwhelming ordinary consciousness.

At the height of sexual arousal, attention narrows and conventional mental control weakens. Spare believed this state could be used to implant a sigil or desire within the subconscious.

His ideas sometimes overlap with sexual magick, although his approach remained highly individual and did not simply reproduce the systems of Crowley or other ceremonial magicians.

The Book of the Living Word of Zos

Spare explored his magical philosophy in an unpublished grimoire referred to in the source material as The Book of the Living Word of Zos.

Related manuscripts and fragments are sometimes connected with The Grimoire of Zos and later posthumous collections of his work.

The text reportedly developed his ideas concerning will, sigils, atavisms, desire and the Alphabet of Desire.

Like much of Spare’s writing, it was not structured as a clear instructional manual. His language could be deliberately obscure, poetic and paradoxical.

He did not wish merely to explain a system.

He attempted to force the reader into a different manner of thinking.

The Conjuration of Roses

One frequently repeated story illustrates the unpredictable nature of Spare’s magick.

Spare reportedly told a friend that he would cause freshly cut roses to fall from the air.

He created symbolic drawings, moved them through the air and repeatedly spoke the word “roses”.

Something then fell from above—but it was not flowers.

The plumbing in the room overhead burst, drenching Spare and his companion with sewage.

The anecdote was presented as an example of successful intent taking an unexpected and unpleasant form. The magical operation had apparently produced a sudden descent of material from above, but not the beautiful result Spare imagined.

Whether literally true or apocryphal, the story conveys an important magical warning: desire expressed without sufficient precision may manifest through strange and unintended channels.

Atavistic Resurgence

Spare is especially associated with the concept of atavistic resurgence.

An atavism is a primitive characteristic or ancestral force believed to survive beneath the modern personality.

Spare believed that the human mind contained forgotten layers inherited from earlier forms of existence. These might include animal instincts, ancestral memories and forces that pre-dated ordinary human consciousness.

Through trance, automatic drawing and magical concentration, the practitioner could awaken these primal energies.

Spare did not necessarily regard them as mere memories. In his art, they often appeared as autonomous beings: animal-headed figures, distorted faces, satyrs, demons and hybrid creatures.

Reifying the Atavisms

To reify an atavism was to give it recognisable form.

The artist allowed something hidden and formless to become visible through drawing.

Spare’s technique blurred the distinction between invention and evocation. Did he imagine the entities, or did drawing provide them with a means of appearing?

For Spare, this distinction may not have mattered.

An entity emerging from the subconscious could possess genuine psychological and magical power, regardless of whether it existed independently in a conventional physical sense.

His drawings became a kind of spirit photography performed by hand.

Dangerous Images

Several sensational stories developed around Spare’s atavistic art.

According to one account, the manifestation of a particularly disturbing atavism contributed to the suicide of one witness and the insanity of another.

No reliable documentation confirms this story, and it should be treated as part of the legend surrounding Spare rather than established history.

Such tales nevertheless reflect the effect his work could have upon viewers.

His creatures do not always appear passively contained within the paper. They seem to look back at the observer, as though the act of viewing has opened a channel between the image and whatever intelligence it represents.

Automatic Drawing

Automatic drawing became one of Spare’s principal artistic and magical techniques.

The hand was allowed to move with minimal conscious control. Lines, faces and figures emerged before the rational mind could decide what should be drawn.

The method did not necessarily require complete unconsciousness.

Rather, the artist entered a receptive condition in which spontaneous associations could direct the movement of the hand.

Unexpected forms might emerge from a single wandering line. Human profiles merged with animals, plants, spirits or grotesque bodies.

For Spare, automatic drawing was both art and divination. It revealed what the conscious personality had attempted to suppress or ignore.

Form and Golden Hind

Spare edited and contributed to two important art journals: Form and Golden Hind.

Form appeared in several phases between 1916 and 1922 and included discussions of automatic writing and drawing.

Golden Hind was co-edited with Clifford Bax and appeared from 1922 until 1924. It reproduced drawings and lithographs by Spare and other artists.

These magazines demonstrate that Spare was not always the completely isolated figure portrayed in later occult mythology. He participated actively in London’s artistic and literary world, even while pursuing highly individual and unpopular ideas.

His Major Published Works

Spare’s major books include:

Earth: Inferno, published in 1905

A Book of Satyrs, privately published in 1907

The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, published in 1913

The Focus of Life, published in 1921

The Anathema of Zos: The Sermon to the Hypocrites, published in 1927

The Book of Pleasure and The Focus of Life contain many of the ideas central to his magical system, including sigils, ecstasy, desire, Kia and the relationship between conscious and subconscious awareness.

Earth: Inferno and A Book of Satyrs established his early reputation for strange, mystical and satirical imagery.

The Anathema of Zos was an angry rejection of hypocrisy, conformity and the commercial consumption of art and spirituality.

A Book of Automatic Drawing

Spare created A Book of Automatic Drawing during the 1920s.

It was published posthumously by the Catalpa Press in London in 1972. Some later bibliographies list related editions or collections under slightly different dates and titles.

The work contains examples of Spare’s spontaneous line drawing and his ability to allow several forms to emerge from one continuous movement.

Human profiles, ornamental curves and supernatural figures flow into one another, creating images that seem both carefully controlled and unconsciously produced.

The Book of Ugly Ecstasy

The Book of Ugly Ecstasy originated as a private sketchbook created during the 1920s and was published as a posthumous collection in 1996.

Its drawings include grotesque beings, demonic figures and strange automata encountered within Spare’s visionary and astral experiences.

Later occult interpretations describe some of these entities as beings formed through stored sexual force or “astral semen”.

The title reflects Spare’s fascination with beauty concealed within the grotesque.

Ecstasy did not need to appear pleasant, harmonious or conventionally attractive. It could also emerge through terror, distortion, sexual intensity and confrontation with the unknown.

The Destruction of His Studio

During the Second World War, Spare’s studio in Walworth Road received a direct hit during the Blitz.

The building was destroyed, together with a substantial quantity of his artwork.

Spare was seriously injured. Accounts state that he suffered paralysis on his right side and temporarily lost the use of both arms.

For an artist whose life depended upon the movement of his hands, the injury was devastating.

Within months, however, he regained sufficient use of his right arm to begin drawing again. He continued to suffer from physical impairment and declining health, but the post-war years became one of the most productive periods of his artistic life.

Poverty and Obscurity

Despite his early promise, Spare spent much of his later life in poverty.

He lived in modest rooms in South London and sometimes earned money by producing inexpensive portraits in local public houses.

He became increasingly remote from the established art world and preferred the company of animals, particularly his cats, to that of most people.

Yet he was not entirely forgotten.

Friends, collectors, journalists and younger occultists continued to visit him. His tavern exhibitions and post-war gallery shows revealed that his artistic abilities had survived hardship, illness and obscurity.

His later portraits are often strikingly sensitive, contrasting with the monstrous beings for which his occult art became famous.

Kenneth Grant

The occultist Kenneth Grant became closely associated with Spare during the final years of his life.

Grant had previously worked with Aleister Crowley and later developed his own form of Typhonian occultism.

He recognised Spare’s magical and artistic importance and helped preserve his ideas for a later generation.

Through Grant’s writings, concepts such as Zos, Kia, atavistic resurgence and the Alphabet of Desire reached readers who might otherwise never have encountered Spare’s largely obscure publications.

Grant’s accounts also contributed to the more sensational legends surrounding Spare.

Gerald Gardner and the Magical Conflict

One of the strangest stories associated with Spare concerns Gerald Gardner, Kenneth Grant and a woman known as Clanda.

According to later occult accounts, Gardner believed that Grant was drawing witches away from his own circle and into the New Isis Lodge.

Gardner allegedly wished to reclaim a self-described water-witch named Clanda.

In 1956, during the final year of Spare’s life, Gardner approached him for magical assistance. Spare was then living in poverty and supporting himself partly by drawing portraits in public houses.

Because Spare and Grant were friendly, Gardner supposedly did not explain the complete purpose of the operation.

The Amphibious Owl Talisman

Gardner asked Spare to create a talisman that would “restore lost property to its rightful place”.

Using the Alphabet of Desire, Spare designed a strange entity that he described as resembling an amphibious owl with the wings of a bat and the talons of an eagle.

The phrase “lost property” apparently referred to Clanda, although Spare was allegedly not told this directly.

The creature embodied the intention of recovery and return.

Like many of Spare’s magical forms, it did not belong to one ordinary species. Its hybrid body combined powers associated with air, night, water and predatory force.

The Black Isis Rite

The talisman was later connected with a Black Isis rite conducted at the New Isis Temple.

Clanda’s role was to lie passively upon the altar. During the ceremony, however, she suddenly sat upright.

Witnesses described her as sweating, convulsing and staring with a glazed, hypnotised expression. She appeared to be overwhelmed by terror.

Clanda later said that an enormous bird had manifested, seized her within its talons and carried her into the night.

She struggled against it and eventually broke free, falling back onto the altar.

The Phenomena in the Temple

The attending magicians reportedly did not see the bird described by Clanda.

They nevertheless claimed to hear a sound resembling enormous talons scraping against the wind. A sudden cold current moved through the temple.

Marks resembling scratches from claws were later found upon the window frame.

The windowsill was allegedly covered by a gelatinous substance that appeared to breathe or move by itself.

A powerful smell of the sea remained inside the temple for several days.

These events cannot be independently confirmed and are best treated as occult legend. They remain, however, among the most dramatic stories connected with Spare’s talismanic magick.

The Fate of Clanda

The talisman did not produce the result Gardner apparently desired.

Clanda did not return to him.

She eventually moved to New Zealand, where, according to the story, she later drowned.

The association between a self-proclaimed water-witch, a sea-smelling manifestation and her eventual drowning contributed further to the sinister reputation of the episode.

No clear documentary record establishes that Spare caused, predicted or intended her death.

The story should not be interpreted as proof of a successful fatal magical attack.

Spare’s Death

Austin Osman Spare died in a London hospital on 15 May 1956 at the age of sixty-nine.

He had been suffering from several health problems and was admitted after his appendix ruptured. He died from complications including peritonitis.

His life ended in relative obscurity, but interest in his art and magical system grew substantially after his death.

Today, his works are held in important collections, and he is recognised not merely as an eccentric occultist but as a significant British draughtsman, visionary and independent thinker.

Spare and Modern Chaos Magick

Spare never described himself as a chaos magician. The movement did not emerge in its recognised form until decades after his death.

Nevertheless, his work provided several of its foundational ideas.

These include:

The creation of personal sigils

The use of altered states to bypass conscious resistance

The rejection of unnecessarily elaborate ritual systems

The psychological use of belief

The importance of personal magical symbolism

The charging and subsequent forgetting of desire

The development of individual rather than universal magical methods

Later chaos magicians transformed Spare’s difficult and highly personal philosophy into a flexible system that could be adapted by almost anyone.

His sigil method is now among the most widely practised techniques in modern occultism.

Artist or Magician?

It is difficult to separate Spare’s art from his magick.

His sigils were drawings, but they were also magical instruments.

His automatic drawings were works of art, but they were also records of communication with the subconscious.

His portraits captured physical likeness, while his atavistic images attempted to reveal hidden identities beneath the visible human face.

Spare did not merely illustrate his beliefs.

The act of drawing was the ritual through which those beliefs became real.

He used the artist’s hand as another magician might use a wand, dagger or scrying mirror.

The Legacy of Austin Osman Spare

Austin Osman Spare rejected conventional success in favour of a dangerous and profoundly personal search.

He explored desire without morality imposed from outside, art without obedience to fashion and magick without dependence upon established orders.

His life contained brilliance, poverty, acclaim, obscurity, injury, sexuality, solitude and extraordinary imagination.

Some stories surrounding him are historically documented. Others come from Spare’s own visionary claims or from later occult legends that cannot be verified.

Together, however, they created the enduring image of Spare as London’s forgotten sorcerer-artist: a man who looked into the hidden mind and drew the beings he found staring back.

Enter the World of Sigils, Sorcery and Occult Art

Austin Osman Spare’s work is only the beginning of a much deeper journey into sigil magick, automatic drawing, altered states of consciousness, spirit evocation, sexual mysticism and chaos magick.

Inside the Occult World Skool Community, you can move beyond brief introductions and begin exploring the actual systems, texts and practical methods that shaped modern occultism.

The Classroom contains structured courses covering ceremonial magick, witchcraft, demonology, ancient grimoires, necromancy, divination, Kabbalah, angels, spirit work and practical magical techniques.

You will also gain access to an expanding occult Library filled with rare books, historical sources and important esoteric works—including material that allows you to study figures such as Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant and Gerald Gardner in far greater depth.

Most importantly, you can ask questions, discuss difficult subjects and receive personal guidance within a community created for serious students of the occult.

Do not merely look at the symbols.

Learn how to unlock them.

Join the Occult World Skool Community today and enter the hidden world of sigils, spirits, forbidden art and transformative magick.