Independent twentieth-century magic
Austin Osman Spare
Artist and occult writer whose sigils, automatic drawing and psychology of desire became indispensable to later chaos magic.
- Dates
- 30 December 1886 – 15 May 1956
- Dating
- documented dates
- Born
- London
- Died
- London
The life
A precocious draughtsman, Spare exhibited at the Royal Academy while still a teenager and self-published books in which image, typography and doctrine are inseparable. He served as a medical orderly and official war artist during the First World War, later living and working largely outside the institutional occult world.
Place in the tradition
His method turns a written desire into an abstract sign and seeks to lodge it below conscious attention. Later chaos magicians made that technique far more famous than Spare was during his lifetime.
a note on the record
History and later legend
The modern account of Spare as the sole inventor of sigil magic is too tidy. He made a distinctive system from older magical signs, contemporary psychology, automatic art and his own vocabulary; later readers then systematised it again.
the written record
Principal works
-
1905
Earth Inferno
An early artist's book combining drawings, aphorisms and a private cosmology.
-
1913
The Book of Pleasure
Spare's central statement on desire, the subconscious, sigils and the state he called neither-neither.
-
1921
The Focus of Life
An illustrated continuation of his magical and psychological system.