Austin Osman Spare

Austin Osman Spare 1904

Austin Osman Spare (born December 30, 1886 in Snow Hill near London , † May 15, 1956 in London) was a British printmaker , painter and occultist . He is considered to be the founder of sigil magic and invented the magical system of Zos Kia Cultus .

Life

Spare was the son of a police officer and showed an interest in art as a child. During his youth his inclination towards the occult developed and influenced his artistic activities. At the age of seven, he says he met a witch whose name he called "Mrs. Patterson ”stated. From her he learned the most important features of his magic, later known as Zos Kia .

At the age of thirteen he accepted a job as a draftsman in a stained glass factory. In the evenings he attended various art schools and received numerous prizes and grants, including the National Gold Medal for Mathematics for a treatise on spatial geometry. At the age of sixteen he received a state award at the Royal College of Art in Kensington.

In May 1904 some of his pictures were exhibited for the first time and received a response in the press. A year later his first book Earth Inferno was published , which contains pictures and short texts, the texts are partly by Spare, but also come from the Revelation of John and the Inferno by Dante . In 1907 a second exhibition of his pictures took place, which showed grotesque, sexualized human figures and a flood of magical symbols. In the same year his second book, A Book Of Satyrs , was published, which contains thirteen satirical drawings on the masquerade and the hypocrisy of society.

The paintings on display caught the attention of Aleister Crowley , and Spare became a candidate for Crowley's magical order Astrum Argenteum in 1910 . His religious name and magical motto was Yihoveaum . Spare put this term together from the Hebrew name of the God of Israel, YHWH , and the sacred Sanskrit syllable Om . Four smaller images of Spare were published in the order's publication. After two years, Spare resigned from the order, on the grounds that he couldn't learn anything there and that the rituals were set up and empty. He was then referred to by Crowley as a "black brother", which he expressed his displeasure with Spar's magical work. However, after Crowley reread Spar's 1913 book of joy years later , he changed his mind about the Zos Kia's magical system .

The Book Of Pleasures (Selflove) - The Psychology Of Ecstasy contains instructions on magical practice. Six different ways of forming sigils are presented, and the other basic pillars of Zos Kia are also discussed. These include self-love , a "state or constitution [...] which becomes that principle that helps the ego to gain insight and all-encompassing union through inclusion prior to conception". Similarly, the so-called death position ( Death Posture ) whose instructions given by Spare for "Hexenart" in three paragraphs, of which the last paragraph describes the first exercise and the first paragraph the final exercise. The Book of Joy also contains instructions for “automatic drawing”, a preparatory exercise for obsession , which is also important for the Zos Kia . The book also deals with his technique of contemplating the “Neither-Neither” (“Weder-Weder”) and his concept of the In-Between (“There-between”). The pictures in the book of joy are a lot richer in magical symbolism and partly consist exclusively of sigils that accompany a small automatic drawing.

In 1916 Spare joined the British Army as a sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a draftsman during World War I and was sent to Egypt . The temples and images of gods that he faced there impressed him greatly; Egyptian symbolism appears in many of his pictures.

In 1921 his book The Focus of Life was published , which contains some very detailed pictures accompanying the text. In this book he explains the philosophical basis of Zos Kia , whereby the text is very concentrated and therefore difficult to understand. The focus of life depicts Spares magic as an allegorical story in the form of aphorisms , at one point in the book there is a description of his worldview as “life and death, the joke called love, in which every person is a god, whatever his faith desires " .

In 1925, A Book of Automatic Drawing was published , which is full of surreal drawings, which are characterized by the fact that they all look as if they were drawn with just a single line.

Spare found his growing popularity as an artist and especially as a magician a nuisance, which is why he published The Anathema of Zos in 1927, at the height of his artistic career . With this book he ended his popularity. It is written in an angry tone and contains only two images. The text is aimed at "the hypocrites", condemns all consumer attitudes in the strongest possible way and contains numerous insults against those who are unable to stand by their own aesthetics.

After Anathema appeared , Spare led a modest life in London. He lived alone, with the exception of his many cats, and was sometimes seen in pubs, drawing portraits for the guests in exchange for a glass or two of beer or having his hand “drawn automatically” while he was drinking his beer.

During the Second World War , Spar's attic studio was destroyed by a bombing in 1940 while he was on duty there, sustaining serious injuries that paralyzed both arms and caused temporary memory impairment . He was very afraid that he would never be able to draw again, but six months later he had recovered to such an extent that he was initially able to draw again with his left arm. The pictures he drew with his left hand were in no way inferior to his earlier works, but it took another three years before he could use his right arm again.

He moved to Brixton, south London, to a ground floor apartment at 5 Wynne Road, the building was demolished in the 1960s. There he spent the last years of his life, in which Spare was in contact with several British magicians, for whom he carried out artistic works, such as an altarpiece for the Nu Isis Lodge by Kenneth Grant or talismans . In these last years he made many of his magical steles and painted everything that was available to him: plates, wooden panels and radio sets.

In 1946 he met Kenneth Grant, who persuaded him to found the Zos Kia Cultus . In particular, the books written by Grant established Spares today's fame.

Austin Osman Spare died on May 15, 1956. He was buried with his father in Goodmayes, Essex.

influence

Spare linked his magic with the psychology of his contemporary Sigmund Freud in that he wanted to anchor the fulfillment of wishes with magical rituals in the subconscious. According to Spare, wish fulfillment happens when the performing magician anchors a sigil in his subconscious and then forgets it completely. A sigil is a "wish symbol" that is creatively created while focusing on what is desired. Then one should anchor this sigil in the subconscious through concentration and trance and then forget it. In this way, Spare tried to create artificial complexes that were supposed to have the effect he intended. This effect leads either to the materialization of the wish, or to knowledge about the wish and its relationship to oneself. Spare called his magical methods “atavistic nostalgia” or “revival of atavisms ”.

The British Crowley student and head of the OTO offshoot "Typhonian OTO" Kenneth Grant learned the magic of Zos Kia from Spare . Even Gerald Gardner , founder of Wicca , was influenced by the work of spare and could be prepared by him ritual objects.

The Zos Kia Cultus is a movement of occultism or magic developed by Austin Osman Spare. It focuses on the personal universe and the magician's influence on it. Accordingly, it has a very personal and individualistic character.

According to Spare, Zos is the sphere of bodies that are viewed as a whole and Kia is the observing self or God that projects itself into the world. Kia is indicated by Spare through the word play "I = Eye" , which is possible in English , the "I" as an eye, as an eternal observer. In the definitions that introduce the Book of Joy , Spare writes about the Kia: “The absolute freedom, the freedom of which is powerful enough to be 'reality' and yet to be free in every moment. [...] The less that is said about Kia, the less it is veiled. ”According to Spare, this is the only belief that should be valid without restriction, because it is self-evident, because every person makes it his at every moment Life, and this is the only belief that does not include belief. Spare expresses this symbolically in the combination of eye and hand. Through this belief it should be possible to transform any other belief into free belief (free of concepts).

The techniques of the Zos Kia Cultus aim at expanding the sphere of the Kia (the self) more and more and thereby experiencing a cosmic ecstasy , since the boundaries between the self limited by identities and the whole world are thereby to be removed. The magical techniques that Spare developed include sigil magic , sexual magic , evocation and invocation , whereby he developed entirely his own approaches.

Although the Zos Kia Cultus has very few followers, it is widely regarded as an important influence in the development of Western occultism in general, and the development of Chaos Magic in particular. Spar's work was picked up by the founders of the Illuminati of Thanateros in the mid-1970s . In Jan Fries' books, too , Spar's influence is clearly evident.

Spare is also considered a major influence on Genesis P-Orridge and his band Psychic TV . Their album Allegory and Self shows a drawing of Spares on the cover, the psychic TV musician John Gosling gave himself the artist name "Zoskia", inspired by Spare.

literature

• Austin Osman Spare: Collected Works. Edition Ananael, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-901134-00-X .
• Gavin W. Semple: Austin Osman Spare - Art and Magic. Edition Roter Drache, Rudolstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3939459460 .
• Jaq D. Hawkins: Understanding Chaos Magic. Capall Bann Publishing, Chieveley 1996, ISBN 1-898307-93-8 .
• Phil Baker: Austin Osman Spare: the life and legend of London's lost artist. Strange Attractor Press, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-907222-01-6 .

Web links

• Witchcraft and Witchcraft - The Magical Methods of Austin Osman Spare
• AustinSpare.co.uk: Articles, Genealogy and Bibliography
• Literature by and about Austin Osman Spare in the catalog of the German National Library
• Images, graphics and texts from Spare
• Article in the Guardian, 2011

Individual evidence

1. ^ Richard Kaczynski: Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. The definitive biography of the founder of modern magick. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley 2010, p. 186. ISBN 9781556438998 .