﻿Grandfather of Chaos Magick and pioneer of the sigils now popular in contemporary Witchcraft,
Austin Osman Spare is an influential figure in Western Esoteric thought. He also conceptualised
a non-dual state of fertile void to be accessed as a source of Magick power
and has been associated to shamanic practices.
Welcome to this episode on Austin Osman Spare and his influence on magick-practising traditions!
[Music] Hello everyone,
I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a Religious Studies PhD and a University
lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick, Esotericism, Witchcraft,
Shamanism, Paganism, and all things occult. This video is a collaboration with my lovely
friend and colleague Dr Justin Sledge, host of the channel Esoterica. Dr Sledge focuses his scholarly
attention on the philosophical foundations of topics in Western Esotericism including Magic,
Kabbalah, Alchemy and Hermeticism. So, make sure to check out his video first,
as he tackles a broad overview of Austin Osman Spare and his esoteric thought,
whereas I will be focusing on its relation to Western Esotericism, Chaos Magick and Shamanism.
On to our topic now… The artist and Occultist
Austin Osman Spare is possibly, along with figures such as Aleister Crowley, among the most
influential magical thinkers of the 20th century, thanks to his emphasis on the centrality of the
unconscious and its manipulation in magick. Spare was a seminal influence on the late
twentieth-century ‘Chaos Magick’ movement, becoming also a legendary figure to occult
readers thanks to the mythologised account of his life circulated by
his younger friend and associate Kenneth Grant. Spare was an associate of Aleister Crowley for
a short time and in 1909 became a Probationer in Crowley’s post-Golden Dawn magical order the A*A*,
or Argenteum Astrum, but they eventually parted ways
and Spare left the A*A*, not having progressed from Probationer to the first grade of Neophyte.
Crowley wrote on Spare’s probationer card, ‘An artist; cannot understand organisation,
or would have passed’. Ha, Crowley, Crowley… a nicer guy you couldn’t find!
Spare rejected Crowley’s style of ceremonial Magick preferring a more free-form,
psychologically oriented style of Magick that leveraged on the unconscious. That’s because
he deemed the unconscious to be all-powerful but to reach that power one has to bypass the
conscious mind. Spare would try to accomplish this by deliberately forgetting wishes, believing that
this would bury them into the unconscious and give them power. He was clearly being influenced by the
psychological idea of how complexes and neuroses are formed, as well as the Freudian return of
the repressed. Spare even claimed that Freud had used some of his ideas and that he had received a
letter from Freud deferring to his greater genius. As Phil Baker explains, Spare’s central method of
communicating with the unconscious was through the use of sigils. These are
graphic occult signs, similar to the seals used to represent and evoke demons, angels,
planets or other entities, a well-established tradition in Western Magick. Yet, Spare’s sigils
were not fixed seals but graphic signs crafted by the Magician. They are created by writing
a wish in a simplified and affirmative form, removing the duplicate letters, and combining
those that were left into a design which was to be imprinted on the mind and then forgotten.
Spare’s inspiration for sigils was the artist’s monogram, a stylized design of an artist’s
initials. This manipulation of the mind was the key to Magick for Spare, as reported in his
major work “The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy,” self-published in 1913.
Spare’s view of Magick is an example of the ‘psychologising’ tendency of twentieth-century
Magick, that we also see in Crowley’s 1904 edition of “The Goetia of Solomon
the King,” where he explains that spirits are really portions of the brain, so a spirit
said to bring treasure is supposedly the part of the brain that governs business abilities.
Spare’s idea of spirits and familiars extended to ‘obsessions’ and ‘automata’,
obsessions being derived from the spiritualist idea of obsession - when the obsessing entity or
force is still separate, as opposed to possession when the entity or force has taken over and
the concept of automata from the work of French psychologist Pierre Janet.
Depriving spirits and demons of their ontological independence - meaning of an existence in their
own right and on their own accord - to turn them into a human projection or archetype
of sort - leads to new potential implications. Within such a framework, it’s easy to infer
that – if deities don’t exist outside of our mind’s construction of them - then they’re made up
by us. This also means that if what matters is the archetypal energy one entity brings about, then I
can make up my own deities based on my personal associations and individual correspondences.
So, if I had to deal with an acquaintance or a co-worker who’s sucking the life
out of me with their negative inclinations and I associate that act to vampirism, I could employ
Buffy the Vampire Slayer as my deity to push against the influence that person has over me.
Well, that’s pretty much what happens in Chaos Magick with the idea that deities are instrumental
and you can even make up your own as long as they allow you to source from the specific unconscious
energy you want to employ by leveraging on individual associations and correspondences.
Baker explains that, in The Book of Pleasure, Spare also wrote about the concept of the Kia,
something akin to the Tao and the Jungian pleroma.
The Kia is both a fertile void behind or above all being and something which can be
tuned into as a higher state of consciousness, offering the non-duality of what Spare called
‘the free or atmospheric “I”. Spare’s ontology paired the Kia with the Zos, the bodily animal
self, with which he identified and one way of uniting the Zos and the Kia in practice
was the ‘Death Posture’, a quasi-yogic relaxation position almost certainly deriving its name
from the yoga term śavāsana or ‘corpse pose’. So, we have seen so far that the three
major contributions to Chaos Magick from Spare’s thought are the practice of Sigil,
the psychologising of spirits and entities that may lead to even tailoring your own deities based
upon your intended purpose, the rejection of ceremonial structures and the concept that
the source of true magical power is achievable by reaching a higher non-dual state of consciousness.
The latter conjures to mind ecstatic experiences that are commonly included as
essential in shamanic journeying and indeed there have been speculations as to whether
Spare’s view of Magick could be considered akin to that of Shamanism, more specifically to the
Western-born tradition of Core Shamanism. In an interesting analysis of the matter,
Christopher J. Miles, argues that considering Spare’s thought as shamanistic is somewhat a
misrepresentation of the theories presented in his works because he’s never claimed to have
drawn inspiration from Shamanism or to be a Shaman himself. The material published by Kenneth Grant
after Spare’s death has emphasised and – in some cases – created a new perspective on Spare that
sees his link with “Witchcraft” as fundamental to his entire belief system and further, as a link
back to an American Indian Sorcery. Other writers have relied upon Grant’s depiction of Austin Osman
Spare and saw his alleged Magick teacher “Mrs Paterson” – who apparently also deflowered him…
great way to learn stuff, Austin!, along with his perception of Witchcraft and the spirit guidance
of an Amerindian Sorcerer as reasons to relate Spare to Western constructions of Shamanism,
particularly that of Harner’s Core-Shamanism, which advocates for “Shamanism” as a universal
proto-religion based on a series of trans-cultural techniques.
However, Miles argues, there’s not enough evidence of any sound connection between Spare’s concept of
Magick and shamanic practices. Indeed, techniques of ecstasy hold an important but ambiguous place
in Spare’s system of magical practices. The Death Posture is, for instance,
a one-time-only technique that frees the Kia in the ecstasy of Self-Love. Once someone
has experienced this state it is ever open to them. Yet, there are other, quite simple ways,
of reaching the state of “Vacuity” that Spare’s magical practice of “sigilisation” necessitates.
Tennis or smoking are a couple, for example. Furthermore, Spare’s spiritual journey is not
like the shamanic journey where you travel to the Upper, the Middle or the Lower World.
These would be considered by Spare as fostering that sense of duality and separation that is
necessary to overcome in order to reach the unity between the Zos and the Kia. So,
this is more a journey back to a higher self that a journey to explore the spirit realms.
Spare’s conceived unity between the Zos and the Kia is also defined as the journey of,
Neither-Neither as it goes beyond the dualisms and separations of mundane lower-self living.
It’d be possible to adopt a metaphorical interpretation and see the journey to the
Neither-Neither as a way of healing oneself, for it grants – according to Spare - the true
freedom of Self-Love, but even employing this more healing-oriented interpretation,
such a journey would still present dissimilarities with Harner’s description of shamanic journeying,
which is more aimed at gaining power and knowledge from the spirit realm in order to help
and heal others rather than journeying toward a non-dual state to achieve one’s own higher state.
This is it for today’s video! Don’t forget to check out Dr Sledge’s companion video
over to Esoterica, you can find it linked in a pinned comment!
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