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 a fertile void to be accessed as a source of Magick power and has been associated with shamanic practices.

Welcome to this episode on Austin Osman Spare and his influence on magick-practising traditions!

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 (1886–1956) 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 (Baker, 2016, p. 303; Woodman, 2003, p. 34).

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 exemplifies the ‘psychologising’ tendency of twentieth-century Magick, which we see in Crowley’s 1904 edition of “The Goetia of Solomon the King,” where he explains that spirits are portions of the brain. Hence, 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 (1859–1947). (Baker, 2016, pp. 303–304).

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 sorts – 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, I can make up my 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 with vampirism, I could employ Buffy the Vampire Slayer as my deity to push against the influence that person has over me. That’s pretty much what happens in Chaos Magick with the idea that deities are instrumental. You can even make up your own if they allow you to source from the specific unconscious energy you want to employ by leveraging on individual associations and correspondences.

In The Book of Pleasure, Baker explains that 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 turned into 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. 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’. (Baker, 2016, p. 305).

So, we have seen so far that the three major contributions to Chaos Magick from Spare’s thought are not just theoretical concepts, but practical tools. These include 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 inspiring concept that the source of true magical power is achievable by reaching a higher non-dual state of consciousness.

The latter conjures up ecstatic experiences that are commonly considered essential in shamanic journeying. 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, 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 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 unlike the shamanic journey, where you travel to the Upper, Middle, or Lower World. Spare considers these to foster the 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 than 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. (Miles, 2006, pp. 79–80).

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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REFERENCES:
Baker, P. (2016) ‘Austin Osman Spare’, in Partridge, C. (ed), The Occult World, 1 edition., London, Routledge, pp. 303–307.

Miles, C. J. (2006) ‘Journey into the Neither-Neither: Austin Osman Spare and the Construction of a Shamanic Identity’, Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 54–83.

Woodman, J. (2003) ‘Modernity, selfhood, and the demonic : anthropological perspectives on “Chaos magick” in the United Kingdom’, Ph.D., Goldsmiths, University of London [Online]. DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.00028683 (Accessed 23 June 2020).

First uploaded 3 Mar 2022