Austin Osman Spare's Biography(Books)(Photos)

Austin Osman Spare was an artist, philosopher and occult
magician. Like Aleister Crowley with whom he had a brief

Ray Sherwin are seen as key figures in the emergence of some
of Spare's ideas and techniques as a part of a magical

association, Spare was a genius in his own time
unappreciated and vilified by a society that could little

movement loosely referred to as chaos magic.

understand him. His was the inspiration that led to the
formation of the 'Illuminates of Thanateros' (IOT) in

Zos Kia Cultus is a form, style, or school of magic
developed by Spare. It focuses on one's individual universe

England in the late 1970's and the practice of what is now
known as Chaos Magic.

and the influence of the magician's will on it. While the
Zos Kia Cultus has very few adherents today, it is widely

It has been argued that Spare's magic depended (at least in

part) upon psychological repression. According to one
author, Spare's magical rationale was as follows, "If the

psyche represses certain impulses, desires, fears, and so
on, and these then have the power to become so effective

Privately printed by Spare during his lifetime

that they can mold or even determine entirely the entire
conscious personality of a person right down to the most

* Earth Inferno 1905

subtle detail, this means nothing more than the fact that
through repression ("forgetting") many impulses, desires,

* A Book of Satyrs 1907 (reissued by John Lane 1909)
* The Book of Pleasure 1913

etc. have the ability to create a reality to which they are
denied access as long as they are either kept alive in the

* The Focus of Life 1921 (issued by The Morland Press)
* Anathema of Zos 1927

conscious mind or recalled into it. Under certain
conditions, that which is repressed can become even more

powerful than that which is held in the conscious mind."

* Behind the Veil issued by David Nutt 1906

Spare believed that intentionally repressed material would
become enormously effective in the same way that "unwanted"

* Songs From The Classics published by David Nutt 1907
* The Shadow of the Ragged Stone published by Elkin

(since not consciously provoked) repressions and complexes
have tremendous power over the person and his or her shaping

Matthews 1909
* The Equinox published by Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton,

of reality. It was a logical conclusion to view the
subconscious mind as the source of all magical power, which

Kent & Co. Ltd. 1909
* On the Oxford Circuit published by Smith, Elder & Co.

Spare soon did. In his opinion, a magical desire cannot
become truly effective until it has become an organic part

1909
* The Starlit Mire published by John Lane 1911

of the subconscious mind.

* Eight Poems published by Form at The Morland Press
Ltd. 1916

Spare "elaborated his sigils by condensing letters of the
alphabet into diagrammatic glyphs of desire, which were to

* Twelve Poems published by The Morland Press Ltd. 1916
* The Gold Tree published by Martin Secker 1917

be integrated into postural (yogalike)
practices—"monograms of thought, for the government of

* The Youth and the Sage privately printed, 1927

energy." Spare's work is contemporaneous with Hugo Ball's
attempts "to rediscover the evangelical concept of the

'word' (logos) as a magical complex image"—as well as with
Walter Benjamin's thesis that "Mediation, which is the

* Form - A Quarterly Of The Arts 1916-1922
* Golden Hind 1922-1924

immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental
problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call

The majority of the books listed above are available as

this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language
is its magic. Spare's 'sentient symbols' and his 'alphabet

of desire' situate this mediatory magic in a libidinal
framework of Tantric—which is to say

Osman Spare.

cosmological—proportions."

Significant titles published since Spare's death include
Poems and Masks, A Book of Automatic Drawings, The Collected

Some of Spare's techniques, particularly the use of sigils
and the creation of an "alphabet of desire" were adopted,

Works of Austin Osman Spare, Axiomata & The Witches'
Sabbath, From The Inferno To Zos (3 Vol. Set), The Book of

adapted and popularized by Peter J. Carroll in the work
Liber Null & Psychonaut. Carroll and other writers such as

Ugly Ecstasy, and Zos Speaks.