Austin Osman Spare

[poliphilo]

This guy trundled onto the Antiques Road Show with a picture by Austin Osman Spare that he'd bought in a car boot sale or found in his attic. "I understand" he simpered to the expert. "That he dabbled in black magic."

"Dabbled"? That's like saying Einstein dabbled in physics or Tiger Woods plays a little golf.  Dabbling is what children do in muddy puddles.

But the words have become glued together, joined at the hip. If it's magic you're a dabbler. Even if, like Spare, you're the world's number one.  The ready made phrase, besides displaying a lack of thought in its user, suggests middlebrow distaste, a waving of the proverbial barge-pole, a nervous refusal to take the subject quite seriously. "Eugh, look at the naughty man, he's dabbling. Children, avert your eyes."

And while we're being prissy, "black magic" is another no-brainer. You might as well talk about white science and black science. Or white shop-keeping and black shop-keeping.   Magic is magic.  It's a discipline. A  profession.  No more or less disreputable in itself than any other.  Like most things people do it can be done with bad intent.  Spare practised magic. He was a magician. He was the magician's magician. Even Crowley deferred to him. It was widely acknowledged that if you wanted results- as opposed to lots of pretty theorising- then Spare was your man.

Much of Spare's writing is available on line. I tried to read some of it last night. And got choked off pretty quickly. Humourless, self-pitying, phallocentric are words that come to mind. Spare was- and I'm weighing my words carefully here- a complete wanker.

But he was also- incidentally, as it happens-   a quite brilliant artist. I wish I had a Spare in my attic.

Comments

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

I heard about this AR incident through a pagan writer's blog and had a dream involving Spare somehow and a local botanica. Weird. I have heard of Spare and know a little about him, but not much; not being the self-promoter Crowley was, he seems to have generated fewer books, bios, etc.

[silveredmane.livejournal.com]

It's been my impression that artistic brilliance often overlaps with, ah, wankerism.

I have The Focus of Life which is his teenage discovery of how the seasons and their ambient energy affect personal power, and The Book of Pleasure which is literally beautiful how-to manual about the spiritual aspects of wanking. Both of them, particularly The Book of Pleasure have inspired and inspirational automatic drawings. It's my understanding that he worked himself into the stupor required to produce them by having an excess of self-induced orgasms. I don't think that Kenneth Grant does him justice in Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare but justice doesn't appear to have been interesting to Grant.

Spare said that there is no such thing as being a genius, that some people, some times, are connected to genius and that there are various methods of becoming and staying connected to genius. Spare's personal method involved wanking. Crowley elevated wanking into a form of sex magick that can be done without a date. Spare had no such social aspirations, perhaps because he preferred the company of para-terrestials to that of humans.

My other favourite thing he said is that since, in time, all things happen, anything that isn't currently true is prognostication (- and that therefore it's narrow-minded to call him or anyone else a liar.

Crowley defined magic(k) as the science of understanding one's self and one's condition and the art of applying that understanding. Application seems to have been Spare's strong suit. I greatly admire him.

[amritarosa.livejournal.com]

It's good the fellow was selling that Spare, then. Doesn't sound like he deserves to own one.

[oakmouse]

"ROSES!"

*evil grin*

He was indeed a brilliant magician and artist, as well as a complete wanker. Well worth observing provided one has the intelligence and sense of self-preservation necessary to avoid his less desirable traits.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

When my husband was "into magic," as we said in those days, he brought home The Golden Dawn, and one night I dreamed that A. Crowley was chasing me down corridors.

He had long fingernails.