Austin Osman Spare

[Rigorous Intuition]

<!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/144/aos.jpg" style="border:0;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br><br>Interesting piece on the artist-magician from the <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/144_spare2.shtml">Fortean Times</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> a few years ago by Phil Baker, entitled "Stroke of Genius."<br><br>An excerpt:<br><br>Spare was out of the limelight, but his real life (forget his 'career' for a moment) had long had a shadow side. He had lived in South London before - his family had moved from Smithfield to Kennington when he was eight - and it was down there, as a child, that he had apparently been seduced in some way by an elderly witch named Mrs.Paterson. He fell, as the expression has it, under her spell. As Spare would tell it later, Mrs Paterson introduced him to fortune telling with cards, and she had the power to 'materialise' thought-forms to the point where another person could see them. She also had the power to lasciviously transform herself from an aged crone to a sexually alluring woman, although some of Spare's art shows that, as far as he was concerned, this was a fluid distinction anyway. Today the social services would be round to Kennington before you could say "Beezlebub", but Spare's destiny was sealed. He could have said, like Marlowe's Dr.Faustus, "'Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me."<br><br>...<br><br>Let's fast forward a few years to look at some of Spare's magic in practice, and to consider the beginnings of the Spare legend in his own lifetime: some of the tales that circulate about Spare make the London Borough of Lambeth seem like HP.Lovecraft's Arkham County. Three examples will be enough. The first takes place around the end of the Second World War, and is told by the late Francis X. King. A friend of King's - "then an art student, now a Chartered Accountant" - had met Spare, and the two of them had got on well. They both hated the fashions of modern art, which had become something of an obsessive topic with Spare. On the other hand, they disagreed strongly over magic, which King's friend scoffed at. When Spare mentioned that he was sometimes possessed by the spirit of William Blake, the friend countered with a stream of sympathetic psycho-babble about schizoid personalities, dissociated complexes, and the rest. This narked Spare into showing his hand: he completely believed in magic, he said, and he had actually been doing it all his life. More than that, he would give the friend a real demonstration of it next time they met.<br><br>Spare was living in a dank and mouldering basement in Brixton, and it was here the art student had his appointment with magic. It was grim in Spare's basement. It didn't smell too good, and it could be noisy, with waste pipes gurgling in the ceiling and buses driving past at street level. The friend wasn't feeling quite as phlegmatic as he had the week before. He had done a little reading in the meantime and it had made him nervous, as reading will. Nevertheless, King says, he felt his "firm adherence to the linguistic philosophy of A.J.Ayer would save him from being gobbled up by the demon Asmodeus or, indeed, any other unpleasantness".<br><br>On entering the dread basement, the first thing the friend noticed was a marked absence of cloaks, incense, magic pentagrams, and general Dennis Wheatley paraphernalia. Spare was eating a piece of pie, and when he had finished it, the demonstration could begin. In place of the usual mystic bric-a-brac were some drawings and papers covered with letters and graphic symbols. Spare announced that he was going to attempt an "apportation", i.e. the production of a material object from thin air. Somewhat dated now, apports were very much part of the lore of spiritualism, and were quite widely performed in the nineteenth century. Spare was going to produce living, freshly cut roses out of the atmosphere. Working in silence, he waved a drawing in the air for a minute or two before putting it back on the table. Spare was clearly concentrating very hard, and the strain was visibly showing in his face as he finally pronounced the word "Roses". There was a moment of tense, pregnant silence before the pipe in the ceiling burst, bringing down a deluge of sewage and old bathwater on their heads.<br><br>Like a lot of Spare stories, this neat tale has the air of being slightly too good to be true. But it is interesting that it seems to originate from the second party, the witness, and not from Spare himself (we'll see why later). King was a notably sane and scholarly writer, and his friend's narrative does have a ring of circumstantial truth about it. Of course, the whole thing lies entirely within the realm of coincidence, but this is not the case with the second story. Something else is going on there, both in the tale and the telling, which has been atmospherically done by Kenneth Grant - a senior British occultist and a key writer in the creation of the Spare legend.<br><br>Spare was occasionally bothered by dilettantes and thrill seekers of one kind or another, and on one occasion two dabblers asked him to evoke an "elemental" to visible appearance. A couple of ectoplasm junkies looking for stronger kicks, they had seen the spirits of the human dead materialised at séances, but now they were on a psychic safari after rarer game. They wanted to see a non-human spirit. Spare tried to dissuade them, explaining that these entities embody atavistic forces from deep in the unconscious, and that it is better not to bring them up to the surface. But the dabblers insisted.<br><br>Spare drew a graphic symbol of his own devising on a piece of paper, and pressed it to his forehead. Nothing happened for a while. Then the poor light seemed to thicken and grow misty. A greenish mist now definitely seemed to be in the room, congealing into flitting, seaweed-like fingers and beginning to constitute "a definite, organised shape" with a nightmarish quality of absolute evil; "it entered into their midst, gaining more solidity with each successive moment. The atmosphere grew miasmic with its presence and an overpowering stench accompanied it; and in the massive cloud of horror that enveloped them, two pinpoints of fire glowed like eyes, blinking in an idiot face which suddenly seemed to fill all space." The dabblers panicked and begged Spare to send it away again, which he managed to do, but they were badly shaken by the experience. One of them was dead within a few weeks; the other was in a psychiatric hospital.<br><br>Kenneth Grant (painted, left, by Spare in 1950) has been underestimated as an imaginative writer in his own right, as well as a receptive ear for Spare's stories. This tale comes - presumably - from Spare, generically influenced by Grant's own avid reading of early 2Oth century visionary writers such as Machen and Lovecraft, and the pulp fictions of Sax Rohmer - the latter being no slouch with the miasmic green mist himself. People can certainly frighten themselves, even to death, but published corroboration is hard to find for this episode. If anything sets up even the slightest thee-dimensional co-ordinate here, it could be a comment that Spare made to his friend Frank Letchford. Letchford was not very interested in the occult, and Spare tended to play down his engagement with it when he talked to him. Spare told Letchford, late in life, that he was disenchanted with occultism, and that he'd had a friend who dabbled and became insane - which may be an unforced, untheatrical echo of some incident behind this story.<br><br>The third story, published several times with minor variations, is the most complex, relying on the imaginative collusion of a number of actors in the drama. It takes place in 1955, in the Islington house of an alchemist. Magical feuding had broken out between two occult groups, one headed by Kenneth Grant and the other by Gerald Gardner, the witchcraft revivalist. Gardner believed that Grant had "poached" a talented medium of his, an unstable young woman called Clanda, and he went to Spare for a talisman "to restore stolen property." Spare had no idea that this was to be used, in effect, against his friend Grant. The talisman Spare drew was apparently "a sort of amphibious owl with the wings of a bat and the talons of an eagle." It is interesting to note that Spare had a reputation among other occultists as somebody who could actually "do the business". Conversely, it seems Gardner recognised he had no ability himself, although he was an expert, which introduces an unexpectedly objective note into his own witchcraft.<br><br>At the magical meeting in Islington, Clanda lay upon an altar waiting to incarnate the goddess Black Isis, but instead things went badly wrong. She felt the temperature drop and imagined a great bird had crashed into the room, taking her up out of it and away. She saw the snow-covered roofs below, as in a flying dream, until the bird began to lose height over a wharf-like structure. She struggled in terror, and suddenly found herself back on the altar. Nobody is suggesting that Clanda went anywhere physically: it all took place, as they say, "astrally". Grant adds that a slimy, saline substance was left on the windowsill afterwards, seeming to pullulate slightly.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>