Austin Osman Spare

Spare was a prodigy as a draughtsman, exhibited at the Royal Academy at seventeen, taken up and then dropped by the London art world, and he spent most of his life in poverty in south London, drawing, and largely outside every occult organisation of his day. He was briefly in Crowley's A A and did not stay.

His contribution is a technique, and it is one of the very few genuine inventions in modern magic. In The Book of Pleasure (1913) he set out the sigil: a statement of desire written out, stripped of repeated letters, and compressed into a single glyph, which is then charged in a state of exhaustion or ecstasy and deliberately forgotten. The theory is that conscious desire obstructs itself, and that the wish must be handed to what he called the subconscious in a form the conscious mind can no longer read.

What makes this historically important is that it needs no hierarchy, no temple, no lineage, no Hebrew and no gods, exactly the properties that made it the foundation of chaos magic in the 1970s and after, and the reason Spare is now more practised than any of the ceremonialists who ignored him. His wider personal system, the alphabet of desire and the entity he called Zos and Kia, is much harder to reconstruct and is described in prose that resists paraphrase; anyone claiming a clean exposition of it is supplying more order than the sources contain.

Spare's life describes a deliberate fall through the English art world. At seventeen he had a drawing hung in the Royal Academy summer exhibition; he studied at the Royal College of Art, was talked of alongside Beardsley, showed at prestigious galleries, and published sumptuous books of his own drawings, The Book of Pleasure among them, whose draughtsmanship critics praised even when its doctrine baffled them. He worked as an official war artist at the end of the First World War. Then, decade by decade, he withdrew: from the West End to south London basements, from galleries to exhibitions hung in the saloon bars of pubs, where portraits of neighbours and film stars sold for a few pounds.

The withdrawal was partly temperament, partly poverty after his exhibitions of the later 1920s failed, and partly principle; he wrote that he preferred his sitters and buyers unpretentious. Bombed out in 1941 and losing the use of his drawing arm for a time, he recovered and kept working to the end, dying in 1956 with a final exhibition in preparation. The revival came posthumously and from an unexpected quarter: Kenneth Grant's books placed Spare at the centre of a magical current, the occult market made his pages valuable, and the art world eventually followed. The pub exhibitions now read less as decline than as a consistent aesthetic position, an artist practising his sorcery of images on the audience he actually wanted.