AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE & THE GREAT WITCH

Much has been made of Austin Osman Spare’s written work, his magical books, the later

aphorisms, his Alphabet of Desire, his sigils. While they all deserve attention and are worth

studying, it has often taken too much consideration away from his actual graphic work.

People have remarked on his idiosyncratic use of language – for example, Dave Evans writes

that even though Spare wrote extensively, he often used “bizarre language, such as invented

or confabulated words”. It’s been suggested that the artist suffered from a mild form of

dyslexia. It is true that Spare can be hard to read at times and it’s generally agreed that his

written outpourings are not his best work. But this entirely misses the point : Spare was

primarily a visual artist – he mutilates language for the image, even sacred language is

profaned by daemonic revelatory vision.

For Spare vision was always paramount. His exchanges with Kenneth and Steffi Grant,

published in Zos Speaks! (even taking into account that the Grants probably kept some of his

letters to themselves), tended to end with “in haste” and seem indeed written in a hurry, as if

he had other things on his mind – except sometimes when the subject concerns something

practical, such as publishing his work. He asks Grant for the meaning of certain terms, such

as ‘Qliphoth’ – a curious omission, all things considered. He sensed, however, how much his

audience – his customers, even – rated language, and obliged with tall tales and, of course,

his esoteric writings. But words, and you might add sigils, are far from being the only

measure of mental or in Spare’s case, occult development.

[ There follows a consideration of a selection of Spare’s images . . . ]

Item 1: The Sun is Sick (to be found in Zos Speaks!)

A black swamp, lit by a wan sun the colour of pale egg yolk, has given birth to a host of

apparitions emerging from the semi-liquid earth. They are vaguely humanoid in outline, their

substance more like roots or growths rising from the fetid soil. They undulate in wave-like

motion, as if animated by a force both from above and below, and when a deeper night falls,

they may sink and melt back into the element from whence they came.

In the foreground, on the right, large carved somnambulant heads of Native American

aspect are mounted on, or even growing out of, a trunk. They have kept a melancholy watch

here since time immemorial.

The atmosphere in this place – it is easy to imagine – is miasmic and unpleasant to breathe,

and the mind, clouded by unwholesome fumes, would barely be conscious and quite possibly

subject to a hallucinatory force. Here the dwellers of the Spirit world materialize from the

arboreal energies inherent in the soil, impregnated by invisible germs carried on the wind,

before rising and swarming with organic life forms.

Kenneth Grant, often fanciful in his speculations, was convinced when he saw this picture

that Spare had unwittingly illustrated an episode of the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft

without even having read his work – it would have been one of his automatic drawings,

created in a trance. Like Lovecraft, he said, Spare had found a formula for entering ‘extra-

terrestrial regions.’ I would suggest this strange concurrence points more truthfully to the fact

that Lovecraft, like Spare, in his creative imagination – particularly where the infamous

Cthulhu mythos are concerned – was a fellow traveller of the astral realms.
Item 2: Druidesque (to be found in Zos Speaks!)

We are in a barren landscape, immemorially ancient, where a brilliant sun of Turneresque

intensity is setting in a sky the colour of a big bruise. Is this the dawn, or the end, of time?

Between hills a stream flows in meandering fashion to the horizon, behind which may lie a

primeval ocean or an abyss of immeasurable desolation. In the foreground a solitary black

rock juts out of the ground and two figures, both dressed in voluminous robes, stand close. It

isn’t clear what they are doing there. Are they the ‘druids’ the title of the picture is hinting at?

They seem cowed and depressed, the head of the one closest to the viewer sits at a very odd

angle to the rest of his body, and what that body would look like disrobed, is somewhat

troubling. They are figures that occur and recur with some regularity in Spare’s work. They

may be of either sex, though usually they’re male. When they’re not heavily robed, they are

not entirely human in their nakedness: sometimes they display satyr-like features – such as

horns or tails or excessive hair in strange places – or they unexpectedly sprout wing-like

appendages.

But to return to the picture: if they are druids, what exactly are they doing in that eldritch,

spectre-haunted landscape, under that baleful sun? In spite of their robes, there is nothing

ceremonial about them or their actions. Not much is known about the druids; they were a

priestly class from as far back as the Iron Age, whose religious practice was said to have

included human sacrifice. It is doubtful whether Spare gave it the name by which the picture

has become known – he may not have given it a name at all – but if he did have ‘druids’ in

mind, he has succeeded in evoking a pre-historic world of eerie silence and alien worship.
 Steffi Grant gave these astral landscapes the adjective ‘panic’, which obviously suggests

the presence of the god Pan. But panic, even when it’s the calm before the storm, anticipates

sudden movement, energy: a volatility, though still a kind of energy. Both these figures are

too weighed down and oppressed by an inability to move. They seem stunned and forlorn,

voiceless before a Mystery they cannot fathom. These are worlds ruled not by a God in his

Heaven, but by another entity entirely, more a Vampire. A Vampire – or even a host of them

– Spare could conjure forth pictorially in his own inimitable way. For here the sun is in the

sickness of Amenta, meaning ‘the Infernal or Inner Earth.’ Hades or Hell, are two of its other

names . . . This is the realm of the Ur-Mother, who haunts men’s dreams, and had chosen

Austin Osman Spare as one of her favourite sons.

When Spare was already in his sixties, Grant asked him for a self-portrait. Shortly after, he

received a drawing of an erect penis, under which Spare had written Self Portrait at the age

of Eighteen. He called it a true self-portrait, in fact the most truthful one he had ever done.

Intuitively, he sensed the nature of his art: which, coupled with the power of his eye and

hand, drew the phallic track of his mind through the entanglements of Nature. He was

penetrating a realm which, as well as being forbidden territory, had been impenetrable for

long centuries, with his miraculous gift for line and form.

By the age of five or six Spare had begun to feel neglected by his biological mother, his

policeman father being usually absent and busy. It’s a sad and all too familiar tale. And

there’s no doubt that he would have needed more – and different – attention than other

children: his talent and urge to draw were already nascent.

He started wandering away on his own into the lonely forest of his imagination . . .
 He was too young to draw knowingly on the pagan, or at least non-Christian, under-

currents in western culture that were then beginning to re-emerge, but he drank from them

naturally, and started to eat some strange fruits lying on the floor of the forest. He was

instinctively drawn towards the Nightside of life.

And then the Witch found and ravished him. He was all of seven years old.

It doesn’t matter whether there really was a ‘Yelg Paterson’ or not: an elderly woman, poor

to the point of destitution, who claimed to be descended from the Salem Witches and had a

Native American spirit guide called Black Eagle – who, when Mrs. Paterson (or ‘Patterson’)

died, became Spare’s own familiar. Whether there was a fortune teller who had the ability to

make ideas and thought-forms real and visible, and appear to him like a nubile young girl,

enticing and irresistible enough to have sex with. [Clearly a powerful myth-in-the-making all

by itself, which has re-appeared – or perhaps been appropriated? – in the legend of at least

one other modern practitioner: self-styled “King of the Witches” Alex Sanders.] What

matters is that the notion, the fancy of a woman of unimaginable years, knowledge and

magical power, who was grotesquely ugly – he would often portray her naked and libidinous

– did not repel or scare him, but instead fascinated and excited him.

Part of the legend and its elaboration is due to the purple imagination of Kenneth Grant,

who would sometimes even put words in Spare’s mouth – or rather on paper – which were

not always necessarily his own. Biographers such as Phil Baker have commented on this, as

when he notices that a piece of text is “too fluent” to have been written by the artist. But then

Grant, like Spare, had been in thrall to Magic from an early age . . .
 The Witch, he wrote, “usually old, usually grotesque, libidinously learned and as sexually

attractive as a corpse” was necessary for transmutation. Also, it wouldn’t be unusual for the

young Spare to have seen some old women of her description on the streets in his

neighbourhood in pre-First World War London – or later even, between the Wars. There

might have been a gypsy fortune teller among them, one who retained a smidgen of a beauty

she may once have possessed, who caught his eye as he caught hers, and with whom he spent

time. She may have been one of his first models . . .

She would become the infinite ‘I am’ of his primary self-divinizing Imagination, replacing

the ‘I am’ of the Christian God. The initiation She bestowed on him was his inalienable right

to self-assertion as an artist, as an artist more than a man.

She became the way Art and Magic revealed themselves to him through Time. After a

short-lived, early period being lauded and feted as a prodigy at an unfeasibly young age, once

he was without the benefit of an enlightened and wealthy patron, Spare had to somehow

make his way alone. Her more worldly credentials, or rather the lack of them, were like a

foreshadowing of what his own life would become: poor to the point of destitution, accepting

nothing from people but the odd symbolic coin for her fortune-telling . . .

Spare would call Her his Second Mother.

Item 3: Aerial Vampire or Man is a Bundle of Ids [see accompanying illustration]

A thick demarcation, coloured red, yellow and blue, snakes diagonally across the paper,

dividing the painting in two and separating two realms: one light, the other darker. On the left

of the picture, in the lighter part, we see the “aerial vampire” of one of the titles of this work:

although her inhuman feet seem to touch the darkness where the demarcation is incomplete

and doesn’t reach the edge of the paper; perhaps that is where she slipped through? Or if she

isn’t actually a vampire, she is definitely not of this world. It’s difficult to imagine a stranger

creature, in spite of the legions of monsters and grotesques that people the imagination of

many an occultist today. Spare’s vampire or demon – who hasn’t burst into flames, or

decayed into a nasty puddle on the floor when exposed to the light, as in the usual vampire

lore – is a potent creature of the Night, which has somehow strayed or made it into the light

of Day, where she stands revealed and transformed. She has become uncharacteristically

immobile: unlike her sisters in the other sphere, whose bodies bend and blissfully contort

themselves. For this isn’t her element. Instead she has acquired an impossible hour-glass

figure, with a sigil marking the spot where the stomach is supposed to be, even though there

hardly seems to be room for it.

Her new, unfamiliar surroundings are scored by mysterious lines of sigils and geometrical

glyphs where the ghosts, or embryos, of aspiring life forms are flattened. For depth has been

obliterated, unlike in the other half of the picture, where forms swim in and out of the

shadows, and the heads of a trio of men seem strangely disembodied. If we could see them

complete with the rest of their bodies, they would dwarf the female shapes which exist in the

same realm. Are they captives, victims of the maenads we see displaying themselves naked in
impossible positions? Have they been seduced and are now lost? Are they now trophies?

They all bear a similar mark on their forehead . . .

On the other side, where the Vampire resides – in a space which is more a diagram of a

space than a real one – a cartouche of sigils occupies the top right of the drawing. Are these

linear signs an attempt to contain or put a spell on Her? To the right of her feet some weird

entities stretch and twist upwards – they seem to have slithered out of the darkness (I will

come back to these.) There are more sigils on her body, and they are delicately drawn, one

above her pubes, and one above each breast, and one on her brow.

She has wings for arms but it is doubtful they could ever lift her into the air, being small

and ineffectual. Still, it would appear that with the top half of her body she’s reaching

upwards, for apart from wings she has also acquired a pale halo, and a sickle of a moon is

visible above her right wing. It goes with her mournful, oval face, morbid eyes and lanky

hair. A halo is usually an attribute of a saint, or at least someone sacred or heroic, though

they’re not naked as a rule. In Sumerian literature there exists the concept of melam, meaning

“a brilliant visible glamour which is exuded by gods, heroes and kings.” Spare’s halo for his

Vampire is pale and almost moon-like: She does not qualify for god, hero or queen, but the

glamour, in all its repellent strangeness, was very real to him.

The Eye and what the Eye sees, both inwardly and outwardly, was all important to Spare,

and he was especially bold and gifted in portraying what he saw. There was the Eye of Horus

that we see on some of his drawings, notably his steles. It was his Solar Eye, the wedjat or

apotropaic Eye, which was born in Ancient Egypt. It creates a distance between eye and

object and makes that distance a charged force-field. It was responsible for his miraculous
feel for line and shape. He reserved his purest, most emphatic line-drawings for his film-stars,

sirens and seductresses, “ravishing sidereal beauties” (in the words of John Balance.) They

were literally Stars in a Heaven he could vividly imagine, but which to him would remain

remote, distant and unattainable.

Sometimes Spare’s Eye keeps equal distance between Sun and Moon, and the whole

picture is an Eye looking out at us, mesmerizing us and casting its spell . . .

When he was more passive to his vision and his senses were in their house of detention, his

Eye becomes phallic, as the demonic muse expressed herself more nakedly, revealing

Nature’s chthonian invisibilities for him to make visible. The snake-like entities in Aerial

Vampire, whose predatory heads – they seem equipped with sharp appendages – each contain

an eye, are an example. They seem to probe and feel their way. They have come up out of the

darkness on the other side, and are viewing the strange being rising up from it, almost

clinging to her. They could snake in anywhere, meander up or down, twist round corners, and

enter the secret places . . . And Spare the Divine Artist seemed to possess unique dispensation

to show what he had seen.

Except for a brief period when he was very young, lauded and feted as a prodigy, which

indeed he was, Spare gradually disappeared from public view. He lived and died in poverty

and squalor, a virtual unknown in the art-world, with only a few friends to keep him from

destitution. It was as if society had drawn an invisible circle round him, to protect itself from

the artist’s dangerous mana and magic. He had become strangely untouchable, his magical art

creating an eerie sexual iridescence round his person which could not be seen except by a

few.
 Nobody who knew Spare could doubt his virility and love of women, (even though it has

also been suggested that when he was young, he may have been bi-sexual, almost as a matter

of course, and because in the overheated turn-of-the-century cultural climate in London a

young artist with Spare’s looks and talent, would inevitably have run into (usually older)

potential patrons with homo-erotic tendencies. Whatever the truth of it is, there is one aspect

of Spare’s Art which has to my knowledge never been touched upon, simply because it

moves under the radar . . .

Spare was able to survey the Great Witch’s savage primordial nature, but he could do

nothing to control it: he could only paint and draw what he saw. Like his distant forebears,

the Romantics, whose artistic bloodlines had been interrupted by the Industrial Revolution,

and had ended in a morass of decadence on the one hand and a soup of mawkishness on the

other, Spare penetrated far into the daemonic realm. With his magic he could induce

hallucinations in himself as well as in others. But Vision such as Spare possessed did come at

a price. Society at the time – not even most of its more enlightened circles – could not have

born or processed the Occult Revelations that came to him. They remained Occult, as ever

suitable for some eyes only.

Priests of the Great Mother Goddess in ancient times were castrated – or even castrated

themselves – so they might become eunuchs in her service and have privileged access to her

secret knowledge. In the process they became hermaphroditized.

In Spare’s Art – usually in work depicting a gathering of witches, or a witches Sabbath –

occasionally you will see naked male figures over whom has come a strange sex-change: they
may have grown breasts; their genitals may have become female, or there may even be a total

absence of genitals. When they are unaffected by these eerie transformations, they often lie or

sit passively, lethargically, oppressed by some ineluctable force. In one picture that was

shown at the I:Mage exhibition earlier in the year, a group of male figures are almost

changing sex in front of our eyes. It is as if masculine assertion is reproved . . .

In another painting, two powerful naked witches stand in front of a table or altar with a

variety of objects on it. One of the objects is a small truncated statue of a male figure, with

head and arms raised, though the arms are chopped off halfway and the head too has been

reduced. A trio of trussed-up male heads is hanging overhead. They look like satyrs. Could

they have served their purpose?

Do we sometimes glimpse the artist himself in one of his witches, having undergone a

mysterious sex change?

Spare had been glamoured by the Great Witch at an unfeasibly young age. It had given him

such an excess of mana he had to hide himself. He could conjure forth creatures hiding in the

hinterland of what Kenneth Grant called the “eroticized psyche.”

Austin Osman Spare had become, not a man who acted, but a man who Sees.

Emma Doeve, September 2013.