The Pocket Austin Osman Spare

Working on the cutting edge of both magic and art, Austin Osman Spare developed a unique synthesis of older ritual magic systems with post-modern, erotic, and surrealist themes. His theory of magic eschews complex formula and ritual to favor creativity, spontaneity, and ecstasy, embracing artistic expression and alternative sexualities. Collected here are some of Spare's most important works. Though dense and esoteric, these texts bear repeated study by the serious occultist, for they speak to the human drives that make real magic possible.

This wonderful book contains four of the most popular writings of Austin Asman Spare, including Automatic Drawings, Anathema of Zos, The Book of Pleasure, and The Focus of Life

The Focus of Life, The Mutterings of AOS is a comprehensive treatise written by Austin Osman Spare on key occult concepts he introduced in his previous writings. Thank you very much for looking at a book by One-Eye Publishing, we hope you enjoy it! We are always adding to our catalogue, so please check back or find us online!

Austin Osman Spare is the definitive biography of the controversial occultist and artist, an enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world whose work was both hailed as genius and decried as immoral decadence. As George Bernard Shaw reportedly said, "Spare's medicine is too strong for the average man." Trained as a draughtsman, Spare enjoyed early acclaim when, at the age of seventeen, his work was shown at the Royal Academy in London. But his star soon declined; Spare went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity. After a brief association with Aleister Crowley, he became absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions, while developing his own magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality. All the while, Spare continued to produce extraordinary art, and held his exhibitions outside of the conventional art world, in London pubs. Today Spare is both forgotten and famous, a cult figure whose modest life has been much mythologised since his death; the world's largest Spare collection is held by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Biographer Phil Baker separates fact from myth, providing wide-ranging insights into Spare's art and mind, reconnecting him with the art community that ignored him and exploring the rich tapestry of the culture that surrounded him, interweaving the birth of psychoanalysis, the historiography of the occult, and the British class system. This richly readable and illuminating biography, containing 50 black and white and 8 color photographs of Spare's art, takes us deep into the strange inner world of this enigmatic artist.

The Book of Pleasure could be regarded as the central text among Austin Osman Spare's writings. It covers both mystical and magical aspects of Spare's ideas; as the modern ideas on sigils (as now have become popular in chaos magic) and Spare's special theory on incarnation are for the first time introduced in this book.There are some chapters in The Book of Pleasure that Spare has referred to within the text, but are omitted. It seems that they were destroyed during World War II

I bring a sword that contains its own medicine: The sour milk that cureth the body. Prepare to meet God, the omnifarious believing, -Thyself the living truth. Die not to spare, but that the world may perish. Nature is more atrocious. Learning all things from Thee in the most sinister way for representation: from thy thought to become thereafter. Having suffered pleasure and pain, gladly dost thou deny the things of existence for freedom of desire-from this sorry mess of inequality-once so desired. And is fear of desire. The addition of the 'I' of a greater illusion. Desire is the conception I and induces Thou. There is neither thou nor I nor a third person-loosing this consciousness by unity of I and Self; there would be no limit to consciousness in sexuality. Isolation in ecstasy, the final inducement, is enough-But, procreate thou alone