"I have not seen a man, who is not God already" - Austin Osman Spare

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"Zos Kia Cultus" redirects here. For the album by the black/death metal band Behemoth, see Zos Kia Cultus (Here and Beyond).

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Austin Osman Spare (30 December 1886 – 15 May 1956) was an English artist and occultist[1][2] who worked as both a draughtsman and a painter. Influenced by symbolism and art nouveau his art was known for its clear use of line,[3] and its depiction of monstrous and sexual imagery.[4] In an occult capacity, he developed idiosyncratic magical techniques including automatic writing, automatic drawing and sigilization based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self.

Born into a working-class family in Snow Hill in London, Spare grew up in Smithfield and then Kennington, taking an early interest in art. Gaining a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, he trained as a draughtsman, while also taking a personal interest in Theosophy and Occultism, becoming briefly involved with Aleister Crowley and his A∴A∴. Developing his own personal occult philosophy, he authored a series of occult grimoires, namely Earth Inferno (1905), The Book of Pleasure (1913) and The Focus of Life (1921). Alongside a string of personal exhibitions, he also achieved much press attention for being the youngest entrant at the 1904 Royal Academy summer exhibition.

After publishing two short-lived art magazines, Form and The Golden Hind, during the First World War he was conscripted into the armed forces and worked as an official war artist. Moving to various working class areas of South London over the following decades, Spare lived in poverty, but continued exhibiting his work to varying success. With the arrival of surrealism onto the London art scene during the 1930s, critics and the press once more took an interest in his work, seeing it as an early precursor to surrealist imagery. Losing his home during the Blitz, he fell into relative obscurity following the Second World War, although he continued exhibiting till his death in 1956.

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One of those attracted to Spare's work was Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), an occultist who had founded the religion of Thelema in 1904, taking as its basis Crowley's The Book of the Law. Crowley introduced himself to Spare, becoming a patron and champion of his art, which he proclaimed to be a message from the Divine. Spare subsequently submitted several drawings for publication in Crowley's Thelemite journal, The Equinox, receiving payment in the form of an expensive ritual robe.[30][31] Spare would also be invited to join Crowley's new Thelemite magical order, the A∴A∴ or Argenteum Astrum, which had been co-founded with George Cecil Jones in 1907. Becoming the seventh member of the order in July 1907, where he used the magical name of Yihovaeum, it was through doing so that he befriended the occultist Victor Neuburg, but although he remained in A∴A∴ until 1912, ultimately Spare never became a full member, disliking Crowley's emphasis on strict hierarchy and organisation and becoming heavily critical of the practice of ceremonial magic.[32] Spare would grow to dislike Crowley, with some rumours arising within the British esoteric community that Crowley had actually made sexual advances toward the young artist, something Spare had found repellent, although these have never been proven.[33] In turn, Crowley would claim that Spare was only interested in "black magic" and for that reason had kept him back from fully entering the Order.[34]

I repeat, with sincere derision, fuck Crowley.

Zos Kia Cultus

From his early years, Spare developed his own magico-religious philosophy which has come to be known as the Zos Kia Cultus (also Zos–Kia Cultus),[102] a term coined by the occultist Kenneth Grant. Raised in the Anglican denomination of Christianity, Spare had come to denounce this monotheistic faith when he was seventeen, telling a reporter that "I am devising a religion of my own which embodies my conception of what; we are, we were, and shall be in the future."[103]

Zos and Kia

Key to Spare's magico-religious views were the dual concepts of Zos and Kia. Spare described "Zos" as the human body and mind, and would later adopt the term as a pseudonym for himself.[103] Biographer Phil Baker believed that Spare derived the word from the Ancient Greek words zoe, meaning life, and zoion, meaning animal or beast, with Spare also being attracted to the exotic nature of the letter "z", which rarely appears in the English language.[104] The author Alan Moore disagreed, believing that the term "ZOS" had instead been adopted by Spare to counterbalance his own initials, "AOS", in which the A would represent the beginning of the alphabet, and the Z would represent the end. In this way, Moore argued, Spare was offering an "ultimate and transcendent expression of himself at the extremities of his own being."[105]

Spare used the term "Kia", which he pronounced keah or keer, to refer to a universal mind or ultimate power, akin to the Hindu idea of Brahman or the Taoist idea of the Tao.[106] Phil Baker believed that Spare had developed this word either from Eastern or Cabalistic words such as ki, chi, khya or chiah. Alternately, he thought that it might have been adopted from Madame Blavatsky in her book The Secret Doctrine, which refers to the idea of an ultimate power as Kia-yu.[106]

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Magic and sigils

Spare "elaborated his sigils by condensing letters of the alphabet into diagrammatic glyphs of desire, which were to be integrated into postural (yogalike) practices—"monograms of thought, for the government of energy." Spare's work is contemporaneous with Hugo Ball's attempts "to rediscover the evangelical concept of the 'word' (logos) as a magical complex image"—as well as with Walter Benjamin's thesis that "Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic. Spare's 'sentient symbols' and his 'alphabet of desire' situate this mediatory magic in a libidinal framework of Tantric—which is to say cosmological—proportions."[112] (An alphabet of desire modelled after Spare's ideas has since been developed by Peter J. Carroll (amongst others), especially in his influential Liber Null, a sourcebook of Chaos Magic.)

Following his experience with Aleister Crowley and other Thelemites, Spare developed a hostile view of ceremonial magic and many of those occultists who practiced it, describing them as "the unemployed dandies of the Brothels" in The Book of Pleasure.[113]

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Crowley has no claim to the knowledge he used when he formed Thelema, said knowledge is ancient and many have come across it in various capacities across the span of recorded history and probably then some - some have abused it obscenely, others not.

See Also:

• Syncretism

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