Austin Spare was described as the greatest draughtsman in England and was the enfant terrible of the Edwardian art scene but by the time of his death he was living in squalor and all but forgotten. This engaging biography charts the rise and fall of British art's darkest star, who was facinated by mysticism and spirtualism and practised automatic drawing before the Surrealists and developed a unique system of magic. By the 1930s Spare had retreated from fashionable society, living in poverty and obscurity but he never stopped working, only now is his work seen.

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.

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.

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

A richly illustrated book of images. Some of Spare's techniques, particularly the use of sigils and the creation of an "alphabet of desire" were adopted, adapted and popularized by Peter J. Carroll in the work Liber Null & Psychonaut. Carroll and other writers such as Ray Sherwin are seen as key figures in the emergence of some of Spare's ideas and techniques as a part of a magical movement loosely referred to as chaos magic. Zos Kia Cultus is a term coined by Kenneth Grant, with different meanings for different people. One interpretation is that it is a form, style, or school of magic inspired by Spare. It focuses on one's individual universe and the influence of the magician's will on it. While the Zos Kia Cultus has very few adherents today, it is widely considered an important influence on the rise of chaos magic.

The Writings of Austin Osman Spare is a collection of three books written by the famous artist and occult author. The three books included in this publication are Anathema of Zos: The Sermon to the Hypocrites, The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy and The Focus of Life: The Mutterings of Aaos. This compilation of three of Spare's most popular works is a must read for those that are fans of his writings and those interested in books on the occult.

In the Spring of 2013 a 79-card, hand-painted tarot deck created c.1906 by the mystic and artist Austin Osman Spare, was identified within the collections of The Magic Circle Museum in London. Austin Spare's life-long interest in cartomancy is well documented, yet very few of his own fortune-telling cards were thought to have survived. This compelling new example of the artist's early work demonstrates his precocious involvement with the currents that shaped the British Occult Revival at the beginning of 20th century, and his interactions with some of the period's lesser-known protagonists. Magic Circle Museum curator and artist Jonathan Allen immediately recognised that Spare's cards were not only art-historically significant, but also entirely unknown outside of The Magic Circle's collections, and set about tracing the deck's provenance, its place in the artist's oeuvre and within the wider histories of cartomancy. Lost Envoy reproduces Austin Spare's tarot deck in its entirety for the first time, alongside new written and visual contributions from Jonathan Allen, Phil Baker, Helen Farley, Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill, Sally O'Reilly and Gavin Semple. The book is designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio, with a cover incorporating the vibrant back colours of Spare's cards, a period binding common to many of the volumes found in The Magic Circle library and a gold deboss of the artist's autographic 'bird-head' motif, as discovered within the deck itself. The numbered and debossed special edition contains several fold-out sections showing conspicuous alignment between cards.--Publisher.

Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. OUT OF THE FLESH of our mothers come dreams and memories of the Gods. Of other kind than the normal inducement of interest and increasing skill, there exists a continual pressure upon the artist of which he is sometimes partially conscious but rarely entirely aware. He learns early or late in his career that power of literal reproduction (such as that of the photographic apparatus) is not more than slightly useful to him. He is compelled to find out from his artist predecessors the existence, in representation of real form, of super-sessions of immediate accuracies; he discovers within himself a selective conscience and he is satisfied, normally, in large measure by the extensive field afforded by this broadened and simplified beyond this is a region and that a much greater one, for exploration. The objective understanding, as we see, has to be attacked by the artist and a subconscious method, for correction of conscious visual accuracy, must be used. No amount of manual skill and consciousness of error will produce good drawing. A recent book on drawing by a well-known painter is a case in point; there the examples of masters of draughtsmanship may be compared with the painter-author's own, side by side, and the futility of mere skill and interest examined. Therefore to proceed further, it is necessary to dispose of the subject in art also (that is to say the subject in the illustrative or complex sense). Thus to clear the mind of inessentials permits through a clear and transparent medium, without prepossessions of any kind, the most definite and simple forms and ideas to attain expression.