on the three ages of magic, magick, and manifesting
Summoning Taoism, Jung and psychology to create Instagram based manifesting.
18 Feb 23 | Vol 2 Issue 5
I was recently introduced to the practice of manifesting on Instagram by my friend Hattie. It got me thinking.
The three ages of witchcraft. Can we say there are three ages of magic? There are ages of mankind. Lots of them. They seem pretty befuddled. Hesiod, an ancient Greek poet dude coined the Five Ages, ages ago. One of which we still haven't broken free from, still shackled to it as it were. The Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron ages. Sports medals still adhere to his yardstick. Which gives Heroic a kind of runner-up, tried-hard, well-done-you, it's-the-taking-part-that-counts status. Which I like. A heroic effort, clap clap. Leaving us with Iron, where we are today. Considered a crock of dung back in 50 BCE compared to the other ages. Considered a crock of dung now.
Given that gold is pretty much useless as a metal, its glinty purpose solely to look fabulous as a display of wealth, and iron is incredibly useful, it demonstrates the value system of those in power when they named the ages. Come the revolution I'll be having the iron based battleship please, no matter how cool your golden one looks. [1 ]
I guess modern folk sound a little foolish talking about the Heroic age, so we've rounded things up into Stone, Bronze and Iron. With the Golden age being reserved for whichever era your people had squatted the greatest landmass belonging to other people. Or the time your grandparents grew up in when you could blah blah etc etc. Let's transfer these ages into the agricultural, industrial, and technological. And return to magic.
Agricultural magic is that cute witches stuff. Wands, familiars and potions. The object of which is to affect people around you. Heal, protect, fall in love, or curse. Community magic.
It goes hand in hand with people wearing gold. Back then helping poor people if you didn't wear a crown was frowned upon. Doing witchcraft things like helping deliver children, or healing sick people with herbs, brought you the reward of being burnt alive at the stake. A bit harsh perhaps. Of course if you were a man you were more likely to be made advisor to the King. Or Queen Elizabeth I if you were John Dee.
John Dee believed angels talked to him, and invented an angel language called Enochian [2 ]. One of the most amazing things about the Enochian glyphs is how they can be mapped letter to letter with our English alphabet — isn't that the most incredible coincidence? One could write a whole article on Dr Dee. In fact, occult believer Damon Albarn, singer of Blur, wrote a whole opera about him. This amuses me no end. Albarn also being a huge promoter — some might say appropriator — of world music. For Dr Dee didn't just believe in the supernatural, he also invented colonialism. In the most literal sense — the occupation of other people's countries and calling them your own, or The British Empire as he dubbed it, or Golden Age as we call it now. Whereas if you have a pair of tits you get burnt alive. Seems a little one sided.
Dr Dee not only inspired Damon Albarn's occupation of Malian music, but ripped off the logo from industrial noise group Einstürzende Neubauten for his own glyph. Nefarious occult mathematician and wife swapper that he was.
If agricultural magic is community magic — affecting those around you, the industrial age heralded a shift to magic affecting your place among those around you. The community to the personal. Industrial magic is personal magic.
It also shifted classes. No more poor people licking toads and wearing black. OK, wearing black stayed, but in velvet. Velvet is a fucker to keep swish if you live in a dirt floored hovel.
My interest in occultists starts with industrial age magick. I have a half entertained half wariness fascination with it. I am not a believer. It elects the same sense of feeling cult leaders give me. Philosophically I admire the alternative lifestyle belief system, existing outside of everyday restrictive cultural norms, not needing heteronormative repressive validation. In reality I find them scary manipulative crazy people. But black velvet is a cool look. With silver. Lots of silver.
If Dr Dee was the poster child for agricultural magic, then Aleister Crowley is the main character for industrial magick?
Uh-uh.
Meet one Austin Osman Spare — the father of manifestation.
Crowley was a horny old man – forgive me, the opportunities for a sex magick ritual devil summoning jokes are rare — and an arch publicist, who usurped Spare's place as the inventor of modern magic — chaos magick.
Actually meet two Austin Osman Spares.
First we have Austin Osman Spare the artist. He's not unknown as mildly obscure painter.
A wunderkind, at 17 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. John Singer Sargent called him a “genius.” The youngest ever exhibitor in the Royal Academy's Summer Show. Journalist Hubert Nicholson published a story headlined "Father of Surrealism – He's a Cockney!" Pop Artist Mario Amaya called his celebrity portraits "the first examples of Pop art in this country", while his automatic drawings "predicted Abstract Expressionism". Mind you Amaya was being paid to write the foreword to Spare's exhibition catalogue. A pinch of salt then. Not a circle of salt. Or a hexagram. That's different.
A sensitive portraitist, his work as a government WWI artist is archived at the The Imperial War Museum. I suspect Hitler didn't know this fact when he requested he be painted by Austin, after seeing Spare portraying himself as the Führer in a self-portrait. Sometimes this column just writes itself. Spare refused the commission, and five years later the Luftwaffe bombed him and his studio, injuring his arm and destroying all his work. Coincidence or Nazi occultism?
Southwark Council has named a street after him, Spare Street in Elephant and Castle.
Once fêted by the press, how did he manage to slide into obscurity? Part bad timing, his Aubrey Beardsley-esque style dated rapidly as Britain started finding all things Victorian unfashionable.
Part simply being the other Austin Osman Spare. The indulging in occultist practice, not art practice one.
"Damn fine painting of my wife you’ve done there, young Spare. Damn fine.", "But I don't remember all those baleful severed goat heads being in our front parlour, what?" Apparently his supernatural beliefs spilled into his manner and appearance, as well as his depictions, hardly endearing him to patrons and gallerists. The Observer called his occult driven drawings "...abnormal, unhealthy, wildly fantastic and unintelligible". These days that’s probably a really good review, but not back then.
As well as inventing abstract expressionism, pop-art and goat sex portraiture, he laid the seeds for manifesting. Inspiring one Genesis P-Orridge who we met last week being über romantic [3 ].
Initially a cohort in Aleister Crowley's new Church of Cloaks, Goats and Darkness, they fell out. Falling out with other wizards is a very common theme in magic circles, one ring to rule them all, and all that. While it's probably not Spare being young, good looking and with magick ideas all of his own that led to Crowley's criticism of him — calling him a 'black brother', a magician whose ego corrupts their development. Remember, Harry Potter wasn't a thing yet — it may have led to their having an affair.
Crowley even wrote a poem about their unison.
See, how subtly I writhe!
Strange runes and unknown sigils
I trace in the trance that thrills us.
Death ! how lithe, how blithe
Are these male incestuous vigils!
Ah! this is the spasm that kills us!Wherefore I solemnly affirm
This twofold Oneness at the term.
Asar on Asi did beget
Horus twin brother unto Set.
Now Set and Horus kiss, to call
The Soul of the Unnatural
Forth from the dusk; then nature slain
Lets the Beyond be born again.
Not content with a power struggle and sexual liaison with The Most Evil Man in The World, he also enjoyed sex with an intersex person, a dwarf, and a Welsh maid. This is the first time I've seen Welsh maid referred to in such a way. I really didn't know it was such a niche thing.
Spare's beef with Crowley was the strict hierarchical nature of The Order, and the heavy use of ceremonial magic. While Spare's art wouldn't adapt to the modern era, his occultist beliefs did.
He believed in The Mandalorian, but instead of calling it The Way, or The Tao, or Brahman, he dubbed it Kia. Not to be confused with Kia, the Korean electric car manufacturer. No Catholic Church like top-down structures for young Austin, he believed in the individualistic poet monk wanderer seeking enlightenment (or endarkenment) journey.
Like Dee he developed the use of sigils. Unlike The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn who saw sigils like magic spells, encoded in books of laws, taught by higher priests, Spare was influenced by the newly founded science of psychoanalysis, particularly Max Stirner. He believed there were no wrong or right sigils. Only ones that were created by and had a personal connection to the conjurer.
Not being a fan of Jung’s psychoanalysis, calling him (and Freud) Fraud and Junk, he still shared with him a belief in automatic writing, psychography, using the method to write his helpful and informative guide to wish fulfilment Anathema of Zos. I was going to quote from it, but that's just a cheap shot. It has, however taught me the useful phrase blind-worm cycle.
He believed the subconscious was a doorway to creating new realities. That for magic to work it had to become embedded in your subconscious. Combined with the idea of encoding a wish or desire into an external visible symbol or representation.
Pretty much Manifesting a la Instagram right there.
He also threw into the mix one of my favourite "I'm too wasted for art house what should we watch now' films, or Ken Russel's Altered States as it’s better known. Except Spare called it atavistic resurgence.
This is the notion that we can regress through both previous incarnations, and putting a new scientific twist on it, ancestral animals we have evolved from. That we can channel past selves, or indeed evolutionary predecessors, summoning forth hitherto hidden past knowledge from these ancient creatures to bend reality to our will. He was also a member of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). Both present and regressed animals presumably.
His beliefs were adopted in the seventies, becoming chaos magic.
Southwark Council has named a street after him, Spare Street in Elephant and Castle.
I wonder which of his practices they were thinking of.
Altered States directed by Ken Russell
Two book recommendations. I've included a bunch of links in the footnotes [4 ] about Mr Spare. He led the most fantastical life, and is well worth reading up on. There's a biography by Phil Baker (no relation, even through atavistic resurgence).
Austin Osman Spare: The Life & Legend of London's Lost Artist by Phil Baker | Buy here
Glow by Ned Beauman | Buy here
Although not inspired directly by chaos magic, the connection (admittedly perhaps only in my mind) between Ken Russel's Altered States and Austin Osman Spare's atavistic resurgence prompts me to think of Ned Beauman's Glow. On reflection it probably has very little in common with Spare, other than some neuroscience. Rather than magic there's a new mysterious party drug, instead of sigils we have a shadowy... Enough said, you can read an extract yourself. For ages I omitted recommending Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics for the simple reason of waiting for the perfect post to present itself — which is highly unlikely. The same can be said for Glow, with suitable subjects being far and between, so pinning it to Spare's strange world seems just as good a fit as any.
This week featured
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Osman_Spare
Our cover stars are Doctor John Dee and Austin Osman Spare, portrayed by the amazing Fatima Fletcher, our artist in residence.
Please show Fatima your love by following and liking every single one of her posts at www.instagram.com/fatima.fletcher, and visiting fatimafletcher.com, where her work is for sale, she is available for commissions.
Her wonderful Ruff Ruff coasters are for sale at fatima-fletcher.square.site/s/shop
Buy me a coffee at www.buymeacoffee.com/vfnIE9P0Ta
References
https://cvltnation.com/the-art-and-magic-of-austin-osman-spare/
https://ultraculture.org/blog/2017/05/01/austin-osman-spare/
https://austinosmanspareprints.com/pages/ustin-osman-spare-an-introduction
https://www.elephantandcastle.org.uk/a-brief-history/visions-austin-osman-spare/
https://flashbak.com/austin-osman-spare-occult-art-439290/
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/alan_moore_an_introduction_to_austin_osman_spare
https://blogs.iu.edu/kinseyinstitute/2022/03/30/austin-osman-spare-the-psychopathia-sexualis-folio/
https://www.artnet.com/artists/austin-osman-spare/
https://kinseyinstitute.org/news-events/news/2022-02-03-austin-osman-spare.php
Legally I have to tell you I might get five pence or something from Bookshop dot org should you purchase something, but really I just want to stick it to Amazon and keep independent bookshops alive. Yeah, rebel me, bringing the man down from the inside etc etc.
Baker's book on Austin is not an easy grab
https://www.amazon.com/Austin-Osman-Spare-Legend-Londons/dp/1907222014