Austin Osman Spare

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Book of Pleasure (1913) and The Focus of Life (1921).

Kia and Zos

At the root of Spare's teaching is Kia, his name for the absolute freedom behind every self: the I that comes before all conceiving, which can be neither described nor believed in, since to believe in it is already to make it an idea. All the rest of the self, its beliefs, morals, fears and wants, is bound and partial. The body and mind taken together as one whole, the instrument through which Kia acts, he calls Zos, and his own name for his practice joins the two.

Belief and the Neither-Neither

Belief is the prison. Every belief calls up its opposite and the two lock together, so that the believer is bound twice over, by what he holds and by what he fears may be true. The way out is not a better belief but the state that is neither the one nor the other, the Neither-Neither, where both sides of a pair fall away. Spare gives a formula to carry it: does not matter, need not be. Held against any thought, wish or fear, it loosens the mind's grip until what remains is free.

Self-love

The Book of Pleasure is subtitled self-love, and the word means something particular. It is not vanity but a mood brought by laughter, in which the self, freed for a moment from belief, is enough to itself and can take in all experience, the painful with the pleasant, without the drawing back of fear or the grasping of desire. Laughter, for him, is the solvent of belief: what can be laughed at no longer binds.

The death posture

The practice by which he reaches emptiness he calls the death posture, because in it the self one knows is absent. In one form the practitioner gazes at their own reflection until it blurs and they no longer know who is gazing, then closes the eyes and holds on to the light that is seen until the effort itself is forgotten. In another they lie at ease on the back, the body loose as in a yawn, breathing out, the face smiling, letting go of all that had seemed essential and forgetting time, until the moment stands outside time. What is wished in that emptiness, he teaches, passes beyond the reach of the doubting mind.

His book gives a harder preliminary, straining the body on tiptoe and breathing deeply in gasps until giddy. The house leaves that out: the breath is never driven to dizziness, and the gentle forms are enough. Anyone whom such practice leaves unsettled, or unsure of what is real, should stop.

The sigil and the forgotten wish

His sigil is a wish condensed into a sign so that it can be forgotten. The method of drawing one, from a sentence whose repeated letters are struck out and the rest combined into a single figure, is taught on the protection art's branch Talismans and sigils. What is his alone is the reason for it. A belief, to be true, must be organic and subconscious; a desire held in the conscious mind is met by its own doubt and by the fear of not getting, and so is held back. The sign carries the wish past that guard.

The sigil is charged in a moment of vacancy, in the death posture or in any state where the mind is emptied, and then the sign is put away and the wish deliberately forgotten. To keep longing for the result, he warns, is to keep the wish where it cannot work. The same method makes mantric spells: the letters of a sentence recombined into a word of mere sound, repeated until the meaning has gone.

The alphabet of desire

Beyond single sigils he built an alphabet of his own, whose letters stand not for sounds but for desires and the principles of the instincts, so that wishes can be written and combined in a sacred script that only its maker reads. It is a private language between the waking self and the deep one, and its power, in his teaching, lies in its being made by the one who uses it.

The free hand

He practised automatic drawing as part of the same art: the conscious mind idle, the hand moving by itself, so that the deeper self can show its own forms. What comes, he held, is older and stranger than anything the waking mind could invent, and the drawing is both a picture and a magical act, a way for the buried life to rise into sight.

He held, too, that the body keeps in its memory every form it has passed through, beast as well as man, and that sigil, trance and the free hand can wake those older forms; the half-animal figures that fill his pictures are, in his account, such wakings. The chaos magicians took up his method a generation after him, and its use with their states of gnosis is taught on the protection art's branch Ceremonial and chaos magic.