Austin Osman Spare: Sigils, Zos Kia and the Alphabet of Desire

Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) was a London draughtsman and occultist whose self-published Book of Pleasure (1913) introduced the method of turning a written desire into an abstract sigil, the technique on which chaos magic was later built. Around that method he developed a private philosophy, later called Zos Kia, and an "alphabet of desire", a personal symbolic language through which he believed the deep, instinctual self could be addressed directly.

Early Life and Artistic Career§

Spare was born in December 1886 near Snow Hill in the City of London, the son of a City police constable, and grew up in Smithfield and later south London. He showed a gift for drawing early, won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, and in 1904, aged seventeen, had a drawing accepted for the Royal Academy summer exhibition. The press presented him as a boy genius, and some contemporaries compared his line to that of Aubrey Beardsley.

His first books were collections of drawings with cryptic text: Earth: Inferno (1905) and A Book of Satyrs (1907), the latter a set of satirical plates on clergy, politicians and social types. The drawings combine academic skill with grotesque, sexualised and dreamlike imagery, and they already include the hybrid creatures, aged women and floating faces that recur through his work. In 1916–17, and again in the early 1920s, he co-edited the art and literary magazine Form, and in 1922–24 the quarterly The Golden Hind with Clifford Bax. During the First World War he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and produced drawings as a war artist.

Spare's art career faltered in the 1920s. He withdrew from the fashionable West End, lived in poverty in Southwark and later Brixton, and sold work cheaply in pubs and small exhibitions. His wider place among artists drawn to the occult is discussed in Magic and Culture.

Spare, Crowley and the Occult Milieu§

Around 1909 Spare came into contact with Aleister Crowley, contributed drawings to Crowley's journal The Equinox, and was briefly a probationer of Crowley's order, the A∴A∴. The association did not last; Spare never took to the ceremonial apparatus of the Golden Dawn tradition, and his later writings scorn ritual paraphernalia, invocations of borrowed gods and the hierarchy of grades.

Spare himself told a story of his childhood initiation by an elderly neighbour, Mrs Paterson, whom he described as a witch with second sight and a connection to the Salem witches. The tale became central to Kenneth Grant's later presentation of Spare as heir to a hidden witch cult. Spare's biographer Phil Baker treats it with caution: there is no independent evidence for Mrs Paterson beyond Spare's own accounts, which grew more elaborate over time. It is best read as part of the personal mythology Spare built around his art, a theme in the broader story of British occultism.

The Book of Pleasure and the Philosophy of Zos Kia§

The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, printed at Spare's own expense in 1913, is a short, difficult book of aphoristic prose and full-page drawings. It sets out a philosophy in which two terms are central.

Kia and Zos§

Kia is Spare's name for the ultimate, unconditioned freedom that precedes and lies beyond all belief, something like an absolute "I" that cannot be described without being limited. Zos is the body and mind considered as a whole, the vehicle through which Kia acts in the world. Later writers, following Kenneth Grant, called the combined system the "Zos Kia Cultus", though Spare himself never founded an organisation.

Neither-neither and self-love§

Spare argued that ordinary belief divides the world into opposites, and that every belief creates its own opposite and its own limitation. His remedy was a state he called "neither-neither", in which the mind rests in neither term of a pair. "Self-love" in his sense was not vanity but a radical acceptance in which the self no longer clings to any fixed idea of itself.

The death posture§

The "death posture" is the book's best-known exercise: a practice of exhaustion and stillness, described both as a bodily posture and as a state of mind, in which thought is suspended to the point of seeming death. In this vacuity, Spare claimed, a desire implanted in the deep self could be realised without the interference of conscious wanting, which he called the "lust of result".

Sigils and the Alphabet of Desire§

Spare's practical magic rested on sigils. In the Book of Pleasure he presented a "sentence" of desire written out, its repeated letters struck out and the remaining letters fused into a single design, an approach examined in Sigil Magic: The Word Method and Its Variants and in the Spellbook entry on the methods of Spare and Peter Carroll. Unlike the traditional seals described in the history of sigils, a Spare sigil represents no spirit; it is a shorthand for the practitioner's own will, designed so that the conscious mind cannot easily read it back.

The "alphabet of desire" was his larger and more personal project. Spare wrote of a "sacred alphabet" in which each sign stood for a basic principle, often sexual or instinctual, so that combinations of signs could express complex desires without words. He gave only a few examples, and different editors reconstruct the system in different ways. The important point for later practitioners was the principle: each magician could build a private alphabet of forms that carried meaning for their own deep self rather than relying on inherited scripts such as Hebrew letters or planetary characters.

Spare also practised automatic drawing, letting the hand move without conscious direction, and believed it could bring forth images from what he called the atavistic layers of the self, memories of earlier stages of evolution. Many of his later drawings, with their crowded, interpenetrating faces, were described by him as products of this method.

Later Life, Kenneth Grant and Posthumous Fame§

Spare's flat was destroyed in the Blitz in 1941, and he lost much of his work. After the war he recovered a degree of reputation with exhibitions in south London pubs and galleries, where he showed pastel portraits, film-star studies and "sidereal" pictures drawn in anamorphic distortion. From 1949 he became friendly with the occultist Kenneth Grant and his wife Steffi, who encouraged him to write down his magical ideas. Spare produced further texts during these years, including material later published as The Zoetic Grimoire of Zos and The Logomachy of Zos.

Spare died in May 1956. Kenneth Grant's Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare (1975) and, with Steffi Grant, the edited collection Zos Speaks! (1998) did much to shape his posthumous image, interpreting him through Grant's own Typhonian Thelema and emphasising the witch-cult narrative. Phil Baker's biography, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist (2011), offers a more sober portrait of a gifted, difficult and self-mythologising artist. Since the 2000s his drawings have been exhibited and collected seriously, and he is now studied both as an English artist of the early twentieth century and as an occult theorist.

Influence on Chaos Magic and Modern Sigil Practice§

When Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin began publishing what became chaos magick in the late 1970s, they took from Spare three core ideas: that belief is a tool rather than a truth, that magic works through altered states which silence the conscious mind (later called "gnosis"), and that a sigil should be forgotten once charged. Spare's indifference to traditional symbolism suited a movement that rejected fixed dogma, and his sigil technique became the first method taught to newcomers, as outlined in What Is Chaos Magick?

Spare's influence also reached the music and art underground through Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth in the 1980s and, through it, the wider sigil culture of comics, tattooing and online practice described in Hypersigils and Modern Sigil Culture. Practitioners have extended his ideas in many directions, from pictorial and sound-based sigils to the deliberate creation of servitors, often far beyond anything Spare himself wrote.

Historians note an irony in this legacy. Spare was an artist first, deeply suspicious of systems and followers, and his writings are idiosyncratic and often obscure. The tidy sigil recipe that circulates today is a simplification of a body of work in which drawing, philosophy and personal myth cannot easily be separated.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Austin Osman Spare?§

Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) was an English artist and occultist from London. He was celebrated as a prodigy in his youth, later lived in obscurity in south London, and is best known in magical circles for the sigil method and the Zos Kia philosophy set out in The Book of Pleasure (1913).

What is the alphabet of desire?§

It is Spare's name for a personal symbolic alphabet in which each sign stands for an instinctual or sexual principle. Spare gave only fragmentary examples, so later practitioners treat it less as a fixed script than as a model for building their own private sign-language.

What do Zos and Kia mean?§

In Spare's writings Kia is the absolute, unconditioned freedom beyond all belief, and Zos is the body and mind as a whole through which Kia acts. Kenneth Grant later used the phrase "Zos Kia Cultus" for Spare's system.

Was Austin Spare a member of Crowley's order?§

Briefly. Around 1909 he became a probationer of the A∴A∴ and contributed art to The Equinox, but he soon parted from Crowley and rejected ceremonial magic in favour of his own methods.

Sources and further reading§

• The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy — Austin Osman Spare, 1913
• Earth: Inferno — Austin Osman Spare, 1905
• A Book of Satyrs — Austin Osman Spare, 1907
• The Focus of Life — Austin Osman Spare, 1921
• Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare — Kenneth Grant, 1975
• Zos Speaks! Encounters with Austin Osman Spare — Kenneth Grant & Steffi Grant, 1998
• Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist — Phil Baker, 2011
• The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern — Alex Owen, 2004
• Condensed Chaos — Phil Hine, 1995