First off, for those who haven’t yet seen it, an excerpt from BBC‘s The Culture Show, which featured a piece on Austin Osman Spare with Alan Moore.

The description given is as follows:

Legendary graphic novel author Alan Moore explores the biggest public art exhibition of Austin Osman Spare for over 50 years, and discovers why Spare, an Edwardian virtuoso artist and occult magician has been left off art history’s canon.

The eight minute segment also features Robert Ansell of Fulgur, who discusses Spare’s Buddhist influences; Phil Baker, who talks about his origins and career; Geraldine Beskin of Atlantis Bookshop, on Spare’s automatic drawings and their spiritual aspect; and Stephen Pochin who curated the recent exhibit at  curated the recent exhibit at the Cuming Museum in London.

Though the best quotes surely come from Alan Moore, who says:

Magick offers the artist a new way of looking at their consciousness and look at where they get their ideas from. [...]

If you can manipulate your own consciousness and perhaps that of others, which is surely something all artists are trying to do, whether their magickians or not, then you will have effected an act of magick. [...]

Spare was a visionary, he was somebody, like William Blake, who was not distinguishing between his art and his spirituality, who felt that the world inside him was as valid and important as the world outside him – if not more so.

(Video and links to two reviews below the cut tag.) Continue reading »

In Catalogue Eight from Fulgur a number of works by Austin Osman Spare are available for sale.

There are several pencil and watercolour illustrations, as well as a series of designs for magickal stele, including the image on the left.

From the website:

Spare produced very few magical stelae, and all of them at the very end of his creative life. The 1955 Archer Gallery catalogue records just seven, here listed by the catalogue item number:

No.60 For Protection from evil people
No.61 For Destruction of Vermin
No.62 Cure for all types of headache
No.63 General Anathema and Malediction
No.64 General Benedictus and Love of All Things
No.65 Desire for Vampires and Succubi
No.66 Desire for Psycho-somatic strength

The following sketches date from around 1953-5 and seem to be preliminary designs for the above series. Here we can see the process of Spare constructing sigillic formula fit for magical purpose. The images are fluid, sketchy, and yet potent. They are all a little grubby, some slightly creased… in essence, they represent an unrestored piece of the Wynne Road studio era. Indeed, it isn’t hard to imagine these laying on Spare’s working table, awaiting a fuller hand to enflesh the designs further.

Very cool.

Saturday Signal: sifting the signal from the noise of the Internet’s occultural cacophony.

I feel like I need some sort of intro here. Last week I said science was cool, and that’s still true, but sometimes science has the mind of a child. A dirty-minded child. This is one of those times. But you gotta know what’s up there, right? Right.

So, um, it turns out there’s weird water lurking inside Uranus. (And Neptune.) If that’s not enough, there’s a giant ash hole on the Moon. I don’t make this stuff up, kids.

Back on Earth baby mi-go have been spotted off the coast of Japan. I’m not sure if I should be horrified or melt at how cute they look…No, I’m definitely horrified.

First, your occultural signal: Continue reading »