Austin Osman Spare: Occult Art, Sigils and Automatic Drawing

Few artists have dissolved the boundary between image-making and occult practice as completely as Austin Osman Spare. His drawings were not simply illustrations of magical ideas. For Spare, the act of drawing could itself become a ritual—a method of reaching beneath ordinary consciousness and giving form to desires, spirits and hidden aspects of the self.

Working largely outside the established art world, Spare developed a visual language filled with spectral faces, distorted bodies, animal-human forms and symbols that appear to have emerged from a private mythology. His work combined the precise line of an accomplished Edwardian draftsman with something stranger and far less controlled.

Today, Spare is remembered as an important figure in occult art, automatic drawing and the development of modern sigil magic. His influence extends beyond the occult underground into Surrealism, visionary art, chaos magic, comics, industrial music and contemporary dark art.

The Youngest Artist at the Royal Academy

Austin Osman Spare was born in London on December 30, 1886. Raised in a working-class family, he demonstrated an unusual ability to draw from an early age and studied at the Royal College of Art.

In 1904, while still a teenager, Spare exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. Contemporary newspapers treated him as an artistic prodigy, and for a brief period it appeared that he might follow a more conventional path through the British art establishment.

That path did not last. Rather than adapting his work to the expectations of galleries, critics or wealthy patrons, Spare moved increasingly toward personal symbolism, mysticism and occult philosophy. The polished academic technique remained, but the subject matter became more private and unsettling.

His figures often appear to exist halfway between the human and the animal. Faces emerge from empty space. Bodies bend into exaggerated forms. Familiar features become masks, apparitions or fragments of a dream.

There is often a sense that Spare was not inventing these beings so much as uncovering them.

Automatic Drawing and the Unconscious

Automatic drawing is one of the ideas most closely associated with Spare. The technique involves allowing the hand to move with as little conscious control as possible. Instead of beginning with a carefully planned composition, the artist follows spontaneous marks, lines and impulses.

Shapes may be discovered after they have already begun to form. A loose curve becomes a face. A collection of marks becomes an animal, spirit or distorted body. The artist becomes both the creator of the image and the first person to encounter it.

Spare believed that conscious thought could interfere with deeper forms of imagination. By weakening the control of the rational mind, the artist could gain access to material buried within the subconscious.

He described automatic drawing in his 1916 publication The Book of Pleasure, years before automatism became widely associated with the Surrealist movement. Spare’s version, however, was not simply an artistic experiment. It was connected to his magical ideas about desire, belief and the hidden mind.

The resulting drawings can feel intimate and unstable. Faces overlap with other faces, profiles appear inside larger heads and human features merge with horns, claws, feathers or animal forms.

These images do not present a clean symbolic system. They behave more like dreams: recognizable for a moment, then immediately shifting into something else.

image via https://flashbak.com/austin-osman-spare-occult-art-439290/

The Art of the Sigil

Spare’s most lasting contribution to modern occult practice may be his method of creating sigils.

A sigil is a symbolic mark created to represent a desire, intention or spiritual force. Sigils have appeared throughout the history of ceremonial magic, often as seals connected to angels, demons, planets or other supernatural entities.

Sigils of Austin Osman Spare - Image via https://visualmelt.com/Austin-Osman-Spare

Spare transformed the idea into something more personal. In his method, a written statement of desire could be reduced by removing repeated letters and combining the remaining characters into a new abstract symbol. The finished mark no longer looked like an ordinary sentence. Its original meaning was hidden inside a compact visual form.

This concealment was important. Spare believed that conscious obsession could prevent a desire from entering the deeper mind. The sigil allowed the desire to be communicated symbolically and then released from constant rational attention.

The mark became a kind of compressed image—a private emblem positioned between language, drawing and magic.

Later practitioners of chaos magic adapted and popularized Spare’s approach, particularly his belief that symbols could be created by the individual rather than inherited from a fixed religious or magical tradition.

The modern popularity of sigils in occult art, tattooing, graphic design and underground culture owes a considerable debt to Spare, even when his name is not directly acknowledged.

Spare, Palimpsest

Zos, Kia and a Personal System of Magic

Spare’s magical philosophy is commonly known as the Zos Kia Cultus.

The term refers to two central ideas within his work. “Zos” was associated with the body, the individual self and lived experience. Spare also used Zos as a name for himself. “Kia” represented something more difficult to define: a universal consciousness, creative potential or state beyond ordinary distinctions.

Spare’s system rejected much of the elaborate ceremony associated with traditional Western occultism. He was suspicious of rigid hierarchies and distrusted occult groups that depended too heavily on costumes, titles and inherited authority.

Spare also spent a brief period within the orbit of Aleister Crowley. He contributed artwork to Crowley’s occult journal The Equinox and had a loose association with the A∴A∴, the magical order founded by Crowley and George Cecil Jones. The relationship did not last. Spare grew increasingly hostile toward ceremonial magic and the elaborate hierarchies, titles and rituals surrounding it. He believed these systems often placed too much emphasis on performance and authority, while his own practice moved toward something more private and immediate: personal symbols, altered states, bodily experience and direct contact with the subconscious.

His magic was physical, psychological and intensely individual.

Desire, trance, gesture, memory and image were more important than expensive ritual tools. The body itself became a magical instrument, while drawing provided a way to communicate with parts of the mind that could not be reached through normal language.

This independence helped make Spare an important predecessor of chaos magic, which similarly emphasizes personal experimentation and the practical use of belief over strict allegiance to a single tradition.

Monsters, Spirits and Atavistic Forms

Spare’s art is frequently described as grotesque, erotic or monstrous, but the beings in his drawings are rarely simple horror characters.

Many appear ancient rather than evil.

Spare was fascinated by what he called atavistic resurgence: the possible return of ancestral or primitive states buried within the human mind. Animal characteristics, distorted bodies and nonhuman faces could represent forces that existed before civilized identity had fully formed.

In some drawings, a human profile shares space with the head of a bird or horned animal. In others, elderly faces emerge from looping lines like spirits materializing during a séance. These forms suggest that the modern personality is only a thin surface covering something older.

This is one reason Spare’s work continues to appeal to dark artists. His images do not merely use occult symbols as decoration. They create the impression of an entire unseen ecology operating beneath ordinary reality.

The strange beings are not placed into the composition from outside. They seem to grow directly out of the line.

Public domain US, 1913 image via https://flashbak.com/austin-osman-spare-occult-art-439290/

“Only from negations can I wholesomely conceive you.
For I know of no courage sufficient to stomach your aspirations.
If you are superman, let me be forever animal.”

Outside the Art Establishment

Despite his early success, Spare spent much of his adult life in relative obscurity. He lived and worked in South London, exhibited in small venues and frequently sold drawings at prices ordinary people could afford.

His refusal—or inability—to fit comfortably into the commercial art world contributed to his outsider reputation. Spare produced portraits, grotesques, mystical drawings, automatic works and studies of local people, but he never developed the kind of stable public career his early supporters may have expected.

During World War II, his home and studio were damaged during the bombing of London. A significant portion of his work was lost.

He continued to draw and exhibit afterward, often living in difficult financial circumstances. Spare died in London on May 15, 1956.

For years, knowledge of his work circulated primarily through occult publishers, collectors and small groups of artists. Interest grew gradually through the efforts of writers, musicians and esoteric researchers who recognized that Spare occupied a unique position between British figurative art and underground occultism.

Austin Osman Spare’s Influence

Spare’s influence is difficult to measure because much of it moved through underground channels.

His sigil techniques became foundational to chaos magic. His automatic drawings anticipated methods later explored by Surrealist artists. His combination of precise draftsmanship, bodily transformation and occult experimentation can be seen echoed in visionary art, comics, tattoo culture and contemporary dark illustration.

Musicians and artists connected to industrial and experimental culture also helped revive interest in his work. John Balance of Coil openly discussed Spare’s importance, while writers and occultists including Kenneth Grant helped introduce his ideas to later generations.

What makes Spare particularly relevant now is the unity of his work. He did not treat drawing, magic and psychology as separate subjects. Each one was a way of approaching the same hidden territory.

The sigil was art. The drawing was a ritual. The unconscious was both subject and Artists' collaborator.

The Archangel Michael and the devil, as painted by Austin Osman Spare | Public Domain Wikipedia Commons

The Continuing Power of Spare’s Art

Austin Osman Spare remains difficult to categorize. He was an academically trained draftsman who became an outsider artist, an occultist who distrusted occult institutions and a symbolist whose most important symbols were designed to bypass conscious interpretation.

His drawings reward slow observation. A face that initially seems clear may contain another profile within it. A decorative curve may become a horn, limb or animal body. Empty areas begin to feel occupied by forms that have not fully appeared.

That uncertainty is part of their power.

Spare understood that the most disturbing images are not always the ones that show us a recognizable monster. Sometimes they are the images that suggest the monster was already present—hidden inside the body, the landscape or the movement of the artist’s own hand.

More than a century after his earliest publications, Spare’s work still feels private, disobedient and strangely alive. His art does not simply depict the occult. It attempts to function as an occult process: a doorway between desire, symbol and the unknown.