Austin Osman Spare and the Art of Sigils
At seventeen, Austin Osman Spare had a drawing hung at the Royal Academy in London. Critics called him a prodigy, and for a few years it seemed that the English art world lay at his feet. Then he turned away from fame and went to live among the poor streets of south London, where he drew visions of strange beings, old women, and spirits that seemed to rise from the paper by themselves.
When he died in 1956, he was almost forgotten. Yet his small, odd method of making magical symbols has outlived nearly every painter of his day.
That method is the sigil, a personal seal made from a wish. It is one of the simplest and most elegant tools in modern occultism, and it was Spare who gave it its present form.
The Artist Who Walked Away
Spare was born in 1886 in London, the son of a policeman. He trained as a draftsman and a stained-glass artist, and he developed a flowing, dreamlike line. For a short time around 1909 he was associated with Aleister Crowley's order, the A∴A∴, though the two men soon parted ways, and Spare is said to have scorned the elaborate hierarchy of Crowley's circle.
His own books are among the oddest in English occult literature. The Book of Pleasure (1913) and The Focus of Life (1921) are written in a dense, poetic and often obscure prose, and illustrated with his own haunting drawings. In them he developed his private mythology: a spirit he called Kia, the boundless source behind all things, and a personal self he named Zos.
Desire Without Ritual
Most ritual magic of the period relied on long ceremonies, robes, temples and the calling of angels and demons by name. Spare took a different road. He held that the real force behind any working is desire itself, and that the great obstacle to its power is the doubting, calculating mind, which hurries to argue every wish out of existence.
His solution was to hide the wish from that guardian. If the desire is turned into a symbol so strange that the thinking mind cannot read it, then it can slip past the guard and sink into the deeper layers of the self, where it may act without interference. This is the idea at the heart of the sigil.
Making a Sigil
Spare's method, as later magicians have summarized it, has a few clear stages:
- Write a statement: a short sentence of desire, in the present and affirmative tone, such as "It is my will to speak with courage."
- Strike out repeats: cross out every letter that appears more than once in the sentence, leaving only the unique ones.
- Combine the letters: draw the remaining letters together into a single compact figure, sharing strokes and curves until the shape is no longer readable.
- Simplify: refine the drawing until it looks like a seal or an unfamiliar emblem, with no trace of the original words.
The result is a design that means something only to its maker. The words have been dissolved, but the wish remains in the figure like a seed in a closed husk.
The Moment of Release
A sigil must also be charged. Spare taught that this was done in a moment of intense, empty concentration, a state later magicians call gnosis. He suggested ways to reach it: the exhaustion of a long vigil, a sudden shock, a deep trance, or the stillness of the "death posture," in which one stands and exhales until the mind falls quiet. At the peak of this emptiness, the sigil is held in the inner eye.
Then comes the hardest part: forgetting. The sigil is burned, buried or torn up, and the wish is put out of mind. If the conscious mind keeps pulling at it, it will only sprout doubts. Left alone, in the dark soil of the unseen, it is said to bear its fruit in its own time.
Spare's Legacy
For decades Spare's work was known only to a few. In the 1950s and 1960s the writer Kenneth Grant rediscovered him and praised him as a forerunner of a new magic. In the late twentieth century, the movement called chaos magic made the sigil its central practice, and Spare was honored as its patron.
Whatever one thinks of its claims, the method is deeply artistic. It treats a wish as a form to be drawn rather than a prayer to be recited. It also reminds us that every symbol, from a coat of arms to an alchemical sign, was once a drawing in the hands of someone who meant it.
Closing
Austin Osman Spare died poor and almost unseen, but his small seals continue to be drawn across the world, on scraps of paper, in notebooks and on the walls of the imagination. They are quiet things: a few lines, a burned page, a wish let go.
In that gesture lies his lesson. The deepest wishes are not forced from the outside. They are drawn within, offered to the dark, and trusted to find their way.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Austin Osman Spare: Tracing Chaos and Automatic Drawing
- Alchemical Colors: Lapis Lazuli, Sacred Pigments, and the Secrets of the Old Masters
- Hilma af Klint and the Paintings for the Temple
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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