From the editor: In the first days of May 1904, the national newspapers declared that a new artistic genius had been discovered. Having just become the youngest exhibitor ever at the Royal Academy, and replete with several scholarships and National Awards, this precocious youth's future looked prosperous. One newspaper asserted that "he is to be President of the Royal Academy,"' another described his work as the "gloomy beauty of high tragedy."' This artist was not merely promising-he was mysterious too. He was presented as "a mystic of the most original type,"' and he claimed to be devising his own religion "writing it out and illustrating with glaring and terrible plates. "4 Fifty-two years later, this same mystical poet-artist died alone in poverty, virtually unremembered. Today, more than forty years after his death, few people have heard of Austin Osman Spare, and the rare and recondite texts he produced remain unexplored.

It is not surprising that his obscure works have passed by the literary historians and critics of the twentieth century. His prose is difficult, yet a study of it will reveal a complex aesthetic and esoteric philosophy. He was an explorer of the imagination and of the Unconscious, and perfected a form of surrealist automatism at least ten years before Breton and Dali. Classed as an occultist, he produced a system of performative language-symbol magic that marked a break from the ceremonial praxis of the Golden Dawn of W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley. Flowering in the aftermath of the Decadents and Symbolists, he created a complex fusion of Nietzschean philosophy and Romantic vision. He was an Edwardian Blake, and like his predecessor, articulated his personal mystical religion through strong idiosyncratic writings and illustrations. One commentator was to remark on this innovative visionary…

Pages: 39
Special Interest: Biography, Occult, Magick, Ritual, Sorcery, Art.