Chaos Magic - 16/mar/2025

Were it not for Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare would have been the most influential occultist of the 20th century. Primarily an artist, author and poet, he occupies a similar space in occult history to William Blake; less an occultist, more poet-mystic. His influence lies less in obscure iterations on masonic rites, more in poems and short screeds about the soul. Magic has always crossed over with art, but Spare makes this a central focus of his work. He made art about magic, and did magic about art. 

For other occultists, it is a simple task to comb through their life and influences, and construct a story which explains how they arrived at their worldview. This is difficult for Osman Spare. We know he was moderately well read, and enjoyed symbolist and Art Nouveau art, but that does not cast much light on how he arrived at his idiosyncratic worldview. He was an artist with a rich and highly developed inner world. 

His worldview is idiosyncratic, even among 20th century occultists. Equal parts a reaction to Nietzche, Freud, and William Blake, the hub of Austin Osman Spare is the unconscious. To him, it is the source of all mystery and magical power. Much of his work involves the magician working themselves into a magical trance that allows the conscious mind to take a back seat, which then allows ideas to flow freely from the hidden depths of the soul. 

That soul is quite deep. The depth of that soul comes from a concept he calls “atavistic resurgence” a combination of evolution and reincarnation, in which the compounded souls of millions of ancestral animals exert influence upon the human. You are you, but you are also all of the monkeys, lizards, fish, and blobs of amorphous proteins that we collectively evolved from. Each human being is like one of those ice cores researchers drill into the arctic to study ancient glaciers. Ten centimeters wide, two kilometers deep. 

That soul is created through the interaction of two fundamental forces, Zos and Kia. The exact meaning of these terms is deliberately obscure, and unique to Osman Spare, but nonetheless essential for a good chunk of 20th century occultism. Where Crowley’s work is rigorous metaphysics buried under poetry, Spare is metaphysics as poetry, but also normal poetry. 

Zos is literally derived from the greek root for life, but Spare seems to mean something both biological and unconscious. It is the desiring part of the world-soul, the component of the universal spirit with an animal impulse to continue existing. 

Its counterpart, Kia is similar to the concept of the Tao. It is always hidden, beyond comprehension, because it never actually manifests. It is a force constantly on the brink of manifestation, an eternal almost-completeness that spurs the world into being. 

Accessing these fundamental forces requires death, but not literal death. A repeated theme throughout his work is Thanatos, and the death-posture. We are conscious and comprehending beings in an incomprehensible world, made manifest by even more hyper-incomprehensible forces. To truly navigate the world, we have to get out of our own way, so to speak. The ego is the enemy, to have any fun it needs to be knocked out. 

What Spare offered by way of praxis, as in things a spare-ian could actually do, was methods of creating art. 

[INCLUDE THE I WANT A FAT BOTTOMED GIRL FOR THE PURPOSES OF SOCIAL CONGRESS IMAGE]

One of the suggested forms of practicing the death posture is automatic writing. A method of writing in which the user simply does not think about the next word coming out of their fingertips. For example, writing for twenty minutes, without stopping, no pausing or backspaces. Spare didn’t invent this practice, but he offered a simple magical explanation for how it worked. 

The most influential concept from spare, is likely his conception of, and method for creating sigils. This method has become so popular, that many today consider it to be an essential component of all magic that goes back centuries. This is not so. I will repeat it here in its entirety. 

CHAOS MAGIC

Realistically we should start with Austin Osman Spare, who himself was a student of crowleys work. He influenced Peter Caroll, and the two guys who invented discordianism. Peter Caroll was the guy who founded the illuminates of Thanateros, which is the body of Chaos Magic. 

SPARE

Key concepts:

The Unconscious - Spare is critical of both freud and Jung, but the nature of the unconscious is central to his beliefs. He constructs an unconsscious that is kind of a black box, a pond of dark water from which all spirituality arises. The unconscious is the central pivot of Spare’s work.

Atavistic Resurgence - A union of evolution and reincarnation. Spare believes that the soul is the result of the influence of the “ancestral animals” from which we evolved. 

Neither-Neither - Its The One. 

Zos - Literally means life but its more like complete physical and spiritual embodiment. Its like if thelemic Will had a biological and unconscious element. This is so unique to Spare its hard to really explain what he means by this. “Spare considered “Zos” to be the body as a whole, including the ordinary mind: the whole mortal, fleshly, existential entity of the person. In later life he would refer to himself as Zos. It seems to combine a sense of the biological or animal with the esoteric; animal from the related Greek roots zoe, life, and zoion, animal or beast, giving rise to words like zoo, zoological, The Zoist (the name of a Victorian periodical and a society, the Zoists, to which Spare's friend Victor Neuburg belonged), “zoetic” (‘pertaining to life’) and so on.” (London’s Lost 36)

Kia - A sort of universal consciousness like the tao or world spirit, but of a deliberately obscure and non-immanent sense. Kia is always on the verge of manifesting, but never does. 

Thanatos / Death Posture - the temporary annihilation of the ego through meditation. Often sexual but not always, a no-mind.

Sigil Creation - One of the things Spare is most famous for. He developed what is perhaps the most commonly cited method of sigil creation shared on the web. The one involving cracking a sentence down into its conjugate parts and then reassembling it into a non-linguistic symbol. 

https://hermetic.com/chaos/austin-osman-spare-and-his-theory-of-sigils im just gonna copy it from here

Automatic Art - A man of my own influence, spare was extremely influenced by the idea of automatic art. Allowing the body to take over, and impulses to flow unimpeded from the subconscious was a huge part of his work. 

As an artist, for someone so concerned with the subconscious and the nature of experience, he trades heavily in sexuality, both sexual and otherwise. His critics and fans alike called his work grotesque, yet attractively so. 

• Tbh one could argue that his focus on the subconscious places a lot of weight on the power of repression. I think this is partially correct. 

• Zos Vel Thanatos means “Zos or death” referring to Spare’s belief that any sufficiently embodied desire could be made manifest (larger passage in London’s Lost pg 245)

• For the purposes of magical genealogy, Spare is considered a student of crowley, but he doesn’t quite fit the mold. Spare is closer to whatever William Blake is to the history of the occult; a poet-mystic who inspired a generation of thinkers. 

• Earth Inferno is a a collection of art, along with short poems of Osman’s own design, along with excerpts from Dante and Omar Kayyam. 

• Micrologus is ostensibly anti-psychology. “The main premise of Religion is the demanding of complete acceptance by faith of some dogmatic thesis and conclusion.”

• One of the first texts ive read that is outwardly anti-religious yet still fascinated with religion

• “Therefore pray not direct to God, but to your own damned self - by sacrifice and service to man, it is the only correct manner of prayer;” WOW

• “"Psychology" is now the equal of any other dogma, inasmuch as it demands the full acceptance of rigid conclusions from undefined qualities and premises.”

• “The offer of such very shaky nominalism - which begins nowhere and ends in an excusing pathology - presents a worse gamble than that of any religion.” What on earth does he mean by nominalism here?

• Hes clearly referring to the idea of normality. Like, anything normal is good and anything deviant from that is a pathology. Which is a legitimate criticism of psychology, but good luck excising normalization from patterns of human thought lol. That goes for religion too. 

• “Neither universe nor man is complete, completing, or dissolving, but only res urging and re-indulgtng existing forms reshaping to function new pleasures of flesh impacting flesh. At least, so I imagine, who loves fat women.” Up top big dog

• “Reasoning and its inferences are a screever's logic, and useless to put us in contact with reality - all reality being more abstract than actual as a para-Ideal we know of, but cannot grasp” ah I see. 

• “The body is the puppet of the mind”

• Oh hey he name drops somnambulism

• “There is no Atheist, no one is free from auto-biography, there is no fearless pleasurist?” Hes making the argument that people are just replacing god with other shit

What is magic to osman spare?

• Its something meditative, something done through art, or something that can be reached through art.

• It involves the annihilation of the ego, as evidenced by the concept of the death-posture, in this sense it is mystical

LIBER NULL

Chaos Magic itself starts with the Liber Null, which has two main pillars:

• Altered states of consciousness are the key to unlocking the mind

•  and that these abilities can be developed without any symbolic system except reality itself.

• Refer to themselves as the inheritors of the Zos Kia Cultus and the A.’. A.’. 

• The Illuminates of Thanateroes are named for the gods of sex and death, the two things that matter to humanity

Liber MMM

• Short treatise on meditation to induce altered states

• Collapses and psychologizes most traditional magical acts. Tarot cards and crystal gazing are all just methods of entering altered states, though “No divinatory system should involve too much randomness. Astrology is not recommended.”

Sigils

• This is one of the things the LN is famous for

• Basically when people want something, they often get in their own way psychologically speaking. The creation of a sigil is the creation of a thing to focus on, and prevent those messy conflicts from arising

• The idea being that you focus on the sigil so hard it loses its meaning, like repeating a phrase to the point where it stops being a word and becomes just meaningless sound. Once you do that, the sigil is charged. 

• You can also use other moments of mindlessness like a moment of extreme fear or pleasure

Liber Lux / Nox

• Follows a left/right division founded on the ethical intent of the magic

• Initiates are free to follow either, but you gotta comit 

• Clearly setting up a unity of both as the ideal

• Draws a division between will and perception and calls its unification Kia, (as in the ZOA)

• Kia is the basis of consciousness. It is the soul and spirit. 

• Huh, they reject notions of god or the tao, and instead lean towards a non-anthropomorphized chaos

• The churning of Chaos casts off aether, which is the cloud of all possible things Chaos could manifest as in the future. It is the kia-thought intermediary.

• Magic is conceptualized as using ritual to focus the Kia, and manipulate the Aether

Gnosis

• One of the five pillars of the work

• Comes in the form of reducing the mind to its smallest state, and expanding it to cover all things

• "There are two methods of becoming god, the upright or the averse."

• Weirdly physiological. They say gnosis can be achieved by doing things like sleep deprivation and sex. 

• So by Gnosis they mean some completely different shit

Evocation

• Little sparks of Kia can get stuck inside objects, in the sense that a beloved teddy bear kinda has a spirit

• You can find them via clairvoyance, in old books, and by making them yourselves

• “Increasing the complexity of a ritual is often a distraction” ehhhhhhh

Invocation

• In the sense of using existing relationships between things as a focus for ritual

• Like, wearing an iron crown and cutting the symbol of mars into your chest to invoke a war god

Liberation

• There is a spiritual energy generated by transgression and violence

• Be sacreligious, destroy the sacred, put a brick through your TV or be gay

• Explore rejected knowledge

• Destroy the boundaries between the exalted and profane

• Satisfy the body

• Scheme against the self

Augoides

• Its crowley. The Augoides is the perfect vehicle for Kia

Divination

• Given that all things come from and recede to chaos, divination works by reading the wripples

Enchantment

• Directly effecting events by thought alone. Like manifesting

The Liber Nox

• The inverse of the previous section. Where the liber lux dealt with metaphysical topics beyond the flesh, this one deals with the flesh.

• “Liber 59

• It is either this nothing or the flesh, and the condition of the

• flesh is dual. Eternal warfare is the price, purpose, and reward of

• Existence.”

• Sorcery: The construction of physical objects of power, using hair and natural magic to make things

• The Double: Its a light body

• Transmorgrification: This is kinda neat. Its an intentional destruction of the ego through acts to achieve union with a thought-less consciousness. 

• Ecstasy: This is the sex magic bit, clearly influenced by the typhonians

Random Belief

• Literally perennialism by dice. Kinda fun. 

Alphabet of Desire

• Some sigil construction stuff

This is also where we get some Aeon of Horus type stuff about the millennium.

PSYCHONAUT

Here’s where we get the idea that the goal is to drown the confused in counter-information, to the point where they lose their grip on reality and achieve a sort-of enlightenment. Whelp. 

This is very anti-psychiatry but weirdly jungian. This whole thing is like, a jungian individual using thelema to interact with an inanimate and aristotelian universe driven by chaos. 

There’s a lot of like, tongue-in-cheek references to the fundamental untrustworthiness of Chaotes in general, but I have trouble squaring their anti-theism with what seem like a sincere belief in action-at-a-distance magic. Or, maybe they’re taking the psychological angle. Like, the mind can’t actually shoot beams which cause people to get run over, but the practices of chaos magic can make people feel like they can. 

So what is magic to the Chaotes? It is crowleyan Will acting in a jungian “inside out” universe. Its a mechanical, psychological interpretation of thelema.