it can be rather surprising for some people to learn that the theory and practice of magic has actually undergone many radical shifts in innovations through history indeed many theories of magic are so unlike one another that they've become in fact well logically and practically mutually exclusive from the naturalistic theory found in al kindy's concept of the stellar rays the solomonic tradition of binding supernatural creatures to the highly apocalyptic mystical ascent of enochian magic the history of western magic is significantly more varied and complex than is often recognized the late 19th and early 20th centuries represent one of the most tectonic theoretical and practical shifts in magic here magical theory and practice formally intersected with the emerging world of psychology and psychoanalysis along with philosophical developments around the concept of the will along with more widely recognized figures like aleister crowley the edwardian artist and occultist austin osmond sparr would prove to be a truly prophetic voice in this magical revolution his artistic philosophical and yes magical genius are only now truly being appreciated with his theory of sigil magic especially how it's being taken up into the development of chaos magic proving an increasingly popular and powerful practice so in this episode let's explore the magical philosophy of austin osmond sparr if you're interested in magic hermetic philosophy or mysticism make sure to subscribe and check out my other content on topics in esotericism in the academic study of the occult also if you want to support my work of providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics like this in esotericism here on youtube for free and hope you consider supporting my work on patreon or with a one-time donation you can find those links below and i do appreciate your consideration of supporting the channel providing university level academic studies on topics in the occult this episode is also really special because it's a collaboration with my colleague and my really wonderful friend dr angela puka dr puka is a phd in university lecturer in religious studies and her youtube channel focuses on the academic study of magic esotericism witchcraft paganism and other occult topics if you like esoterica well you'll absolutely also love dr puka's channel angela's symposium make sure to check out her episode on spars influence on contemporary esoteric practices chaos magic and shamanism now let's turn to austin othman spars theory of kia zos and how the creation of sigils can unlock the magical power of the divine and individual genius i'm dr justin sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music] austin osmond sparr the son of a london policeman was an artistic and occult genius his artistic work prefigured much of surrealism both in form and in philosophical tenor his written works are evocative and read like the visionary works of the symbolists folks like rembo his works on the occult the topic of this episode also introduced in advanced both theoretical and practical aspects of magic in ways that are still very much having an impact today of course the central difficulty of appreciating this occult genius is unfortunately precisely sparse writing they are written in an often opaque evocative even prophetic style with his exact meaning often being obliquely expressed at best and some of his works are simply automatic writing or stream of consciousness and the constraints put on them by the purely rational mind much less an editor they're just not there they're simply absent the reader should simply submit to the whirlpool of his frenetic often biting psyche that's all to say that i'll be very honest and admit that i still can't admit to having a firm grasp on his works in their entirety and thus my summary of his philosophy will therefore one's going to remain pretty provisional further even substantially different interpretations of his magical philosophy are totally possible that whole his philosophy is really opaque part and i gotta say i by no means will pretend to have a definitive position or analysis of spars philosophy in fact it's likely that no such definitive analysis is even possible i mean it's about the raw nature of someone's psyche but never ventured never gained let's let's dive in spar details his philosophical and in turn his magical theories in a series of increasingly difficult essays through his life starting with his 1904 book published in 1905 essay the earth inferno and what is generally taken to be his mature positions is laid out in his 1913 the book of pleasure and extended in the 1921 the focus of life though he wrote enormous amounts of works after those courthouse philosophy from the very beginning are the interplay between two fundamental aspects of reality kia and zos kia was for spar the fundamental primal energetic vortex of reality a kind of pure mental life akin to the hindu brahman or the dao but beyond any true representation or even temporality typically spar would actually depict kia as a kind of divine feminine whose energetic life force was imbued in all that is especially all that lives and is sentient in fact kia pervades life through the process of evolution such that the sentience of all previous forms of life endure in every single living being thus kia is both the life and the sentience of all life and all sentience zos sparr's magical name was also his general term for the human organism as the organic embodiment of sentience and consciousness in sparse thinking zos emerged as alienated from the pure primal reality of kia and this alienation was fostered by everything from unconscious and sheepish conformity to social convention and venal morality to dogmatic and ceremonial religion including ceremonial magic including ceremonial magic more on that in a moment and even the very structure of the psyche itself this alienation of zos from kia is the core problematic in spars thinking and his magical system is wholly aimed at overcoming it thus unlocking the divine genius and power within the practitioner well how so primarily by focusing one's psychic energy into a highly compressed symbol or sigil which when planted into the subconscious serves to open a kind of magical back door by which one can access the power of kia for the magus but before unpacking this a bit more and it needs a lot more unpacking let's appreciate just how innovative his thinking is in the history of magic and philosophy more generally to appreciate the complexity of sparse thinking it's worth noticing at least some of the elements of the philosophical and occult ideas that are motivating his general philosophical project the first is incorporating elements of western occultism with ontologies actually more typical in hindu and taoist thought more on this in just a second of course axemic signs of power or sigils have been known in western magic for millennia in fact i've covered some of their history in another episode you can check that out in the card above these symbols were typically thought to interact with reality through a series of occult sympathies which when employed correctly could compel reality or even the gods to behave in accordance to the will of the ritual practitioner or magician thus such a symbol or string of symbols composed in the appropriate time typically governed by astrology are the appropriate surface or the appropriate accompanying invocation or sacrifice could compel someone to lust after someone else you could create illusions like magical banquets you could allow for victory and a horse race or you guessed it you could find buried treasure this form of magic was ubiquitous from the greek magical papyri to renaissance hermetic magic like that found in cornelius agrippa speaking of agrippa the sigils developed in his three books of occult philosophy are even keyed to both astrological numerological and even kabbalistic symbolism just put all the symbolism in there providing the one of the most unified theories of sigil production and all of western occultism his system of sigil production that of agrippa is still being used though note the difference in sparse thinking for spar while the sigil was developed for the realization of the will of the magus the actual causal mechanism under the hood so to speak is utterly different rather than manipulating occult sympathies in the cosmos spar sees sigil production and use as a means to overcome the alienation between the primal reality of kia and the alienated human organism or zos much in the same way that meditation allows one's atman to realize that it was always already brahma breaking that barrier of alienation does serve to empower the magus metaphysically even but the turn there is inward it's a subjective turn whereby the will is empowered through the union of the energetic vortex of life kia with one's own reality as zos notice also the centrality of the concept of will and the role of the subconscious and sparse thinking beginning with early modern cognitive theories of mind and especially desire modern and contemporary philosophy of mind take it that the psyche itself is a tiered structure with only some element actually self-conscious and the other's own or subconscious this idea flowered in the thought of frederick nietzsche who thought that a primal will the will to power existed as a deep drive or impulse within all living things unconscious human adherence to this will to power resulted in a master morality of wanton impulse while the reactive suppression of the will to power produced a servile morality of rational law such ideas came into full fruition with the powerful theories of freud and jung freud of course held that the ego was a careful balancing act between the powerful regression of the tyrannical superego upon the insane compulsive chaos of the id his student and eventual rival jung would extend the structure of the mind to virtually i mean metaphysical limits positing a vast collective unconscious wherein lie the myth structures and symbols which give rise in some sense to consciousness itself to this mix we should add developments in 20th century western occultism whereby focusing on and empowering the will of the magus through techniques such as yoga and tantra again those being taken from eastern philosophy would take center stage in the theory and practice of luminaries such as aleister crowley though florence farr should get much much more credit for this innovation than she does surprise surprise women being suppressed in the history of occultism her series of 1908 articles are especially important here if you've ever read them or heard of florence far she's really worth checking out though spar to be sure proved to be a maverick in basically everything rejecting both psychoanalysis he actually called freud and jung this he called them fraud and junk respectively that's some good shade there and he derided crowley and ceremonial magicians as the quote unemployed dandies of the brothels again some great magical shade for spar the task of the true magus was to transcend the alienation of zos from kia a truly herculean metaphysical task though not through talking therapy on a couch are hierarchical and stuffy hermetic organizations and slavish dedication to ceremonial magic but through the intense focus of the will through the use of sigils and limit experiences spar develops these concepts most clearly in the book of pleasure and consists of two interlocking practices the first is the condensation of one's will into a sigil here sparr simply writes out his will and roman letters he gives the example of quote this is my wish to obtain the strength of a tiger and he compresses the letters and words atop each other to eventually form a single glyph or sigil which should be easily visualized now with the sigil one begins the process of implanting this sigil seed of pure will into the subconscious of course zose is alienated from the divine vortex of pure becoming in life so to unlock this power one has to bypass the defenses of the ego which block the power of kia spar notes that the successful implantation of the sigil into the subconscious is actually best achieved when the defenses of the ego are the weakest states of what spar calls vacuity one of these states is simply physical exhaustion either wearing the body through exercise to the point where the ego struggles to impose psychic order or in the throes of orgasm where that temporary bliss of the little death overloads the ego's defenses here of course it's worth noting that spar and crawley aren't terribly dissimilar at least in practice so there's a lot of experimentation with sex magic and tantra at this time another such state that spar thought was useful was extreme despair and disappointment in such states of disillusionment where the ego can no longer even cling to hope it's more possible that the subconscious becomes more accessible when the ego thinks that everything is lost in some sense it's let go and that relaxation of the ego allows one to bootstrap things in to the subconscious for some reason this all reminds me of like creating a stack overflow so you can get access to memory addresses in a program or whatever a final technique seemingly based on meditative yoga seems to have been the most preferred by spar it's what he calls the death posture here one stares into a mirror at oneself until the reflection is unrecognized as oneself the breakdown of the ego is beginning then closing the eyes one visualizes a small x of light which eventually flutters away as the quote ego is swept up as a leaf in a fierce gale here ego consciousness begins to totally break down and the gateway to kia opens in all of its grandeur and terror in this moment the condensed will of the magus in the form of the sigil seed can become implanted into the subconscious the world closest to the domain of kia further these limit experiences are themselves far from normal consciousness which aids in a very important part of this process forgetting the implantation of the sigil seed at all recall the ego will attempt to suppress these heightened expressions of will and thus the active forgetting of the implantation of the sigil seed into the unconscious or the subconscious which is again activated by the power of kia can only work if it becomes part of what spar calls the organic totality of zos for it to work you have to forget it's there in fact this kind of power reaches back to kia through all evolutionary life from the total history of life itself in a process that spar calls atavistic resurgence whereby one can access the totality of the vital powers and memories of all living things as expressions of kia in fact this is an interesting aspect of his thought one doesn't ascend in sparse thinking rather one regresses through sentience back to the primordial powers of kia through this sigil magic without the need of initiations or ceremonial props which are kind of cool or even dogmas these all get in the way of the process for spar he argues that one can access the most vast form of power imaginable by dispensing with all that spar himself would develop numerous such sigils the meaning of which remains rather mysterious to us to us now as he sought to overcome his own alienation as zos vel thanatos from their primordial power of kia in fact many of these become the so-called alphabet of desire in the later chaos magic movement although it's sort of weird that they become sort of fossilized as ideal sigils whereas i think that spar himself would be skeptical of that spars occult theory and practice lie at a fascinating crossroad in the history of magic his turn to the psychical aspect of magical practice would prove to be trailblazing but he never seems to abandon the primal reality the ontological status of kia thus he never made magic merely psychological in nature it's not just all in your head it's not just psychological self-help while the same time he still centered psychic drama as the central magical site of course this dialect can be detected in other 20th century occultists as well thinking here of aleister crowley who early on seemed to have held that the holy guardian angel was a dimension of one's own psyche or self although at a later time it seems pretty clear that he held that the hga was actually a separate ontological being thus the question of the psychologization of magic remains an active topic in debate within occult circles today is it are the goetic demons just aspects of your psyche are they real austin ospanspar lived in rather meager even impoverished conditions for most of his life and his art much like in the history of art wasn't properly appreciated for its genius during his lifetime his occult ideas and practices would go on to be popularized by folks like kenneth grant who certainly did his own share to propagate the alleged magical powers of sparr's powerful will allegedly spark it make it rain i mean not like that like rain rain but this would all come to be a foundation for what we now call chaos magic again you got to make sure to check out dr pooka's companion episode on spars influence on contemporary esoteric practices especially chaos magic and shamanism if you want to see how sparrow's ideas have survived and thrived in the contemporary period his maverick and frankly iconoclastic approach has proven popular in today's occult practices which are marked by a high level of individualized and subject-oriented practice his works are widely reproduced though and varying quality and cost they tend to mirror each other the good ones tend to be more expensive although i'd recommend just finding high resolution scans of his early works to really appreciate them as the works of art as much as they are works of literature and the occult the standard study of spars life art and occult thought would be baker's austin osmond sparr the occult life of london's legendary artist though this work is getting more and more rare over time and a bit more expensive hopefully it will be reprinted although some people don't like it because it's a little deflationary it's still rather good make sure to subscribe check out my other content on topics on esotericism and again i hope you consider supporting my work of making scholarly and free content on topics and esotericism on the occult here on youtube for free by taking a look at my patreon or considering a one-time donation your contributions to this channel make this possible and i really am blessed to be able to produce university level talks on topics like these here on youtube for free so thank you so much for your support until next time i'm dr justin sledge and thank you for watching esoterica where we explore the arcane in history philosophy and religion you