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Austin Osman Spare
Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of one of my favourite artists, Austin Osman Spare. Like many people in the 1970s, I was introduced to the work of Austin Spare by Man, Myth and Magic, a...
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Ginsberg’s Howl and the view from the street
James Campbell in The Guardian this weekend writes about the arrest fifty years ago of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for his publishing Allen Ginsberg’s paean to ecstatic drug use and gay sex, Howl and Other...
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Aleister Crowley on vinyl
The appearance of occultist Aleister Crowley on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper is well-documented—here he is looking rather grainy on my CD insert—although I always forget which of the Beatles it was who...
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Kenneth Grant, 1924–2011
Kenneth Grant by Austin Spare (c. 1951). Kenneth Grant, writer and occultist, died last month but the event was only announced this week. He’ll be remembered for the nine fascinating occult treatises...
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Weekend links 58
Oya by Alberto del Pozo (1945–1992). Also known as Yansa, Oya is Changó’s third wife. She is the goddess of the winds and of lightning and is mistress of the cemetery gates. Passionate and brave she...
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Murmur Become Ceaseless and Myriad
Efflaration (1952) by Austin Osman Spare. The Austin Spare revival continues with another exhibition, Murmur Become Ceaseless and Myriad at Flat Time House, London, curated by Mark Titchner. Unless...
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Abraxas: The International Journal of Esoteric Studies
A welcome arrival in the post recently was two issues of Abraxas, the book-format journal of esoteric studies from Fulgur Esoterica. I’ve always observed the contemporary occult scene from a distance,...
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Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
Going through some of my loose copies of Man, Myth and Magic recently turned up this article by Kenneth Grant that I’d forgotten about. I have two separate sets of Man, Myth and Magic: a complete...
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Spare things
Cthulhu Cultus: The Sun is Sick (no date) by Austin Osman Spare. I’ve been telling people about this drawing for years but I’ve not posted it here before. Spare produced this piece after Kenneth Grant...
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In the Mind’s Eye
One of the posts last December concerned a short TV film by Alan Garner, To Kill a King, the final entry in the Leap in the Dark series which the BBC ran from 1973 to 1980. Each half-hour episode...
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A Book of Satyrs by Austin Osman Spare
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word “satire” is Formerly often confused or associated with satyr, from the common notion (found already in some ancient grammarians) that Latin ‘satira’...
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More Spare things
A couple of Austin Spare-related news items arrive in the same week so it’s worth linking again to Earth: Inferno (2003), a short film by Mor Navón & Julián Moguillansky based on the book by...
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Form and Austin Osman Spare
The University of Heidelberg‘s scanning programme continues to be a source of delight for those of us without professional or financial access to rare book collections. Having recently made the entire...
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Weekend links 422
Wu Ming, a communist writing collective known for its historical fiction, sees Kolosimo as using pseudohistory as a tool to shake people from their belief that capitalist society is natural and...
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A Book of Satyrs revisited
Searches for art by Austin Osman Spare continue to lead people to these pages so here’s another link to Spare’s A Book of Satyrs (1909). Spare’s second self-published volume, created when he was 20...
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Man is the Animal: A Coil Zine
Death is centrifugal / Solar and logical / Decadent and symmetrical / Angels are mathematical / Angels are bestial / Man is the animal —Fire Of The Mind by Coil In the post this week from Temporal...
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