Short Film of Austin Osman Spare's 'Earth Inferno'

Austin Osman Spare is one of the most legendary artists and occultists of the turn of last century. As an artist, his materialising atavisms and automatic drawings are phenomenally evocative of intelligences marshaled from deepest dimension. As an occultist, his invention of the sigil as a pictorial means to manifest desire was a massive technological breakthrough for the art and, along with his other methods, form a large portion upon which the canon of Chaos Magick teachings derive from (see the post on Peter J. Carroll). Numerous apocrypha are bandied about regarding Spare's evocation of entities and the subsequent insanity rendered upon less adept observers (see the works of Kenneth Grant). Together with Aleister Crowley (of whose A .'. A .'., Spare was a onetime member), he stands as a giant of early 20th century occultism (see the post on Crowley).

In 1905 (at age 18), Spare published a limited run of his first book 'Earth Inferno': a combination of art and aphorisms. In 2004, Producto Desecho produced the following homage, featuring a Kenneth Anger-like series of tableaux vivant. Bon appetit.