Journey into the neither-neither: Austin Osman spare and the construction of a shamanic identity

Abstract

The English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) created a dense and fecund body of work that is built upon a foundation of automatism, the pursuit of a state of Vacuity, and the reification of what Spare termed Self-Love. Although a one-time student of Aleister Crowley and clearly influenced by some aspects of Western European esoteric currents, Spare has remained on the margins of the twentieth-century occult revival due both to the complexity of his language and idiosyncratic nature of his system of magical theory and practice. A number of voices have, however, sought to locateSpare and his system within a shamanic framework linked to perceptions/constructions of witchcraft and Amerindian sorcery. This article seeks to examine what this might mean through a discussion of the dual influence of Michael Harrier's core-shamanism and Kenneth Grant's mediation of Spare, while also providing an overview of Spare's writings on trance techniques designed to address the apparent evidence for his shamanic identity.