Paterson who, as far as we know, must have been quite a Wiccan-like character. He claimed to have experienced while a child an initiation of sorts by an elderly witch, one Mrs. He was born in 1886, the son of a London police officer, and we know very little about his childhood. Despite his various publications after the turn of the century, he remained practically unnoticed until the late sixties. Compared with Aleister Crowley's enigmatic and infamous life, Austin Osman Spare's existence certainly seemed to befit only a footnote. Nevertheless, this important work has at least led many an occult researcher familiar with literature to Spare. Nowadays he is basically known only in this cultural context internationally, he has received only some attention in literary circles at best-ironically, in a footnote! This footnote is found in Mario Praz's pioneering but, unfortunately, rather superficial work La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (The Romantic Agony, Florence, 1930) where he terms him, together with Aleister Crowley, a “satanic occultist” -and that is all. Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was a typical child of this era and, after Aleister Crowley, he was definitely one of the most interesting occultists and practicing magicians of the English-speaking world. Particularly intellectuals, artists, and the so-called “Bohemians” became advocates of values critical of civilization in general as can be seen in the literature of Naturalism, in Expressionist Art and in the whole Decadent Movement, which was quite notorious at the time. In brief, it was a time when it seemed appropriate to question the belief in technology and the omnipotence of the celebrated natural sciences.
The secret lore and the occult in general were triumphant, and there were good reasons for this: the triumph of materialist positivism with its Manchester industrialism was beginning to show its first malice, resulting in social and psychological uprooting the destruction of nature had already begun to bear its first poisonous fruits. The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was a time characterized by radical changes and great heretics. Austin Osman Spare and His Theory of Sigils
0 kommentar(er)
