![]() ![]() The Book of Pleasure reeks of diabolism to such an extent that Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony (Oxford, 1933) refers to Spare as an English "satanic occultist", and he places him in the same category as Aleister Crowley. When barely twenty years of age he began writing The Book of Pleasure, in which he used art and sex to explore the subconscious mind. Despite his inability to remember quite when he was born, the place was certainly Snowhill, London: he was the only son of a City of London policeman. That his life was a curious blend of past and future. ![]() But whichever aspect of the deity he more closely represented, it is a fact He told me he was not sure whether he was born on the last day of December 1888, or on New Year's Day, 1889 whether, as he put it, he was Janus backward-turning, or Janus forward-facing. The circumstances of his birth emphasize the element of ambivalence and inbetweeness which forms the theme of his magic. They walk calm and primal, of no dimensions, and to us unseen." This aptly describes Austin Osman Spare. Lovecraft, in one of his tales of terror, alludes to certain entities which have their being "not in the spaces known to us, but between them. Northampton: Sut Anubis, 1987 ( facsimile).Austin Osman Spare and the Zos Kia Cultus By Kenneth Grant (From the Magical Revival).The book has been reissued several times: The book had originally been planned as a mutus liber of illustrations only – "the Wisdom without words", but was expanded later. It seems that they were destroyed during World War II. There are some chapters in The Book of Pleasure that Spare has referred to within the text, but are omitted. It covers both mystical and magical aspects of Spare's ideas as the modern ideas on sigils (as now have become popular in chaos magic) and Spare's special theory on incarnation are for the first time introduced in this book. The book could be regarded as the central text among his writings. The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): Psychology of Ecstasy is a book written by Austin Osman Spare during 1909–1913 and self-published in 1913. ![]()
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