In September of that year, I’d kicked a years-long IV narcotics addiction cold turkey and was trying to navigate through this absolute, unyielding reality that I had cowered from for the previous 20 years of my life. I had entered recovery and that immediately paid off: I stayed clean. I felt better.
One of the suggestions given to me – which I resisted the most – was this: to pray for help to get clean and stay clean each day. To pray in the morning to stay clean and then pray at night, to give thanks for another day clean.
As someone who’d grown up in the Deep South of the United States, I took this as “repent,” “obey,” “grovel,” etc. the very things I’d heard growing up in the bible belt.
In my mind, prayer wasn’t an intimate communication but rather a sustained throat-clearing apology. But I did. I prayed. I felt like a fool but as a new recovery friend had asked me, “What’s the worst that could happen? Nothing. You’ve got nothing to lose here.”
And he was absolutely right.
So I continued to pray. I made a “composite God” of things that I liked and was attracted to: love, art, freedom, and mystery. I blasted through the confines of worrying about going to hell. I had been slamming hell into my veins and central nervous system for years. Hell burns only in the mind. As Roky Erickson wrote, “Hell is filled.” And, almost as soon as I began to formulate my own kind of prayer, things began to happen. Good things. Encouraging things. And unexplainable things.
This is one.
Through a serpentine path, after getting clean and trying to investigate some kind of understanding of God or a higher power, I’d stumbled into studying Gnosticism, Hermeticism, The Bhagavad Gita, etc. I was familiar with some of these wisdom traditions but had never really explored their actual history, content, or how I could apply the ideas and principles into my daily life. I found similarities in all of these things; parallels that seemed already carved out for me: “Keep going toward this.”
Somehow, I wound up at William Blake. I was familiar with Blake through Allen Ginsberg. I reread some Blake paperbacks that I had on my bookshelf, especially Urizen. I began reading Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Blake, which acknowledged that many consider Blake to have been a Gnostic Christian. He was at the very least, certainly a heretical Christian.
Late one night I finished the Ackroyd book. I was laying down in bed in the dark and my mind began to race. But my mind frequently races, one obsession rattling the bars to escape for the next thought tear into my brain. Over the years, I’ve learned to try and never chase it but rather just let the narrative run itself into exhaustion.
My mind was suddenly filled with thoughts of Austin Osman Spare. An early-to-mid 20th century British occultist, writer, and painter, Spare existed on the fringes of both the UK visual arts and spiritualism scene.
I was mainly familiar with Spare through his 1918 pastel drawing, Dressing the Wounded During a Gas Attack, from an art history class I had taken in 1989 during my first claw marks at attending a community college. I had also seen Spare’s work on an album cover of a Psychic TV record. That was the sum total of what I knew about Spare.
And I was soon aggravated that his name, and that aforementioned WWI drawing, kept zipping around in my head. I rolled out of bed and sat in front of my computer. I did a Google search for “Austin Osman Spare.” Within a matter of minutes I discovered these two things:
* At times Spare had claimed to have been, and also argued that was not, possessed by the spirit of William Blake.
* And at that moment that I did that online search, it was Spare’s birthday. He was born on December 30, 1886.
It was midnight on December 30, 2007 as I sat there in front of my computer in that darkened room.
Naturally, I soon stepped into the zone of Austin Osman Spare, studying him and collecting books by or about him, making attempts at his system of sigil magic, which eventually led me to the next place, and then the place after that, and even here to this very moment.
“Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps. The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.”
– William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827)
“It was the straying that found the path direct.”
– Austin Osman Spare (Dec. 30, 1886 – May 15, 1956)
“The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling.”
– Anonymous Ancient Roman aphorism, as read in Evelyn Underhill’s book, Mysticism (1911).
STAREHOUSE 