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Spare's artwork is beautiful but his written works are a tough read. It's been said that he's been translated into German but nobody's translated him into English!
I wonder if the fact that he was focused on his artwork meant he didn't attmept to communicate clearly through the written word. Also he was very young, 27 or so when he first began to publish his magickal/mystical writings , and is quoted elsewhere as saying he had the ideas clearly but didn't always have the words to express them. This isn't helped by his subject matter - it's a very stripped down sort of mysticism, parallel to Taoist immediacy, (there's a few direct paraphrases from the Tao Te Ching in his work) and in a lot of ways, the simpler something is the harder it is to talk about. If you doubt this, think of the tons of verbiage that have acculmulated round the Qabalah, compared to Zen say.
(I nicked this point from commentator Lionel Snell, whose essay here is very useful. He's written a commentary to Spare's most well known work "The Book of Pleasure" called Spare Parts but I can't find it online.)
The Book of Pleasure is also The Book that spawned sigil magick. The section of sigils is actually quite clear and lucid compared to the rest of it so it might be worth flicking through to that in an online edition and giving it a browse. The BoP is still a tough read though and I've been pondering the first line for years - "What is there to believe in but in Self, and what is Self but the negation of completeness as reality?" - (how sad am I, I remember it). If anybody wants to get into a discussion re. this or other scraps of his writing this might be a good place.
I think it's worth checking out his commentators as well. American mage Steven Mace is probably the most straightforward to grasp, and takes Spare's stuff and links it to straightforward magickal techniques. Kenneth Grant, Spare's liteary executor, hints and tantalises with fragments of Spare throughout his books, which is as good a way in as any. Lionell Snell also seems to exude the essence of Spare, in a way - part of Spare's thing is an awareness of of duality, and LS really seems to have got this under his skin, in a really playful way.
I'm sure that's more than enough to be getting on with - I don't know when to shuddup  I do feel his written work is worth persisting with though. It's wonderful stuff, just takes a while to digest. |
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