Austin Osman Spare – occultist, avant-gardist and ‘Britain’s first pop artist’ – Financial Times

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Collectors of the work of early 20th-century English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare have, up until now, been of a type. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin has a notable number of paintings, as did the late Genesis P-Orridge – founder of industrial sound provocateurs Throbbing Gristle. In his memoir, Orridge describes an acquaintance shaking and shouting: “Those paintings, cover them, they’re alive!” One particular work, The Ides, depicting two aggressive-looking self-portraits of Spare flanked by Romanian prostitutes, was turned to face the wall. Months later, after touring overseas, Orridge returned to discover house-sitters had turned the painting around and vanished, leaving rooms splattered with red paint. Spooked, Orridge sold the painting to Chris Stein of Blondie.

Kickstarter: AOS Tarot Deck and Book

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Strange Attractor has created a Kickstarter to fund the publication of a new paperback edition of Lost Envoy, as well as a physical edition of the deck itself, at, most likely, 65mm x114mm, (which is 1.14 times the size of the original cards) so that researchers and tarotists can handle the deck and explore its unique working features for themselves.

Richard C McNeff: Aleister Crowley MI6 The Hess Solution

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May 1941, Ian Fleming of Naval Intelligence recruits Aleister Crowley to crack the recently captured Rudolf Hess by exploiting their mutual fascination with the occult. To fill in the background to Hess’s disastrous flight, Fleming provides the diary of Albrecht Haushofer, the deputy Führer’s assistant. 1945 finds Crowley in a boarding house in Hastings where he tutors Will, a fledgling priest, in Latin. The victim of a Soviet honey trap, Will steals a file that reveals the devastating consequences of Crowley’s mission and discovers the true identities of the Reception Committee waiting for Hess in Scotland. Is the file genuine or a black-ops fake concocted by British Intelligence? Can a crazed rocket scientist in California supply the answer, or ‘M’, the Beast’s controller? Featuring Dion Fortune, Anthony Blunt, Hitler, Jack Parsons, and two Beatles, Aleister Crowley MI6 is a riveting spy thriller anchored in fact.