Austin Osman Spare and the Modern Sigil
Updated
Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) was a London-born artist and occultist. Almost every modern sigil — including the ones our free generator draws — uses the letter method he described in the early 20th century.
Who he was
Spare trained as an artist in London and exhibited at the Royal Academy as a teenager. He later stepped away from the art establishment and developed a personal magical philosophy, published in books he wrote and illustrated himself.
The Book of Pleasure (1913)
In The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, Spare set out the sigil method: write a sentence of desire, strike out repeated letters, and combine the rest into a single glyph. The glyph is then charged in a state of focused 'vacuity' and deliberately forgotten.
Why forgetting mattered to him
Spare believed conscious wanting gets in the way — he called it 'lust of result'. Turning words into an unreadable shape, then putting it out of mind, was his way of letting the intention work without the doubt that comes with re-reading it.
The Alphabet of Desire and Zos Kia
Spare also wrote about a personal 'Alphabet of Desire' — symbols each person develops for their own drives — and named his wider system Zos Kia Cultus. These ideas were picked up decades later by chaos magicians.
His legacy
From the 1970s, chaos magic writers such as Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine made Spare's sigil method a core, belief-neutral technique. Today it is the default way sigils are taught online, in books and in tattoo studios.
Try his method free
Write one present-tense sentence, remove vowels and repeated letters, and join the rest into one shape. Our free sigil maker does the reduction and drawing automatically, or you can draw it by hand using our step-by-step guide.