Magic has consistently suffered the threat of extinction. Its preservation has historically been entrusted to hidden sanctuaries, such as secret societies and lands remote from ecclesiasticism.
The arts have also played an important role as keeper of esoterica. Medieval craftsmanship, neoclassical architecture, the French decadents, and the Surrealist movement cultivated magic within their time and culture. From their combined periphery emerged Austin Osman Spare, whose channelled artworks and innovations upon magical philosophy and practice were seminal to the development of an esotericism that thrived through the end of the twentieth century.
The rich prolific publications of ancient texts in our time and their resulting furor are an unprecedented forward surge for the occult. But its backward gaze obscures the development of the same Greco-Egyptian paradigms enshrined in Trismegistus, Picatrix, and Agrippa in the forms they assumed from the 1940s to the new millenium.
In this lecture, Spare's extravagant tapestry of works will be discussed, along with his magical ethos and its impact on his devotees who broke boundaries in magical theory and practice. It reveals how their cultural influence forced esoterica out of the arcane and avant-garde to disseminate through the reaches of popular culture itself.
Micki Pellerano is a reputed professional astrologer and a practitioner of Hermetic Magic with over twenty years' experience. His practice derives inspiration from a broad range of systems including yoga, tantra, and chaos magic. Occultism permeates Pellerano's history as a visual artist. He speaks and presents regularly, while maintaining his program and educational platform Time Lord TV.