I've been in a loose email discussion with a friend about an experiment I did about a year and a half ago involving scrying all of the sketches in Austin Osman Spare's The Book of Ugly Ecstasy. I hadn't thought much about it again until this casually came back up recently. The idea for this operation came from the introduction to the book by Robert Ansell where he mentions toward the end: Now there are actually three books of interest to me here: The Book of Ugly Ecstasy, The Valley of Fear and The Book of Automatic Drawing. What these three books have in common is that they are primarily automatic sketches of various entities; groteque hags, therianthropic beings and some self-portraits. A lot of them are morphing into/out of each other. A few have some surrealistic landscapes included. My theory is that Spare charged all of his artwork like talismans and these sketches in particular are actually the result of evocations of various Genii, therefore they should actually act as conduits for others to do the same. I consider these books to be visual grimoires and alive with meaning. I had also made note of the fact that there are 22 numbered plates and one unnumbered plate in Ugly Ecstasy making it similar, at least in number, to the 22 trumps of the Tarot with one extra being off the wheel. I wanted to contact the currents of these pictures and glean whatever gnosis I could from them. I even gave the operation the title The Tarot of Ugly Ecstasy. I did exactly what Robert Ansell described with the candle with every plate in the book; 3 a night for 8 nights. I have had plenty of experience with this method with other portals so am perfectly capable of getting results with it. However, in this case I didn't get anything other than some optical effects on a few where they seemed to move and morph about. I have a few speculations about why this seemingly didn't work: It was not really the right approach. I was not in the right mindset during this time and maybe had too much else going on magically. I had announced it on another forum beforehand and this act (which is not my usual m.o.) short-circuited my effort. I could be completely wrong in my theory on Spare's artwork. Perhaps it did actually work and I haven't noticed or have not been able to tune into it. For discussion I am simply asking: does anyone here have suggestions for other approaches to tapping into the intelligences of these drawings? Has anyone else actually tried working with these drawings in the way suggested by Ansell? Or other ways? Would anyone else be willing to experiment with them in similar ways to compare notes?
I own all those books but have only looked at them and leafed through them in a 'normal' way. I would be ready to give the candle-method a shot some time later in the week and maybe report back in case that anything unusual should happen. To me The Book of Ugly Ecstasy would seem very fitting to this method since its drawings very much seem to be what Grant would have described as a perichoresis (inter-mingling) of various levels such as male-female, human-animal, plant-human, human-demon etc. that also characterizes the Sabbath. I could well imagine that those depictions would be prone to sabbatically and ecstatically 'leap' in accord to the movements of a candle flame...
Hey K, I look forward to anything you may discover and want to share here about trying this. Do you think I approached this too formally and perhaps these sketches should be gazed upon under similar conditions (i.e. with the candle) but more casually? I mean I really stared at them and tried to pierce through and put myself into their worlds. I did not do this in a relaxed fashion at all.
As a 'disciple' of Dionysos I can only say: yes, maybe! Surely, I would believe that a more unforced, unconcentrated form of passive attention could bring other results. I once was at a long concert of modern composer-music with a scholar friend, a professor, who has -IMO- a concentration addiction, he cannot not concentrate, so consequentially he was immensely bored. In the break I told him to listen to such modern music as if it was film music, as if it would be only setting a background and an atmosphere for ones musings and creative ponderings or feelings that could be triggered by it. If nothing happens, then also fine, but then one would at least have spent a relaxed evening, taking a break from everyday life having time for oneself neither with expecting anything to happen nor being expected to do anything.
I have merely done a short session last week that I only consider as a preparation. As you maybe can see from my first comment I took the dictum by Ansell about that ~'the mystery of their creation may be illumined by a single candle flame' which could be metaphorical in a literal sense and had put up a small candle (later my intuition/HGA-thingy told me that I would require a black velvet cloth which I acquired synchronistically in the meantime.) I had the impuls to scan the images both in candle-(shadow-light) and in normal light (light) and thus certain features and faces that are drawn thicker come out stronger and are prominent in their shadow side (e.g. faces in no. 4, 5, 7) while other subtleties- the finer lines- show themselves better in their light side. Also I ascribe to its influence a sudden budding interest in Voodoo and traditional African magic and have noticed a certain mercurial-martial streak that it partly could have brought out in me and that showed me an uncharacteristic side of myself. In this connection it is interesting that the Roman gem that is reproduced at the beginning of the book is as far as I can discern a depiction of Heracles with the Lernaean Hydra (?) and a furnace or tripod with fire in it which has to me martial connotations. It also could be Pluto. Do you know anything of it? I only took note of it after that small meditation. This gem (maybe in conjunction with the marmot- frontis piece) could be used as an initiatory gateway image next time. I have no time for it till tomorrow but will make another scan in the latter half of the week.
Interesting thoughts there K. Regarding that Roman gem. You seem to have come to the same conclusion I have about it. I once tried to search that gem out to see exactly what it is but could find absolutely nothing. When searching a description of it (like "Greco-Roman god with club in hand") I simply came up with similar images of Heracles and Hydra but nothing identical to it. With that I just assumed that it is a depiction of Heracles and Hydra. As you know, the only thing said about this gem in the text is in a footnote to the exact passage I quoted in my first post: In the very back of the book there is only one reference to it: So perhaps it is a catalyst or a passage, at least for Spare himself, into the space where these images came from.
As hinted to elsewhere, I have had to deal with some real life inconveniences (the world can be obnoxiously intrusive at times!) so didn't come back to this, yet in the meantime stumbled on this quote from Images and Oracles of AOS. It could be interesting in connection with what you said about the 22 (+1) numbered images and I about their dark and night (edit: and light!) side-aspects:
