man's insanity is heaven’s sense
‘I don’t believe anything, but I have my suspicions’ (Wilson)
‘Can I take that one, please?’ she asked politely. ‘Of course!’ I said, feeling a little guilty at how relieved I was, the small talk was ending.
I packed the print neatly in a tube whilst the Zettle card reader pinged, and handed it across the trestle table. ‘They're just so original,’ she remarked.
‘Ah, well, you know, that’s very kind.’ I rambled, grateful but unsure of the correct etiquette.
She smiled, and her eyes dropped to another print depicting a distended mutant baby in Gothic armour, eating a church with one hand and fighting off a flying saucer with another. ‘So,’ she said, suddenly curious, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
Half-remembered utterances from half-mad magicians drift in snow globe currents behind my glazing sight. Surely you know, I think, surely you've been there too, to that place we half-drown beneath during our nocturnal schedules. That ineffable pool that gapes, split-skulled, atop the crown of our awareness. That bottomless ocean where lurk the Leviathans of religion and culture and ideology. That dark, immense span of tide, pregnant with glittering nonsense, waiting to be fused into matter via the occult conductors of sign and symbol and signifier. All that potential, collecting in spin drifts above our rational eye. Surely you’ve seen it?
But I didn't want to seem weird, so I shrugged ‘Ah, you know… Pinterest.’
Man's Insanity is Heaven’s Sense
An autotheoretical essay applying esoteric models to navigate and exact inspiration
‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
I probably should know, we all should: artists, musicians, writers, performers, other dealers in the intangible, we rely upon their coming. Erect our worth and wealth about their gravity in personal, professional solar systems.
In periods of my life where art-block lingered, I found myself aimless, without destination. What would happen if it became an epidemic? If culture became paralysed by the blank page.
If a taxi breaks down, the driver knows a little about how the engine functions to get it running again, so why shouldn’t artists? But where to start? There’s no universal instruction manual, no book of parts, no 24-hour helpline. There’s no single accepted truth to be pulped, sifted, and summarised atop Google’s AI scrape.
Imagine someone born without any senses: no sight, no sound, no touch, no smell, no taste. Perfectly formed in all respects, but quarantined from the outer world, sealed inside their skull, nothing getting in or out.
In ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ’(1689), the empirical philosopher John Locke proposed that, should the mind be deprived of the materials of experience, there would be nothing for the brain to think with. Therefore, no children of thought, no personality, no soul, no ideas. Is it inspiration then that animates our matter?
Locke believed the mind's purpose is to use the five senses to build a working model of the external (he believed more real) world, as accurately as an individual can.
This attitude has proven extraordinarily useful in manifesting our ideas physically; it's given us vaccines, moon landings and microchips.
But you cannot measure an idea itself; it has no weight; it exists without mass, charge, or spin. You can empirically record its footprint, the blinking digits of an EEG machine, but these neurological events merely support an idea. The concept itself does not exist in the physical world; you won't find it tucked away in a lobe or stuffed down the back of a cortex (Lycan,2012).
So we must look beyond the physical. To find alternatives to off-the-peg consensus. There are older technologies, systems fitted, bespoke to plot the spaces we cannot measure. Fictions rarely tell truths, but rarer still tell lies.
The moment a material event transcends to concept, it leaves behind the empirical theatre and enters an ocean better plotted by the medium, the poet and the magician.
‘Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.’ (Moore,1996,p.200)
The Medium
It's 1871, Kensington. The room is dark, sharp rays of May are pinned back by thick curtains. A woman in her sixties stands beside an easel and paints. Paints, although there isn't enough light to see. The complex net of geometry gushes from her hand without hesitation, blossoming into a radiant lunacy, guided by the still-dripping touch of her drowned nephew.
Later that month, the old British gallery will host an exhibition of newly created works produced by a host of spirits, including seventy archangels. Their ecstatic testimonies, poured upon onehundred-and-fifty-five pages in delicate, winding watercolour. Their mortal collaborator, the respected and tenacious hand of Georgiana Houghton, spiritual medium and artist.
Houghton was born in 1814 to a large family. After moving to London, they fell into poverty, her siblings dwindling, dying of flu and tuberculosis.
Although details are murky, it appears Houghton and her favourite sister Zilla received some artistic training; however, in their thirties, Zilla fell ill and passed.
Houghton’s grief became a long-drawn depression. She stopped making art and went to live with her mother, remaining inactive until the age of forty-five.
One day, Houghton’s cousin’s invitated her to attend a séance. The techniques employed paused Houghton's depression (Higgie,2024).
The binding of several minds, the depriving of senses, the suspension of rationality, to empty the self and let fill what may come to that space set behind the eye. So live hands may palsy with the alphabet of the dead. So waking tongues may impart barbarous glossalgias from a realm unburdened with matter. Methods by which Houghton may paint with her sister once again.
Although psychoanalysis was not yet born, Houghton’s world was pregnant with its methods. Automatic writing and drawing, inner voices experienced as separate from the self, and explorations of consciousness’s boundaries.
The rites are similar enough; it seems to me the difference between much of early psychoanalysis and spiritualist practice is dependent upon whether you consider these other worlds reside without or within.
‘Occultists in lab coats.’(Moore,2010)
Locke’s tabula rasa suggests the self is an aggregate of information. The people we meet, like everything, come to reside within us, decoded from light and sound, rebuilt in the mind. We get to know some people well, building rounder, more detailed models of them, to the point where they can be conjured even when elsewhere.
I talk to people in my mind. Friends, family, podcast hosts. It's not so much inner monologue as inner duologue. I know it’s me wearing a mask of another, but it is through them I have my most interesting thoughts.
We continue to do this after someone close to us dies, especially so. Picture them on the bus beside us, ask them for guidance. Sometimes the ghosts migrate from conscious direction to the unconscious. Flashing in the corner of our sight, catching traces of their voice, admits busy conversation. So fully understood, so well realised, a replica, the distinction between interior and exterior space can become blurry (Lee,2024).
Houghton appeared to have an extraordinary talent for feeling, experiencing grief and ecstasy in equal intensity. Her five senses, so acute, she may aswell have had a sixth.
In November 2018, an exhibition was hosted at Lenbachhaus, Munich, showing three female spiritualist artists, including Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Georgiana Houghton. The exhibition was appropriately named ‘World Receivers’. Although receptivity should not be misread as passivity, as that doesn't account for the work produced.
‘World receiving’ resonates with me. I have never felt my ideas were truly my own. I don’t labour over their construction; they arrive fully formed, from parts of my mind I dont control, happening to me like weather or sickness.
I believe, whilst Georgiana Houghton did not contact her deceased family from outside herself, she loved and understood them so well, she was able to raise them from within. Their souls, discerned and recorded by her five senses, conducted into wax, watercolour and ink.
I say this not to drag down the world of spirit to a dull empiricism, but instead to raise the inner space of the imagination to a status of awe.
The Poet
It’s 1790, the sun is low, and Lambeth begins to glow with the stink of whale oil. In the ground-floor of a squat terrace house, lit tallow, a man bleeds backwards verse across copper plate. Studied through a mirror bejewelled with inked fingers, a carefully inverted account of angels and devils’ pool in the birthing light.
William Blake waits patiently as the stop-out-varnish solidifies across the fire sheen. He thumbs a wall of wax around the testimony and bathes it in nitric acid. A goose’s feather quickens the erosion, the tip tinting a corpse-lip blue in the stir pattern.
Vermillion pigment, crushed with yellow-ochre and Prussian-blue, whipped to a paste with linseed oil, becomes a deep oxide. Spread thin now upon glass, dabbed thinner by leather, the bloodied inferno guilds the glammer topography. Atop the dark fire, Blake lays the virgin white.
With a beetle strength, he hauls the star wheel, hand over hand, wedding cog to cog and page to plate. Contraries drive the toothed mechanism, wheezing to completion upon the resting shelf.
The woollen sheets are pulled back, the lovers dismount, exhausted, their afterglow lingering in the manuscript. Heaven and hell, consummated in a London slum.
William Blake was appalled by Locke's empiricism, where individual imaginations are squandered on uniform replicas of the physical world (Whittaker,2025).
Where most saw a thistle, Blake saw an old man. What some believed to be a tree in Peckham Rye, through Blake’s eye, became a host of angels. These were not hallucinations; Blake saw perfectly well that a tree was a tree through his ‘outward eye’, but would become imbued with symbolism and meaning through his ‘inward eye’. He called this ‘twofold vision’ or ‘poetic genius’. Blake argued that our vision is due to our own weak poetry (Higgs,2019).
‘When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’(Blake,1810)
Although Science may not be able to measure the world of ideas, it can measure the shadows cast. A 2011 study conducted by the University of Liverpool invited people to read Shakespeare while undergoing an MRI scan. They found the unconventional syntax engaged neurological activity associated with greater receptivity to new information. Notably, Shakespeare often placed these disruptions before dramatic reveals, as if priming the audience’s consciousness. (McCrum,2011)
Western occultism similarly employs ‘barbarous tongues’ in spellcraft (Moore,2023). I’m often inspired by the resonance of unsympathetic symbols whose collision gives rise to something entirely different.
Blake often championed the union of opposites, perhaps as a means of awakening the ‘poetic genius’ within, allowing us to see beyond the oppressive empirical vice. Poetic apocalypse.
The etymology of poetry derives from the Ancient Greek word ‘poiesis’, meaning ‘making' or ‘creation’. In Plato’s dialogue ‘The Apology’(399 BCE), Socrates is accused by Anytus, Melitus & Lycon of being a poet or maker of gods. In Jerusalem (1804,p.93), Blake wrote, ‘Anytus Melitus & Lycon thought Socrates a Very Pernicious Man, So Caiphas thought Jesus.’ Here, Blake is claiming Jesus to be a God-maker. In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’(1790,p.11), Blake wrote ‘The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses(…)Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.’
The beat poet William S. Burroughs believed language is a virus, and humans, hosts, where the disease festers and reproduces, piloting the mind in a modified state understood as inspiration. Via the means of oblique representation, music, dance writing and art, they migrate to other minds, continuing the life cycle. (1986)
While most find his theory upsetting, suggesting they are not in control, I find it a creative relief; it's not my fault if this essay is bad, it's the virus.
Richard Dawkins later coined the term ‘meme’, defining it as a ‘unit of cultural transmission’(1976,p.192)
Both Blake and Locke saw the mind/body as inseparable from eachother. However, where Locke believed the outer world built the inner, Blake understood the inner world to build the outer. ‘Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses.’(Blake,1790,p.1)
Blake believed gods resided only within the imagination, but he did not think them less for that; instead, he thought more of the imagination, for it is the place where gods reside.
Why attempt to condense and narrow the divine when we could expand it? Change our senses through art and stories, expanding ourselves outwards, populating a world with a system of our own devising.
Inspiration, to Blake, was not inert information but a living presence all around, experience itself, and not to be constrained.
The Magician
It's 1941, a frightening-looking man with dirt-shot eyes and barbwire hair squats in a Brixton basement, littered with canvas and cat shit.
Austin Osman Spare pulls back from the page, knocking his head as he stands, and considers its tangled splendour.
The drawing is unapologetically Freudian, a self-portrait rendered in pen and ink, bristling with breasts and penises. He has the legs of Pan and a book of magick in his hand. Between his buck legs, a man and woman ten centimetres tall covort in melting embrace, and behind him, a determined-looking woman dressed in unfastening robes presents him with a catalogue of masks.
Self-possessed, or just plain possessed, it's five months since the Luftwaffe destroyed Spare’s previous accommodation, rendered a Caligari prolapse in the searchlight. A bad time for him, but a worse time for estate agents, the cockney magus makes do.
Spare mutters gravel to himself, swears, massages his moorland features, and returns to his crouch. Swallowed by the drunken towers of gaping paint pots, spent tubes and stiffened brushes.
His winding nib, weaving what is and isn't.
Born in 1886, Austin Osman Spare was a child prodigy and the youngest entrant to the Royal Academy, praised as a ‘genius’ by Singer Sargent. But by eighteen, he rejected a comfortable artistic career for the life of a magician, ‘swine with the swine,’ he put it, his work hanging in more pubs than galleries (Ansell,2007).
Spare’s magickal system combined the then recent influx of Eastern esoterism, Western occultism and early psychoanalysis. At the heart was what Spare called the ‘Kia’, a term representing the universal, formless consciousness underlying reality. He believed that by accessing this deeper level of mind, he could manifest desires into reality.
Spare’s practice, ‘sigil magick,’ worked by compressing personal intent to symbolic forms and impressing them upon the subconscious. He spoke in opaque, metaphorical language, believing that ultimate understanding lies beyond rational comprehension. He aided this by developing his ‘death-posture’, a method where, after staring at his own reflection until exhaustion, his consciousness disassociates from the body. By this, he hoped to bypass the reductionist mind and gain access to his internal pantheon (Sledge,2023).
Spare believed, not dissimilar to Blake, that gods/spirits, despite their interiority, are no less significant. But, unlike Houghton, who sought to channel, or Blake, who sought to converse, Spare sought to control.
Inspired by Nietzsche’s Dionysian, using sigils, Spare attempted to enter ‘Kia’ and impose his own will to power over the mental deities. This aspect of magick has always felt a little ‘Thatcherite’ to me.
Spare becomes his most interesting when he explores how art can be a vehicle to and from ‘Kia’. A conductor to a space of pure concept. He did this with his ‘neither neither’ method, where his drawings would be simultaneously of two things at the same time (Ansell,2007). A candle and a nude. It works as an acid, destroying the container of concepts, allowing free notion to flow more easily between the state of what is and isnt the imagination exists in.
Final Suspicion
‘It was the straying that found the path direct.’-(Spare)
Although the mind may begin as Locke’s tabula rasa, clusters of sensory information gradually coalesce into concepts, then transmit semiotically to other minds. Some gather complexity across cultures, behaving as if almost alive, developing agency.
Ordered into castes, we create systems to commune with them, shut out the world and focus upon their transmitters, symbols, words, and iconography. We reduce our egos in meditation, so they grow in place.
Some work through us unnoticed, others collaborate, a few compel the hands of prophets, demanding their transmitters be erected in permanent gold.
It surrounds us.
It is the Ether, and Golgonooza, and Kia. It is all the higher townships. It is the fire in Plato's cave. Realer than Earth.
It is where our souls are born, and it is where they shall return. Back to the churn. It is our afterlife, the currents from which our ghosts are conjured to sit beside those we leave behind.
The three spirits invoked are alike in many ways; above all, the ideas in their work were new and rare.
How deep must we swim to find ideas before it is their time? How mad would we seem?
I’m not sure the truth even matters.
These are models, systems for simplifying motions beyond our measurements.
The question isn’t
What’s most plausible?
But
What gets results?
By my knowing, occult theatres provide the solution. The performance offers techniques and theorems to find inspiration and conduct it into matter. It shifts grandeur from the artist to the seed from which the art grew. Imposter syndrome and narcissism, undone by the smallness of my part. Forces intention and reverence to my practice. If a card trick is entertainment, and a spellcraft is propaganda, then apocalypse is art’s highest aspiration.
Reference list
Althaus, K., Matthias Mühling, Schneider, S., Städtische Galerie Im Lenbachhaus Und Kunstbau München and Hirmer Verlag (2018). World receivers Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and John Whitney, James Whitney, Harry Smith. Munich Hirmer.
Ansell, R. (2007). Austin Osman Spare. Fulgur Press . [online] Available at: https://www.fulgur.co.uk/artists-and-writers/austin-osman-spare/ [Accessed 3 Dec. 2025].
Anton Wilson, R. (1960). I don’t believe in anything, but I have my suspicions. [online] Available at: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/50980-i-don-t-believe-anything-but-i-have-many-suspicions [Accessed 3 Dec. 2025]. The original date and source are unknown. Likely from a lost radio recording.
Baker, P. (2011). Austin Osman Spare: Cockney visionary. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/may/06/austin-osman-spare-phil-baker [Accessed 3 Dec. 2025].
Blake, W. (1790a). The marriage of heaven and Hell. William and Catherine Blake, p.11.
Blake, W. (1790b). The proverbs of Hell. William and Catherine Blake, p.1. ‘Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses.’(Proverbs of Hell,1790,p.1).
Blake, W. (1804). Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion [a Poem with Illustrations by William Blake]. William and Catherine Blake, p.93. ‘Anytus Melitus & Lycon thought Socrates a Very Pernicious Man, So Caiphas thought Jesus.’
Blake, W. (1808). A Vision of the Last Judgement . [Ink and Watercolour] This work remained unfinished. it is the annotations Blake made around it that i lifted the quote from ‘When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 11 ‘Memes: The New Replicators’ p. 192.
Higgie, J. (2024). ‘The Substantiality of Spirit’: Georgiana Houghton’s Pictures from the Other Side. [online] The Public Domain Review. Available at: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-substantiality-of-spirit/.
Higgs, J. (2019). William Blake versus the world.
Lee, S. (2024). Halloween Special with Stewart Lee. bbc. 29 Oct. Stuart Lee recounted an incident of seeing and interacting with his mother after she had passed away. Believing himself it just to be within his mind.
Locke, J. (1689). An Essay concerning Human Understanding. London: Dent.
Lycan, W.G. (2012). Is property dualism better off than substance dualism? Philosophical Studies, 164(2), pp.533–542. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9867-x.
McCrum, R. (2011). Why Shakespeare never fails to get brains buzzing. The Guardian.
Melville, H. (1851). Moby Dick. 1st ed. Chapter 125, ‘The Log and Line’) [1.2, 1.10] ‘man’s insanity is heaven’s sense’.
Moore, A. (1996). Voice of the fire. Knockabout. ‘Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.’ Chapter 12, ‘pips fire escape’, p. 200.
Norman, K. (2015). The Information Theory of Life | Quanta Magazine. [online] Quanta Magazine. Available at: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-information-theory-of-life-20151119/.
S.Burroughs, W. (1986). The Adding Machine: Collected Essays. The Adding Machine , p.47.
Sledge, dr.Justin (2023). Austin Osman Spare - Sigil Magick in Theory and Practice - The Origins of Chaos Magick. [online] Youtu.be. Available at: https://youtu.be/HsVOFdRvziQ?si=-FYyJk41Bpyk4cWz [Accessed 16 Jan. 2026].
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