“Earth Inferno” (Selected Plates) by Austin Osman Spare (1905).
This was Spare’s first published book, issued when he was eighteen years old and studying at the Royal College of Art in London.The title of the third image shown above is “Portrait of hisself aged 17″.
Self-published by Spare through the Co-Operative Printing Society, copies of Earth Inferno were purchased by Sylvia Pankhurst (a prominent Suffragette) and other friends from the college.
The title and structure of this short work references Dante’s Inferno, including the famous first lines of that poem.
The first image is the “clavis” (”key”), to the work, and can be seen as a representation of Samsara, the repeating cycle of birth, life and death (reincarnation) as well as one’s actions and consequences in the past, present, and future.
At the “still point of the turning world” in the center of the wheel is the dominion of Zos and Kia. In the later “Book of Pleasure” (1913) there is an image with the text “The Body Considered as a Whole I Call ZOS”.
Spare was a member of Aleister Crowley’s A∴A∴ from its founding in 1907, leaving it five years later in 1912. Zos has certain similarities to the Thelemite entity Hadit. In turn, his concept of Kia (represented by a vulture in the center of the circle and in some of the other plates) can be seen as an analog of the Egyptian star-goddess Nuit.
In some late texts of the “Book of Coming Forth by Day”, the vulture goddess Nekhbet is referred to as Father of Fathers, Mother of Mothers, who hath existed from the Beginning, and is Creatrix of this World.