The influence of Austin Osman Spare on Jimmy Page’s choice of rune – or sigil – seems rather clear. For his part Jimmy Page has often maintained that Zoso was intended purely as a representative of Saturn, the ruling planet of his Capricorn sun sign, the ruler of hard work, adamantine will and strength, and necessary strengthening restriction. ‘Spare’s “sentient symbols” and his “alphabet of desire” situate this mediatory magic in a libidinal framework of Tantric – which is to say cosmological – proportions.’Īlso a writer, in his grimoire The Book of Pleasure Spare spoke of the Zos Kia Cultus, a philosophy of magic he developed that focuses on one’s individual universe and the influence of the magician’s will on it a way of thinking – influenced by Aleister Crowley – that was very familiar to Jimmy Page.Īnd Zos, of course, is only one letter away from Zoso. Spare was endeavouring to rediscover the evangelical concept of the ‘word’ as a magical complex image. These sigils would thereby become ‘monograms of thought, for the government of energy’. He would elaborate these sigils by condensing letters of the alphabet into what have been described as ‘diagrammatic glyphs of desire, which were to be integrated in postural practices’ – yoga, in other words. (Around the time of the recording of Led Zeppelin IV, Spare was championed by Kenneth Grant, a protégé of Crowley, in the popular Man, Myth and Magic encyclopaedia partwork, which commenced publication in 1970.)Īmong the several methods through which Spare communicated his art were his use of sigils, influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Always taken with notions of mysticism and other worlds, Spare – like his mentor for a brief time, Aleister Crowley – claimed to have had direct experience of the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. Turned off by the commercial art world, he rebelled, downgrading himself and selling his work at what were nothing more than inebriated evenings masquerading as exhibition openings in South London pubs.
Spare was a Clerkenwell policeman’s son who became a teenage painting prodigy, celebrated in exhibitions while still at the Royal College of Art. Looking at Spare’s paintings, you may receive similar impressions as you would when listening to the music of Led Zeppelin: images from the far, far past coupled with those from a distant science-fiction future – what you imagine and what you see are equally valid and interrelated.Īustin Osman Spare - Portrait of the Artist One of Spare’s specialities were his sidereal paintings, as though you were looking at a cinema screen from the side. It should not surprise you to learn that Spare was not only a visionary artist, but also a philosopher and occult musician he was the inspiration for what is now known as chaos magic. The work he has collected includes Spare’s 1907 Portrait of the Artist. In recent years it has become known that the world’s most prolific collector of paintings by Austin Osman Spare, sometimes described as Britain’s greatest unknown artist, is Jimmy Page. Robert Plant devised his own symbolic image, a feather within a circle, an icon that spoke very much of Native Americans but which the singer claimed was sourced from the ancient Mu civilisation.īut what of Jimmy Page’s rune? The sigil that became known as Zoso, by which Led Zeppelin IV was sometimes termed before Jimmy himself adopted it as a kind of sobriquet? (He even named his own photographic autobiography, published much later, Zoso.) As might be expected from the ever precise and measured Jimmy Page, the origins of Zoso were considerably more arcane. Bonham’s three interlocking rings represented the man, woman and child – of his marriage, presumably twisted upside down, much to the delight of the rest of the band, Bonham’s image became the logo of Ballantine beer, his Midlands local brew. Jones’s image was appropriately of an individual who possessed both confidence and competence. Both John Paul Jones and John Bonham took their sigils from Rudoph Koch’s The Book of Signs. But devised by each individual in the band.
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