Also in the autumn of 1907, a young visionary artist named Austin Osman Spare was becoming the enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, and he had a show, ‘Black and White Drawings by Austin Osman Spare’, at the Bruton Galleries. “His management of line has not been equalled since the days of Aubrey Beardsley,” wrote a critic: “his inventive faculty is stupendous and terrifying in its creative flow of impossible horrors.” The Observer went further: “Mr. Spare's art is abnormal, unhealthy, wildly fantastic and unintelligible, and altogether of a kind which will make the family man hesitate to take his wife or daughter to the gallery.”
Crowley sought him out, walking into the gallery at 13 Bruton Street, between Bond Street and Berkeley Square, and announcing himself to Spare as the “Vicegerent of God upon Earth.” In due course they became friends, for a while, and Spare joined the fledgling A∴A∴ as a Probationer. He seems to have swapped drawings for his A∴A∴ outfit: “I cannot afford the robe (have nothing) and it's kind of you to pay off on the work. Do you order it or I?”
Spare flunked the academic side of the A∴A∴ curriculum, and never got beyond the grade of Probationer. Crowley failed him and, looking over his Probationer's Oath form a couple of years later, wrote “An artist. Can't understand organisation or he would have passed.”
Spare's subsequent recollections of Crowley are not flattering. He remembered seeing Crowley put a dollop of spaghetti on his head in the Café Royal so it ran down his collar, and doing his invisibility routine nearby in Regent Street, wearing a cowl and making the Sign of Harpocrates (for silence). According to his own account, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, Spare told him “I saw you – so did others!” He also remembered him wearing cosmetics in the Piccadilly area – looking like a male prostitute, he thought – and said “My God, if I had to go to all that effort to attract ’em, I'd give up the ghost.”