kaos

Grant has even uncovered a document purported to be from Paterson’s covens which
mentions such names as Syth Ooloo (water), Syth Odowogg (fire), Hru Syth (air),
Shognigoth (earth), all from a document called “Entreating the Stones”. Syth is, of
course, Set.
Grant introduced Mrs Paterson in 1972 in The Magical Revival:
Spare’s intense interest in the more obscure aspects of sorcery sprang from his early
friendship with an old colonial woman who claimed descent from a line of Salem witches
that Cotton Mather had failed to exterminate. Spare always alluded to her as Mrs
Paterson, and called her his “second mother”. She had an extremely limited vocabulary
composed mainly of fortunetellers’ argot, yet she was able to define and explain the
most abstract ideas much more clearly than could Spare with his large and unusual
vocabulary. [p 180–181]
Paterson is seen as the source of Spare’s knowledge:
Although penniless, she would accept no payment for her fortune-telling, but insisted
on the odd symbolic coin traditionally exacted as a sacrifice fee. Apart from her skill in
divining, she was the only person Spare ever met who could materialize thoughts to
visible appearance. [p 181]
Grant then goes on to talk of this “siddhi” and how Paterson was supposed to have used
it on clients when words failed her to project “a clearly defined, if fleeting, image of the
prophesied event”.
It is clear that Ken Grant was painting a larger than life picture from the beginning
even if Austin Spare did relate these things to him. Paterson next appears in Cults of the
Shadow, 1975. Grant adds that:
Spare was initiated into the vital current of ancient and creative sorcery by an aged woman
named Paterson, who claimed descent […] the formation of Spare’s Cult of Zos and Kia
owes much to his contact with Witch Paterson … [p 196]
Now we come to a little technique:
These magicians utilized human embodiments of power (shakti) which appeared—
usually—in feminine form […] in the case of Austin Spare, the Fire Snake assumed the
form of Mrs Paterson, a self-confessed witch who embodied the sorceries of a cult so
ancient that it was old in Egypt’s infancy. [p 203]
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