Practical Sigil Magick

This post is based on the answer to a question I received about sigil magic. Whether you always must forget the sigil. This is just my honest and humble opinion, and I'm sure some will disagree, but I guess sigil magick is a highly personal form of magick anyway.


The principle behind sigils is very simple, and was originally a system developed and used by A. O. Spare, and later became one of they key techniques of Chaos Magic.

Basically, sigils work by avoiding the normal "lust of result" problem that is inherent in other forms of magick, where you do a working/ritual, and then there is a battle between the conscious and unconscious mind, where your conscious mind is coming up with things like "is it working yet", "I hope it works". The statement of intent is encoded into the sigil in such a way that the key elements (such as the basic shapes of letters) are still present, but in a form only the unconscious mind recognises, which bypasses the conscious mind and avoids this battle between the conscious mind and it's doubts, and allows the unconscious mind to act on the desire.

The sigil is created, charged during an altered state of consciousness - or gnosis (this may be a ritual, sex, a strong emotion, there are many ways of charging sigils), then it is normally lost, forgotten, destroyed, burned, etc. Now, you don't need to actually forget the sigil, just what the sigil is meant to do, so you avoid the lust of result that I mentioned above. A sigil may well be kept, until you no longer remember what it's for. For example, I have a "Hypersigil" that I turned into a painting, and it is on my wall, I see it everyday. but I no longer remember the actual statement of intent. You can also create lots of sigils, then charge them randomly when you have forgotten what each one is for. One of the things I tried was creating lots of sigils, shuffle them like a deck of cards, then randomly charge them.

Of course, there are also times when the sigil is kept, and is associated with the magical working, such as when creating a servitor, and because you know or at least have an idea of what the servitor is meant to do, does this mean that the sigil has lost some of it's potency (except maybe when you use it to activate the servitor via someone who doesn't know what it is)? That's an interesting question to explore I think.

Do The Great Work!




Frater Therion