A sigil is a statement of intent that has been compressed into a shape, so that the shape can be worked with instead of the words. That is the entire idea. Everything else is technique, and most of the technique is about one problem: how do you keep wanting something without thinking about wanting it.

The two things called sigils

These get conflated constantly and they are not the same.

  • Traditional sigils are the seals and characters of the grimoire tradition. The sigils of the seventy-two spirits in the Lesser Key of Solomon, the planetary characters, the seals of angels. These are received. They are not designed by the practitioner; they are inherited, copied accurately, and used to address a specific named entity. Getting one wrong is a mistake, not a variation.
  • Modern sigils are the ones almost everyone means. These are constructed by the practitioner from their own statement of intent, and the whole point is that nobody else has ever drawn this shape.

This article is about the second. If you are working with grimoire seals, copy them exactly from a good edition and do not improvise.

Where the modern method comes from

Austin Osman Spare, an English artist, developed it in the early twentieth century, most fully in The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy in 1913.

Spare's argument, stripped of his considerably stranger surrounding metaphysics, runs like this. Conscious desire is self-defeating, because the more you consciously want a thing the more you reinforce your awareness of not having it. So you take the desire, convert it into a form the conscious mind cannot read as language, charge it in a state where the conscious mind is not operating, and then forget it. The wish is then held somewhere that does not know it is wanting.

This was taken up and systematised by the chaos magick current from the 1970s onwards, particularly through Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin.

So: the sigil method is roughly a hundred years old. It is genuinely effective, it is one of the best-designed pieces of magickal technology in circulation, and it is not ancient. Anyone telling you sigils are an old tradition is either thinking of grimoire seals or has not checked.

The method

  • One. Write the statement of intent. Present tense, positive, specific, and one thing only. "I have steady work that pays enough." Not I want a job, which states the wanting. Not I am not broke, because the negative does not encode. Not I have work and I am well and my mother forgives me, which is three sigils in a coat. The single most common failure is at this step, not at any later one. Vagueness in, vagueness out.
  • Two. Strip it. The classic Spare method: remove all repeated letters. I HAVE STEADY WORK becomes I H A V E S T D Y W O R K, then dropping duplicates leaves a smaller set. Some practitioners strip vowels as well. Some keep them. It does not much matter; what matters is that you end up with a reduced set of letters that no longer reads as a sentence.
  • Three. Build the shape. Combine the remaining letters into a single design. Overlap them, rotate them, mirror them, let one letter's stroke serve as another's. Keep going until it stops looking like letters. You will know when it is finished, because you will look at it and be unable to read it back. That is the whole test.
  • Four. Redraw it clean. Take the tangle and draw it again as a deliberate single form, in one continuous motion if you can. Draw with your dominant hand, the sending hand; steady the paper with your non-dominant hand. If the continuous unbroken line rings a bell, it should. It is the same principle as the hexafoil, arrived at independently a few centuries later.
  • Five. Charge it. This is the part with the most nonsense written about it, so plainly: you need a state in which your ordinary discursive thinking is not running. Any of these will do it.
    • Exhaustion, physical or emotional
    • The moment of falling asleep, hypnagogia
    • Drumming, chanting or dancing to the point where you stop narrating
    • Sexual arousal or release, which is Spare's own preference and is why his method has the reputation it does
    • Fixed staring at the sigil until it distorts
    • Fear, in the controlled sense

Hold the shape in your attention at the peak, and let go. I would add something that the chaos magick sources tend not to say. You do not have to use an extreme state. A quiet, wholly attentive minute with the shape, done daily, works perfectly well and is considerably less disruptive to your life. Consistency substitutes for intensity.

  • Six. Forget it. Spare's most important instruction and the hardest. Destroy the paper, or put it somewhere you will not see it, or draw it on something that will be gone by morning. Do not keep it on your altar where you will look at it and remember what it was for. Do not tell people what it says. The forgetting is not superstition. If the entire mechanism is getting the desire out of conscious circulation, then a sigil you keep thinking about has been undone by definition.

Where to put them

Once you stop thinking of a sigil as a piece of paper, the options open up considerably.

  • Carved into the wax of a candle before dressing it, so it burns down as the candle does
  • Drawn in oil on a threshold, gone by morning
  • Traced in condensation on a window
  • Drawn on the sole of a shoe you wear daily and never look at
  • Written in salt and swept up
  • Stitched inside a hem
  • Baked into the underside of something
  • On the back of a mirror
  • Drawn in the air over a jar before sealing it

Note how many of those are concealed, and note how many are at thresholds. The British household protection tradition worked this out four hundred years earlier by a completely different route, and the convergence is worth noticing.

The awkward question

Does it work because of energy, spirits, subconscious reprogramming, or selective attention?

I do not know, and I am suspicious of anyone who tells you they do.

What I can say is that the method has an unusually clear internal logic, that it requires you to state precisely what you want in one sentence, and that this alone accounts for a great deal. Most people do not know what they want at that resolution. Finding out is not a small thing.

Whatever else is happening, the sigil is a machine for producing clarity and then getting out of its own way, and I have never known that to be useless.

Practical cautions

  • One sigil, one intent. Always.
  • Do not sigil other people's behaviour. The same reasoning that applies to any working applies here. Sigil the outcome you want in your own life rather than the compliance you want from somebody else.
  • Do not stack them. A page of forty sigils is forty diluted intentions and a strong indication that you are anxious rather than working.
  • Give it room. Do not remake the same sigil weekly because nothing has happened. That is the opposite of forgetting.

Sources

  • Spare, A. O. (1913). The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy. The original method. Full text at the Internet Sacred Text Archive, and widely available in facsimile.
  • Spare, A. O. (1921). The Focus of Life.
  • Carroll, P. J. (1987). Liber Null and Psychonaut. Weiser. The systematisation of the method within chaos magick.
  • Sherwin, R. (1981). The Book of Results.
  • Hine, P. (1995). Condensed Chaos. New Falcon.
  • Baker, P. (2011). Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist. Strange Attractor Press. The serious biography.
  • The Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton), ed. Mathers and Crowley, for the received-seal tradition. Full text at the Internet Sacred Text Archive.
  • Davies, O. (2009). Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford University Press. For where the traditional seals actually come from.
  • Historic England, What Are Witches' Marks? — for the continuous-line principle arrived at independently.

Related: [Marks on the Beam: Apotropaic Carvings in British Buildings]; [The Grammar of the Petition Paper]; [Fixing and Dressing: Candle Work as Activation]