How to Forget Your Sigil & The #1 Reason It Didn’t Work

So you’ve created a sigil and you have activated it, but what do you do with it now?

This has become a bit of a contention, especially with new people to Chaos Magic and sigil magick. 

And it’s something that definitely requires a bit more explanation regarding how everything works and how it all happens.

So this is probably going to be the most important video of the whole sigil magick series that I will create here. 

The usual instructions are to destroy the sigil and forget about it. A lot of people find this very confusing and difficult to do, because how do you forget the sigil?

There is one method where you can actually create a bunch of sigils, put them away for a couple of weeks and keep going back to them and checking to see if you actually remember what the sigil represented.  When you don’t remember the representation of the desire, then you activate it, and you just keep going through the sigils and can you keep adding to them. 

That works pretty well, in most cases it becomes quite easy to forget, but for a lot of people it’s not so easy. You could go week after week and you can still remember what the sigil actually represented. This is why it requires a bit more understanding of what we mean by forget.

I’m going to explain this quite briefly here, attempting to put it into the simplest terms possible.

We are going to imagine the conscious mind is in the front of the head, and the subconscious mind is behind. 

For the average person on the street who does not practice magic, they tend to go through their everyday, mundane life. Whenever we encounter something, which happens at every nanosecond of the day by the way, all of that information is inputted, and goes through filters which sensor out a lot of the data. 

In Chaos Magick, these filters are often referred to as the psychic sensor, but it is a filter in general terms, because when we consider the sheer amount of data, the thousands upon thousands of stimuli that actually hit us every second of every day, if we didn’t filter them out we would probably end up going completely insane. However, once all of that data and stimuli from everyday life has passed into the subconscious, it all gets stored. 

You can actually test this by asking two people who have experienced the same accident to describe it. The result is going to be that you get two slightly different versions.

With sigil magick, we use an ecstatic state to bypass this filter, or psychic sensor. This ecstatic state is the gnostic, trance or liminal state that I have previously spoken about. This state, being liminal, means that it is a betwixt, or between state. You are between conscious and unconscious, this world and the other world, etc etc. It’s a Crossroads. It is at this Crossroads that the psychic sensor is bypassed so that the data from the sigil work can be passed directly into the unconscious or subconscious mind without being filtered in any way (some people separate the subconscious and unconscious in these models, but I am trying to keep this as simple as possible).

Peter J. Carroll suggests that the psychic sensor is the Holy Guardian Angel (or in his terms the Augoeides), and Aleister Crowley said that we cannot access the unconscious directly until we have attained Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel.

So, once that desire, sigil, glyph, etc. has bypassed the psychic sensor, that being the Holy Guardian Angel, and implanted itself in the unconscious mind, it can then go to work, making the desire manifest. It will literally alter everything in order to make that thing a reality because it has been added to the reality that must be. The difficulty is the conscious mind and therefore the need we have to forget about the sigil and the work done.

Like a little imp, it will start creeping back into the conscious mind and you kind of see it out of the corner of your eye and then instead of engaging with it you have to push it back and just forget about it. This is where meditation comes in very very useful and it’s why meditation training is always considered an essential foundation to becoming a magician, sorcerer, wizard, witch, whatever it may be, whatever your aim is, whatever your goal is. 

Through meditation we learn how to become mindful. We also learn how to quiet the mind and as the train of thoughts starts to arise, we can just gently push that train of thought away and just come back to our focus and our concentration. 

It’s the same thing with the sigil working. It’s this little desire that comes creeping around and you see it, then you push it back again. 

Stephen Mace in Stealing the Fire from Heaven, page 21 to be exact, (in case you want to ge the book) actually explains it really well. Mace says:

“To work Spare’s technique, the sorcerer does not use ritual to call up the power he needs to accomplish his desire. Instead he obtains his desire by stifling the thought of it. He does not permit himself to consider it, and if it should sneak into his thought-stream, he suppresses it as soon as he notices its presence.

“Spare called this deliberate repression ‘making the desire organic’. When we dwell on a desire in our conscious mind, we involve ourselves in rational attempts to satisfy it, attempts that bind our energy into structured schemes that defy the fluid essence of power. We waste our energy weaving dreams–tapestries of method and motivation, expectation and fear of failure—veils that keep us from seeing ourselves as nodes of power linked directly to Infinity. But when we repress our desires, they shrink away from consciousness to turn in on themselves–becoming discrete entities–and if we can pour enough energy into them (even as we keep the thought of them out of our waking minds), they will sink down into the wellsprings of Fate, where the energy will be able to adjust Fate’s flow according to our wills.”

I think that explains it perfectly.

Ok, so now I think you have a better understanding of the process and what actually needs to happen in order to get this to work. 

But it still brings up the question of, what do you actually do with a sigil?

You can destroy it, and there are a lot of different ways you can actually do this, but again, it’s about experimentation, about finding the thing that actually works for you. Most people suggest burning it, however you can also keep it.

One of the manifestation techniques that you may be familiar with is the vision board. With this method, you put images on the board, you then put it up somewhere so that you can see it on a daily basis, such as in your bedroom. When you get up in the morning, you will then look at the vision board as you pass it, and then you go do whatever you do during the day. When you go back to bed at night, you look at the vision board again as you pass by, and that is how the vision board basically works. 

It’s that constant reinforcement of your desires to the unconscious mind, and you don’t need to stand in front of it and focus on the vision board. It’s simply the act of passing by and just letting the subconscious see it. You can do exactly the same thing with the sigils.

Now, once you’ve activated the sigils, you can also do a banishing. Not everyone does, but it’s a great practice and can help you to forget the Working that was just done. It clears the space so to speak. Quite often with Chaos Magick we banish with laughter. Just start belly laughing, you’ll soon forget everything.

After that, you go about your mundane things. Just your normal everyday things to try and push the desire into unconscious, and not bring it back to the conscious. So just make a cup of coffee, go have a smoke, I don’t know, whatever you like to do. Have a cookie. Do other things to stop thinking about the sigil. It’s sometimes like someone saying don’t think of a pink elephant and you think of a pink elephant, but with more time and training you will find that you don’t think of a pink elephant anymore.

Once you’ve done all that then take the sigil and put it on a wall. Continue doing that with your sigils and build a collection, creating a nice decorative wall of images. When you pass by, you then view it and the subconscious just takes it all in again, but make sure you don’t stand there and think to yourself, what was that one again, because then it’s going to start bringing it into the conscious mind and you are going to battle to actually push it back again.

Another way that you can actually do sigil magick, from beginning to end is put them up where you can actually view them and let them become boring. Over time they just become normal, it becomes part of the scenery and you then forget about them, you really can’t be bothered by it. 

It’s like having a sticky note on a board and you keep looking at the sticky note, which is probably a motivational phrase, and eventually one day it just becomes so normal and boring that you don’t even pay attention to it. 

Once sigils on the wall become completely and utterly irrelevant, then you can take them down and burn them. 

So, as I say again it’s all about experimentation and finding what works for you, because that is what magick really is. Simple as that.

Why It Didn’t Work

So, you’ve created a sigil and done your magick, but you got the total opposite result of what you were wanting.

What went wrong?

Why didn’t the sigil work, or did it?

Let’s have a look at the no 1 reason why sigil magick doesn’t work.

When it comes to sigil magick we find that a lot of people create the sigil, do all the work as prescribed, but then the opposite of what your desire was starts happening.

Some time back I actually replied to somebody on a sub reddit about this.

They were saying that they created the sigil in order to bring true happiness. But the next day everything just went wrong. There were accidents, they kept losing things, everything just went haywire during the day. Whatever they tried to achieve just failed. It was a complete mess.

Instead of true happiness as per their request, they got anger, frustration, and annoyance, but definitely not happiness from all these events that were happening.

They wanted to know what they did wrong, why the sigil didn’t work.

Everybody came with the usual replies, you know, this, that the other and don’t lust after results, etc. etc.

But it got me thinking; they asked for true happiness. 

What is true happiness?

In my mind, true happiness means that no matter what happens in your life, or what life throws at you, you’ll still be happy.

That’s what true happiness is, right?

My reply therefore, was as follows, you asked for true happiness, so your subconscious is probably trying to teach you how to get true happiness, or trying to teach you that it doesn’t matter what happens in your life, all the bad things, all the good things, true happiness is not affected by any of that. No matter what happens, you are still going to be truly happy.

If you think about it, when we do magick, or manifestation work and sigil work, we send it out there and we have this idea of what we want in our head, but our subconscious is a bit of a nasty beast sometimes, and what you might end up getting is not exactly what you imagined and this is because quite often people aren’t specific enough with what they want.

I have come across some people who teach sigil magick who say that with sigil magick specifically you don’t need to be as specific with your intent as other forms or techniques.

To some degree I agree, but I think it depends on what you need, and this is why sigil shoaling becomes quite important. With shoaling you’re actually narrowing down the path in order to get to that ultimate goal, but shoaling will be discussed in the next discourse.

So if you want happiness in your life, you first need to examine what you think happiness is. A good area of examination for this particular topic is Buddhism, which talks about the whole idea of freeing yourself from or overcoming Samsara, this natural world of pain and suffering.

We go through pain and suffering every moment of every day and we seek happiness. What we usually do is we find something that makes us happy. Problem is that that happiness is only temporary.  You might get a new car for example. A car that you’ve been wanting for years and years. It’s just the perfect car, it’s a Ferrari or a Porsche or whatever a dream car is to you. Now you are as happy as a pig in shit. But a month later it starts getting more normal. A month after that you are used to it and it doesn’t really make you that happy anymore. So it’s all just temporary happiness, therefore if you are going to ask for something like true happiness, then it’s not going to come from anything or anyone. It’s going to come from yourself and from freeing yourself from all of that pain and suffering to begin with.

That’s not going to happen overnight obviously, but you have to think about these things before you actually make the sigil because if you don’t, then what you think is happiness, might not be what your subconscious thinks and understands and realises. 

This is why I think that with sigil magick you need to get very specific and you need to really think about what you are putting out there in order to get back.

I mean, the usual typical example of this kind of thing is if you want money to go on a vacation. You do your sigil magick and you say, “I want money to go on a vacation”, and then Aunt Mary dies. I don’t actually think I’ve got an Aunt Mary, but she does seem to pop up in a lot of discussions. 

So, Aunt Mary dies and she leaves you this huge inheritance and it’s the exact amount of money, okay maybe not huge, but she leaves you an inheritance and that is the exact amount of money you need in order to go on the vacation.

But you didn’t want old Aunt Mary to die in the first place because you love Aunt Mary, everybody loves Aunt Mary. I sincerely hope you don’t have an Aunt Mary who is not a nice person. But we like Aunt Mary here.

Back to the story. So you didn’t want Aunt Mary to die, obviously not because you like Aunt Mary, but you weren’t specific enough, you didn’t say where the money will come from or possible avenues in order to get the money. Ok, so you don’t want your Will sentence to be excessively long, but you can add it into the intent.

So your will sentence might say, “I want enough money to go on vacation”, but what you need to do before you actually create a sigil and charge sigil, is to consider everything, so when you actually do the charging, consciously you are thinking I don’t want it to come from Aunt Mary’s inheritance, I don’t want her to die, here are the possible ways in order to get it; through a side hustle; through a bonus at work; or if somebody owes you money, they pay it back, as long as it doesn’t harm them.

That is another example that used to come up in books and stuff years back. If you want an extra boost of money and someone owes you which is the same amount you’re needing, that they pay you back. The problem is, if the person is forced to pay you back which then puts them in a position where they can lose their house, their family, even their life, it’s not really something that you want, I guess some people might, but me personally, I wouldn’t want that for somebody.

Just think about the avenues in which you can bring into your life what you want, as long as it’s in a manner that suits your own ethics and morals, and be specific.

I guess it’s not really only just about being specific, you really do need to think about the ways in which it can manifest. So if you just put something out there and you don’t think about what avenues it will take in order to manifest, then it will just take whichever avenue it wants to and afterwards you might sit there thinking, the sigil did this, the sigil went wrong. 

It wasn’t the sigil, it was user error. 

You have to take responsibility for your magic. When you do magick, you are the only one responsible for the outcome, nobody else, nothing else, just you. 

So, if you are not going to be responsible, or take responsibility for what happens, then don’t do it in the first place.

You can’t blame the sigil, you can’t blame the magick, you can’t blame anybody else, you’re the only one to blame.

If somebody dies; that’s on you. Harsh I know, but that’s the reality of it.

So think about it before you actually go and do the magic.