So far we have discussed how to create sigils, how to activate them, and sigil shoaling. To compliment sigil shoaling, let’s now talk about the robofish.
If you are a bit adverse to fish, very sorry about that but this all comes from Gordon White, so you can blame him.
The concept of the robofish came from a study that was done in 2010 at the University of Leeds wherein a robotic fish was placed with a shoal. They wanted to see how the robotic fish would influence them. As the robotic fish made very abrupt, decisive movements, the shoal would follow it. We could say that the robotic fish became the alpha of the pack. The same thing happens with most group or communal animals, even humans.
The reason this becomes so significant to sigil magic and specifically to sigil shoaling is that the robofish becomes the alpha of the pack and directs all of the other sigils.
Now, in regards to shoaling and the robofish, we mentioned previously that we would take our large, broad objective and split it into smaller goals, making those goals more defined in order to reach the larger objective. Because these sigils are shoaling together, they gather more and more energy.
The reason the robofish becomes so important here is because it is a fixed, determined point. The robofish is something that is inevitable. No matter what happens, the sigil and intent behind the robofish is one that will happen regardless. This makes the robofish immediately successful.
As we saw with the experiment at the University of Leeds, the shoal of fish are inclined to follow the robotic fish, so in shoaling sigils, you create a robofish which is already successful, therefore all of the other sigils in the shoal will follow the success of the robofish.
So for your robofish, think of something that is inevitable. Do you have a daily habit that you do without fail? You can even make it something like I brushed my teeth today. I eat two boiled eggs and toast every morning, so I can make my roboish about that.
Then, throw your robofish in with the shoal and watch them all manifest one by one. It’s simple, it’s easy and it’s also logical.
I just want to wrap up this whole sigil series with progressive and possession sigils, and I’m putting them together because they’re both pretty quick explanations.
I came across these two sigil working concepts in the book Chaonomicon by Jack D. Hawkins.
Unlike your normal sigil working where you can create and launch a sigil within a few minutes, these are sigil workings that you do over a period of time.
You would start off the same as before. Think of your desire, create your Will sentence, design and draw you sigil from the letters or whatever method you have chosen to use. Then, from your jumble of letters that you are left with after removing the vowels and repeated consonants, you can then create a mantra. Take those letters and start to speak them, adding vowels back in so that you end up with an audible and phonetic sound which becomes your mantra. Make sure the mantra flows because you will be repeating it over and over again to use in order to enter an ecstatic state.
Then you would decide on a period of time. This could be done over a three day period because three represents manifestation, or for seven days so that you complete a round of all seven planets. It could be half a lunar month, so you could develop the sigil from the new moon to the first quarter and then do the magick itself from the first quarter to the full moon.
Then, for that period of time, you work with the sigil on a daily basis. For this you can do half an hour meditation as an example. Do this every day and at the same time every day so that you create a pattern.
What you are going to do over that period of time is charge the sigil, and then on the last day you launch it, and it is when you launch it that you use the ecstatic state.
All you’re doing during that period is putting energy into the working itself, into the desire, into the outcome that you want. You can use visualisation for this if you want to, visualizing the outcome as being done. In other words, whatever you want to bring into your life, it’s already in your life, make it present tense.
Then on the last day you go into an ecstatic state or a state of exhaustion, and you launch the sigil. After that can take the sigil down and destroy it.
Now, with the possession sigil, this works best for something that you want to improve with yourself or for improvement in your health, something that can be internalized. I think it goes without saying that if you have health or mental issues, make sure you consult a doctor before doing any of this work, especially with some of the methods of trance induction.
So, maybe you want to become wiser, maybe you want to become a better writer, maybe you want to just improve your health generally, maybe you do have an ailment that you want to actually cure. It’s all about improving or benefiting yourself and your physical being, your mental being, your spiritual being, your emotional being.
What you would do is create your sigil and then draw that onto a large piece of paper or a board, large enough to be able to stand on it. Put that on the floor.
To begin, you stand outside or away from the board. Then you are going to imagine a circle around the sigil. If it makes it easier, draw a circle on the board around your sigil. From that circle you are going to imagine a column of light. Whilst you build up this column of light you can chant your mantra which you created from the Will sentence, using it to create an ecstatic state or bring yourself to a point of exhaustion. Direct all of the energy into the column of light and let it build, grow and pulsate with power, stretching down into the earth and up into the heavens. This column of light becomes pure energy that is imbued with your desire.
When you feel you are ready and you have built up enough energy, then step into the column onto the sigil and let the energy, which if you remember is imbued with the intent and desire, possess you. Let all of that energy fill every cell of your body.
Very effective and definitely worth giving it a shot.
If you try any of the methods mentioned throughout this series, or any methods that haven’t been discussed, I would love to hear from you regarding your experiences. If you go to anchor.fm/leewjohnson then you can leave me a voice message, or if you are reading this on my blog, leave a comment.
Last time we spoke about sigils and the no 1 reason your sigil work may have gone awry.
Today I want to actually talk about sigil shoaling, and what it really has to do with fish.
Sigil shoaling was created by Gordon White. Check out his blog runesoup.com if you haven’t already. Excellent blog and he also has a great podcast.
Sigil shoaling is basically a gathering of sigils in order to reach the main objective.
When we think of a group of fish, we usually refer to a “school of fish” as opposed to a “shoal of fish”, however, there is a difference between shoaling and schooling. When they’re shoaling they are gathered socially in the same spot, and it’s usually quite a large group. When they are schooling, they are all swimming in one direction and going to a destination.
Taking this into consideration, the basic principle is that you create a number of sigils for the directive of the bigger intent or larger intent, and you throw them all in. You then shoal your sigils. A term that Gordon White actually likes to use is “increasing the chaos”.
Imagine a group of fish that is shoaling. If you view it from the outside, from quite a distance, it looks quite chaotic, so they build up this chaos and then all of a sudden, they will start swimming in one direction to their destination.
So what we are going for here with the sigils is this increase in the chaos, building the energy up and then allowing it to explode so that they all move in one direction toward your larger intent, your objective, your target. That’s the main principle and it works pretty darn well.
In the last discourse I mentioned that your intent can’t be too broad, such as I want money, I want sex, I want love, I want lots and lots of marshmallows, okay marshmallows are quite specific, unless of course you want a specific colour of marshmallow. But if it’s something very broad then it’s very difficult to know how it’s going to actually manifest, because you haven’t set a proper specific intent.
So if you just throw it out there, then the subconscious, universe, whatever we want to call it, will go ok, well here it is. However, it then comes through a path that simply doesn’t align with what you had in mind.
Regarding this, someone previously asked, “Is it possible to write a larger sentence or even a paragraph, including directives you desire your spell to follow, such as specific conditions and dates?” and also went on to say, “…if broken up into chunks and sigilised, is this shoaling?”
Concerning the first part, it would be a bit difficult to write a long paragraph and then create a sigil from it because, as you know, when creating the will sentence, you break it down into consonants, into letters and then from those letters you then create your sigil. But if you’ve got a very long paragraph you’re going to end up with probably all the letters of the alphabet.
What you can do in this instance however (just to get a little off topic) is to use it as a prayer paper in conjunction with candle magick. A nice method to use in relation to this is to put a candle inside a jar, put herbs in just to boost the energy, and then write an entire page, with exactly what you want and with all of your directives, dates, everything and very specific. Then fold up that entire page and put it inside the jar. You can wrap it around the inside, but wrapped around in such a fashion that you can still burn the candle in the middle. Then you will take a small candle, put it inside and burn it down, seal it with a lid, and then store it somewhere, or bury it depending on what the actual intent is.
But when it comes to sigil magick what you could actually do is write an entire page or paragraph, whatever it may be, a bit like externalizing your intent, get it out of your head and into a solid form which is onto a piece of paper and into words. From there you can create an image that symbolizes your entire intent. If you are an artist, this would be a great deal easier. You can take that entire written piece and create an artwork out of it. There are no hard and fast rules to this. If it works for you through experimentation, then use it.
Concerning the second part, can you break it up into parts?
Yes you can. If you took that paragraph and broke it into chunks that you can actually make into sigils, then you can put them all together, throw them all in the pot, and do sigil shoaling.
So that is definitely an option.
The other thing I wanted to mention has to do with actually creating your goals.
I battle greatly with this myself.
You know, people ask, “What do you want?” I don’t know what I want half the time. I may say that I want lots of money, but I don’t want lots of money.
If I have enough to pay the bills and be comfortable, buy a book every month and things like that, then I don’t need lots of money, I only need enough money.
People may say they want a new girlfriend or new boyfriend or a new spouse. I’m single and enjoying it, I don’t need any of that.
Maybe, to go on holiday, yeah sure, I want to go on holiday, but it’s really not that important.
I enjoy my life, but the one thing I do require is a constant income every month, a constant base income.
Ok, so I could consider it from that point of view, that I need or I require this base income.
It is difficult to get to that point if you are listening to everybody else and I think this was my problem. If you are having the same problem, you might find the solution the same way. Break it down and be honest with yourself.
When you are watching all these videos on YouTube about people manifesting things,people filming from Bali or doing this or that, and they have this fantastic life. They probably don’t, but they portray themselves to have this fantastic life, and they portray themselves as extremely happy and it makes you want that as well.
It creates resentment.
You might not want to actually admit that but it can create a bit of resentment, because this person has this life and it’s a life that you want. They’ve got it and they got it so easy, but you have been struggling for so long, why haven’t you got it?
This can make it very difficult to figure out what you want because you are clouded.
You know what you want, but you can’t put it into a specific thing.
So, forget about all of those people, they really don’t matter to you.
Their life is different, you have walked your own path through life and your experience in life is completely different to everybody else’s.
So, forget about me, forget about everybody else, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you.
And really think about it and if it does help to write it down, then write it down.
If it’s total nonsense, then it’s total nonsense. It doesn’t matter.
Through that nonsense you are going to find some order.
Just start trying to pinpoint what it is that you need. Taking my example again, my biggest is a basic income that is regular every month. Instead of it going up one month and down the next, just allowing me to survive, just to have a regular base income every month, and then anything extra is a bonus.
I don’t want to be rich, but if I say I want to be rich, that will solve the problems won’t it? But it’s not what I really want. I don’t want to be famous, but again, that will solve my problem because I will have a large income, but again, I don’t want that. What I do want is just that base income, and then I can save everything extra and go on holiday.
What I am trying to demonstrate here is that if you ask for things that you don’t really want, you are going to end up fighting against yourself, and you won’t be able to manifest anything. Your brain will start to ask why. Why do you want to be rich? Why do you want to be famous? It knows you don’t want those things, so it will push back. This creates doubt.
You need to become mindful of what you actually want, how you feel about things, how you feel about money.
If you don’t like money, you are going to reject it. That may sound strange, who doesn’t like money? But a lot of people will complain about money. As it comes in, it goes out; I hate money; money is evil, etc. etc. If you have said these things then you are creating a hatred for money. So you have to love money first of all, but if you don’t really need to be rich and it wouldn’t actually make you feel comfortable and happy, because it wouldn’t, then you’re going to start doubting.
Those doubts are going to come in and therefore it’s not going to manifest in any meaningful way.
So get down to what it is you really, really want.
Once you have gotten to that point, what’s next. Continuing with my own example, how do I make that income?
Web development has been my main business for many years, but what do I really want to be doing? I want to be teaching magick, healing people, writing books, and helping people by providing services for them. That’s what I really want to do, but that side of my business life needs to develop more, so I need to continue getting my main income through web development for a period of time, and at the same time, building my personal brand.
However, to develop my personal brand I need to make it the primary focus, otherwise I will be stuck in web development and the thought that that needs to take the primary lead, so a mind shift needs to take place. One by which I shift from thinking of web development as my main source of income, to my personal brand being that. Whatever comes from web development is then a bonus.
Now I have a more defined goal, some direction. Now I need to break that up into smaller bits which will determine how I will get there, what I use to make that reality manifest. So how do we do that? Because to create a sigil just for the above mentioned goal would be too broad.
I need to do marketing to create new clients.
I need to create synchronised moments where people find me during the time that they specifically need what I’m providing.
I need to create a loyal audience and the audience I have created thus far is incredible, they are my community.
Okay, there’s three already, there’s a few other things I could come up with.
Be more present on Facebook and Instagram, which I haven’t been, in order to grow audiences there as well.
So, there are four things. I can now create a sigil for each one of these, and then throw them all into the pot.
What you can also do is throw in completely and utterly random things. I want to have better health, I want to cure cancer, whatever, throw that in with everything else and that will add to the chaos, which increases the chaos and it builds up the energy more and more.
Then, as soon as one of the sigils starts to manifest, it creates more energy for the others to start manifesting, and you cause a chain reaction.
You can think of it like a spinning wheel with all your sigils attached. It spins faster and faster until all of a sudden one flies off and starts to manifest.
As it manifests, it bounces back and brings the energy in, adding to the chaos. Then the next one flies off, goes and manifests, comes back and builds up more energy, and on and on.
That’s the way I have come to understand and see sigil shoaling.
To take this even further, you can break down your smaller goals even further. Earlier I mentioned four things that I can do to get more business and build my personal brand. Take each of those and break those down, treating them as goals to get to, which then all comes together to reach the main objective.
As always, get creative and don’t limit yourself.
Hopefully you now understand sigil shoaling a bit better, and I hope this also helped anyone who is battling with their goals to actually create, understand and define those goals.
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.
Once you have created a sigil, you are going to want to activate or launch it, or whatever terminology you want to use.
There are a lot of different ways you can actually launch your sigil, so I just want to go over some obvious ones, and although there’s a lot of information out there about the obvious methods, there are some methods that are a little less spoken about.
Now the objective here is to transfer the glyph from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind as I have mentioned previously. The way to go about this is to enter into a trance state, and that trance state can be done using whatever method suits you, so it is really a case of experimenting with as many methods as you can think of and come across in order to find the ones that actually work for you. Depending on the actual type of sigil or the type of work you are doing or even just the mood you’re in at the time, the method you use can differ. Finding those different methods that work for you gives you a nice little arsenal for you to work with.
Some of the obvious methods would be things like spinning, whirling, dancing, drumming, clacking, chanting, and singing. There really are a lot of different ways. There is also spontaneous singing which is a method I really enjoy using. It requires you to go into a deep meditative state and then all you do is just start singing complete nonsense. This means letting whatever sounds and words come out of your mouth just come out. I like to use spontaneous singing to work with energy and just mould that energy, which definitely helps it to move and at the same time, brings you into a trance state.
I have mentioned the Death Posture in the past, but I’ve never really described it, and there’s a very good reason for that. If you suffer from physical health issues, you definitely want to stay away from this, and if you suffer from mental health issues, don’t even consider this, just run far away. It’s a very intense method and it does get very painful.
I did do a bit of research, just to refresh my memory on the actual method of the Death Posture, which then brought up a whole lot of other memories of methods I experimented with several years back. Those methods were the Hanged Man position, and I also remembered the Heron pose which was said to have been used by the Celts to enter into a mantic state.
Concerning the Death Posture itself, this was described by Austin Osman Spare, who first wrote about it in his Book of Pleasures. There are actually three methods mentioned in the book, but the one that everybody seems to pick is the second one, so I am going to describe that one. This is a very painful method, but is very effective. The best thing to do is to stand with your back against a wall, clasp your hands together and put them behind your back, making your arms rigid. Then you get on your tiptoes and also stretch your head upward, and stay in this position. Through this process and by holding this position, your body becomes completely tensed, and it does start to cause a deficiency of air, because your neck is stretched out and also because of the strain which is placed on the rest of your body, so expect your breathing to become laboured. Stand in that position for as long as you possibly can. It’s going to get extremely painful and because of the oxygen deficiency, you will probably feel a lot of tingling in your body and also light headedness, but eventually you go into an altered state of mind. At some point you will collapse on the floor, so make sure you have got something soft to land on. It’s at the point when you enter into the altered state of mind or consciousness, that you would activate the sigil, using visualization.
When you collapse on the floor you might feel a bit hysterical. This actually reminds me very much of the mantic practices and mantic states of the Celts and the Bards, when they would sit on the Faery Mounds overnight to gain inspiration or Awen. It is mentioned in the tales that sitting overnight, the Bard would either leave inspired, or would become completely and utterly insane. This is why I say, if you have mental health issues, don’t even try this method.
Another very simple method that I like to use, is one whereby you take a pencil, although a ballpoint pen can work better because it makes a bit more noise, and start to draw a circle around the sigil which is on a piece of paper. Then, just keep circling, and what you will find is that you start to pick up a rhythm from the sound of the pen or pencil on the paper, which is usually laying on a desk or some kind of hard surface. You simply continue to circle around and around and get into the created rhythm which is very much the same type of concept as drumming. What also happens is that as you draw the circle around the sigil, your hand blocks the sigil with every pass and then it comes back into view, which is a type of flashing, as the hand covers and reveals the sigil. This whole process puts you into a trance state with the rhythm of the circling and the flashing of the sigil. When you feel you are ready, you can simply tighten the circle into a spiral and as you get into the centre, with the pen or pencil spinning frantically, build up that energy and then dramatically lift the pen off the paper and thrust the sigil into the subconscious.
Speaking of flashing (which incidentally has nothing to do with genitals, for the most part anyway), there are a few different methods, but one way you can do this is to simply gaze at the sigil. With this method you may also want to look into a yogic practice called tratak. With tratak, you usually start off with a dot, although you can use a candle but I don’t recommend it because you can burn your retina if not done properly. However, you draw a dot which is a couple millimeters in diameter, onto a piece of paper, and put it on the wall so that it’s at eye level. Sit about a metre and a half away from it and simply stare at the dot without blinking for as long as you possibly can. The actual practice is to stare at the dot without blinking for about half an hour or even longer, but that takes a lot of practice, so try to do it for as long as you can. You can use the same principle with your sigil. So in that instance you would take your sigil and simply gaze at it. The reason I mention tratak is because you might find that as you gaze at the sigil, you blink, and as you blink the image keeps shifting slightly and you feel that you need to start all over each time. However, if you use this method of gazing without blinking, it helps with the sigil activation because you will find that after a while the image starts to pulsate, or the lines move. You may also experience the sigil completely disappearing, or the background being removed which enhances the sigil. The sigil almost comes to life, and that is the sigil activating.
What you can also do is use colour by transferring the coloured sigil onto a surface where you see the complimentary colour of the sigil. Put the sigil up against a white wall, or have a blank white piece of paper next to it. You would draw your sigil in a specific colour, green for instance, and then after gazing at it for a while you then move your focus to the blank paper or wall. You will then see the sigil in its complimentary colour, in this instance it would be red. Continue to gaze at the red sigil on the white surface until it completely fades away.
I also know of people who use neon paint and a strobe light. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this for anyone who suffers from epilepsy however. You can even use neon paint in conjunction with sex magic, especially if you use glow in the dark paint. If practicing sex magic with a partner or group of people, the sigil would be painted on the bodies of all participating. I would suggest drawing it on different places of the body so that at the point of orgasm, no matter what position you may find yourself in, you will still have a view of the sigil.
Using sex magic to activate the sigil can be somewhat difficult and does take practice, but its a great deal more enjoyable to become skilled at. It is at the point of orgasm that you want to bring the sigil into view and concentrate only on the sigil. This is why it can be very difficult because during orgasm we tend to only focus on the sensations and the sexual act itself. However, it is that one-pointed focus and the complete exclusion of any other thoughts that make it such a good method. It brings you into complete focus and places you in a liminal state, excellent for transferring the sigil to the subconscious.
Sex magic can also be practiced by yourself, so don’t think that just because you don’t have a partner to practice with, that you can’t do it. My suggestion here is to use edging. Whenever you get close to orgasm, slow down or stop and pull back, but let the energy move up your spine and through your body. This builds energy in the body but also makes the final orgasm more explosive, taking you completely out of the current space and time and making the activation so much better.
With the use of sex magic it should be mentioned that it is not the actual sexual fluid or even the energy that is created that activates the sigil, its the liminal state that is a result of the orgasm which is required. Although the energy can be used in particular ways to project magick when that is required, and the sexual fluids can be used to create elixirs, charge talismans, create servitors, and such things, in the case of sigil magick, it is the liminal state that is the goal.
As I have mentioned, there are a lot of different methods that can be used to get into that trance state required to transfer the sigil to the subconscious mind. The main thing is to get creative. Try as many methods as you can, and see which ones work for you under different circumstances and for different purposes. You may want to use sex magic for love related sigils and the circling method for money magic for instance. Just get creative, and there is no reason why you can’t combine different methods to reach your goal. As Austin Osman Spare himself said, “…everybody needs to create their own method”, but considering the amount of Chaos Magicians in the world today, coming up with a new method gets a bit tricky, but you can create your own methods through combination, and your own set of methods.
To go with an extremely simple method, Gordon White mentions that he simply gazes at the sigil which has a certain magical quality to it, but once it loses that magical quality and becomes a normal image on a bit of paper, then he knows that the sigil has transferred.
So there really are a plethora of methods that can be used to activate a sigil and to get into that gnostic, trance or liminal state in order to do that, just as there are any number of ways to actually create the sigil itself. Explore, experiment and most of all, have fun.
So let’s talk about sigils, what they are, how to create them, how to activate them, why you activate them, the whole process really.
The main reason why I created this discourse is because the YouTube algorithm decided to spit videos onto my feed about sigil work, and to be totally honest with you, I was incredibly disappointed.
The first guy wasn’t quite sure if he was even pronouncing the word sigil correctly, and then proceeded to say that it’s extremely ancient magic which was created in Egypt. Ok, using glyphs in magic is ancient, but you can take it all the way back to the first person who drew on a cave wall, so it’s older than suggested. However, modern sigil magick was developed in more modern times, but we will get to that just now. Also, if you are going to teach a magical method, at least learn how to pronounce the most vital word of that method.
The second one was a lady who suggested that sigil work and sigil magick is Chaos Magic, which therefore means that it is very weak magic. To say that Chaos Magic is very weak, is an extremely bad representation and really shows an incredible lack of knowledge.
She also mentioned the use of bodily fluids to activate the sigil. Now you can use bodily fluids to draw the sigil, but it would not be used to activate it (unless the idea of using orgasm as a liminal state was misunderstood here). Where you would use bodily fluids in this instance would be to create a servitor which can begin with a sigil, but that is for the next section of this discourse.
The problem I had with these people, as lovely as they are, is that they were teaching magical methods under the guise of contemporary Law of Attraction methods to several hundred thousand subscribers without actually having any foundational work or really any proper in depth study.
So, what are sigils? They are an image, or a glyph, that represents an intent or desire, and that intent is passed from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind.
If you look at the history of sigils, the modern use of sigils within Chaos Magic was originally created by Austin Osman Spare who is considered to be the grandfather of Chaos Magick. Chaos Magick itself only developed after Spare died, but a lot of it was based on what he wrote about his practices.
It has been suggested that he got the idea from his grandmother (if I remember correctly), who used to create bind runes or binderune. If you have a look into bind runes, it’s basically the Nordic practice of taking a bunch of runes and combining them into an image or a glyph, and the same thing happens with modern sigil magick where you take a bunch of letters. You take the shapes of those letters and you combine them into an actual image, so you overlay them, move them around into whatever configuration you want. If you’re an artist or you like doodling, this would be great for you, you’ll love it to bits.
It’s a method that you can use for manifestation, in fact, it really is mostly a manifestation method. You can use it for anything you really want to, but whether you are wanting money or need to heal yourself, you are manifesting a desire.
If we look further back then you may be familiar with the demons of the Goetia. If you look into the seals of the demons, or the seals of angels from Kabbalah, and even the veve of the lwa from Voodoo, these are all glyphs and symbols that represent the spirits, the demons, the angels and the lwa, whatever spirit you’re working with, and that spirit obviously ties into an intent.
You even get corporate sigils, those being logos that have created a certain psychological intent or hook. When you see the Nike swish, you know exactly what it is and you associate it with a certain thing. If you are into sports then you probably want a pair of Nike, and so it creates a desire. There is also the McDonald’s Golden Arches, so there are all these glyphs and logos that have been used by corporations that have become sigils. Obviously in the beginning it’s just an image, but over time, as the demand starts being created, the desire is there and then it becomes a sigil. As soon as you see it, you associate it with something.
So there are lots of examples of what sigils are and how they are used in the modern world and in the years past in ancient history, but I think the main thing to speak about is the modern use of sigils and Chaos Magic. You don’t need to be a Chaote or Chaos Magician to use sigils, but this modern usage we speak of does originate in Chaos Magic and came from Austin Osman Spare and very much his Alphabet of Desire. From there, Chaos Magick was created and largely based on his teachings where sigil magic was included. Now, people are using it in their daily practice.
The whole thing with sigil magick, and this has a lot to do with most spell work in fact, would be the ability to move it into the subconscious mind. The easiest way to explain that process is called the 80/20 theory. If you are in an active state during the day like I am now, my subconscious mind is 20% active and my conscious mind is 80% active. Imagine a seesaw and the one end has an 80kg weight (the 80% conscious mind), on the other is a 20kg weight (the 20% subconscious mind), so the 80kg weighs it down on one end. What you need to do is change that into 20% conscious, 80% subconscious, so you would take your sigil and as you go into a gnostic or trance state, you move the scale or the seesaw through the gnostic state so that the sigil or intent shifts from your conscious to your subconscious, and that is how it gets planted, and the way to actually transfer that from the conscious and subconscious is through trance work or a gnostic state.
You can use death postures, which can get rather painful, although I did go searching for other videos on YouTube about sigils, and there was one guy who mentioned actually using yoga postures that you find to be very difficult and painful, and holding that posture. When you can’t hold it anymore then you imagine the sigil bursting into white flames. So yoga postures you can used, but also sex magic, masturbation, anything that gets your conscious mind to move into a gnostic, liminal or between state.
There are also some people who have developed the practice of sigil magick further. If you like to read comics, specifically DC and Vertigo, you’ve probably heard of Grant Morrison, and there is also Alan Moore who created Promethea and Providence. However the series that Morrison created was The Invisibles. If you have read that, then you were subjected to a hypersigil, which is considered to be a series of artworks with the intent of manifesting the desire through that medium, and Morrison did this through his comics, and very successfully.
There is also Gordon White. Have a look for runesoup.com which is a very good blog about Chaos Magic. White developed the idea of shoaling, which is grouping similar sigils together. If you imagine a shoal of fish, it is a number of fish all moving in one direction and in unison. So the whole idea behind sigilization and shoaling is that you create a bunch of the sigils to represent one thing, instead of being too general. As an example, you want lots of money, which is extremely general and broad. Instead, you target each sigil with a specific aspect in order to get to that point. So for instance, if you own a business, you create one to bring in more clients, you create a second one to discover more sources to get more clients, and maybe another one to get your current clients to become loyal and therefore refer your business more often. So you create a whole series of sigils in order to get to your goal.
He also came up with the idea of creating a robo-fish. Now the robo-fish is a sigil which is aimed for the intent of creating something that is inevitable. You as the Chaos Magician or the sigil worker knows that whatever this robofish sigil is aiming for will happen. It doesn’t matter if the sky falls or the world blows up, it will still happen, and that robo-fish then leads the rest of the shoal. Because it is inevitably successful, the others then follow suit and therefore, all of the other sigils are then successful.
What is important however is the idea of moving the sigil from the conscious to the subconscious mind through the use of a trance state. I will speak more about this in a future discourse. You could create a sigil and just look at it day in and day out, working similarly to a vision board, but that would take a long period of time. Eventually you would become bored of looking at the sigil and that is when the conscious mind slips and the sigil goes to work in the subconscious.
But if we are using sigil magick properly, then we would use the trance state to shift it through, and then forget about it on a conscious level. What often happens is you start to lust after results, and Ray Sherwin mentioned this a lot. Even before you have finished (but especially afterwards) with your spell working or your sigilization, whatever it may be, you start lusting after results. This is basically your conscious mind putting up roadblocks, and anybody who is human will do this. So let’s say you created the sigil with the intent to get a new job, and you do the whole sigilization and the sigil work, you’ve activated it, and there it goes. It’s now in the subconscious and its on its way, but your conscious mind comes along and says, “Okay, but what if I asked for the wrong thing”, “What if I actually need to do this first”, “What if I get a job that I don’t like”, what if what if what if, and all these what ifs start hitting it left, right and centre, and whereas this intent was going to its target in a straight line before, it is now being pushed off course by all of these what ifs.
The best way to stop lusting after results is firstly discipline of course, but if you do find this is a problem for you, then create a whole bunch of sigils for all different things and put them into a box or a book, just put them away somewhere. A week later come back to them and start taking them out. If you look at a sigil and you know exactly what it was for, then put it back and keep going through them. Once you pick up a sigil that you don’t recognise and you can’t remember what it was for, activate that one. The subconscious remembers what it was, but as long as a conscious doesn’t, then it can’t do any damage. So then, activate the ones you don’t remember and put the others back. Again, a week later, come back and repeat the process. I find this very difficult because I tend to bloody remember all of them, but a lot of people use it very effectively.
So there you have it, the basics to sigil magick. Just to recap briefly. Create your image from your desire. Pass that from the conscious mind to the subconscious through the use of a gnostic, trance or liminal state, and then forget about it on a conscious level. Simple and easy.
