What You Need to Know About Sigils

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.