The sigil is the most widely used technique in contemporary magic, and the one most practitioners learn first. It is simple, it needs nothing but paper and a pen, and it can be learned in an afternoon. It is also very easy to deceive oneself about, for a reason built into the method itself.
This page describes what a sigil is, how one is made, and how one can be tested. The Order's own texts teach no sigil work. Its only sigil, the Open Ring, is a sign of a different kind, explained at the end.
Three Meanings
The word comes from the Latin sigillum, a small seal. It is used in three senses, which should be kept apart.
- A sign. In the broadest sense a sigil is any symbol used to stand for something in a magical or religious context. The Open Ring is a sigil in this sense.
- A seal of a spirit. The grimoires give each spirit a seal, a figure that is its signature and, on some accounts, its address. Drawing the seal is part of calling the spirit. The page Demons and Spirits describes where those spirits come from.
- A mark of desire. In the modern technique, a sigil is a statement of what the practitioner wants, reduced to an abstract figure that no longer reads as words. This is what most practitioners now mean by the word, and it is the subject of the rest of this page.
The Letter Method
The method most widely used was set out in the early twentieth century by an English artist and occultist, and taken up later by the chaos magicians described on the Currents page. Its steps are these.
- State the desire. Write it as a single, plain sentence, in the present tense or as a statement of will. "My record is unbroken" is better than "I hope I will keep my record better."
- Remove repetition. Strike out every letter that has already appeared. Many practitioners strike the vowels as well.
- Combine. Join the remaining letters into a single figure, overlapping and rotating them as needed.
- Simplify. Redraw the figure, removing and merging strokes, until it no longer looks like letters at all and the sentence cannot be read back from it.
The sentence "my record is unbroken," for example, leaves the letters M, Y, R, E, C, O, D, I, S, U, N, B, and K after repetitions are struck, and M, Y, R, C, D, S, N, B, and K if the vowels go too. Those letters, combined and simplified, become a mark that means the sentence to the one who made it and to no one else.
Charging
A sigil is said to be charged when the practitioner fixes their whole attention on it, in a state in which ordinary thought has fallen quiet. The theory behind the method holds that conscious wanting interferes with the result, and that the desire, once reduced to a mark and planted below the level of words, works best when the conscious mind lets it go. For that reason the charging is followed by deliberate forgetting: the practitioner puts the sigil out of mind and does not think about it again.
The literature recommends many ways of reaching the necessary state, including trance, exhaustion, ecstasy, and intoxication. The Order's rule is that every working is sober, and the sober routes are enough. A practitioner can charge a sigil by sitting in stillness until the mind is quiet, then gazing at the mark without thinking about what it means, for as long as attention holds. Some practitioners use the breath exercise described on the page The Subtle Body as a preparation.
Disposition
When the sigil has been charged, it is disposed of in one of two ways.
- The temporary sigil is destroyed. Most practitioners burn it in a heat-proof dish, and some scatter or bury the ashes. The destruction marks the forgetting.
- The permanent sigil is kept: drawn on a talisman, carved into a candle, placed on an altar, or worn. It is used for an aim that continues, not for a single result.
Some practitioners keep a personal sigil, a mark for themselves rather than for a desire, and keep it private. Some advise against making it public, lest it end on someone else's altar. Whatever one believes about that, a practitioner's own mark is theirs to keep private, as the Discretion page says of practice in general.
Other Forms
The letter method is not the only one.
- The spoken sigil. The same reduction is applied to the sounds of the sentence, and the remaining syllables are rearranged into a nonsense phrase and chanted until it means nothing to the conscious mind.
- The pictorial sigil. A simple drawing that stands for the desire, stylized until it no longer depicts anything.
- The personal alphabet. Some practitioners build up, over years, a private vocabulary of marks for recurring aims, so that a sigil can be composed from known parts.
- Figures from the tradition. Some draw on the seals of the grimoires, on the stroke directions that ceremonial magic prescribes for drawing figures in the air, or on star figures drawn in a single line, such as the unicursal hexagram and heptagram.
Magical Scripts
Some practitioners write their sigil statements, their incantations, and even their records in a magical alphabet. The most widely used is the one called Theban, a letter-for-letter substitute for the Latin alphabet. It is often said to be ancient, but it first appears in a Latin book on ciphers printed in Germany in 1518, attributed there to a legendary magician of Thebes, the reputed author of a medieval grimoire. Another script, the angelic alphabet called Enochian, comes from the spirit diaries of an Elizabethan court magician and his scryer.
A practitioner who uses one of these for their own record should do so for privacy, which is their right, and not for secrecy, which is a different thing. Groups that add private marks to a script so that only members can read their texts are keeping a locked grimoire in the sense the Order's essay Against the Locked Grimoire describes. The Order uses no letters of any sacred alphabet.
Testing a Sigil
The difficulty of testing a sigil is built into the method. The practitioner is told to forget it. A practitioner who has forgotten what they wanted cannot honestly say afterward whether they got it, and is very likely to notice, months later, something that seems to fit, and to count it as a success. Sigils are the easiest of all techniques to count generously.
There is a simple solution, which keeps the forgetting and the record both. Before making the sigil, write the statement of desire on a separate page, with the date and a date by which the result should appear, and seal it in an envelope. In the record, note only that a sigil was made and charged, and give it a number. On the date written on the envelope, open it, read the statement, and write down, as plainly as possible, what happened. Then note what was likely to happen anyway, and what you did by ordinary means.
A practitioner who does this for a year, with every sigil, will have something far more valuable than an impression: a count. Some find that their sigils do something they cannot explain. Some find that they do nothing. Either finding is worth having, and the standard by which to judge it is set out on the page On Magic.
The Open Ring Is Not a Sigil of Desire
The Order's sign, the Open Ring, is a sigil only in the first of the three senses. It stands for the Order's understanding of the work: the ring is the work, the point at its center is the self, and the gap is the gift. It is not charged, it does not represent a desire, and it is not meant to be forgotten. Like the Gesture that traces it, it marks and reminds. It does not act. The page The Serpent and the Open Ring describes it, and anyone may use it for any purpose, including as the basis of a sigil of their own.