If you could truly believe, we should realise the virtue of it. We are not free to believe .  .  .  .  however much we so desire, having conflicting ideas to first exhaust. Sigils are the art of believing; my invention for making belief organic, ergo, true belief.  –Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure (self-love) (1913)

And thee most powerful weapon we have is thee Sigil, thee magickal process by which we charge our dreams and desires, and make manifest their living beauty. -Genesis P-Orridge, Thee Psychich Bible (1994)

On April 20, the first day of Taurus during the full moon in Libra, I had the pleasure of giving a presentation on Chaos Magic to the Minnesota Left Hand Path Community meetup in Minneapolis. If you’re reading this and don’t know about them, it’s probably in your interest to look them up on Facebook here. They’re a great group involved in many things. Naturally we talked about sigil making and that’s inspired me to do some blogging.

IMO sigils are an example of Sondheim’s lyric in a song near the end of Into the Woods, “Wishes are our children.”

A sigil is basically something you create as a personal symbol imbued with a wish or intention. I’ll describe how to do that in a future post. In the classic method of Austin Osman Spare, the sigil maker actively forgets the intention so that for practical purposes, the sigil becomes a thing independent of your continuing belief or physical pursuit that might otherwise be diverted by other concerns competing for your time and attention. Why? We are all magical as much as physical beings, and some say our minds have a censor that prevents magic from manifesting without skilled effort. In this view, the sigil is supposed to enable you to slip past the censor to allow the process to work. Whatever the reason and frankly, all proposed reasons are only theories, something prevents all our wishes from coming true and sigilizing is a technique for getting around that magically in order to fulfill your desires.

Another idea more in line with Sondheim’s lyric is that sigil making creates a ‘fetish’, in an anthropological rather than a sexual sense, that works for you. I’m not going to cite any authority on that because that’s my idea. A wise woman once summed this up for me in a five words: a fetish is a “thing that is a person.” In other words, it is a seemingly inanimate object or symbol that may acquire agency and works on your behalf. This is a broader definition of fetish than the sexual kind but it works in a similar fashion – for some people an object like shoes, nylons, a painfully cinched waist or other objectified body part, etc. becomes as desirable as a sexual partner and more so in some cases, or in a sense becomes the partner. The thing becomes like a person and serves to satisfy a burning desire. The sigil does the same but outside as well as inside the bedroom. But perhaps those are not so different. A sigil can potentially become a sexual fetish as well, if only temporarily until it is incarnated. Formulate an intent that’s a sexual desire, sigilize it, charge and release it through sexual excitement… The possibilities are endless.

Apart from the media on which it was created, a sigil also has a spiritual life and can travel beyond its corporeal form to do its job, even after the form (a piece of paper on which it is written, etc.) is destroyed. This is because you endow it with life, become the maker, and give it a job to perform for you: fulfillment of your desire or intention.

In the last century or so of Western thought, the fetish has been conceived as disempowering by putting people in a position of relating to things and not other people. In contrast, the sigil is activated to get you more of what you really want. The power and responsibility is in your hands. This can involve relationships with other people if their wishes coalesce with your own. But there are ways these powerful motivations are turned against us in advertising and the marketplace every day. Perhaps no one has articulated this better than Karl Marx  and Marxian thinkers who have followed him, through his concept of commodity fetishism. In this ‘anti-life equation’ people are reduced to consumers with desires fed to them, and their fulfillment pre-appointed, so rather than fulfilling their true desires their behavior is directed and controlled to the benefit of a small cadre of fabulously wealthy masters. More on that in a future post along with instructions for how you make a sigil that works for you.

But next, I want to provide some background for those of you who have not done this before, or a refresher for those who have, starting with the use of divination with spellcasting.

Sources

P-Orridge, Genesis (2010), Thee Psychick Bible (edited by Jason Louv). Feral House.

Spare, Austin Osman (1916), The Book of Pleasure (self love). Available at the Hermetic Library: https://hermetic.com/spare/pleasure