There isn’t much about sigils that hasn’t already been said. A Google search can get you all the information about sigils, how and why they work. Even youtube can come up with some very vaild methods for creating them. Sigils happens to be, in my opinion, where many magickal practices begin and end. When I say end, I don’t mean that the practitioner stops magick altogether, what I mean is that sigils are so effective, that once one gets into the practice of making them, often times that’s all the magickal worker wants or needs in their arsenal. Sigils are one of the tried and true methods of spellcraft. However, as I will show you in other articles, there is a ton more to be obtained with the sigil process; sigils are in my opinion the strongest foundation for magickal work and the platform be which many other magickal processes can grow their roots, so it is important we begin here on our way up the high magick tower.
My method for sigils is slightly mutated and deviant of the traditional method. It is what works for me, do your own research to find out what works for you.
Step one: Write down your desire
Write down your desire. However write it down as if you already have said thing or are already receiving it soon. “I am feeling well” or “I have found happiness” or “I have met a new friend” are all good examples.
Step two: Dissect and minimize the words
Some people cross out all of the vowels, I don’t. However if crossing out the vowels works for you, feel free to do so. I instead cross out all the repeating letters, which is typically the next step if you were crossing out all of the vowels as well.
So if you have “I am feeling well”:
My Version looks like this:
IAMFELNGW
The vowel-less version looks like this:
MFLNGW
Step three:
Draw a wild image using only the left over letters you have. Some people write the letter as is, one on top of the other. Others dissect it and make it look as much like abstract art as possible. The goal is to make the symbol look nothing like your original intent.
My sigil ends up looking like this when I am done:
One of the most common messages I get on Tumblr goes something like this: “What is your process for creating sigils? It can’t be as simple as scrambling up letters, so what’s the real secret?”
The truth is, there isn’t a secret. Making sigils is actually quite simple. Anyone can do it. Even for a complete newcomer, the process should take less time than a coffee break. While there are many, many ways to create sigils — magic squares, automatic drawing, grid overlays — the methods don’t really matter all that much.
In this post, I’m going to show the step-by-step method I used for creating the most recent sigil I’ve published. It came at the request of a young woman who wanted to catch the romantic attentions of another female. It said simply: “She will see me in a romantic way.”
As you can see, I’ve gone with the most basic sigil-creation method here. I’ve written out the text, and I’ve isolated the consonants from the sentence. While there is an “occult” tradition behind this method, I wouldn’t get hung up on thinking that it’s the “right” way to make a sigil. It’s no better than any other method, it’s just easier to explain.
This first step is meant to abstract the coherent words into a less-coherent jumble of letters. The words stop being as meaningful, but the symbols behind the sigil’s intent remain. To keep things simple — and to speed up my next step — I arrange these letters into a grid.
The next step is to abstract the remaining letters even further. Here, I’ve simply started combining elements of the letters together. I generally start by picking two letters from the grid of consonants, and start combining lines, curves, curls, dots, and other pieces of those letters together.
I try to keep these new symbols as simple as possible — four or five pencil strokes at most — because I’ll be further combining them in the next step.
From here, I generally play around with a few ideas, combining elements of symbols as I go. Sometimes these ideas come easily, as seen in the picture, but sometimes it can take pages and pages of sketches to find one I like. In particularly thorny situations, I’ll even start the entire process over from scratch, just to give myself a clean slate.
Once I’ve found a design I like, it’s time to start on the final design. Much like every other stage in the process, there is no one “right” way to do this. This is also the step where most people could happily stop. When the sigil looks and feels “right” to you, it’s done. The sigil is complete, if you want it to be.
In my case, however, I’m also making art for my website and social media. That means creating a version of the sigil that will (hopefully) catch other people’s eyes. There are countless ways to do this — charcoals, crayons, digital painting, markers — and I’ve experimented quite a bit over the years.
I also like to have an excuse to play with ink and brushes, so that’s how this one came together. I like that it’s a little unpredictable — with streaks and globs and splatter — and I’m always thrilled when a happy accident improves the design.
As you can see, I create tons of variations, tinkering with brush sizes, stroke direction, the amount of ink in the brush, and other stuff. While I liked some of these versions, none of them looked quite right. So, I kept going until I found one that did.
A few ink-soaked pages later, and this version was the clear winner. From here, it was just a matter of scanning the image in and doing a few technical things in Photoshop to make it look better in black and white. I add the text, the watermark, and … that’s it.
Here’s the finished version.
As you can see, there’s no great secret to making a sigil. Nor should there be. Sigils are about focusing intent, and even a few pencil scratches on notebook paper can become a perfectly wonderful sigil with the right intent behind it. Yes, some people (like me) like to do a little showing off with things they picked up from art class, but that should never be a barrier to creating your own personal sigils.
Questions? Thoughts? Leave a comment or drop me a message.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted? Nothing is real, everything is possible.
This statement is usually taken at face value as the main ethos of chaos magick. From personal experience, the majority of chaos mages do not actually ascribe to the is way of thinking as universal. It is a way to feel “edgy” and to get yourself in the right state of consciousness to perform magick when you are first starting out. The absurdity of it pushes consciousness past the psychic center and allows the user to shed to their ingrained moralism and logical materialism. It allows the beginner mage to exist in a state of consciousness where magick is always possible. That being said, from personal experience, a better understanding of this main principle would be restated as “nothing is real, everything is possible”. This reinterpretation allows the mage to discover their own, ever negotiable, code of ethics through experience, without being tied down to the moralism of concessious reality. It also sheds the immature edginess of the initial statement. NOTHING IS REAL. Reality is an ever changing flux of chaos for the mage. Through the practice of magick, we cast our will upon the universe and manipulate the probability of chaotic phenomena to fall in our favor. EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE. The mage’s understanding of the possibilities of the universe is ever changing. To believe we truly know and understand the workings of this absurd and chaotic existence, is to chain ourselves and our conciousness to a miserable and unchangable demiurgic reality. Our conception of the possibilities of reality is determined only by the unmeasurable variables of our magical experiences.
In our practice energy is one of, if not the main fundamental construct that allows us to manifest our desires through our intent. Our consciousness, and state of being allows us to mold, and impact the energy around us allowing us to create, and give birth to new entities, consciousnesses, and constructs. This post serves as a list of different forms of creation based on intent, energy, and thought. It will start at the purest form, and work its way down to the more complicated constructs that can exist through the simple use of intent, and energy.
Pure Source Energy
Pure source energy is energy that has not been assigned a purpose besides existing. This energy comes directly from source, and usually becomes a form of programmed energy in some form, or another. This is the only one on this list that is not made by intent, and energy, but much rather is the basis for it.
Programmed Energy
Programmed energy is energy that has had intent, or emotion placed into it, so that it can be used to carry out a goal, or bring that specific energy into a situation. These programmed constructs of energy usually do not have any cognitive function, and are just the pure essence of the intent, or emotion that was placed into them. All forms of energy have some form of programming in them except for pure source energy. Programmed energy takes on the traits, and purpose of the intent, or emotion, and is the most basic form of energy that shows some form of consciousness. There are many different various ways energy can be programmed, or take on some form of programming. These programs can even be rewritten, or transmuted by other energies, or consciousnesses.
A poltergeist is an entity that is created from non expressed high emotional feelings. These high emotional feelings usually manifest into a poltergeist by accident, and the person who creates them might not even know that they did create one. They are usually accidentally created by practitioners, or people who do not know they have a psychic gift. These entities are usually led by the intention of the high emotions, and are just made up of a high amount of programmed energy. They really don’t have much of a consciousness though, and they just pulled in the direction of the intent that they were created from.
Sigils in general are a type of symbol that are filled with a specific intent in order to be charged, and activated. Sigils can be pretty much anything as long as they can be filled with intent, and can be charged, and activated in order to manifest the intent. Sigils are assigned a specific intent, and then are given energy to use in order to further that intent. They are more advanced than simple programmed energy, because they act more as a producer of certain energies. As they are charged they transmute that energy into whatever the intent wants it to be, so that it can be used to fulfill its purpose. As you can see this makes them more like small intricate machines that are created for a certain purpose. In essence there are a lot more like simple servitors, and do not exactly have a complicated consciousness, but you can see the framework for an entity to start to form from the simple framework of a sigil.
Servitors are an entity that is created from the energies, and intentions of a practitioner. They are entities that are commonly used to serve, or perform some form of task for usually the person who creates them. These entities are quite a lot more complicated then just some simple programmed energy, or sigil. These entities are usually given personalities, character traits, spiritual forms, names, housing, and a purpose. These entities usually release their energy in order to perform their purpose, because of this these entities need to take in energy into themselves in order to feed, so that they can continue to exist. They are most of the time subservient to the person who created them, but they do show a level of consciousness, and have even been shown to act upon it and go rogue at times. They are practically the beginning to a new simple entity that has been created simply through programmed energy, and intent. Though these entities usually do not have a lot of free will it has been documented that they can gain more of it, and learn to become self-sufficient.
Tulpas are an entity created primarily through thought alone, and usually do not have housing. They are actually quite a lot like servitors in many ways, but they have been known to have a lot more free will, and are not usually assigned a overarching purpose. These entities usually take very intense focus to create, and are kept alive through feeding, and continuous attention in order to give it energy so that it can continue to exist. They have quite a lot of free will because they usually are not assigned purposes at least not in the same way servitors are. They are more like equal companions, and friends that just happened to be attached to you, and your mind.
Egregores are thought forms that are created by the combined collective consciousness of a group of people. These will always form whenever a group comes together to further the same goal, and are like hive minds of energies for a specific group. These egregores still need to be maintained in order to grow more powerful, and to continue on existing separately of the consciousnesses that created it. Egregores are greatly influenced by the group of community members that are a part of it, and it builds its personality, essence, energy, and ideals off what the sum of them are thinking, intending, and releasing into the world. Egregores have pretty much complete free will, because they are not bound, or created in particular really by people. Their ideals, and intend come directly from the collective consciousness of all the people that are in the group, and will influence what they do, look like, and even act like. If these entities are greatly cared for they will eventually become powerful enough to exist without the consciousness, or energies of the group, and can continue on their own without them. Egregores can be created consciously if the group is aware of it, or in most cases will be created unconsciously of the group. Groups that are aware of it, and our magical practitioners of any type will usually create even stronger egregores when they come together, and if the egregores do eventually get strong enough they will take on a complete life of their own.
Godforms
Godforms are very powerful, and free willed entities. they usually evolve from one of the other constructs of programmed energy, and will become a godform when they finally become powerful enough to sustain life on their own. These entities are very independent, and do have their own consciousnesses, personality, character traits, spiritual forms, beliefs, ideals, and morals. Once an entity reaches this state, they don’t need whoever, or whatever created them, and are completely unique, powerful, individuals. They can do whatever they wants to, but they usually hold their dominion over an aspect of something, and are worshipped, and/or fed by people in order to get stronger. They’re practically gods that were created like other types of thought forms but are known for being a lot stronger.
Conclusion
The things that can be created from our consciousnesses, intent, and energies can greatly affect the world around us. Our creations a very powerful even if we do not know it, and we have a responsibility to understand what we are capable of doing. Intent and energy can be a powerful tool if we know how to use it correctly.
I discovered this type of technique for creating sigils while working on a kabbalistic talisman in 2009. Later on as I had tested it, I started to apply it in other designs as well as you can see in the ‘Seals’ section on the personalised planetary seal for Saturn.
The basic idea was to generate sigils that follow the repetitive pattern of a circle – rather than a single line format. Moreover, the talisman I had been working on was very much related to the Tree of Life (Etz Chiim); therefore it seemed counterintuitive to use a non-kabbalistic method to come up with the sigil. – Here is the result and a brief description on how to apply it yourself.
The method of Etz Chiim sigilization is an alternative way to the traditional approach of generating sigils from magical Kameas or the Golden Dawn Rose Cross. The main difference is that this method uses the 22 paths of the Etz Chiim, the kabbalistic Tree of Life, to create the sigils of a name. This is of advantage if the work carried out is of kabbalistic nature, as in this case the continuous application of the Etz Chiim reinforces the subjective synthesis in the magus. In addition, this method of sigilization works with the repetition of the sigils in accordance with the numerical value of the planet or sephiroth in question. The rhythmic repetition of the sigil brings a dynamic component that is often missing in the static, simple image of a sigil.
The Chaos star is a spoked device with eight equidistant arrows radiating from a central point. It was originally devised by the fantasy author Michael Moorcock as a symbol of chaos (infinite possibility), and has been adopted as a symbol of Chaos Magick. Its current rounded shape was devised by occult author and chaos magician Peter Carroll.
“The Chaosphere is the prime radiant or magic lamp of the adept – a psychic singularity which emitteth the brilliant darkness.It is a purposely created crack in the fabric of reality through which the stuff of chaos enters our dimension. Alternatively, it may be considered as a demonstration of the axiom that belief has the power to structure reality.” – Liber Null & Psychonaut
I don’t really know what people generally call this method of sigil making, so I’m just calling it “Letter Shaping” because you’re using the basic shapes from certain letters. This is the most common form of sigil making, and it allows the most creative influence. As you see above the sigils are for nearly the same thing, yet the sigils came out completely different. Not because the purpose was different, but because I approached them both a different creative way, and that’s what I like so much about this method. There’s a lot of freedom and personalization involved.
This was the first method of sigil making I ever learned, from a post by @the-darkest-of-lights. I decided to make my own tutorial on it with my spare time. Happy sigil making! I’ll be making more of these on other methods of sigil making I think, because there’s so many different methods, and this was quite enjoyable to make.
(I know that you can make sigils with the other various planetary numerology squares but honestly I still haven’t figured out how, I only know this one.)
Occult Aspects 