sigil magic 101
by Michael Robin Cooke on Mar.06, 2009, under Kitschchaos
This post has been improved upon and expanded as an article – it’s available here
Sigil magic as used in Chaos magic is a technique created by the great Austin Osman Spare.
A Young Austin Spare in a 'chaostar' by Michael R. Cooke
Austin Spare examined magic and occult as practised and from a pragmatic point of view- what works to manifest results, and what doesn’t. Very simply put, will or clear desire, plus faith, plus ‘gnosis’ is the winning combination.
The third thing, ‘gnosis’, may seem mysterious – it’s a magical state of consciousness wherein the mind isn’t thinking – it can constitute a singular state of meditative consciousness, a moment of sexual orgasm, a mind entranced with ‘magical’ ceremony or a simple everyday moment of absent-mindedness.
‘Faith’ comes easier to some than to others. The good news is that your most conscious mind is the least important magically. If you have imagination enough to lose yourself in the fantasy of a movie or a book, to ‘feel’ something in response to ceremony (Catholic mass counts) – you’re capable of having sufficient faith for magical purposes.
Will or desire can seem deceptively simple. What are you using magic for? If you’re on this site, the answer could be – wealth! But you may want wealth to become the envy of others, to sate the expectation of a spouse, or to have freedom to help the needy – it’s a means to an end that is what you REALLY want. People that are wealthy are people that are free of want materially, and the irony is that those people are rarely rich and more commonly free of attachment in a Buddhist sense. If you pay attention to rich people – they are most often more consumed with need for more money than those poorer than themselves!
If you want to become rich ANYWAY – direct your will to a goal specific and financial.
But why sigil magic? Why not Hoodoo, Law of Attraction, or classic techniques from the Golden Dawn or Aleister Crowley?
Because the conscious mind is untrustworthy. Here’s why:
The ‘Duality of desire’ – your will is always divided against itself. No matter how badly you want change, part of you has adjusted to what is and fears change. The increase of wealth and prestige accompanying a job promotion is countered with the possible loss of camaraderie of co-workers who would become subordinates, the loss of being right right about the unfairness of the promotion process, and the loss of future compassionate and loving sympathy from co-workers assuring you you deserved the promotion.
The ‘is it here yet’ problem, formally labelled the ‘lust for result’. Also known as ‘the watched pot never boils’, this phenomena will very often prevent a result from manifesting as long as you are consciously anticipating it.
The ‘New Thought’ LOA techniques, those of NLP and ‘positive thinking’ have become backbones to sales and marketing. What they all have in common is the need to control thought. The nature of thought is to be chaotic, it’s not a simple thing to control (and really, if you want to play that game, the Zen Buddhists perfected the approach). But magic doesn’t require thought, and sigil magic takes thought out of the equation.
So that’s how sigil magic is different, taking the conscious mind out of the equation. It does this by disguising the nature of the will, so the conscious mind is out of the loop when it comes to empowering it, the subconscious handles everything.
The process is very simple. Concisely state your will in a single sentence. Distinguish the unique letters (sometimes just the unique consonants). Create an image from/with the letter shapes of the unique letters. Elaborate or simply the image to finish your sigil.
Ideally you create several sigils, some for things you want very much, others for much lighter purposes, such as ” I will enjoy a nice slice of apple pie”. Then save the sigils together, without the statement of intent. and wait a week.
Now when you ‘launch’ a sigil, you are likely to have forgotten exactly which intent corresponds to which sigil. It’s okay, don’t try to remember, your subconscious remembers perfectly. And this way there’s no duality of desire, no lust for result – the conscious mind is less likely to interfere.
‘Launching’ the sigil involves looking at the sigil while experiencing gnosis, commonly masturbation is used as the moment of orgasm constitutes gnosis. Exhaustion from dancing, katas, holding an uncomfortable position… is also used.
If you take the unique letters from your statement, and rearrange them into phonetic nonsense words – you may launch the sigil meditatively by chanting these words as you would a mantra.
sigil creation
Be very careful creating your statement of intent. Your result will be exactly what your statement asks for. Just like almost all wishing folklore, how you state your wish is critically important.
If you are an artist, you can put a great deal of energy into the elaboration of your sigil as artwork. In this fashion the process of creating the sigil and ‘launching’ it can become one, as the creative process can, when intense enough, constitute ‘gnosis’ in its own right. I say this with the limited authority of my own experience.
Some Examples of sigils by Mike Cooke:
this sigil relates to websites
this sigil relates to personal finances
another sigil relating to personal finances
This last sigil, you may notice the inclusion of Norse runes. It’s totally okay to accent the sigil derived from your statement of intent with symbols from other traditions. If you are Christian, for example, the inclusion of a crucifix may reinforce your submission to the will of God and transform the work into a form of prayer. If you work with other traditions those symbols may be effective for you too. I chose Norse runes as I’m part European and no doubt such symbols are relevant to some fraction of my ancestors (sigil magic always works, but how is a mystery – a hypothetical collective unconscious may have something to do with it, which would make the beliefs of ancestors relevant).
I have a lot more to say about sigils, but this is good for now. Please share your comments and results if you try this out.
Related Posts - Children of the Corn, children and magic Children of the Corn. This turn of phrase at this...
- Binghamton NY Rampage - Why people go on rampages. 14 Die in Binghamton Rampage - NYTimes.com. Today, April 3rd...
- Love & Sex Magic This is naturally, a response to the Google advertising on...
- Crowd Funding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_funding From that wikipedia article: Crowd funding (sometimes called crowd financing...
- Sigil Magic like Zatanna!? (introducing Servitors) Zatanna, DC comics cheesecake magician temptress super-heroine, the above image...
- When a "Social Media Expert" Gets it Wrong I uncovered this article in Forbes by Mike Schaffner, a...
- Blogging for Success Everytime you went and surfed through the internet, you probably...
- We Walk This Earth We have a part of ourselves, let’s call it mind...
- One Of The Reasons I Wrote Solstice Surrender (Not the Obvious, Either) by Tracy Cooper-Posey, guest blogger and author of Solstice Surrender....
- I Hate The Word "Frugal" No offense to the Frugal Dad and others like him,...
21 Comments for this entry
1 Trackback or Pingback for this entry
-
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner
July 27th, 2010 on 3:16 pmThe Ultimate Sigil…
The Ultimate Sigil represents Omneity, in which all things exist in potentiality like an acorn which contains a full grown Oak…….
March 9th, 2009 on 12:43 pm
cool sitename man)))
————————
ad: http://pedeno.ru/
March 10th, 2009 on 3:52 pm
Hello, I can’t understand how to add your blog in my rss reader
————————
my blog: http://joneri.ru/
March 11th, 2009 on 12:03 am
Okay, vastly improved article on sigil magic is posted in the Articles section here: http://kitschchaos.com/articles/chaosmagic_sigils.htm
Second, you have two basic options for the rss feed.
Option 1 is to have the feed emailed to you, this is done with google feedburner and the form is art the top right of this blog.
Option2. click the rss icon at the very top right of this blog and it opens a menu that allows you to add the feed to the reader of your choice.
March 11th, 2009 on 12:07 am
Also, The ‘cool site name’ kind of reply – I let the first one pass. I really don’t mind your using this blog to link to your business site (unless you deal in porn, gambling or warez) – but I expect you to offer something relevant in a comment by way of fair trade.
March 16th, 2009 on 8:35 am
Hi. Nice site you have here. Do you mind if I use it on my website layout?
March 16th, 2009 on 10:29 am
Stephanie, I certainly don’t mind if you want to link my site on yours. What is it exactly that you wish to use in your layout? Be aware that I’m using WordPress for the blog, and the theme and plug-ins are freely available to any wordpress user.
I am thinking of releasing boiled down articles to the online article databases, are you interested in such content?
April 23rd, 2009 on 4:24 am
Could you recommend any specific resources, books, or other blogs on this specific NLP topic?
April 23rd, 2009 on 3:17 pm
Henry James,
Good luck with your website, be aware that phpBB sites can attract spam hard core.
Sigil magic is not an NLP technique. Though NLP and Sigil magic are both interested in the subconscious, and NLP is closer to being an occult system in and of itself than any comparable self improvement paradigm.
I encourage you to include sigil magic in your nlp efforts, if you want more information, simply google “sigil magic” and/or “Chaos magic”. It’s one of the few magical techniques uniquely identified with Chaos magic.
More information on NLP? I have some suggestions on my sales page (tools).
May 20th, 2009 on 2:01 pm
Very interesting post… Would like to use some of this on my blog. Is that ok or not?
May 21st, 2009 on 1:32 am
If you give a backlink to this site and give me, Michael Robin Cooke dredit as the author, sure, go ahead.
July 2nd, 2009 on 4:07 am
Hello Guru, what tempt you to post an article. This article was exceedingly fascinating, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday.
July 15th, 2009 on 7:41 pm
What a fascinating and interesting article. I also believe that we create our own destiny and this article does a great job of explaining it.
July 19th, 2009 on 7:38 am
I find the concept of ‘sigils’ very interesting. I’m not sure whether I believe it on a subconscious understanding or whether my spiritual side thinks it could work. I will try it and see, and as always, not care why anyway because if it works “why” doesn’t matter.
March 13th, 2010 on 3:49 am
Hi – I just wanted to say thank you for sharing these ideas with this blog. After reading the post, I was wondering if you could share a few of your ideas regarding those latest Nigerian attacks. Many thanks
March 13th, 2010 on 4:21 am
The Nigerian attacks, a slaughter of Nigerian Christians, really is unrelated to magic or anything else covered by this blog. It’s a kind of madness that reminds me that even as America approaches a Corporatocracy, at least the government is secular and citizens enjoy broad religious tolerance.
The word “occult” means hidden and the idea of publishing ideas about sigil magic as publicly as I am in this blog, it is a reflection of the newness of tolerance of minority belief.
March 19th, 2010 on 1:22 pm
A bunch of the buttons on your site appear broken. You should probably fix them.
March 19th, 2010 on 7:59 pm
The buttons work, it may be that the logo is a high res png for the alpha channel transparency chewing up bandwidth. I know that this site works terribly with dial up or spotty broadband. I’ll compress the logo some, that should help.
May 3rd, 2010 on 7:41 pm
I was wondering if you have noticed in your personal experiences or in others who have spoken to you about sigil magic if there is a marked difference in effectiveness depending on whether the desire is strictly personal/selfish or if it is directed towards others _either including the self, or with the self omitted)?
I personally have found much greater efficacy when I have displaced myself from the desires, but many of my friends do not experience the same thing.
May 12th, 2010 on 2:51 pm
In Conscious magic, even law of Attraction, it is often easier to produce results for other than yourself because issues such as the lust for result and the duality of desire are less relevant. Sigil magic introduces a possibility of taking the conscious mind out of the picture, if you launch sigils that you’re forgotten the desire they represent.
I create sigils in spurts, 5 to ten at a time, on small pieces of paper, remove the statements the sigils are derived from and place the sigils in a bible at the page featuring the 23′rd psalm (Hoodoo influence there) – I wait at least a week before launching anything, and when I do, usually I’ve forgotten what the sigils were for. This should give ‘selfish’ desires as much efficacy as selfless ones. Just be aware that your stated intent may not be delivered to you exacty the way you want.
May 4th, 2010 on 2:58 am
Great articles & Nice a site!!
May 6th, 2010 on 9:06 pm
This article really stunned me. This is the first time that I came across such thing as sigil.Can you elaborate more on how the whole process about this thing works?
How does the sigil image influence a person mind?
Thanks.
Ken Wu´s last blog ..The Power of Thought