R.Callvsto

Austin Spare’s Stele of Revealing

Sigil Magick is defined as a magickal system that makes use of occult characters, diagrams, condensed verbal intentions, geometric symbols, mystical alphabets, angular signatures of spirits and other kinds of symbolic or hieroglyphic representations. The word sigil comes from the Latin word sigilum, which means “seal.” Of additional significance is the Hebrew word SGULH or sagulah, which means “some kind of word or action” that has a specific spiritual or magickal impact. The use of sigils in magick has its roots in antiquity, possibly from Hebrew sources, since sigils often accompanied magickal squares, which were used extensively in the Jewish tradition of ceremonial magick. 

Most often, sigils, or specialized characters, were incorporated into grimoires and had a traditional use, requiring the wielder to copy them exactly as depicted, even though they had to have been invented by someone at some point in history. These kinds of sigils were carefully crafted using very specific techniques (and not derived from either imagination or revelation), but the methodology used for their creation is typically missing from those same works. (A good example that shows how these sigils were developed can be found in Donald Tyson’s version of “Three Books of Occult Philosophy” originally written by Agrippa - particularly Appendix V on Magick Squares (Llewellyn 1997).)

Some believe that magickal sigils or characters have a power and potency all to themselves, others believe that a sigil has to be activated, at the very least, by the imagination and will of a trained and competent magician. Some grimoires are notorious for the sigils and characters that they contain, lending weight to the superstition that sigils have an independent volition quite separate from whoever invented or wields them. Most often, sigils are reputed to be the specialized symbolic names of angels, demons or various spirits, and the sigil is used to summon and evoke them. This makes a sigil similar in some ways to the “Veve” as found in Haitian Vodoun. Still, sigils used as the symbolic name of a spirit assumes that the sigil is a more pure and direct representation of that spirit’s true nature, and of course, whoever knows the “true” name or nature of a spirit has direct power over it. 

When I perform an invocation or an evocation, I will employ a sigil crafted from the name of the target spirit. That sigil can be derived from a number of sources, but I generally use the Rose diagram from the Golden Dawn Rose Cross, which has the Hebrew letters drawn on the three concentric circles of petals, representing the triple division of those same letters (3 mother letters, 7 double letters and 12 single letters). One could also derive a spirit sigil from one of the appropriate magickal planetary squares, depending on the spirit’s hierarchical association, since there are different squares for each of the seven planets. There is also the Aiq Bkr magickal square that can be used to craft a sigil from a spirit’s name.

Essentially, a sigil is a visual magickal sign of some sort, whether it’s taken from some traditional body of magickal lore (grimoire or tradition), or created by the magician to represent the name of a spirit or to encapsulate a specific intention or desire. Manufacturing sigils became the hallmark of the famous British witch and sorcerer, Austin Osman Spare, who proposed a system of creating sigils by condensing and extracting the forms of the letters from a phrase that stated the magician’s intent. Spare called this methodology “sigilization,” and it was later adopted by Chaos magicians and others who use it as an independent system of magick. Sigilization is employed for casting spells, organizing and deploying an “alphabet of desire” for the same, or building up thought forms. However, it is probably one of the most direct and useful methods for creating a magickal link that I ever seen or experienced.

First, let me define what a magickal link is, and why it’s important in certain kinds of ritual magick. A link is employed whenever a magician seeks to make something happen in the material world. It is usually tangible in some manner and it should model or symbolize the magician’s intention. A link is a symbolic quality that establishes a connection between the magician, his desire, the magickal power raised and the intended target, whatever that happens to be. 

In archaic forms of magick, the link was usually something that was directly “linked” or attached at some point to the target, such as hair, finger nail parings, blood, jewelry or clothing, if the target was to be a person. If the target was more general, then the link consisted of herbs, power objects (stones, crystals, odd shaped pieces of wood), bird or animal parts (or even human parts), bits of metal (magnets, nails) or other curious odds and ends collected while on the hunt for internal occult connections. A table of correspondences would also help the magician sort out and select analogous items consisting of colors, incense, herbs, gem stones, precious and semi-precious metals - the list is nearly endless. 

These various objects would be put together in an artistic manner to symbolize the intent, such as piercing an apple with rusty nails, piercing dried organs or herbs with thorns, or creating a poppet or miniature human shape out of wax or some tuber, adorning it with bits of hair, finger nails or cloth, and then baptizing and naming it for the intended target. The objects would be blessed, charged, assembled, and the final product would be used in a spell to make something happen. The completed link object could be put in a metal container or a bottle, a leather or cloth pouch, and either kept, buried or burned. In some cases words could be printed on the object, or perhaps even a scrap of cloth or paper could be used to contain drawings and words or names. In antiquity, curses were drawn and written out on lead sheets, folded and dropped into a well or stuck between the stones of the victim’s home. 

Organic or inorganic links are called “gross links” because they are made from organic or inorganic materials, where the actual physical form and structure determines its use and intended purpose. Writing something down on a parchment, paper, cloth or a thin sheet of metal is a very different kind of link. A drawing or writing represents a transitional kind of magickal object, becoming more of what I call a symbolic link, since it uses symbolic forms to depict and establish the link. 

A symbolic link is more versatile than a gross link, which is normally used just once. A symbolic link often caries no trace of any previous spell on it, so it can be reused for other purposes. A link that could be fashioned to be used multiple times would require that the original intent was the same. For instance, you could fashion a symbolic link for acquiring money, use it for yourself, and then at another time, use it for a friend. So long as there were no identifying factors or names, a general symbolic link can serve multiple purposes.

In the energy model or theory of magick, a link is used to imprint the raised energy before it’s exteriorized to fulfill the magician’s intention. The raised energy can be highly qualified, or not, but it still has to be imprinted with the magician’s desire. In the system of magick that I use, a sigil is employed to facilitate the instrumentation of a link. The act of imprinting the energy is where the magician wills the link, in the form of a sigil, and the raised energy into a unified field. (This technique will be discussed in more detail later in another section.) 

Crafting a sigil to be used as a link doesn’t usually trigger it’s inherent effect or cause the desire to become manifest by itself. This is because one needs to charge or consecrate the sigil after fashioning it, and then apply it as a link within a magickal working where the energy is raised. Others may perform sigil magick as an independent magickal mechanism, so in that situation it’s possible that the act of crafting it might actually trigger the spell. 

Since it is my habit to always craft a sigil just prior to performing a working (and I have never, to my knowledge, crafted one without it being used in a working), it would be difficult for me to judge whether the act of crafting the sigil prematurely triggered a working. I just know that in order for a ritual working to be successful, a link must be fashioned and used to imprint the energy. The two magickal operations performed sequentially are being blended together, but it’s possible to fulfill a working with just the internalized application of the link. Now that I have explained how I use sigilization in my magickal workings, I should probably describe how to actually craft a sigil. 

The general rule for crafting a sigil is to start out by writing a phrase that encapsulates the intention of the rite. It should be written in upper case, then the phrase is reduced to a simple pictographic diagram through a process of reduction and simplification, where the curves, lines, and intersected forms of those actual letters are reduced to a unique set and reassembled into a kind of logo. 

Let’s go through the steps that one would typically follow to produce a sigil, keeping in mind that there are a lot of variations and methods used in this technique. How I do it may not be exactly the same as how others do it, but each practitioner will ultimately find a technique that works for them. 

1. Write out a phrase of your intent; make it as simple and specific as possible. You can also eliminate words like “I” or “desire” or “will” from the phrase since that would be redundant. Just state what you intend or seek to make happen. 

To make things easier, you will want to print this phrase out in all capital letters, but actually, I prefer to add the nuance of having larger and smaller letters in the mix. Using all caps actually helps to reduce the number of linear forms in the sample of extracted letters. 

The act of succinctly stating one’s intention also helps to simplify and refine the intention of a work. It’s better to reduce the intention down to one thing. If you are seeking to make more than one thing happen, then you should employ more than one phrase and then build multiple sigils from them. (It might also be necessary to perform separate workings for each sigil link as well.)

2.  Looking over the phrase, from left to right, eliminate all redundant letters - or letters that occur more than once. Now the phrase should just have all of the unique letters in the order that they first occur.

3. Next, eliminate letters that are variations of each other, for instance, “M” and “W” are analogous to each other. Break out of the letters the various analogous structures, like the cross bar in the “E”, “R”, “F”, “A”, “H” or “G”, the curve in the “B”, ‘C”, “D”, “G”, “J”, “P”, “R”, “S” or “U”, and the vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines that are found in the remaining letters. All of the these forms are reduced down to a single form, or dual forms facing left or right. The “O” can become a small circle or it can be fused with the rest of the curves, being a left and right curve joined together. What you have now are just single incidences of multiple structures (essential forms) arrayed in a line, like letters.

4. Assemble the line of essential structural forms together again to create a condensed linear form, which should look something like a pictographic representation or logo of the original phrase. This last step may require several attempts to find a final structure that “looks” elegant and interesting to the eye. You can fashion a single sigil form, or multiple sigils. Using multiple iterations to build a sigil makes for a less cluttered final sigil structure. If you are going to use a name in your sigil, then I would recommend making that a separate sigil form from the actual intention. 

The point of this exercise is to produce a final structure that is simplistic, looks something like a pictograph of the intention, and the letters used in the original phrase can still be perceived in the final shape, although this last condition is not as important as creating a memorable pictograph. 

I usually have to make four or five passes using this process before I am able to condense the form down to something that is esthetically pleasing and interesting to look at. Austin Spare was something of a graphic genius when it came to this kind representation (he could probably do it automatically and in one pass), but you don’t have to measure your results by that very high standard. 

While working out the sigil, I will use a pencil on a scrap of paper, but the final form will be rendered on parchment with a special water-proof ink. It could also be painted on a piece of board, cloth, etched on metal, or even drawn on the floor or wall of your temple. However it is finally done, it will become an important magickal instrument, so the act itself should be executed as if it were a magickal rite, with the intention of the sigil and its associated desire strongly fixated in the mind of the magician. 

Once the sigil is crafted, it will need to be consecrated if it’s to be used in a magickal working. This step is not followed by many who use sigilization magick, but this is how I do it, and it keeps the sigil from being too active until its intended use. I will consecrate the sigil with just a spot of lustral water (carefully applied with a wand) and then fumigated over an incense burner just before performing the working. For the sigil of a spirit, I would use consecrated wine, leaving a small stain on the corner as a sign that the sigil parchment has been activated. 

Although I don’t actually work sigil magick without also performing a working of some kind, the basic idea behind it is to fill the mind with an emotional charge associated with the desire or intention so that no other thoughts or feelings are possible. This is a type of powerful obsession, often accompanied with a deep focused trance. This mind state is gradually built up through the process of crafting the sigil and then it’s elevated once the sigil is committed to its final form, executed in ink on parchment, or in whatever media is elected. The magician holds the sigil before his sight, focusing on the image of the design (not the words that were used to build it), while the emotional sentiments associated with the spell are worked to a climax. Then the sigil is either destroyed or set aside and promptly forgotten, allowing the image of the sigil to work in one’s unconscious mind. The magician can generate an intensely focused climax in a number of different ways, such as an orgasmic release through sex magick, masturbation, or even assuming Spare’s Death Posture. Yet often just intensely focusing the mind for a period of time and then quickly releasing it, is sufficient to obtain a good result.  

I should probably mention two other methods that are used to create a sigil device. These are the methods of fashioning a mantra or using condensed pictures. The mantra technique is similar to the word based sigil, except the reduced set of letters and vowels are arranged to spell out a magickal word or formula. It will most likely (though not always) be a nonsense word, but it will symbolize a specific intent. It will function as a barbarous magickal word of power, which can be used in a chant or as a mantra. A sigil derived from a picture or symbolic images (such as the symbols for the elements, planets, astrological signs, alchemical symbols, or even international traffic signs) uses the same methodology as stated in steps 3 and 4 for building a word sigil, where the forms are broken apart, condensed and reassembled. 

That’s briefly how to formulate and use sigils as links in the discipline of ritual magick. This is based completely on how I do it, so of course, there will be a lot of possible variations. I doubt that two magicians who use this technique do it exactly in the same manner, but I believe that I have revealed the basic steps that most would follow. A more thorough resource on the art of sigil magick is to be found in the book “Practical Sigil Magic” by Frater U.D. (Llewellyn, 1990), which I heartily recommend.

Ninth Vision. Personification of God’s power (?)

In the continued saga of Paganism and the Force - and the hard coding of the Dark SIde as Pagan, I offer up this link. Some relevant excerpts:

“…what is sacred endarkenment?

One of my earliest attempts to define it was esoteric: “a clearing and strengthening of inner vision, and grounding it in the earth through an alchemical reckoning with the sacred dark.”  This, however, is only a start.  There are many other equally appropriate definitions, and dimensions that only become apparent with time and relevant experience.

Eventually I started keeping a list of concepts and practices I associate with sacred endarkenment.  Here are a few:

deep listening incubation lamentation and funereal dance grief rituals stillness and silence darkroom retreats regenerative, healthy solitude ecologically responsible ways of handling death and decay handling “dark” emotions with integrity refusing to center whiteness, and resisting white supremacy supporting indigenous peoples’ sovereignty decolonizing time (and spiritual practice in general) honoring chthonic and wrathful deities, and powers of the underworlds valuing restfulness, hibernation, and “doing nothing” trusting inner guidance receptivity and surrender “slow culture”

Other kinds of dark physical spaces designed for purposes of rest, restoration, healing, and contemplation include those built by the darkroom retreat movement and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, many of which have rooms built specifically for the purpose of dark retreats – lengthy solitary retreats designed for advanced practitioners, in a space completely absent of all light.

Retreating into the dark can also provide space for incubation.  In his remarkable book In The Dark Places of Wisdom, Peter Kinglsey writes beautifully about receptive practices of incubation in ancient Greece: lying down to rest in a special enclosed place – often a den, or a dark cave – and either falling asleep and dreaming, or entering a state described as neither sleep nor waking.  In this way, people received prophecies, messages from the gods, healing, and visions.  The key was to do absolutely nothing – to exert no effort, no struggle, no interference with the process.  That was how the healing would come: through surrender.

One day, I believe, we will have polytheist and Pagan monasteries with similar incubation spaces.

If polytheists are to create appropriate spaces for this kind of incubation in our religious practices, we must make room for doing nothing.  We need true leisure – an abundance of unhurried, unstructured, and uninterrupted time.

This points to a structural constraint facing the modern polytheist revival: as things now stand, few of us have sufficient leisure time to cultivate such a practice.  Time management skills, while useful in some cases, can only take us so far in a world where most of us must spend the bulk of our time earning a living.  Even our best attempts to slow down – worthwhile though they may be – won’t be sufficient to develop a religious culture that honors leisure in a world that economically and socially penalizes those who don’t keep up, and in which women and marginalized folks are saddled with a disproportionate and never-ending burden of unpaid, unreciprocated emotional labor.

Sacred endarkenment practice, then, may bring us into social justice activism – recognizing and properly valuing emotional labor, supporting the movement for unconditional basic income, and resisting the ways our time is colonized and conscripted into the service of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Trusting embodied emotional intelligence is another way we can practice sacred endarkenment.  Cultural, economic, and social pressures often leave us few options but to layer a false veneer of pleasantries and “positivity” over our authentic emotional experience, so as not to drag others down.  Many of us habitually hold ourselves at a certain distance from what we call dark emotional states — pain, suffering, conflict, grief, despair, sorrow, anger.  Yet sometimes there is bittersweet, hidden medicine to be found in dark emotional processes when they are faced and addressed skillfully and with kind hearts.  This is the medicine of sacred endarkenment.  Those who create and hold space for it are doing valuable emotional labor, and opening paths to genuine joy.

We practice sacred endarkenment when we look deeply into darkness and acknowledge its worth, instead of turning away.  Annihilating forces, after all, are just as essential to life as generative ones, as alchemists know.

There is nothing inherently negative about darkness.  Darkness has been discredited – and associated with evil and doom – by oppressive forces that benefit when noses are kept to the grindstone and “dark” emotions are suppressed.  Why?

Hello. Yes, it’s me again. You might have noticed I’ve been gone a while, and there’s a reason for that. I held on when it seemed like there were just a few bad eggs, a few racists poisoning Heathenry for everyone else. But now, after watching our country elect a Nazi sympathizer and waking up to the deep-seated white nationalism underpinning most heathen discourse online, I gave up wanting anything to do with it. I still believe in the Norse gods, but I cannot, will not, align myself with racists and racist sympathizers. The heathen community is fundamentally broken, and before everyone comes to terms with these key issues it will not get better:

 The broader heathen community is racist– it isn’t just a few rotten apples. Nothing makes me more suspicious than when I see high-profile heathens losing their mind about a news story or organization calling out racism in the community. Those who are quick to cry “Those are fake heathens! Real heathens wouldn’t do that!” are missing the point. There are a lot of far-right Neo Nazis and other white nationalists who practice Heathenry, in real organizations and following widespread rituals and beliefs. There were AFA members and affiliates at Charlottesville. Troth leadership interacts with Nazi-loving extremists on social media. Two of the three biggest heathen orgs in the US- the Odinic Rite and the AFA- have been flagged and investigated by the SPLC. And even for those who are quick to say “I’m a universalist heathen, I don’t interact with people like that!” it’s rare to find a single kindred in this country that doesn’t have someone crying about the “loss of our ancestral traditions” or the “need to go back to our roots!” And you know, that isn’t an inherently evil sentiment, but it easily, so easily, treads a line, which brings me to my next point–

When you say you are ridding our culture of “Judeo-Christian influence,” you sound a lot like anti-Semites. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to be a Christian, and no one should have to be a Christian just because it’s dominant in their society. But I feel like a lot of heathens need to take a step back and really listen to what they’re saying sometimes. Christianity isn’t inherently incompatible with European culture because it comes from the Middle East. There isn’t some Abrahamic conspiracy to steal pagan holidays or keep those of Northern European descent from their culture. Our gods are not an endangered species, and we are not living in a post-colonial society. The Catholic church didn’t like people being pagans a thousand years ago for political reasons and that is it. No “woe how hard it is to be Northern European displaced from our native traditions.” No “everything is a Christian conspiracy to keep us from the truth.” When you say things like that, you sound like white nationalists. You okay the racist, anti-Semitic notion that Europeans and Middle Easterners are inherently different and parrot centuries-old anti-Jewish propaganda that claims widespread conspiracies exist to control the white population. Yet these ideas are so common in heathen circles that I shrugged them off for years, and I’ve seen them repeated on almost every heathen page and social media group I’ve ever encountered. Claiming “Ostara was stolen from us” or Europeans are just “better suited” for the old pagan beliefs isn’t just bad scholarship– it’s racist. Pure and simple. Which leads me to, finally–

A lot of heathens okay “racism lite” without a second thought, but it was low-key racism that got us into this disaster in the first place.  The same people who cry “those aren’t real heathens” every time a heathen commits an act of terrorism often okay a kind of “racism lite” that  makes this religion a gateway to more extreme groups and mindsets. Most people aren’t going to go from upstanding citizens to swastika-waving neo nazis overnight, but heathen discourse– a discourse that triumphs “honoring the folk,” “protecting our people,” being a real heathen man or woman, claiming “heritage not hate” about symbols and runes used by extremist groups– paves the road from normal to nazi, and it’s something we all need to face. You don’t need to be “trying to reclaim” swastikas, for example; you need to be focusing on the kind of damage swastika-wearers have done and still do and try to fix the problem. You shouldn’t be yelling on the sidelines and insisting that you have a right to your culture, too, while native people and other PoC are trying to talk about how their cultures were actively erased and appropriated. You shouldn’t use totally justified news articles about extremism in the heathen community to call your religion oppressed while most of you just shrug at the idea of a Muslim ban.

 If you think not being able to wear a swastika or othala rune even though ~it’s our heritage~ is on par with the actual discrimination PoC face, you are part of the problem. “Taking back the swastika” hasn’t reclaimed the symbol; it has normalized it. Narratives of European nativism and cries to protect European heritage in the heathen community might not always be at the level of Stormfront material, but they sure look like stepping stone in that direction. And you know, the shit that has gone down these past few years– the rise of the alt-right, the election of Donald Trump and other far-right leaders worldwide– it hasn’t all been “Heil Hitler!” types causing these issues. For every one extremist there’s hundreds who are kind of in the “I just want to protect white people” boat, or even the “I will look the other way when I see racism because I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker” boat. And you know what? Those people are just as much to blame for what’s happened as the ones out there waving Nazi flags.  

In short, the bottom line is “keeping frith” with racists or supporting the idea that white culture and gods are somehow in danger is just as bad as being a Neo Nazi. And there’s a lot of it, a disgusting amount of it, in the heathen community.

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

I did a 5th Step (a semi-confessional life story) with my sponsee: he told me some really heavy shit (incest, childhood fights that turned into court cases, a bully breaking his arm, being locked in solitary for 3 weeks straight, schizophrenia & mental hospitals, “Jesus work camp” aka rehab, illegal halfway houses that were better than the licensed ones.)