Sigils are a natural follow up to Words of Power, because you create a sigil straight from your Word of Power, so if you haven't read that yet, this will give you an idea where we're picking up from.
History of Sigils
Sigils are a key part of my technique, because they by themselves can be a symbol of a whole goal. A sigil is one symbol that can represent anything you can capture in language. Most often, just like with Words of Power, this will be a sentence, but you can use this to embody through symbol an entity or spirit that you work with, yourself or a target as a taglock, and I often find this more powerful than the raw name. In fact, sigils of angels and the like were often in older systems created using something like this method or this one. Thanks to the authors of both of those links, for writing those instructions. I don't use either method much anymore, and I'd likely be a bit rusty.
So today we're going to focus on a heavily modified version of the Chaos Magic / Spare method of making sigils. I find that it's approachable for everyone, and there's certainly a reason folks picked it up. This is a system that's often uncredited, so just so everyone has an option to learn more about Spare and this system, here's a link to the Esoterica YouTube channel's episode on Spare. Justin over at Esoterica is wonderful. He's not a practitioner, the easiest way I can describe him is a scholar of the esoteric, and he really knows his stuff.
The technique
So, I'm going to pick up with a different statement of intent here. different Words of Power. Partially for magic reasons, and partly because this is one I ended up needing anyway, so it was easy to do. So, here our Words of Power are: NYTAL RIPOSH MOX DOGI
Now comes the fun part. All we do here is stack letters on top of each other. Normally I'd do this all in one step without redrawing, but this way you can see the steps.
So, here you can see all the steps. Notice in step 2. I added a line to the middle of the I. That's to be a mark that does SOMETHING for the H. That's personal to me, and I've never seen anyone else do it, I don't think, but I find it very effective. Also note that in step 6, I tweaked the line from step 5 just a little, to get them to fit right. That's right in line with what we'll get to in a second.
The art
So now that that's done, we can move on to the part that I think is fun. What we have at this point is fine, but it's also kind of dry, and doesn't flow well. If magick is art and science, we've done the science, so now we add the art to our sigil.
When creating your sigil, also think of the ways you're going to use it. This sigil might be better off split into a couple, maybe one for each new word, if you want to draw it in the air, or carve it on a small candle. This one is particularly complex, so better suited for things that you can really see what you're doing. We'll go over different ways to use our sigils in the next article.
Hope that clears up at least one method of using sigils, and shows that it's not as hard as it seems sometimes.
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