Creating a sigil is a four-step magickal technique: craft a precise statement of your desire, condense it into a unique symbol, charge it with energy, and then release it from your conscious mind. It’s a foundational practice in results-based magick, designed to bypass rational thought and program your subconscious to manifest a specific goal.
Defining Your Statement of Intent
The effectiveness of your sigil depends entirely on a clear, powerful, and well-phrased statement of intent. This is the foundational command you’ll be encoding. Your statement isn’t a passive wish; it’s an active declaration of will. When writing it, adhere to a few simple but crucial rules:
- Phrase it Positively. State what you want to bring into being, not what you want to remove. Instead of “I will not be anxious,” use a statement like “I AM CALM.”
- Use a Tense of Being or Intent. Frame your statement with an active magickal command. Phrases like “I AM…” or “I WILL…” are far more effective than “I want…” or “I hope…” which imply lack.
- Be Specific but Unrestricted. Your goal should be clear, but avoid over-specifying the details of how it should manifest, as this can block unexpected avenues of success. For example, a statement like I AM IN CONTROL OF MY MIND is direct and powerful.
Designing and Condensing the Sigil
This stage transforms your linguistic command into a purely symbolic glyph, stripping it of conscious baggage and making it easier for your subconscious to accept. The most common method, derived from the work of Austin Osman Spare, is a straightforward process of reduction and combination.
- Write the Statement. Start with your crafted intent in uppercase: I AM IN CONTROL OF MY MIND.
- Remove Vowels. Delete all the vowels (A, E, I, O, U, Y) from the phrase:
M N CNTRL F MY MND. - Remove Repeated Consonants. Go through the remaining letters and cross out any duplicates, leaving you with only one of each:
M N C T R L F D. - Combine and Stylize. Now, take these unique letters and combine them into a single, abstract design. Overlay them, twist them, and connect them until they are no longer recognizable as individual letters. The final aesthetic isn’t important; what matters is that you’ve created a unique glyph that represents your will.
Charging and Activating the Sigil
Charging is the act of firing the sigil’s intent into your subconscious mind. This requires bypassing your rational “psychic censor” through an altered state of consciousness, or gnosis. This can be achieved through a dramatic peak experience or through a slow, subtle absorption over time.
- Excitatory gnosis involves high-energy methods. You can achieve it through wild dancing, drumming, intense exercise, breathwork, or any activity that builds to a climactic, thought-extinguishing peak. At that moment of release, you visualize the sigil intensely, effectively burning it into your deeper mind.
- Inhibitory gnosis involves low-energy methods of deep calm. This is achieved through prolonged meditation and focus, where the mind becomes so still that all internal chatter ceases. In that profound silence, you hold the sigil in your mind’s eye, letting it sink gently and unopposed into your subconscious.
- Indifferent vacuity is a third, passive method of achieving gnosis. Instead of a single peak moment, this technique charges the sigil through prolonged, casual exposure. The idea is to place the sigil where you will see it so often that your conscious mind stops noticing it, allowing the symbol to slip directly into the subconscious.
Forgetting and Releasing the Sigil
Regardless of the charging method used, the final and most critical step is to release the sigil and its associated desire from your conscious mind. This act prevents your lust for result—the conscious craving and anxiety about the outcome—from interfering with the magickal working. Achieving this state of non-attachment is paramount.
For sigils charged with excitatory or inhibitory gnosis, the release is often best achieved through an immediate, symbolic act. Destroying the physical sigil by burning, tearing, or burying it provides a clean psychological break, signaling to your mind that the operation is complete.
For the indifferent vacuity method, the release is integrated into the charging. You achieve this state of non-attachment by normalizing the sigil’s presence until it becomes mundane. You can use it as a PC wallpaper, stick it on the wall for a few weeks, or even tattoo it on your hand. Once you no longer consciously notice it, the work is done, and the physical copy (if temporary) can be removed.
Summary & Protips
While the core process of intent, condensation, and charging is the basic engine of sigil magick, the truly advanced practitioner treats the sigil not as a static spell, but as a living piece of psychic technology. The focus shifts from merely launching the intent to considering its entire lifecycle, its interaction with other workings, and its relationship with time itself. The sigil becomes less of a fire-and-forget missile and more of a self-executing code, an acausal messenger, or even a temporary psychic virus designed to rewrite a specific line in the program of reality.
Here are some extra protips for you to take advantage of:
- For complex goals, use “sigil shoaling”: launch a swarm of smaller, single-purpose sigils, each handling one specific aspect of the larger intent. It’s similar to, but slightly differs from hypersigils.
- Create “living sigils” that are designed to be redrawn or modified daily or weekly for a set period, turning the enchantment into an evolving process.
- Program your sigil with a “death sentence”: a secondary instruction for its residual energy to be consumed by another sigil or a servitor upon successful manifestation.
- Observe the “retro-temporal echo”; notice how the solution to your sigil’s goal was often already in motion before you even cast it, and learn to trust this effect.
- Use a “decoy sigil” for a minor, acceptable failure right before your main working to deliberately misdirect and exhaust your psychic censor’s doubt.
- Experiment with “glitch sigils” by creating them from nonsensical or grammatically broken statements of intent to further confuse and bypass the logical mind.
- Instead of destroying a sigil, you can “bury” it in a piece of art or a story, allowing it to charge slowly through your creative engagement with the larger work.
Common Questions
Q: Does my sigil have to be artistic or look good?
No, the aesthetic quality of a sigil is irrelevant. Its only purpose is to be a unique, abstract shape that represents your intent to your subconscious mind.
Q: Are there other methods to create a sigil besides using letters?
Yes, you can also use the pictorial method by drawing a simple picture of your desired outcome and stylizing it, or a mantra method by creating and chanting a condensed version of your intent.
Q: Why is it so important to destroy the sigil after a peak-moment charging?
Destroying the sigil after charging it is a symbolic act that aids in consciously “forgetting” the working, which is crucial for preventing lust of result.
Q: What are the most common reasons a sigil might fail to work?
The most common reasons for failure are a poorly phrased or contradictory statement of intent, the magician’s own lust of result interfering with the manifestation, or unrealistic intent.
Q: Can I have multiple sigils active at the same time?
Yes, in fact, having several sigils active at once is a classic technique to combat lust of result, as it spreads your focus and makes it harder to obsess over any single outcome.
Q: Can I create a sigil to influence or control another person?
While technically possible, attempting to override another person’s will is very hard to achieve and often backfires in unexpected ways; it is generally advised to focus your magick on yourself and your own circumstances.
Q: Does a sigil’s effect have an expiration date?
This depends entirely on the intent. A sigil to find a specific lost object completes its task and becomes inert once the object is found, whereas a sigil to learn a new skill can create a permanent change in your abilities.
Q: If I use the “wallpaper method” (indifferent vacuity), do I ever need to recharge that sigil?
No, the wallpaper method is a form of slow, continuous charging through constant, casual exposure. It does not require a separate, peak-moment recharge; its power builds as your conscious mind learns to ignore it, allowing it to sink into the subconscious over time.