Sigil

The word comes from the Latin sigillum, seal, a diminutive of signum. In its historical magical sense, a sigil is the seal attributed to a spiritual entity, to be invoked through ceremonial magic. The Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, a grimoire compiled in the 17th century, lists 72 sigils of the goetic demons. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim in De occulta philosophia (1531) gives several methods for constructing planetary sigils from magic squares. Modern witchcraft uses a broader sense of the word: a sigil is no longer only the seal of an entity, but any graphic symbol charged with an intention formulated by the operator.

The modern use of the sigil as a tool of intention magic is largely attributable to Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), a British artist and magician. Spare developed a method in The Book of Pleasure (1913): formulating a desire as a sentence, removing repeated letters, then graphically combining the remaining letters into a single symbol. The sigil thus obtained is memorized, charged through an altered state of consciousness (orgasm, exhaustion, meditation), then consciously forgotten to let the unconscious do the work. Chaos magic, founded by Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin at the end of the 1970s, systematized and popularized this technique. Since the 2010s, the internet has given rise to a culture of digital sigils.

The most common sigil method follows Spare. The practitioner formulates an intention in the affirmative present (I find work that suits me), removes vowels and repeated letters, graphically combines the remaining letters until a satisfying form is reached, and then stylizes it. The sigil is then charged by concentration, and finally forgotten to activate the process. On Tarotoui, the sigil is documented as a contemporary tool of intention magic. The practice is generally considered a tool for symbolic structuring of intention, more than magic in the literal sense. Many practitioners insist on the psychological dimension.

The psychological reading of the sigil sees the practice as a technique of structured autosuggestion comparable to positive affirmations. Confusing modern sigil (personal intention) and traditional sigil (seal of a specific entity) is a simplification. Note also that generic shared sigils found on the internet do not work according to the personal method: the supposed efficacy lies in the subjective investment of the operator, not in the isolated symbol.