Sigil Witchery Read online

  O (name of spirit or deity), come to me

  By candlelight and altar still.

  Bring your power and your will.

  Guide my hand with steady line.

  Draw tonight your sigil fine.

  You can repeat this up to three times if you feel compelled to do so.

  Set your pen to paper, and let your drawing arm become loose and relaxed. Your hand may begin to move to perform automatic writing—let it do its thing, just make sure it stays on the paper. You may start to see shapes in your mind’s eye, and be compelled to let your hand trace them out. Both are likely options. Just take your time and don’t rush it or try to over-correct or analyze it as it happens. Once you feel you have reached the end, close the sketchbook and express your gratitude and appreciation to the energy you have worked with. Extinguish the candle and clear your space.

  I recommend performing this ritual one to two hours before you normally go to bed. Then you can see if you get any more information in your sleep. In the morning, center yourself, open up your sketchbook and consider the drawings, and compare them to anything else you might have seen in your dreams. From there, meditate upon the images and craft the sigil.

  Sigils in Motion

  Though this is not exactly easy to cover in a book format, I want to talk a little about incorporating sigils into movement. As someone who is also a professional dancer, I wholly believe that incorporating movement into ritual is a powerful way to embody magick. One of my favorite things to teach is how to use very basic movements to make a stronger mind-body-spirit connection and get some amazing results. When you’re aware of your entire body, from your toes and heels to the top of your head and out to your fingertips, it’s so much easier to be engaged with what you’re doing. The human body dancing is also all about making shapes in space. You can draw lines and waves with your hands, arms, and legs, trace circles and figure eights with your hips, and so much more.

  With this in mind, you could use part or all of your body (depending on your range of movement) to “draw” your sigil. The easiest way would be to use your hand or arm to trace it into the air in front of you. You can “walk” your sigil—tracing it out in steps either by memory or by drawing it on the ground with chalk or etching it into a sandy beach, then walking it like you would a labyrinth. Just make it big enough to do this easily. Also, if you know when you start designing your sigil that you plan on walking it, then it may be very helpful to consider that during the design process so it’s easier to move through. You can think about the different parts of the sigil as you process through them—or better yet, just focus on the overall message as you walk it.

  Sigils in Motion

  But before you do anything with your body, be sure to be present in it first. That may sound silly or obvious, but it’s far too easy to just go through the motions versus actively feeling what you’re doing with your body. I have included here an outline of what I cover when I teach this in person. (If you need more visual or audible help, check out my DecoDance DVD. I cover this exercise in my points for posture, as well as teach a lot of small and large movements you can use to embody a sigil. It also has an accompanying CD of music to work with. Okay, shameless self-promotional bit over!)

  Be Present in Your Body Exercise

  To start: if possible, get in a standing position, ideally without shoes on (socks are fine). If you’re unable to stand, sitting will work too. You may find it helpful to put on some instrumental music with a slow and steady beat, or one that builds slowly to a speed that’s comfortable for you. Most importantly, listen to your body, and don’t do anything that feels uncomfortable or hurts.

  1) First, take a deep breath and let it out over a count of three to four seconds. Take a second deep breath and let it out over a count of six seconds. Then take a third deep breath, and slowly let it out for a count of about eight seconds.

  2) Next focus on your feet. Rock your weight so that you shift from toes to balls to heels and back, slowly and gently. (If you’re seated, then flex at your ankles to roll your feet against the floor in the same manner.) Think about the temperature and texture of the floor as you make contact with it.

  3) Bring your focus from your feet up to your ankles and calves, slowly shifting, squeezing and releasing the muscles in your calves.

  4) Next softly bend and gently straighten your knees, without locking them in either position. Think fluid and rolling, like floating on water over small waves.

  5) From your knees, think about the front of your thighs (quads) and your backside (glutes). It often helps to place your hands on these parts of yourself, thinking about how they feel as you squeeze those muscles. (How many ritual exercises include grabbing hold of your own butt?)

  6) Move on up to your hips and make sure your pelvis is in a neutral position—not over-extended to the front or overly tucked up in the back like a duck. You can do this by engaging your lower abdominal muscles (as if someone made a motion to punch you in the stomach and you flinched to protect yourself) or by placing your hand on the base of your spine, fingers pointing down. If your fingers are pointing straight down to the floor, you’re pretty close to neutral.

  7) Check back in with the rest of your body that we’ve covered so far—feet, calves, knees, quads, and glutes—then focus on your belly. Take a deep breath in and visualize your navel as a “receiving area”—like an ear that is listening to the world.

  8) Then move your focus up to your chest, where your sternum (breastbone) is. Take a deep breath in and visualize projecting out from your chest—seeing it as the “speaking zone” as you exhale. Make sure your shoulders are not hunched forward or pushed too far back. You should be able to get a nice deep breath if they’re in the correct position.

  9) Now shift your attention from your chest up through the center of your neck to your head, and expand out of the top of your head, thinking of reaching up into the sky. Then breathe in again and send the breath down your spine back to your toes. You should feel a sense of connection from the top of your head all the way down to your feet.

  10) Take one more deep breath in and visualize energy moving up from your toes, knees, hips, chest, and out your arms all the way to your fingertips. Allow yourself to reach fully out and up with your arms, being aware of your entire arm—shoulder to elbow to wrist to fingers. Now you are fully in your body and ready to move!

  Whether or not you decide to put your sigil into motion, I still recommend doing this exercise. Once you’ve got the order down, it’s something you can do in just a couple minutes, every day. It can be helpful as part of a morning balancing routine to get you moving. Or you can use it at the end of the day before you go to bed to calm your mind. It’s a fantastic exercise to practice with a group before doing any sort of group working or ritual.

  Comparing Sigil Methods

  Before we end this chapter and get into the technical aspects of sigil witchery, I would like to talk a bit about why this method is so effective—not just for me, but for all the other people I have taught it to.

  First, sigil witchery is a system I have developed intuitively over the years through the combination of my fine art training and personal practice of Modern Traditional Witchcraft. When you study art history extensively—looking at how, where, and why art has been made by humans all over this planet—you begin to get a sense of why we create and the power that is inherent in art. Then when you study the history and practice of folkloric and mythic Witchcraft in its many forms all over the world, you see similar correlations. We seek to influence ourselves, our society, and the world we live in—to exchange power and energy with it. We have been doing this since we first began looking at life in more abstract ways: wondering why we are here, what is life, what is death, what is the meaning of everything, who made us? That is the lens through which I view both art making and witchery.

  That is to say my relationship with sigils devel
oped differently from what’s standard for occultists. I’ve never been into ceremonial magic, and I’m not shy about saying that. However, when studying the development of modern Witchcraft, Wicca, and Neo-Paganism in general, I thoroughly researched the societies and systems that fed into them: Agrippa, alchemy, Blavatsky, Crowley, the Golden Dawn, Freemasonry, and on down the rest of the alphabet. I understand and appreciate them for what they are, but give me folklore, ecstatic practices, and the immediacy of getting my hands dirty with pigments and roots without the extra trappings.

  And while I have heard about chaos magic for years, my gut reaction to it is similar to that of ceremonial magic. I can appreciate the theories and sentiments, but a lot of the personalities and pontifications wrapped around them really have turned me off repeatedly. It wasn’t until after people started asking me to teach my method of crafting sigils that I had to go look at the more commonly known approaches—mainly those popularized by Peter J. Carroll’s and Kenneth Grant’s writings based on the work of artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (AOS). Spare apparently became disillusioned with ceremonial magic and personality occultists after dealing with Crowley—which makes me wonder what he would think of that branch of occultism today. Looking at the history and scope of Spare’s art and interests, I think that his own personal approach to crafting sigils was probably very much related to mine. His work is extremely organic, layered, and visionary in nature. I have a theory that as he was largely surrounded by wordsmiths and intellectual folks who were not artists, he was asked about how he did what he did. (Oh yay, the dreaded “explain your art” question!) And so I think he developed some instructions that would work better for them and sound more concrete than “I just did what came naturally to me.”

  In fact, after I had the revelation about Spare’s method while writing the first draft of this book, I decided to see if I could find out more about my hunch. It seemed so obvious to me, but maybe I was wrong? I found some quotes taken from Spare’s The Book of Pleasure referenced online in various places by chaos magicians that seemed counter-intuitive to my theory. Then I got hold of a copy of this book to read in its entirety. It’s quite clear to me that it is definitely something a passionate, esoterically inspired artist would pen in his mid-twenties, trying to make his mark on the world. It’s steeped in a blend of vague language, mysticism, and ire. (I think AOS was a far better artist than he was a writer.) It’s easy to see why there are so many different interpretations of his work, because it’s rather convoluted and unclear—but the language clears up immensely once he gets down to talking about sigils in the section “Sigils. Belief with Protection”: “I will now explain their creation and use; there is no difficulty about it, how pure and clear it all is.25 Out of love for my foolish devotees I invented it.”

  BOOM. There it is! Translation: Sigils are such an easy thing for me to do that I don’t even have to think about it. However, I devised a method to try to explain to my buddies how to do it.

  And in the attached note 25, Spare drops the mystical shroud of vague esoteric language and tells it like it is: “By this system, you know exactly what (you believe) your Sigil must relate to. If you used any form stupidly, you might possibly ‘conjure up’ exactly what you did not want—the mother of insanity, or what always happens then, nothing at all. This being the only system, any result other than by it is accidental. Also you do not have to dress up as a traditional magician, wizard or priest, build expensive temples, obtain virgin parchment, black goat’s blood, etc., etc., in fact no theatricals or humbug.”

  Why he didn’t choose to write the rest of the book like he did this note, I don’t know. I’d rather have a drink with Austin, author of snarky note 25, than the Austin who penned the rest of the book (which summons the need to have a drink just to offset the headache one gets reading it).

  To spare you Spare, I’ll summarize my understanding of his writing on sigil crafting. He believed sigils work best by accessing the unconscious mind versus actively fixating on an idea. According to him, sigils are best crafted in trancelike states, in a state of extreme exhaustion, or at the moment of sexual release—all points where the conscious mind lets go and the subconscious, unconscious, or non-active thinking side takes over. He thought it best to “erase” the sigil, so that you aren’t constantly thinking about it. I don’t believe he was being so literal about erasing the sigil, meaning that you should destroy or burn it. Rather, I think he means to be in a relaxed state and then, once you’ve done your work, move on as needed. Don’t fret, worry, or get too hung up on it.

  As a visual artist as well as a performer, the various trance/non-thinking states all make perfect sense to me. The more conscious you are of what you’re doing, the more your left brain can inhibit your ability to tap into what you’re doing. The left brain analyzes and picks everything apart, while the right brain revels in sensation, looking at the overall picture instead of the tiny parts.

  Left Brain versus Right Brain?

  Now is the perfect time to look at how the left brain and right brain function. It’s not that we have two different brains in our skulls, or that everything is so cut and dried. Rather, the left/right brain concept is a good way to look at patterns of thinking, how we process information and relate to the world around us.

  Our left brain analyzes the details. It is the center of language and thinking in words, as well as logic, math, and linear explorations. It loves order and facts. The right brain balances it out by thinking in images and looking at the whole picture. It is the center of imagination and creativity, the expressive nonverbal arts, emotions, rhythms, and melodies. Some people are so deeply rooted in one side of their brain that some activities involving the opposite hemisphere can be difficult for them—not impossible, but not exactly comfortable, and it takes some training and practice to overcome that difficulty.

  In 1979, Dr. Betty Edwards published a groundbreaking book on enhancing creativity and improving drawing skills called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. In it, she explores a variety of techniques and exercises that help stimulate and enhance the right brain. It’s packed with some really impressive before and after photos of real work by people utilizing her suggestions. What does this have to do with Spare, and the chaos magicians who modeled sigil technique on his work? I think that he created the initial-letter technique as a way to help jump-start left-brain thinkers. Crafting a statement and then removing all of the vowels and extra consonants from it forces you to look at those letters as shapes. It tasks you with the challenge of making it into an image in a MacGyver moment. To make an image, you need to tap into the right hemisphere and access the most intuitive part of your brain, which is key for magick. It’s a tool to help you get used to thinking about images as having meaning, versus always thinking in words.

  But if you’re already adept at using your right brain, especially for art and magick, then that method is not going to feel very intuitive. It asks you to make a meaningful statement, strip it of meaning, and then reassign meaning to it. It’s very back and forth. However, if you associate words with images, and those images can be merged together to create your sigil, you’re making a straightforward procession from left to right brain. This steady progression from analytical thought to intuitive imagery is what sigil witchery is all about. It feels much more immediate and dynamic.

  It’s like the difference between performing choreography while thinking about it step by step versus actually dancing with the music and feeling the movements. Learning how to do the steps is integral to the process, but you need to be able to connect those steps with feeling and an overarching meaning to give the dance life. And sometimes you need to throw away the choreography and just move to the music.

  With all that said, there’s one very important thing to keep in mind: Everyone grasps information a little differently. There is no wrong approach. They all get you to the same place—just like walking, riding a bicycle, driving a car, or
hopping on a plane can all get you where you need to go. All are forms of transportation, but some may be more efficient or better for time, distance, budget, health, or the environment. Still, they’re all choices in the end. The sigil method that works best and is successful for you will be the right one.

  [contents]

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  11. Cindi May, “A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop,” Scientific American, June 3, 2014, www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop.

  12. Dustin Wax, “Writing and Remembering: Why We Remember What We Write,” www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/writing-and-remembering-why-we-remember-what-we-write.html.

  Chapter 4

  Design Guidance

  Now that we’ve covered marks, shapes, and symbols, and gone in depth about the whys and hows of sigil witchery, we’re going to get inside the designer’s studio (aka the Witch’s cottage). I’m going to share with you what I do to make sigils from a technical standpoint. I’ll also provide tips and tricks to make the process smoother for you to learn and be confident in. We’ll also explore the fabulous world of art supplies so you have a better understanding of what materials you can choose to work with.