Wish Granting Squiggles
Magic works in practice but not in theory.
peter j. carroll
If you have picked up this book for reasons other than familiarity with my blog, Rune Soup, then I should probably tell you that sigils are its accidental spécialité de la maison. If you have picked up the book because you are familiar with my blog, then this is likely the chapter you skipped to while standing in the store. Buy the damn book already.
For better or for worse, sigil magic has come to be seen as the defining technique of the chaos system. For much of my magical career, I wasn’t that interested in it. Firstly, the most famous—but by no means only—method of sigil activation involved masturbation and this seemed to my teenage mind to be a waste of a good wank. (If I only had time for five or six a day, why spend one on magic?) Secondly, I had sunk all this money into pendants and wands and incense and trinkets—you try getting High John the Conquerer in regional Australia pre-Internet—so why would I put all that effort aside for just pen and paper? It seemed so unwizardly.
The thread running through my misconceptions was probably due to a personal failure to consider sigil magic in its wider historical context—a failure that remains visible in the occult world to this day. We shall endeavour to correct that by beginning—inevitably—at the beginning.
Leaving aside their myriad ways of construction and enchantment, what a sigil ultimately “is” is a pictographic representation of an idea or outcome. There are repeating patterns of red ochre paint found in caves in southern Africa that are one hundred millennia old, giving us our earliest known evidence of what is called symbolic thinking … which means having one thing represent something else. On the surface, that may sound like a simplistic development, but it is the original act of sorcery from which all others come and is as good a point as any from which to date the emergence of humans into full consciousness. Having a thing stand in for another thing is a deliberate act of creation that is exceedingly rare. The Pacific octopus may be highly intelligent and possessed of its own language of body movements and pigment changes, but they don’t tend to write too many off-Broadway shows. (I would spend more time at the theatre if they did!)
Thus sigil magic techniques as most commonly found in chaos magic are a direct continuation of that first act of sorcery. They have been rendered down and had the intervening thousands and thousands and thousands of years—the hieroglyphs of Egypt, the defixiones of Rome, the seals of the grimoire spirits, the symbols of the planets—cooked off, leaving only the magician and his or her symbolic capacity. In many ways it is an outrageous act of vandalism and probably one of the main reasons why sigil magic—and chaos magic—remain so persistently unpopular in the wider occult discourse.
Unpopular though it may be, it possesses a huge advantage over any other form of popular enchantment: iteration speed. It was the realisation of this advantage that triggered my come-to-Jesus with sigil magic and led to—may I humbly submit—my own contribution to its ongoing canon. Let me explain what I mean by iteration speed.
In 1959, British Industrialist Henry Kremer founded the eponymous Kremer Prize, administered by the Royal Aeronautical Society, which continues to this day (there are two prizes remaining). The first two prizes were both for human-powered flight: one for the first machine that could fly a figure-of-eight between two markers a half-mile apart and the second for one that could cross the English Channel. More than a decade of failed attempts went by before a would-be competitor named Paul MacCready turned his mind to the challenge. MacCready realised that the problem that needed to be solved was not human-powered flight. The problem was that no one understood the problem. Previous applicants would spend up to a year building a flying machine only to have it fail and send them quite literally back to the drawing board. The speed of learning was too slow. Other applicants were not building on enough new data in between their attempts. MacCready discovered that the real challenge that needed solving was one of iteration speed: how to build a machine that could attempt flight, fail and be quickly modified to try again. Pursuing a big goal in large, single attempts—with only a limited understanding of all the intervening complexities—was not going to get the job done fast enough. So MacCready solved a different problem: how can you design a flying machine that can be rebuilt in hours instead of weeks or months? He and his team went on to solve this challenge and in the late seventies won both the figure-of-eight prize and the English Channel prize, netting the equivalent of $3.8 million in today’s money.
In the modern world, whether you achieve your goals or not depends on how you navigate the intervening complexity between where you are and where you want to be. Processes and outcomes have become infinitely more complicated. In previous eras you would enchant for a good harvest, a largely binary event over which you have minimal intervening control (hence recourse to sorcery). Getting yourself from the family home in the suburbs of Arizona to a super-yacht moored off a Croatian island or whatever your goal happens to be requires significantly more steps and a healthy appetite for iteration. Sigils often provide the best opportunity to solve the real problem.
Sigils and Psychology
As practiced today, sigil magic is a modification of a system created by Austin Osman Spare, a twentieth-century London occultist and only latterly celebrated artist. He was exploring some cutting-edge psychological theories that are now more than a century old and require revisiting. Spare’s hypothesis was that all magic manifested via processes in the unconscious mind which only spoke the language of symbols and emotions. The conscious mind—possessed of language and artifice—merely got in the way. Thus the goal of magic was to occupy the conscious mind while sneaking a symbolic request into your unconscious where, left unmolested, it would eventually manifest. Once this was completed, the magician need only ensure they never recall their goal ever again because this would bring it back up from the unconscious into the conscious mind. Unless you are an alcoholic or suffer from a severe mental illness, this is functionally impossible … particularly if the goal is something like “money to buy food to feed my children.” Your conscious mind has a tendency to notice when these kinds of goals go unfulfilled.
With the dubious benefit of an extra century of psychological and psychiatric research, Spare’s operating hypothesis can be improved upon … although he should certainly be congratulated for getting more right than he did wrong. Firstly, the divide between the unconscious and the conscious is not nearly as clean-cut as Spare presumed. Many psychologists would go so far as to say it is an entirely illusory—albeit convenient—heuristic. The practical implication is that you will not break the world if you accidentally recall the goal of your enchantment. Indeed, the unencumbered movement of a concept up from your unconscious to your conscious and back again may even improve the likelihood that your enchantment will stick in the same way moving a visual or a fact in between your short- and long-term memory improves overall recall. I unashamedly offer you anecdotal evidence, from my own life no less, that this is indeed the case.
There is a caveat to that first point, and it is actually the entirety of the second point: when it comes to the unconscious only speaking the language of symbols, Spare was definitely onto something. His is a very well-corroborated hypothesis with supporting evidence from studies in sense memory, colour therapy, psychotherapy, neuroscience, as well as pretty much the entire history of art. For occultists, the most useful evidence comes from the kind of experiments into non-local consciousness effects we have encountered in previous chapters. When Dr. Russell Targ ran an experiment using remote viewing to correctly predict silver futures on the commodities exchange nine weeks in a row—making $120,000 and the front page of the Wall Street Journal in the process—he did not have his remote viewers attempt to predict the price swing directly.59 Remote viewing, like all non-local consciousness effects, appears to work better with textures, shapes, and feelings than with numbers and letters. Instead, he got his viewers to describe the object the trader who actually made the silver trade for them would hand to him at the end of the week: a bottle of champagne if silver closed up a lot or a cold pancake if it closed down a lot.
The practical implications of this for magicians working principally via manipulation of their own consciousness is to put some effort into the aesthetics of your spellwork so as not to trigger an “ick” reaction from your unconscious. Here’s that word, again—find an oblique route to your goal … like a sigil.
In whatever tradition you belong to, there is much to be gained from the detailed study of these kinds of experiments. I am of the opinion that the most important magical research performed in the twentieth century happened outside the insular world of ceremonial magic and it has only been in the last decade or so that this has started to come to light. The surface remains almost entirely unscratched.
Classic Sigil Construction
Never in my life did I think I would be in a situation where I could quote myself (speaking of masturbation), but seeing as the post on Rune Soup in question has been viewed almost a quarter of a million times since publication, why attempt to catch lightning in a bottle twice?
“Classic” is meant in the loosest possible sense, of course. What it really means is “post-Spare.” There is no better introduction to classical sigil construction and chaos magic in general than Grant Morrison’s late nineties gem, “Pop Magic.”
Here is what you do:
Mash the remaining letters into a single (hideous) glyph. Then start amending this glyph until it starts to look more pleasing. I try to make mine look organic or petroglyphic, but that’s a personal preference. Your unconscious is different from mine. (Probably.)
You really can’t get this wrong. Of course, you’ll think you are doing it wrong the first few times. Common concerns include:
Well, it doesn’t need to look like anything. But it works better if it looks pleasing. And only you will know when you get to “pleasing.”
There are some recommended changes to the classic copy construction I have picked up from years of hoodwinking people into buying things they probably don’t need.
Those of you who are familiar with the piece will see my intention with this chapter is to fill in some of the background research and thinking that led to the creation of my sigil creation method. Ensuring your sigils look pleasing, for instance, is based on my interpretation of Stargate Program research suggesting that “enjoyable” and “unenjoyable” are easiest for the unconscious to recognise rather than a personal predisposition for pretty things.
If I were to take this book from your hands and start underlining parts of it, what is most important to keep in mind is using the present tense to describe completed situations. Examples would include “I am a size 8” rather than “It is my will to lose weight.” You see how the latter encodes a lack rather than a success. Using the “lose weight” sentence effectively enchants the desire to be on a diet rather than living at your goal weight!
And while we are at it please, please quit it with the “it is my will” claptrap. The notion of will is a monumentally misunderstood Victorian atavism that bears no relation to what the previous century of personality and consciousness studies has given us. It makes you sound like a stroppy, pompous toddler … and this is coming from a guy who just quoted himself.
Shoaling and Probability
A shoal is a group of fish. When they all swim in the one direction, they are schooling. When they are hanging out for reasons of safety, hydrodynamic efficiency, and general social reasons, they are shoaling. Having grown up in a house overlooking three beaches, been wreck and shark diving all over the Pacific, shot a documentary on a sunken city, and previously worked for Discovery Channel, using “shoal” as my group noun for sigils was probably an inevitability.
The whole notion of launching multiple sigils at once emerged through experimentation with complex magical targets. We presumably have fantasy fiction to thank for the belief that larger goals (more specifically, “lower probability goals”) require the input of larger amounts of sorcerous energy, longer rituals, more expensive sacrifices, and so on. Such a belief, although pleasingly dramatic, does not align very well with what we understand about probability and the very real but small changes consciousness can effect in the physical world. Pete Carroll describes our situation thusly in The Octavo:
Daunting probabilites often appear for complex tasks like winning in war or business or love from a weak initial position; however all of those steps involved in winning may not actually look so impossible individually.
The probability of throwing a dozen heads consecutively comes out at a desperate 0.000024, so only one person in four thousand might achieve it on average. However each individual step has a 0.5 probability and a magician with any sense will choose to attack such steps individually rather than go head to head against such formidable odds.60
Shoaling as a process came out of the realisation that achieving a big goal—such as complete financial independence—was best achieved through the successful eventuation of dozens of smaller, higher probability outcomes. Taking “financial independence” as a hypothetical example, these smaller components could include a promotion for your husband/wife/partner, the resignation of a colleague you are in competition with, improved visibility within your wider industry, improved physical health, and so on. After each successful shoal, the probabilistic “critical path” to the magician’s big goal shifts and he or she reloads and goes again. Consider it the Kremer Prize approach to practical enchantment. If it were simply a matter of throwing more energy at a big problem, then not only would the Aztec civilisation still be around but you would not be reading this book because you would already be wealthy … or at least you would be reading it on the deck of your super-yacht in Croatia. Right away you see how shoaling works in concert with divination: divine for the pitfalls and shoal sigils to nudge for beneficial probabilistic outcomes that avoid or skirt around them. If I had to put the secret of my success such as it is into a single sentence, it would be the previous one.
The initial results of shoaling multiple sigils in the one activation session were orders of magnitude better than anticipated. Based on nothing but personal opinion, I attribute this to an inevitable reduction in lust of result. Recall that Spare believed that keeping your goal, your need, in your conscious mind while attempting to communicate it to the unconscious immediately scuppered your attempt. When you create five or six sigils to launch in the one sitting, it is much easier to consciously forget which particular sigil is encoded with which particular goal. To your eyes, they simply become wish granting squiggles.
With practice, shoaling also improves your magical target selection as you develop an intuitive understanding of the high and low probabilities of preferred outcomes in your life. For instance, if you are struggling with self-image issues, it may be better to enchant for a torrid, extramarital affair than a better haircut and wardrobe because the affair can only eventuate given five or six intervening preferred outcomes. Over time your improved capacity to assess probability and risk bleeds into other areas of your existence. This is the life’s work of a chaos magician: fine-tuning probabilistic dials for fun and profit.
Robofish
Continuing my entirely arbitrary marine metaphors, we turn now to the robofish. The term comes from a 2010 University of Leeds study into fish behaviour. The researchers created a robot stickleback fish and placed it among some live sticklebacks. When the robofish made bold or fast moves, the other fish tended to follow it, providing insight into how shoals form and schools move … it appears that having the robofish behave in a decisive way makes the real fish think it knows something they do not, and so they follow suit.
Folding this idea into sigil magic, in every shoal be sure to include a sigil for an event that is happening or is guaranteed to happen, such as “I eat spaghetti tonight” or “I am in my house.” This sigil is the robofish. In my personal experience, the improvement in preferred sorcerous outcomes is simply night and day. We may speculate some mechanism as to why this may be so. If we are in fact communicating requests to our unconscious, sending a simultaneous request for something that is completed or in the process of being completed with some goals that have yet to be completed may serve as a trigger of where—the physical—and when—the now—the results are expected. Indeed, it was seeking to improve the when that led my discovery of the robofish technique in the first place. I was looking for a way to hasten the arrival of my preferred outcomes which at the time were behaving far too much like standard shipping for my liking.
Sigil Activation
As should be evident by now, I am a proponent of the operating hypothesis that sigils work through some little-explored function of human consciousness (which is not to say I am exclusively a proponent of psychological models of magic). From a practical perspective, that means any suggestions as to how you can activate them will necessarily be limited because it is your unconscious, not mine, that we are seeking to influence.
There is a stereotypical image of a mid-nineties chaos magician spray-painting sigils in a post-industrial wasteland and a more updated stereotype of chaotes—horror of horrors—reblogging each other’s sigils on tumblr. Experimental methods are fine as far as they go—which is often not very far, hence the need for experimentation—but if one is to take this technique seriously, a more stable and reliable launch procedure is required.
Firstly, you need a space that is dramatically and aesthetically pleasing. If you resonate with an eldritch, tentacled mise-en-scène then let that inform how you dress and prepare your ritual space. This is not an off-the-shelf consideration; it will be unique to you. My own preference is for a visual style I might call “South Pacific hoodoo” if I were in the mood to make the whole Internet angry at me. You can only get this wrong by overthinking it.
Step 1
Pre-Ritual Preparation
Typically I use any old pen and paper to generate the five or so sigils I intend to launch. Once I am happy with their designs, I inscribe each finalised sigil on an individual piece of black card or art paper using a gold paint pen. Again, this is for aesthetic reasons. They look lovely in the low light of candles and incense smoke in a darkened room, as if they are positively squirming to get off the paper and into the ether. Definitely visit your nearest art supply store and pick out your own iteration of what “nice” sigils will look like to you. This will depend largely on your own artistic talent. Mine is nonexistent, hence the paint pen.
Once you have your finalised sigils, gather them with the candles, incense, lighters, and anything else you will need in your ritual space.
Step 2
Ritual Opening
It goes without saying that both you and the private space you are using are physically clean. (Or possibly deliberately dirty if you are going for a Constantine vibe.)
Lay out and light your candles and incense and arrange your sigil cards in front of you. Most often I do this sitting or squatting in front of a woven Fijian mat on the floor of my ritual space.
Close your eyes, turn a little to your right and sweep your hand in front of you, visualising grey dust and miasma being swept hundreds of feet away from you, through roofs and walls, as if blasted with a leaf blower, before ultimately dissolving. At the same time, say
HEKAS, HEKAS, ESTE BEBELOI
Continue around in a full circle, sweeping with your hand and repeating the phrase. Go round again if you feel the need. Return to/sit in front of your sigils and candles.
Step 3
Invocation
Every magician needs a magician’s god or goddess. Find a being or beings in your preferred pantheon who are universally regarded for magical prowess. You do not need to select one based on rulership of your main goal; you need one who is all about the magic. We are creating a manifestation space here. Depending on the project and my headspace, my two go-to beings—at least when it comes to gods—are either Isis or the Abrahamic God (reached by aligning oneself with the super-powered folk saints and mythical personalities of the Old Testament).
Let us start with Isis. I regularly use an invocation based on an Isis aretalogy translated in the mid-twentieth century by the biblical scholar Frederick C. Grant. You can instantly find it online by looking for either “Cyme Inscription” or “Isis Aretalogy.” Then it is a simple matter of replacing the repeated instances of “I am” with “thou art.” Nevertheless, once again demonstrating the extreme disconnect between much of the legacy publishing and digital worlds, the copyright was more than difficult to track down so it won’t appear in print here. Instead, I commend to you the opening lines of the Ave Maris Stella, first written in the sixth century, so we are probably fine on the copyright front. Whilst the debate regarding whether Mary is or is not Isis will have you up arguing till sunrise at Pagan parties, Our Lady, Star of the Sea is a fairly transparent borrowing of the Isis of the Late Period. For our purposes, the Ave Maris Stella plugs into the same current in a conveniently copyright-free way.
Ave Maris Stella.
Dei mater alma
Atque semper Virgo
Felix Cœli porta.
Sumens illud “Ave.”
Gabrielis ore
Funda nos in pace,
Mutans Evæ nomen.
Solve vincla reis
Profer lumen cæcis
Mala nostra pelle
Bona cuncta posce.
Option B is the Petropolitanus Academicus invocation as translated by Ioannis Marathakis in his edition of the Hygromanteia. You do not need to use both invocations. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.
Lord our God, Adouni, Elisabaoth, Lamekh, Sante, Lamantou, Khamatan, Tetragrammaton, Beginning and End; holy, holy, holy Lord Sabaoth, the whole heaven and earth are full of your glory; our father which art in heaven, uphold us with your holy names, holy Lord God Sabaoth; by the prayers of the holy forefathers Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Methouselah, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Melchizedek, Joshua the son of Nun, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, David and Jesse, Solomon and Rehoboam; by the prayers of yours saints, O Lord our God, be my saviour, merciful to me, my defender and my assistant. Amen.61
Step 4
Activation
By now you should be in a mildly altered state of consciousness. Sit, relax some more, and look down at your sigils. This is a passive activation method akin to a mandala meditation. Sit and breathe until you are ready to proceed.
Pick up each sigil card in turn and hold it a comfortable distance from your face. Stare at it. Do not rush. Just as in meditation, if your thoughts wander, gently bring them back to the form of the sigil. Look at it as if you are seeing it for the first time. Let your eyes unfocus so that its lines begin to warp and double.
After an indeterminate time, the sigil you are holding will … this is difficult to describe … deflate. The sensation will be as if the object you are holding was previously magical and has gone back to being inert, just a piece of card. When that happens, say the following phrase, put it down and pick up the next sigil.
Does not matter. Need not be.
Continue along this line until all your sigils have activated. Very occasionally you will find one that does not appear to resonate or refuses to “deflate.” Put it down, pick up another one and return to it at the end of the launch. I have no explanation for why this happens, but it does.
Close as appropriate to whatever being you initially invoked.
Step 5
The Aftermath
Austin Spare suggested destroying your sigils once they had been activated which is certainly an option for you if it feels appropriate. But there is a phenomenon I have encountered working in media and advertising known as “low attention processing.” Essentially, it is when you are being advertised to without your conscious awareness that it is happening, and it is probably how most advertising works, as well as why so many ad execs drink so heavily. Even with a single, background exposure to an advertisement, brand preference increases. I know you are thinking this wouldn’t happen to you, but everyone thinks that about advertising. That’s called the “third person effect.” (My people have words for everything.)
Instead of destroying your sigils, I recommend putting them up somewhere visible where they will quickly fade into the background of your daily life. For me this is typically on the mirror in the bedroom, or blu-tacked to a window you walk past every day. If low attention processing is a method of unconscious communication, we may as well attempt to utilise it. There is potentially an additional benefit to this approach which is that, eventually, you genuinely will completely forget what each of those sigils was for. I am looking at a few pasted up on the window in front of me and I honestly have no idea what they are about. These can be removed over time or at random.
One final note. Given that we do not really know the mechanism of action by which sigils actually work I am perhaps being overly superstitious, but using them for curse work or malefica is not recommended. There is a commonly understood psychological concept called priming whereby what you look at or experience influences your state of mind. So people who are exposed to words like “elderly,” “retirement,” and “hip replacement” when filling out surveys actually move slower and with more pain after completing the surveys than those who were not exposed to the same words. However it works, a vengeful or violent phrase, even in sigilised form, probably doesn’t belong floating around in your own unconscious.
Further Implementation
As sigil magic is such a pared-down technique, it naturally lends itself to experimentation. One of the first ones to consider is further altering your consciousness when activating your sigils. A common manifestation of this is to turn your intention into a nonsensical mantra rather than an image via a similar process of removing repeating letters, vowels, and then shifting around what you have left over until it sounds right. Repetitions of the phrase then replace the visual activation method. An extension of this process would be to (legally) alter your state of consciousness via entheogens and other intoxicants. Marijuana works well with mantras, for instance.
In Buddhist areas of the Himalayas, you can often find mani stones, stones inscribed with mantras and left as offerings to spirits of place or to provide protection. Sigils can be used in a similar fashion. Several times I have used my trusty gold paint pen with stones collected on the holy isle of Anglesey and left these along the Thames near my house. Mythopoetically, Thames comes from Thamesis or “Isis” which is actually why I adapted the above aretalogy in the first place; she is the patron goddess of London’s great river. Be considerate going down the mani stone route. Genius loci have their own agendas and existences to lead. They may react ambivalently to you leaving your enchantments around.
One of the more common questions I am asked is what to do if you only have one or two sigils you wish to activate. Here is where you can indulge in some of the flippancy that gives chaos magic such a bad name. There are always pointless things to enchant for: spotting celebrities when you are out on the town, getting a seat on the tube or bus, freebies in restaurants. If these ideas do not take your fancy, then try for something a little more lofty. Consider sigilising holy or empowering phrases such as “every man and every woman is a star.” Even song lyrics will do at a pinch. It is your head after all.