Throughout the years that I have been studying and practicing the occult I have found the use of sigils to be the simplest and most effective of all magickal methods, for me. Not only can one throw together a simple sigil in a short amount of time, there can be hardly any work involved, in either the making or the 'casting' of the sigil.

A sigil is simply a symbol made through the combinations of letters found in a statement of intent/desire or in the name of a deity or such. After the image, or glyph, is made one can ' fire off ' or charge the sigil through a variety of techniques.

Now I will be stepping on a few toes here, by not fully agreeing with what some of the geniuses of the occult world have said about sigils, these including the likes of Austin Osman Spare, Frater U.'.D.'., and Peter Carroll (too name a few). Most people who use sigils use them as an autosuggestive tool and feel they must be 'burned' into the unconscious and later forgotten about to effectively work. I don't necessarily agree with that. As I have said before in other writings, magick is about individuality, there are no clear cut rules and/or techniques for everyone. One must use what they learn and acquire from writings and other sources in a way that best suits them. Therefore, the techniques that I will discuss in this essay will be ones that I have used and know have worked for me.

For me, a sigil is just another focusing tool for the Will, as is any other magickal paraphernalia. The focusing of the will is found while making the sigil and the actual transference of the Will is occurring during the 'firing off ' or casting of the sigil.

A sigil is started with a simple statement of intent/desire. It has been said by others that this statement should not include any negatives, for the unconscious cannot decipher them and the opposite of what one desired may be the outcome. I personally, as far as I remember, have never tried to make a sigil using negatives, so I do not know how that would effect the outcome for me, Ii guess it is best for one to decide beforehand how they feel about that, before attempting it themselves.

Simply, start with a statement of what you want to occur or gain. I have seen many variations of the wording of these statements beginning with: It is my intent... or It is my Will.... or It is my desire... etc. For now I will use "It is my Will...". So your statement would look something like this:

"It is my Will to ace my trigonometry exam" (for practice purposes only)

This leaves you with the letters: ItsmyWloacergnx or itsmywloacergnx

From here you go about making a simplified image consisting of overlapping the letters so that it soon forms an image that is indistinguishable from the original sentence. Note that the letter M can also be an upside down W or a sideways E, so neither of those letters need to appear more then once in the image. See figure 2.

Here is a very simplified version of the sigil, believe it or not all the letters from the statement of intent/desire can be found within it, yet it is impossible to tell that it originally came from that sentence.

Usually I will add a little bit to the sigil by extending some lines out and capping them with an arrow or a circle, just to add a little bit of myself to it. I really don't know how that idea came to me, I just began doing it one day while making a sigil, and it stuck. See figure 3.

fig. 3