Sigil Magic: The Word Method, Pictorial and Mantric Sigils

Sigil magic, in its modern sense, is the practice of condensing a desire into an abstract graphic sign, "charging" it in a state of focused or emptied attention, and then deliberately forgetting it. The classic form is the word method published by Austin Osman Spare in 1913, in which the letters of a written intention are reduced and combined into a monogram; chaos magicians later added pictorial, sound-based and other variants, all built on the same psychological model.

Origins of the Modern Sigil Method§

Signs called seals, characters or sigils have been part of Western magic since antiquity, as the overview Sigils: History from Solomonic Seals to Spare explains. Most of those older signs represented a spirit, planet or divine name and were copied from books. The modern sigil is different: it is made by the practitioner, for a single purpose, and represents nothing outside the practitioner's own intention.

This idea comes from Austin Osman Spare, whose Book of Pleasure (1913) described sigils as a means of planting a desire in the deep self while keeping it out of the anxious conscious mind. Spare's book was little read for decades. Its method returned to prominence in the late 1970s, when Ray Sherwin's The Book of Results (1978) and Peter J. Carroll's Liber Null presented it as the basic technique of what became chaos magick. From there it entered almost every strand of contemporary occultism, from Wicca to online eclectic practice.

The Word Method Step by Step§

The word method is the version most often described in manuals, and the Spellbook's entry on sigil magic after Spare and Carroll gives it as a practical exercise. In outline it has three stages.

The statement of intent§

The practitioner first writes the desire as a short, positive sentence, often in a set form such as "It is my will to…" or "This my wish…" (Spare's own phrasing). Manuals stress that the sentence should be specific and should describe an outcome rather than a feeling of lack; Sherwin and Carroll both emphasised clarity of intent as the precondition for any result.

Reducing the letters§

Next, repeated letters are struck out, leaving each letter only once; some teachers also remove vowels. The remaining letters are no longer readable as the sentence, which is the point: the link between the sign and its meaning is meant to be obscured.

Building the monogram§

Finally, the remaining letters are combined into a single design. Strokes are shared, letters are rotated, reversed or nested, and the figure is simplified until it looks like an abstract emblem. Practitioners usually add flourishes or remove recognisable shapes until the sigil no longer "reads" as letters at all.

Charging, Gnosis and Forgetting§

A sigil, in this tradition, does nothing until it is charged. Spare located the charge in moments when ordinary thought is suspended, such as exhaustion, ecstasy or the "death posture". Carroll called such states "gnosis" and divided them into inhibitory forms (stillness, meditation, fixed staring, sleeplessness) and excitatory forms (dance, chanting, sexual arousal, strong emotion). During that state the practitioner focuses on the sigil, often until an image of it persists when the eyes close.

The second, equally important element is forgetting. Spare argued that the conscious desire for an outcome works against it; the "lust of result" keeps the wish in the anxious, doubting mind. So after charging, the sigil is usually destroyed, burnt, hidden or mixed among others until the practitioner can no longer remember which sign meant what. Some practitioners make a batch of sigils, set them aside for weeks, and charge them only when their meanings have faded.

These descriptions are given as practitioners give them. Whether sigils produce any effect beyond the psychological is a matter of belief, and magic of this kind is no substitute for practical, medical or financial help.

Pictorial Sigils and Visual Magick§

Spare's own work suggested that letters were only one possible starting point. In Practical Sigil Magic, first published in German in the 1980s and in English in 1990, the German magician Frater U∴D∴ (Ralph Tegtmeier) distinguished several further types. The pictorial sigil starts from simple images connected with the desire, for example a key, a door and a road, and combines and stylises them into a compact figure until the source images are no longer obvious.

The German-born writer Jan Fries pushed this further in Visual Magick (1992), drawing on Spare's automatic drawing. His "freestyle" approach treats sigils as intuitive scribbles produced in trance, refined by repetition until the hand produces a sign that feels right. In this approach the method of construction matters less than the practitioner's sense that the form carries the intention.

Some practitioners also borrow older techniques: tracing a name across a planetary magic square, as described in Magic Squares and Planetary Seals, or across the Golden Dawn's rose, explained in Rose-Cross Sigils. These methods produce a line rather than a monogram, and their users often combine them with the chaos-magic idea of charging and forgetting.

Mantric Sigils and Other Variants§

The mantric sigil translates the same principle into sound. The letters of the reduced sentence are rearranged into nonsense syllables, which are chanted until they become a rhythmic, meaningless formula. Frater U∴D∴ compared the result to the "barbarous words" of older magic, whose very strangeness was thought to give them power, and to the repetitive mantras of Asian traditions.

Other variants have multiplied with the spread of chaos magic:

• Sigil batteries and alphabets: following Spare's alphabet of desire, practitioners design a personal set of signs for recurring aims and combine them.
• Gestural and bodily sigils: movements or postures performed in trance as carriers of an intention.
• Digital sigils: designs made on screens, built into animations or images, or produced by "sigil generator" software.
• Collective sigils: a design shared among many people who charge it together, an approach associated with Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth and with later online campaigns described in Hypersigils and Modern Sigil Culture.

The sigil is also sometimes used as the "body" or link of a servitor, a semi-independent entity created for a task, which extends the method from a single wish to an ongoing process.

How Practitioners and Scholars Explain Sigils§

Most chaos magicians explain sigils in psychological terms, though they hold the explanation loosely, in keeping with the movement's view of belief as a tool discussed in What Is Chaos Magick?. The common model holds that the conscious mind generates doubt and contradictory desires, whereas the unconscious can act on a clear instruction if that instruction reaches it in a form the conscious mind does not recognise. The sigil, the altered state and the forgetting are designed together to deliver it.

Others prefer more traditional language: the sigil links to a spirit, a current or an "information field". Carroll himself proposed a speculative "magical equation" in Liber Kaos (1992) that treated magic as probability manipulation. These accounts are internal to the practice.

Scholars of religion approach the subject from outside. Anthropologists such as T. M. Luhrmann, in her study of English magicians, described how practitioners learn to interpret events through a magical framework, so that outcomes are read as confirming the work. Psychologists would point to priming, attention, and the tendency to remember hits rather than misses. Historians emphasise the method's novelty: despite its use of the old word "sigil", it is a twentieth-century technique shaped by modern ideas of the unconscious rather than an ancient tradition.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the word method of sigil magic?§

The word method writes an intention as a sentence, removes repeated letters, and combines the remaining letters into a single abstract design. It was described by Austin Osman Spare in 1913 and popularised by chaos magicians from the late 1970s.

Why do practitioners forget their sigils?§

Spare argued that conscious longing for an outcome, the "lust of result", interferes with it. Forgetting the sigil after charging is meant to leave the intention to the unconscious, free of doubt and anxious checking.

What are pictorial and mantric sigils?§

A pictorial sigil combines simple images related to a desire into one stylised figure. A mantric sigil turns the letters of an intention into a chant of meaningless syllables. Both were systematised by Frater U∴D∴ in Practical Sigil Magic.

Is sigil magic an ancient practice?§

The word "sigil" and the use of magical signs are ancient, but the specific method of turning a personal desire into a monogram and charging it in an altered state dates from Austin Osman Spare in the early twentieth century.

Sources and further reading§

• The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy — Austin Osman Spare, 1913
• The Book of Results — Ray Sherwin, 1978
• Liber Null & Psychonaut — Peter J. Carroll, 1987
• Liber Kaos — Peter J. Carroll, 1992
• Practical Sigil Magic — Frater U∴D∴, 1990
• Visual Magick: A Manual of Freestyle Shamanism — Jan Fries, 1992
• Condensed Chaos — Phil Hine, 1995
• Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England — T. M. Luhrmann, 1989