#Manifestation sigil series

Seal of Solomon – Purported magical signet ring of the biblical King Solomon.Runic magic – Magic using runes or runestones.

Icelandic magical staves – Sigils found in ancient Icelandic grimoires.

Ceremonial magic – System of magical rituals drawing from many historical and modern sources.

Behenian fixed star – Fifteen stars with magical significance in medieval astrology.

Apotropaic magic – Magic intended to repel evil.

Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance. The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summoning up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings. They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hairstyles. Morrison has also argued that modern corporate logos like 'the McDonald's Golden Arches, the Nike swoosh and the Virgin autograph' are a form of viral sigil:Ĭorporate sigils are super-breeders.

#Manifestation sigil series

Their comic book series The Invisibles was intended as such a hypersigil. Grant Morrison coined the term hypersigil to refer to an extended work of art with magical meaning and willpower, created using adapted processes of sigilization. Later chaos magicians have expanded on the basic sigilization technique. When such a being becomes large enough that it exists independently of any one individual, as a form of 'group mind', then it is referred to as an egregore. In modern chaos magic, when a complex of thoughts, desires, and intentions gains such a level of sophistication that it appears to operate autonomously from the magician's consciousness, as if it were an independent being, then such a complex is referred to as a servitor. In the words of Spare, there should be 'a deliberate striving to forget it'. Īfter charging the sigil, it is considered necessary to repress all memory of it. Using any of the gnostic techniques he reifies the sigil and then, by force of will, hurls it into his subconscious from where the sigil can begin to work unencumbered by desire. The magician acknowledges a desire, he lists the appropriate symbols and arranges them into an easily visualised glyph. The chaos magician then uses the gnostic state to 'launch' or 'charge' the sigil – essentially bypassing the conscious mind to implant the desire in the unconscious. In chaos magic, following Spare, sigils are commonly created in a well ordered fashion by writing an intention, then condensing the letters of the statement down to form a sort of monogram. In a very real sense, everything he created was an act of sorcery. The same techniques and consciously driven functional intention also permeated his paintings. He would reduce a name or an idea to a 'glyph' and then write across the paper from right to left, turn the paper and do the same again, and so on, turning the paper around and around to create a multidimensional grid.

It also influenced artist Brion Gysin, who experimented with combining Spare's sigil method with the traditional form of magic squares:Ĭalligraphic magick squares were one of the techniques most commonly applied by Gysin. Spare's technique became a cornerstone of chaos magic (see next section). Spare did not agree with medieval practice of using these, arguing that such supernatural beings were simply complexes in the unconscious, and could be actively created through the process of sigilization. Austin Osman Spare Īrtist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) developed his own unique method of creating and using sigils, which has had a huge effect on modern occultism. The sigil was like a signature or sign of an occult entity. The Sigil shall then serve thee for the tracing of a Current which shall call into action a certain Elemental Force') and it was used in the making of talismans. The members of the Golden Dawn were perfectly familiar with it ('combining the letters, the colours, the attributions and their Synthesis, thou mayest build up a telesmatic Image of a Force. The word sigil has a long history in Western magic. The locations were then connected by lines, forming an abstract figure. An excerpt from Sefer Raziel HaMalakh featuring various magical sigils (or סגולות, segulot, in Hebrew).Ī common method of creating the sigils of certain spirits was to use kameas, a special use case of magic squares - the names of the spirits were converted to numbers, which were then located on the magic square.