When Sigils Will Not Work



Some of you who are old hands with magic will have read through my Sigil Magic Seminar and other texts and scoffed at my assertions that "sigils always work." Some of you may have gotten the joke, however. I made that assertion for two reasons: One) To get the practitioner/experimenter to keep an open state of mind, open enough to find for themselves when sigils will work best and when they will fail. I believe the difference is clear for anyone who has even the most minimal experience with sigils and other magical techniques. Two) Within the context of the sorts of things that are explained in the Sigil Magic Seminar, the assertion is correct.

I felt that most occultists are smart enough to tell the difference, but in the past few months I have recieved a lot of queries about the failure of sigil magic in certain situations. There is a lot of information out there online which discusses this topic, but I am putting my two cents into the mix so that some of you out there do not remain confused. There are some key points to discuss (intentions, technique, situation, etc) so that those of you who are practicing with sigils can forego some of the trial and error that many more experienced practitioners have dealt with in the past.

So here we go...

And remember, Sigils Always Work except in the some of the following...


Obsession
This is probably the number one reason why sigils will not work.

The key point to successful use of sigils is the fact that you should forget about your intention. The best way to forego this trap is to not ensigilize for things that you can't get out of your mind. Otherwise you are trapped into always thinking about when your sigil is going to deliver you the results you desire. This sort of thinking actually breaks your link to your desired result and the sigil will not work at all, unless perhaps you are knocked unconscious for a period of time.

A lot of people, myself included, have spent a lot of time in this trap. Usually we get to thinking that maybe we should do the sigil again, or send it some more energy, or maybe there is something extra we can do to 'tweak' the process along. And we usually end up failing because we fell into that "Lust for Results" that Magicians are always blathering on about. (They blather for a damned good reason on this point however.)

This is why it is very important to Forget the Desire/Intention. That's the whole reason why we go through the hoops of writing out a statement of intent and then garbling it into a symbolic representation that our conscious mind cannot recognize as that very intention.

If you find yourself having problems with this, you should first ask yourself whether sigils are the best technique for accomplishing your intentions. If you ponder this before you generate your sigil, you will save yourself a lot of wasted time. If you feel that sigils are the best thing you can do, but you still have problems with forgetting your intention, I suggest you use the simple trick of creating the sigil and then not launching it until you have some other sigils for other intentions. Then you can mix and match and launch them. (Don't worry.) In this case a prerequisite is that you have some time to allow for your intentions to manifest, unless you're the sort of nutty chaoist that does several magical operations a week.

Now there are some intentions which can be ensigilized and not totally forgotten, but those are usually either sigils on the way to becoming servitors, or they are 'broader' intentions that have less to do with personal desires than with influencing world events. In that case it may not even be proper to call it sigil magic. (Though I still do.) The PMM have done some successful workings along these lines using group generated sigils and such.


Unclear Intention
If your intention is muddled, your sigil will usually just be stillborn. In some cases, your sigil will take on aspects of intentions you were thinking about perhaps unconsciously and then cause those to manifest. (This is usually inconvenient and sometimes dangerous.) Many can argue that this isn't an example of sigil failure, but of screwed up intentions. I wouldn't argue one way or the other as the whole point is to make manifest your intentions at the time you sat down to do the hocus pocus in the first place. Simply put: Get your shit together as much as possible and then get it even tighter together before you go encoding your statement of intent. This will save you months of wasted time.

Something of note: Somehow, by making your intention and your s.o.i. as clear as possible you make it easier to put it out of your conscious mind when the time comes. The only analogy I can think of is the cathartic act of writing poetry (or some other such art). The thoughts that need to be expressed are released, thus leaving life open to new things and thoughts.


Very Improbable Chances of Manifesting
As in any other magical operation, some things are more probable than others. If you launch a sigil to make the Moon crash into the Earth, while the possibility of such an occurence is still non-zero, your sigil will still fail because it is up against a behemoth challenge. More than likely, it will cause you to see the Moon crash into the Earth in a dream and then be done with it. Or for those of you quantum-heads, perhaps it simply causes your intention in a parallel universe where the probability of a sigil-wielding magician causing the Moon to crash into the Earth is much higher. For the purposes of magical discipline and experimenting, try to keep your intentions simple and within the realm of probability, even if you stretch it all the time.


Charging Too Hard
Sometimes the ritual act of charging the sigil establishes a link between your conscious mind, the intention, and the sigil which then leads to obsessing over it in the following days. This can only happen because of the ritual and the mindstate of the practitioner. If this happens to you frequently, you may wish to ask yourself again, if sigils are best for the sort of things you want to accomplish. Some of these 'sigil' rituals are much more suited to the creation and use of servitors anyway, unless you can remember that the only need for ritual in sigil magic is to attain gnosis (or Neither-Neither), and to banish the whole thing from your conscious mind.

Sigils actually need not be charged at all in order for them to manifest your intentions. The act of generating the sigil is often enough. If that scares you then you should probably spend your time on other pursuits. The way this works is that the creation stage slips your intention beyond or outside of your consciousness. In fact, the only reason why some of us still charge sigils is that in that 'heightened' energy state, we actually attain gnosis...or perhaps we are just a little weird.


So What the Hell is Going On Here?
In case you haven't figured it out yet, the most important factor in sigil creation and in the success of the sigil is your state of mind. All the techniques and rituals and other props are merely for creating a mindstate (gnosis) through which you can 'link' your intention to manifesting.

Read that again. It is the most important thing you can realize for greater success with sigils.

The following are snippets from a discussion written by Marik, posted on Chaos Matrix (www.chaosmatrix.sigsergod.txt) over ten years ago, which I feel may be of help in sigil magic, as well as in other forms of magic:
Fries discusses in some detail the process of spell-making , and the common delusionary knots with which magicians engaged in this confrontation bind themselves. Most of these result from the mechanism Spare termed "lust for result", and are solved through deliberately forgetting the sigil, the magickal intention, and, ultimately, the precipitating desire.

As Fries states:
Sigils are used where conscious will finds its aim frustrated. We use sigils to bypass adverse conditions, to avoid the censorship of identity, to achieve our will through avenues we do not even know about. If you think about results while transmitting, you effectively bind your mind to find a solution along the desired channels, and this is frequently a hindrance, as "the desired channels" are usually the very approach that does not function. Our conscious selves are often the greatest obstacle to the sigil's manifestation.

Unfortunately, as Fries points out, many magicians seem to miss the point, and, influenced by the power stratagems of traditional magick, charge and recharge their sigils,doubtless berating themselves for their magickal flaccidity as they do so. In this way, they assume, the sheer force of their conscious will shall drive the sigil into the deep ground of being and hence to fruition. In fact their actions raise ever stronger barriers against this occurring, as the conscious mind, whose habit it is to deny the unity of the universe and the interdependence of all phenomena, builds walls of steel against itself. Fries counsels patience and compassion. He suggests dealing with the non conscious mind as one would deal with an old, wise, dear friend. He suggests:

Magick can be worked quite easily once one learns to re-believe in innocence, simplicity and direct inspiration. Why use a memorized invocation, including "divine names" and "words of power" when one can get better and livelier results by "speaking from the heart" plus a dose of freestyle chaos language and chanting?

Why indeed? Partly the answer lies in the personality and conditioning of the magician, partly in the depth of his experience of magick. Magicians with very strong traditional belief structures, magicians conditioned by membership in a magickal order such as the Ordo Templi Orientis, or even the Illuminates of Thanateros, may need elaborate ritual in order to break down this conditioning until a state of simplicity can be reached. Magicians who are relatively new to magick may need ritual in order to increase self confidence and decrease the effect of the anti-magickal consensual belief structures. Magicians, young or old, who have for some reason opened the door to their own simplicity can successfully cast a spell with a brief hand movement, with a howl at the moon, or with, as I do from time to time, curse with the crushing of a fortune cookie at a Chinese Restaurant. No chaos magician writing today suggests discarding Spare's techniques. The hold of traditional magick is far too strong to neglect such an efficient system for deprogramming. But at least among the community of chaos magicians discussing sigils on the Internet, suggestions are routinely made that magick is far simpler than even sigilising."


That said, I may add more to this discussion in the future as more people send in comments and share results of their experiments. Perhaps the whole point of sigil magic itself is to lead practitioners to that state of "empty handed magic" alluded to in Marik's discussion, but that is a topic for a future essay which I am now working on.

-Irreverend Hugh
April 12th, 2005