Sigil Magick: A Practical Guide
Updated
Sigil magick is the practice of turning an intention into a symbol and charging it. Its modern form comes from the English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), and was later adopted and popularized by chaos magic in the 1970s and 80s.
Austin Osman Spare's method
Spare described writing a statement of desire, removing repeated letters, and combining the rest into a glyph. The key idea was that the conscious mind should forget the desire while the symbol is 'charged', so doubt and over-thinking can't interfere. He wrote about this in The Book of Pleasure (1913).
Sigils in chaos magic
Chaos magicians such as Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine treated sigils as a core, belief-neutral technique: a tool that works through focused attention rather than any one tradition's gods or symbols. That practicality is why sigils are now used far outside occult circles.
Charging a sigil
Common techniques: staring at the sigil until the mind goes quiet (gnosis through stillness), charging during intense exercise or breathwork (excitatory gnosis), or at a chosen moon phase. The shared element is a brief moment of total focus.
Forgetting and 'lust of result'
Spare warned against 'lust of result' — obsessively checking whether the sigil worked. Practitioners put the sigil away or disguise it among other sigils so they stop thinking about the original words.
Common mistakes
Vague intentions, negative phrasing ("I don't want…"), making dozens of sigils at once for conflicting goals, and treating the sigil as a replacement for action rather than a focus tool.
Planetary and astrological sigils
Older grimoire traditions built sigils from planetary magic squares (kameas). MySigil blends the modern letter method with your birth chart — your ruling planet and element shape the geometry.