How Do You Make a Sigil?

You make a sigil by writing a clear statement of intent, removing the repeated letters, combining the remaining letters into a single abstract symbol, charging it in an altered state of consciousness, and then deliberately forgetting it. The whole process takes about twenty minutes, and the forgetting is the part most people get wrong.

Key Takeaways

• The standard sigil method comes from the English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886 to 1956).
• The five steps are: state the intent, strip repeated letters, design the glyph, charge it, forget it.
• Statements of intent should be present tense, positive, and specific.
• Charging requires gnosis, an altered state where the conscious mind goes quiet.
• Sigils are used across occult traditions, not only chaos magic.
• Deliberate forgetting, sometimes called banishing of laughter, is considered essential to the method.

What Is a Sigil?

A sigil is a desire compressed into an abstract symbol that no longer visibly resembles the words it came from. The point of the abstraction is to let the intent bypass conscious scrutiny, on the theory that wanting something too visibly gets in its own way.

The word comes from the Latin sigillum, meaning a seal or small sign. Older occult traditions used the term for fixed, inherited seals belonging to spirits and planets. The modern do-it-yourself sigil, the one people actually make at home, is a twentieth-century invention.

Who Invented the Modern Sigil Method?

Austin Osman Spare invented the modern letter-based sigil method, publishing it in The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy in 1913. Spare was a working artist in London with an early career in the Royal Academy, and he built his magical system almost entirely outside the ceremonial orders of his day, having briefly passed through Aleister Crowley's A∴A∴ and found it not to his taste.

His method was picked up almost wholesale by chaos magic in the late 1970s, which is how most people encounter it today. Spare himself never used the term "chaos magic," having died more than twenty years before it existed.

By S.L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley - http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/grimoire/ac_goetia.pdf Archived 2018-07-04 at the Wayback Machine, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

How Do You Make a Sigil? Step by Step

Step 1: Write a Statement of Intent

Write your desire as a single present-tense sentence, phrased positively and specifically. Traditional practice starts the sentence with "This my will" or "It is my will," though this is convention rather than requirement.

Good: "This my will to secure the job at the gallery."

Bad: "I want to not be broke anymore."

The second one fails on three counts: it is a want rather than a will, it is negative, and it is vague enough that nothing could satisfy it. Done means you have one sentence you could read aloud without wincing.

Step 2: Strip the Repeated Letters

Remove all vowels, then remove any letter that has already appeared. Some practitioners keep vowels and only strip repeats. Both work, and the vowel-stripping version simply gives you fewer letters to draw with.

Taking "THIS MY WILL TO SECURE THE JOB AT THE GALLERY":

• Remove vowels: THSMYWLLTSCRTHJBTTHGLLRY
• Remove repeats: THSMYWLCRJBG

Done means you have a short string of unique consonants, usually somewhere between six and twelve letters.

Step 3: Design the Glyph

Combine the remaining letters into one symbol. Overlap them, rotate them, flip them, stretch them, break them into their component strokes. Keep going until the result is a shape rather than a legible word.

There is no correct answer here and no aesthetic standard to meet. The only real test is whether you can look at the finished symbol without immediately reading the sentence back out of it. If you can still see "GALLERY" in there, redesign it.

Done means you have a single glyph you can redraw from memory in a few seconds.

Step 4: Charge the Sigil

Charging means holding the sigil in your attention during a state of gnosis, an altered state in which the ordinary internal monologue stops. This is the step that requires actual effort, and it is where the method either works or does not.

Two broad routes, both drawn from the standard chaos magic framework:

• Inhibitory gnosis: stillness, extended meditation, staring at the sigil until vision blurs, controlled breathing, sensory deprivation.
• Excitatory gnosis: drumming, dancing to exhaustion, sustained physical exertion, sexual arousal.

Whichever route you take, the sigil should be the last thing in your mind at the peak. Done means you reached a moment where you were not narrating your own experience.

A caution worth stating plainly: some traditional excitatory techniques involve pain, fear, or pushing the body to genuine exhaustion. These carry real physical risk and are a poor idea for anyone who is unwell, exhausted, or in a bad place mentally. The inhibitory route reaches the same destination and does not require an ambulance.

Step 5: Forget It

Destroy or put away the sigil and stop thinking about it. In Spare's system, and in chaos magic after him, active desire is what blocks the result, so the working is only complete once the conscious mind has let go of it.

Common methods: burn it, bury it, tear it up, or draw it on paper you then throw away without looking at again. Some practitioners use the "banishing of laughter," breaking the mood deliberately with something absurd so the working does not linger.

Done means a week later you have to think for a second to remember what the sigil was for.

By Rune370 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

What Are the Other Types of Sigil?

Not all sigils are made from letters. The word covers several distinct traditions, and confusing them is the most common source of muddle for beginners.

Type	Origin	How it is produced	Used for
Letter sigil	Austin Osman Spare, 1913	Built by the practitioner from a sentence	Personal intent
Planetary sigil	Renaissance ceremonial magic	Traced across a kamea (magic square)	Planetary workings
Spirit seal	Grimoire tradition, e.g. the Lesser Key of Solomon	Inherited, copied exactly from the text	Evocation of named spirits
Monogram sigil	Modern variant	Initials or symbols combined visually	Personal identity, group marks
Pictorial sigil	Modern variant	Drawn from an image rather than words	Intent that resists wording

Spirit seals are the important exception to everything above. In grimoire traditions the seal belongs to the spirit and is not yours to redesign, which is very much the opposite of the Spare method. Anyone moving between the two systems should know which one they are in. The broader question of how symbolism works in occult practice is worth reading properly.

How Do You Know If a Sigil Worked?

You know a sigil worked if the outcome named in the statement of intent occurs. This is deliberately unsatisfying, and it is the honest answer.

The standard practice is to note the date and the intent somewhere you will not see it, then check months later. This gets around the obvious problem, which is that a person who is watching for a result is also a person who has not forgotten the sigil.

Practitioners disagree sharply about whether sigil magic acts on the world or on the practitioner's own attention and behaviour. Both camps report results. Nobody has produced evidence that settles it [CITATION NEEDED].

What Are the Most Common Sigil Mistakes?

1. Wording the intent as a wish rather than a will. "I hope to" and "I want" describe a state of lacking. The sentence should describe the thing as settled.
2. Making the intent negative. "Stop being ill" keeps illness as the subject of the sentence. "This my will to be in good health" does not.
3. Charging without real gnosis. Staring at a symbol while mentally reviewing your afternoon is not an altered state.
4. Failing to forget. Checking on a sigil daily is the single most common failure, and it is fatal to the method.
5. Making the glyph too legible. If the letters are still readable, the abstraction has not happened.
6. Sigils for things you cannot stop thinking about. Deeply urgent desires are the hardest to forget, which is why practitioners often advise starting with something modest.

FAQ

Do sigils need to be drawn by hand? Hand-drawing is standard because the act of designing the glyph is itself part of the working, and because it forces you to engage with the letters properly. Digital sigil generators exist and some practitioners use them, but the method assumes a period of focused construction that a one-click tool skips.

How long does a sigil take to work? There is no agreed timeframe. Practitioners commonly cite anything from days to several months, and most advise checking no earlier than a month out so that the forgetting has had time to hold. A sigil that has clearly failed can simply be redone with a better-worded intent.

Can you make a sigil for someone else? Yes, and practitioners do, though most consider intent worked on another person without their knowledge to be a straightforward ethical problem. Traditions with an explicit ethical code, such as Wicca with its emphasis on harm, take a firmer line on this than chaos magic does.

Is sigil magic the same as chaos magic? No. Sigil magic is a technique that predates chaos magic by over sixty years. Chaos magic adopted it and made it central, but plenty of people use sigils without holding any chaos magic beliefs, and sigil-style work appears across modern occult practice generally.

What should you do with a sigil after charging it? Destroy it or store it out of sight. Burning is the most common choice, followed by burying and tearing. What matters is not the disposal method but that the sigil leaves your daily field of view.

Can you tattoo a sigil? You can, and people do, though it directly contradicts the forgetting step of the Spare method. Permanent sigils are usually made for ongoing conditions such as protection or identity rather than for a single outcome, which is a different kind of working.

Do sigils have to be secret? Under the Spare method, yes in practice, because a sigil that other people ask you about is one you will not be able to forget. Group workings that charge a shared sigil collectively are the deliberate exception.

Once you have the theory down, wearing the symbolism is the easy part: our gothic pins and gothic patches cover most of the occult vocabulary, and the 3 for £12 mix lets you build a set without committing to one sigil for life.