The Master Works of Chaos Magick: Practical Techniques For Directing Your Reality - Adam Blackthorne 2016

Emotional Crafting

You’re now going to use an emotion-based method to create a sigil. It’s so easy that you’ll wonder if it’s magickal at all, but I can promise you that it is.

At this point you’ve got a goal, and you’ve created a magickal question in the past tense. In our example, the question is, ’How did I get this beautiful piano?’ or something similar.

For you it could be:

’How did I learn to control my anger?’

’Why am I so at ease in social situations?’

’Why is my boss so kind to me these days?’

’How did my sales get so high this year?’

Or anything else you like. The magick can be aimed at changing you, your luck, the people around you, or manifesting something physical that you desire.

Now we come to the second part of sigilisation. This is where traditional Chaos Magick would have you create a scribbly doodle out of all the letters. If you’ve seen this all before, I know, it can be pretty boring. Bear with me for a few paragraphs, try not to yawn, and we’ll get somewhere interesting.

Traditionally, this is how you turn a bundle of letters into a sigil. You write down your magickal statement (in our case, it’s a question, but traditionally it’s a statement such as, ’I am a wealthy person’). Ok, you write that down, and then you get rid of some letters. Sometimes you omit duplicate letters and vowels, sometimes you just put everything together. Whatever method you use, you create a drawing out of the remaining letters. What you end up with looks like a sort of mashed up tree of letters. Something like this:

Often it’s more intricate, as there are lots of letters. Then you redraw it, by scribbling about again, making it look less like letters.

And then you might redraw it again, trying to make it look a bit like a magickal sigil.

Eventually, after more messing around with your doodle-scribble, it may look something like this:

Redrawing just means that you draw it again, taking out the bits you don’t like, changing anything you want. There are no rules at all, so you never ever need to wonder if you’re doing it right. The drawings don’t matter. What matters is that you started with letters from your question and squiggled them into a sigil.

You keep drawing until you get to a point where the squiggle no longer reminds you of the letters you started with, or of your goal. That’s that idea with traditional Chaos — you must forget your goal.

Can you imagine how difficult that it is?

’I really want to get a promotion, but now that I’ve done magick for the promotion, I’ll just forget about it. Wait a minute… I forgot to apply for the job.’

A variation on the theme that we’ve encouraged is that you forget about the magick, but not the goal. It’s ok to think about your goal. You think about it as though it’s an inevitable pleasure, and that defuses the fear. But you forget about the magick.

In one of Damon Brand’s books, he explains a sigilisation method that uses this method more directly. Rather than trying to forget the goal, you create a sigil that actually represents your goal, because you don’t need to forget about it. This is the number one myth when it comes to traditional Chaos Magick. You will always be told that when you fire your sigil with a moment of magick, you must then forget about your goal. If you think about your goal at all, it short circuits occult reality, and your chosen desire cannot come to pass. I’m pleased to tell you that this is pure fiction.

You can think about your goal, so long as you don’t sit around doubting the magick itself, and hoping that the magick’s going to work. The goal is something you can dwell on, happily. But don’t sit around thinking about your ritual.

Damon’s method is a good one — creating an abstraction that feels like your goal, meaning you never have to put the goal out of your mind.

The process I like to use is similar, but goes a bit further. Forget about converting letters into a doodle. You don’t need the letters at all. Instead, you say your question out loud, while moving your pen around on a piece of paper. It’s not exactly automatic writing, but it’s a bit like that.

If your question is, ’How did I come to own such a beautiful piano?’ you say that out loud, while moving your pen around on a piece of paper.

Use any paper. Use a pencil if you prefer, or finger-paints. The artwork just happens by itself. Say the question out loud a few times; the most important thing is that you feel the question while your pen moves. Feel as though you have your result, that it came some time ago, and that you’re looking back in bliss.

Without that feeling, you’re just a noisy robot who’s drawing something rubbish. Feel the question, and scribble away.

What you end up with may not look so elegant. It may look like this:

Or this:

Great artistry is not required. Phew.

You can do a couple of things now. If you feel like it, declare that this is your sigil and use it in the next stage of the ritual. Or you can refine it. There’s no need to think or feel anything as you refine; you just redraw the best bits, or the bits that you like.

You might take that last scribble and make it look like this:

And with one more refinement it could look like this:

And then you declare that this is your sigil. You don’t have to say, ’This is my sigil,’ out loud. You just decide that this is it and that the work is complete.

I like to put a circle around it because it makes it feel universal yet contained, as well as just looking a bit more magickal than a doodle.

The sigil is a way of summing up your magickal intent in a visual form.

Feel the question. Say it out loud. Draw something. Refine it. You’re ready for magick. In fact, you’ve already done some magick. Notice that you have performed emotional alchemy, and it was effortless. You had a problem (or a goal you desired) that you felt one way about, and then by asking yourself a question about your result in the past tense, the emotion changed. The act of creating the sigil means that the magick is already bubbling away.