Guest Post On Sigils

 This guest post on Sigils is an excerpt from Klaas Pieter van der Tempel's "Pause, Play: A Higher Consciousness Handbook." It's very good.  Readers interested in seeing more can purchase the book here for under $3.

 Sigils

 

What: Impregnating reality with your artistically rendered will and imagination. Why: You decide. How: Find your will, express it artistically, then release it and let the unconscious manifest it for you.

 

Ancient Hindu intellectuals were not all blindly religious, nor were they carving images of weird gods and goddesses for shits and giggles. Instead, they realized that the gods they imagined and the symbols they made to represent them were projections of psychological powers. As Joseph Campbell says, “They [the Gods] are in you, not out there.”

 

Sigils, like the gods, or any other outer symbols like logos, statues, coins, flags, etc, are projections of what is inside of you onto the outside world. A sigil, in its basic form, is a doodle drawn during class that expresses your boredom and the desire to do something other than what you are doing. It is a symbol drawn to express some desire or identity.

 

If you draw or write something with a specific intent, whatever you have just created is like a magical letter delivered to the unconscious. This is a sigil.

 

Sigils are effective. Just look at the faces on coins or the statues of kings, pharaohs, and gods. Or the logos of our corporate culture. They all evoke certain feelings, certain reactions and associations, and they succeed in reproducing the reality that they represent. McDonald’s is recognizable anywhere in the world, and people know exactly what it means when they see the big M appear at the side of the highway. When you wear the shirt of some well known brand, you are representing them and their vision of reality, and you are helping to spread it for them.

 

When you make your own sigils, it may help to be crazy, weird, and esoteric about it. Whether random or meticulously designed, sigils shouldn’t remind you of your original desire or intent. If they do, they will remind you of your expectations and will thus conflict with the ego.

 

Also, the sigil is not a command but a request. Use natural or synchronistic things, because the sigil is a living message, a living gateway. Empty yourself; contact the deep; create and then embrace the sigil; allow it to submerge; close the gap; then forget about it. Drop your expectations of your desire being fulfilled. This emptying may take effort, but the transmission none. Care for the form, nothing else. Don’t think about the results while transmitting. Success is determined by factors largely beyond your individual control.

 

Personally, I like to ‘keep it symbol.’ Write something on your hand, or your arm, or your belly or wherever, draw a doodle that means something to you, and glance upon it during the day to be reminded of whatever meaning you imbued the symbol with. Ozzy Osbourne, for example, has smiley faces tattooed on his knees, so that every time he takes a dump he reminds himself to be happy.*

 

For serious sigilizing I recommend the book Visual Magick by Jan Fries.

* Technically, a symbol isn’t a sigil because it clearly represents something recognizable. So a smiley face is bending the rules. In a good way.