Sigil Magic: Did The Spell Work?

Does the day change at midnight or at sunrise? The answer will determine whether a recent spell should be considered a success or a failure.

Or perhaps, it will show you that evaluating magical workings is a deeper matter than you might think.

At this year’s Mystic South I led a workshop on “Sigil Magic: A Chaos Magic Approach.” I’ve done sigil magic for at least 15 years – it’s one of my most frequently used operative magic techniques. I’ve taught it before, but always in a small group setting – never anything like this. I was a little nervous, but the turnout was great, the class went well, and numerous people had nice things to say about it afterwards.

Sigil magic how-to

I like sigil magic because it’s simple and quick. All you need is paper and pencil and a few minutes to activate the sigil. You can find how-to instructions in lot of places, but here’s how I do it.

Write your goal in plain English (or whatever your language of choice happens to be). Your target statement should be clear (as literal and precise as possible), positive (for what you want, not to avoid what you don’t want), and in the present tense (“I have” not “I will have”). This is the hard part – selecting the proper target and crafting an effective target statement is at least half of the job.

Cross out all the vowels. Sometimes Y is a vowel and sometimes it isn’t. Decide whether a number looks like a vowel or like a consonant… or just spell it out.

Cross out all the repeated letters.

Rewrite all the remaining letters and check to make sure you didn’t miss something that should have been crossed out, or crossed out something that should have been left.

Combine the remaining letters into a sigil. Maybe this looks like a sigil out of the grimoires. Maybe it looks nothing like a sigil out of the grimoires. Mine tend to look like some combination of elvish script and an electrical wiring diagram.

Tweak it a time or three until it’s done. It’s done when you say “yeah, that’s about right.” If you’re summoning a demon from a grimoire, you’d better have the sigil drawn exactly right. If you’re doing chaos magic, it only has to look right to you.

Draw the final sigil on its own card or piece of paper. You don’t have to do this, but I find it works better when I isolate the final sigil from the earlier drafts.

Activate the sigil. There are many ways to do this. My usual method is to hold the sigil in front of me, concentrate on it (on the sigil, on the marks on the paper – not on the goal it represents). After a short time, the sigil will start to fade out of focus. That means it’s done. If you like, raise and release energy, add prayers and offerings, or anything else that makes it seem more magical to you.

Put the card or paper somewhere you’ll see it without noticing it. I put mine on a bookcase in my office. Some people burn or bury theirs. I don’t do that till the working is complete, but if you haven’t guessed by now, the only rule of chaos magic is if it works for you then it’s good.

Teaching in a live lab

I talked the class through this process, including an example. I didn’t want to fake the demonstration – I also didn’t want to do something terribly complicated. So for a target, I selected “I am home safely on Sunday” (I might have used slightly different words – one of the keys to effective sigil magic is “fire it and forget it.”). I turned those words into a sigil and activated it.

I picked this target because 1) it was simple enough for an example, 2) it was a real desire (“be careful what you ask for…”), and 3) the odds of a favorable outcome were good but far from certain (“I win Powerball” was much less likely to be successful).

Did the spell work?

Anybody who tells you their spells always work is either lying or they’re only working magic for things that are virtually certain in the first place. I would not be an ethical witch / Druid / magician if I wasn’t honest about the effectiveness of my magic – especially a spell I worked in a public setting.

I got home at 1:15 AM.

On one hand, the calendar flips over at midnight. 1:15 AM is Monday. I didn’t get home on Sunday, therefore my spell was a failure.

On the other hand, we treat the hours after midnight as part of the previous day’s night. The next day doesn’t start till sunrise, or until we go to bed and get up the next morning. So my spell was a success.

There’s a lesson in this – for me and for all of us.

Plans, influences, and results

I was supposed to leave Atlanta at 7:50 PM EDT and arrive at Dallas Love Field at 10:00 PM CDT. Plan on 20 to 30 minutes to get off the plane and get to baggage claim (you can do that at DAL but not at DFW) and then 40 minutes or so to drive from Dallas to McKinney. I should have been home 30 to 45 minutes before midnight.

But then I volunteered to take Cynthia home so she wouldn’t have to Uber.

And then storms across the country canceled over 800 flights and delayed over 5000.

And then Southwest took our plane out of service for maintenance after the “A” groups had already lined up. They had another plane available, but it had just landed and had to be unloaded.

And then our gate in Dallas was occupied when we landed and we had to wait for that plane to load and leave.

Against all that, I had sigil magic.

Vague targets bring vague results

Baggage claim in Dallas was exceptionally fast. Or more precisely, our bags were some of the very first to come off the belt. Traffic driving home was very light.

If I had withdrawn my offer to Cyn I might have still made it home by 11:59. But that would have qualified me for a firm “yes” in the AITA game. Plus Cyn is a highly competent witch and might have decided to express her disappointment in ways I would find unpleasant. Friends don’t do that to friends. While I did the time calculation, I never considered actually doing it.

And that’s because getting home by 11:59 wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t the energy I put into the sigil. What I wanted and what I put into the sigil was to be home safely before I went to sleep on Sunday night, even if the calendar said it was Monday morning.

I’ve said it many times: vague targets yield vague results. I was vague on what I meant by “Sunday” and the magic took the path of least resistance, as it often does.

Getting what you want is a win

I got what I asked for, at least by one way of reckoning. The spell wouldn’t have been a failure unless I didn’t get home until after sunrise at 6:28 AM.

If getting home by 11:59 was what I really wanted, I should have put that in my target statement. And I shouldn’t have offered to take Cyn home in the first place. And I probably should have booked an earlier flight. A successful working combines both magic and mundane action.

Did the sigil make the difference between getting home at 1:15 AM and having my flight canceled and not getting home till the next day? Did it keep the maintenance issue from not being detected till after we were in the air and having to divert to an intermediate airport? Did it stop something from happening I haven’t even thought about that would have delayed me further?

Or would the outcome have been the same if I hadn’t done the magic?

I don’t know. Magic doesn’t make things happen. It increases the probability that things will happen. It’s rare when we can look at an outcome and say “I’m positive this happened because of my magic.”  But when you practice magic for long enough, you get to the point where it’s easier to just accept the victories instead of trying to rationalize them away over and over again.

Here’s what I know for sure: I got what I wanted on a day when a lot of people who were flying didn’t.

Mark this spell down as a success.