Chaos Magick - As defined by Peter J. Carrol

Here is part two of my series on Peter J. Carrol and Chaos Magick. In this article I will give an overview of the system of chaos magic and the ideas that it espoused early on in its inception. This is, of course, an outsiders perspective on chaos magic as I understood it from my studies and readings starting decades ago. Since I was never a practitioner, my ideas may lack some of the greater details and depth associated with this anti-tradition.

I have never been a follower of Chaos magic, but I did read a lot of books and materials that this new traditional developed, but while I did admire many elements that it proposed about magic, I already had a fully developed system of magic that a lot of differences with Chaos magic. I also had personal and powerful connections to the Deities and Demigods associated with my Witchcraft magic. I could never just drop all that and just assume that they were just delusions trying to control me. However, I feel that I can share some of my observations about Chaos magic as it was presented in the early years when Peter was promoting it as an alternative to traditional magical practices, even though it has dramatically changed over the decades. I apologize in advance if I have gotten anything wrong or omitted anything important.

The basic premise of Chaos magic is that every social system is merely a game, but it is one that is typically stacked against the individual who hasn’t mastered or seen through it. Therefore, we are manipulated by government and commercial propaganda and we are forced into following a myriad of protocols and social dictates in order to achieve what amounts to a losing proposition within the status quo that is already closed to us. It is, in a word, a “suckers paradise,” and to have any degree of awareness of what is actually going on can be both humiliating and depressing. The only way to escape this trap is to break the rules and use a chaotic and creative way of thinking and acting in order to truly see the world for what it is, a system of lies passed off for truth. This is, of course, a very antinomian way of perceiving the world, and it has distant echos in the subversive religious beliefs and practices of the Gnostics of antiquity. 

This kind of direct approach to all aspects of life is also, and particularly, applied to the occult arts and magic in general, since it is believed that through forms of subversive and rule-breaking magic that the probabilities can be bent and distorted so that a single individual can triumph over the terrible autonomous and soul-less social oligarchy. Cherished traditions, icons, cultural themes and belief systems are inverted or ripped out of their context to serve the purpose of individualistic magic and self-empowerment. The only loyalty is to one’s self and to one’s social family, and the rest of world is subject to cynicism and disassociation. In such a manner, the tangled individual is freed from the traps and foils of economic classes, responsibilities, social obligations and peer group expectations. 

As a chaote (chaos magician)  you get to unapologizingly pick and choose what is important and meaningful to you, and therefore have the power and vision to find your way through all of the quagmire of a post-modern existence. Chaos magic might be nothing more than a system of magical tools and techniques, but there is a purpose to their use and an ultimate goal. That goal is freedom from the social-economic game and to be self-empowered enough to be able to acquire an edge over everyone else. Enlightenment to chaotes is to be free and footloose, to be able to write your own rules and live outside and beyond the social-economic grid. Magic, particularly a subversive magic that breaks all of the rules, is the key to achieving this type of enlightenment.

Other sources that have been included in Chaos magic are the writings of Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson, and for the very high minded, William S. Burroughs. Added to this selected lore is the complete pop cultural media of the 1980's and 1990's. I am sure that this ever growing list of sources will continue unabated because the basic premise of Chaos magic is to appropriate whatever lore is practical and serves to produce a useful and effective system of magic. Media culture is the boiling matrix from which Chaos Magick was brewed, and in order for it to exist, it must therefore continue appropriating and borrowing from whatever is the latest craze or fad, since such things are the most relevant at present and represent a rich vein of potential magical lore. 

Implicitly, Chaos magic is the occult science and magic of the itinerant IT professional who grew up playing video games, reading science fiction books (such as “Neuromancer” by William Gibson), watching sci-fi and fantasy videos, and listening to Punk Rock and Heavy Metal. In other words, Chaos magic was the prefect venue for occult geeks. There may be other types of professions that chaotes could occupy in their mundane lives, but the IT profession is probably one of the biggest, and it’s one that is the most adaptive and conducive to their life-style and philosophy.  

One of the first tenets in Chaos Magick is that belief is just an impersonal tool, it has no intrinsic value. A chaos magician should be so completely flexible that any belief whatsoever can be adopted in order to achieve some end. Some might call this kind of approach blatantly cynical, but it serves the individual to elect those beliefs which are the most advantageous to them at a given moment. Since nothing is really true and everything is relative, it is only a fool (or a tool of the game masters) who actually invest their passions and order themselves according to their beliefs. This is particularly true since most belief systems were developed to coerce and control the masses. According to the writings of Austin Spare, belief is the end product of the will impacting desire, so whatever one wills through desire becomes a convenient belief that can aid one in achieving a goal.

Our lives reside and persist in a world that is stochastic in nature and constantly changing. Nothing lasts forever, so nothing really has any intrinsic value. We are buffeted by forces that are greater than ourselves and we seem to have little or no control over what happens to us. Yet this chaos that affects all of the dynamic social systems, groups and even institutions can be harnessed and used by chaos magicians so that they become liberated and achieve self-mastery. Knowing the game and seeing through the lies and deceptions allows one to also perceive the most direct way to achieving goals and stepping out of the social trap. To fully escape from the rigid world of rules and protocols requires one to harness the very powers that can destroy that world. 

While most people see reality as a seamless stream running from the past to the future, a chaote sees reality for what it truly is - a nonlinear stochastic process that is destroyed and recreated every moment (what they called “immanentize of the eschaton”). While this had more meaning in philosophy or the social sciences, it is an attempt to foster a utopian society in the current world. In Chaos magic, it means learning to be aware of the discontinuity of reality, that endings are immanent and occur with frequent regularity. The end of everything is found in the beginning, and visa versa. Continuity is an illusion, and in fact, it is a shared delusion. If one knows this to be a fact then the continual re-creation process can be manipulated and changed through the agency of the will. 

Another important tenet is that individuality and the perceived values associated with the egoic term “I am” is an illusion. The self is broken into many parts and not all of them are unified in effect or purpose. The unified self is an illusion, and in fact, it is lie that we all perpetuate. Therefore, one can assume any persona or social mask to achieve a specific end, since the concept of selfhood is actually a pernicious fiction. A better term for the multiform personal self would be “we,” and in fact one can see this aspect of the self in multiples of significant numbers (three selves being one of the most common). However, being too much attached to a specific identity is very limiting, particularly if others can define you and thereby manage and control you. 

We therefore have a persona for work, social situations, intimacy, and magic. In fact we have multiple personas. Yet one who is empowered is able to selectively choose and build their persona for any given situation, and they are deliberately not attached to any of them. The most powerful of all personas is one that is completely neutral and not-attached, where they just quietly observe and display no overt sympathy or engagement with any faction. This is the foundational mind-state upon which chaotes would establish their concept of the self, because it can give them the greatest flexibility. 

The base-line mental state for inducing chaos and bending probabilities is called the Gnostic State, but it is actually a form of self-induced ecstasy. Austin Spare talked about this technique, linking sexual orgasm with death, and he called the method the Death Posture. According to his writings, the Death Posture used a technique of physically exhausting the body by assuming a highly stressful physical posture and maintaining it until one is completely spent and unable to continue. The resultant mind state and physical euphoria that follows such a release assists one to be cleansed and purified so as to be able to see with different eyes and more perfectly project one’s willful desire. Of course, this is a form of self-induced ecstasy, so any technique of inducing ecstasy will work, including masturbation and taking mind-altering drugs. Chaos Magick has embraced variations on this technique to aid the practitioner in breaking through the embedded structures of reality and being released into a domain outside of the socio-cultural matrix. These variations can be classified as inhibitory (meditation or trance), excitatory (orgasm or induced ecstasy), and indifference (sensory isolation). 

Chaos magick also uses the model of the unconsciousness to explain the mechanism for shaping or bending reality. I suspect that this idea was also taken from Austin Spare’s writings, since he was also very wedded to the idea and used it in a similar manner. The basic premise is that to be effective in promoting a magical objectives, one needs to acquire a mental state where that objective is the sole and single point focused within the mind. The magician should bind that objective with their passion, merging all of their emotions and desires into it, and allow themselves to achieve a climax, using one of the techniques of ecstasy. Then, they should completely disengage with that objective and immediately block it from the conscious mind, simultaneously forgetting and releasing it. Using this technique, the desire will pass from the conscious mind as an empowered thought-form and enter into the subconscious mind where it becomes a powerful magical complex. 

Chaos magicians appear to believe that the unconscious mind is the reservoir of all magical power and potential, and that once an empowered desire is released fully into that mental domain it will manifest in the material world. What is also implied in this method is that the unconscious mind of an individual is connected to all of the rest of the minds of humanity which are part of that collective domain. This is the only way to explain how releasing and forgetting an empowered desire could emerge into the material world. Through the media of the unconscious mind can a magical act can affect things and individuals not directly connected to the one performing the operation. In my many years of practicing magic using various techniques, I have found this idea to be correct and quite useful. Drawing something (or someone) to you is better done by empowering a desire for that thing (or person)  and then quickly forgetting it. This does indeed push the desire below mental awareness into a kind of collective where it can better operate without conscious interference.

The mental flexibility espoused by Chaos Magick is exemplified by the concept of paradigm shifting. What this typically means is nothing more or less than being able to change one’s perspective or viewpoint, even arbitrarily. As a practical technique, paradigm shifting breaks down social conditioning so that the chaote can realize the truth without attachments, underlying alliances or personal biases. It helps the chaos magician to always think outside of the matrix and not to become wedded to any specific idea or belief system. This fits with the rest of the overall perspectives and beliefs that embody Chaos Magick, starting with the self and proceeding with the world-view. If everything is relative and nothing is true then even one’s cherished perspectives must be subjected to constant change and innovative insights. It is, in a word, the nature of the chaotic beast. 

This brings me to one of the most effective magical tools in the arsenal of the chaos magician, and that is sigil magick. Austin Spare perfected this art, but authors such as Carol and Frater U. D. have brought this technique out of obscurity and into general practice. I have found this technique to be extremely useful in my own practices and use it quite regularly. There are a number of specific techniques used, some which are based on graphically condensed representations of the common letters used in a phrase representing a specific desire, others on verbalizations or word creation, and still others on pure iconographic representations. The basic premise is to take a word or a phrase, or ideogram and convert it into a condensed symbolized form or graphic character. Then the magician uses this as the focus for projecting an empowered desire into the unconscious mind where it can become a powerful complex. 

Once one becomes adept at creating sigils then the various symbolic glyphs can be selectively organized into a veritable “alphabet of desire” representing all of the dualistic emotions that one could possibly experience in the psychic world. These emotions would represent foundational pairs, such as life and death, desire and fear, love and hate, power and weakness, etc. Breaking out these pairs into more specific qualities, such as terror, fright, paranoia, or evasion for fear, and then qualifying these emotional qualities with character based glyphs, one could use them in magic, singly or together in phrases, to more effectively symbolize a desired goal or mental state.

Sigil magick is by far one of the more powerful tools at the disposal of the chaos magician, and Chaos Magick has borrowed heavily from the obscure ideas and techniques espoused by Austin Spare. In many ways, Chaos Magick is Austin Spare’s step child, and in some ways, I think that he would have approved of it (in theory). However, he would have considered the middle class status of most Chaos practitioners as the idle fancies of the pampered privileged elite, and that few if any have actually connected with the primitive, horrific proto-human atavisms that he considered to be the core of his system of magic. Austin Spare despised the ceremonial magicians of his time (especially Crowley), so it is doubtful that he would have been very sympathetic to the resurgence of the study and practice of ceremonial magic today, even for those who have abolished all of the rules and protocols normally associated with it. (In fact, I think that Austin Spare would have looked more favorably on the Old Craft Tradition of Witchcraft.)  

Chaos magicians use a combination of the techniques of mental liberation, self-induced ecstasy, pop symbology and social icons, and the heavy promotion of sigil magic, to achieve magical results in the material world. Chaos Magick is preeminently a system of mental discipline that requires a constant and consistent effort in order to achieve self-mastery. Theurgy is given some redefined tropes within the chaos dialectic, similar to religious based liturgy (the mass, exorcism, initiation, etc.), but it is not something that chaotes find comfortable or in line with their overall perspectives. This is also true for any kind of work with spirits, since in Chaos Magick spirits are defined as a greater mental phenomenon. Spirit servitors are crafted thought-forms that are mental projections empowered and imprinted with the magician’s desires, and it is questionable whether or not that they would have any kind of existential reality apart from the consciousness of the magician. 

This is also true in regards to classical spirits, such as angels or demons, demigods or various deities. All these entities are nothing more than hallowed out masks that can be used, discarded, or switched out with other entities at the whim of the magician. However, greater relevance is given to egregores, group-mind thought-forms, the synergetic mass-beliefs of large groups of people, and the power invested in pop icons and cultural/media based themes. It would seem that Chaos Magick focuses particularly on the psychology of the magician, and that the operant effects of its magic are particularly thaumaturgic rather than theurgistic. This has to do with the basic models of magic that underlie the systems of Chaos Magick.

Regarding models of magic, Chaos Magick has created one that is a hallmark of its practices, and that is the stochastic model of magic. I understand that the chaos model of is where magic is mediated by shifting chaos dynamics. The chaos theory of magic attempts to understand the experiences of the magical and to describe the practice of magic in terms of random, chaotic, or fractal processes typically found in nature. The chaos theory of magic describes all aspects of magic and magical experiences in terms of these dynamics and the mathematical models that define them. The physical universe is stochastic, or random, in nature. While the random processes of nature sometimes combine to form the appearance of stable laws of causality, this is viewed as an exceptional or unusual circumstance. Reality is arbitrary and is defined only as a function of one’s own beliefs. There is a correspondence in chaos magic between the methods of magical action and the theories of Quantum Mechanics.

Many Chaos practitioners consider the Chaos theory to be a meta-theory, using whatever model works at the moment while not being attached to any specific method or model. In my opinion, this ideal has not really been effectively followed, and Chaos magick appears to have succumbed to becoming a theory or model itself.

The other model is the Information Model of Magic. The Information Model is based on the communication of information, which could include nearly everything that humans do to communicate. Everything in magic, from the symbols, correspondences, the regalia to the ritual actions can be seen as a stream of information, and that things with an inherent quanta of information are the very ‘packets’ or ‘kernels’ of information that are pulled or woven together to fashion a special kind of media called magic. 

Magic is therefore a linguistic event, and what drives the whole process is the precision of the stated intention and weight of the other supporting communications that are grouped around it. This is basically how the Chaos magicians of the 1990’s defined their model of magic, and the belief was that it abrogated all other models, making it the one and only true model. Of course, the folly of such a belief is that the spirit, energy and psychological models of magic still stand – there are spirits, there is energy, and there is the mind itself. However, the Information Model of magic is still quite useful and informative. This is because as a model it fully embodies and explains the efficacy of sigil magic.

As I have said previously, Chaos magic has evolved considerably over the last four decades, and in many ways as a tradition, it no longer adhered to tenets as established by Peter Carol. While Peter continued to publish books and his organization, Arcanorium College, continued to promote his ideas, his singular approach has been added to by a plethora of writers and practitioners. To get an idea of just how expansive Chaos magic has become, I leave with a webpage, and you can find it here.

Still, Peter J. Carrol was a brilliant occultist and magician. We owe him a great debt of gratitude for all his contributions to the practice of magic as a post-modern phenomenon. He came on the occult scene and really shook things up, and in many ways, it needed that kind event to bring magic into the post-modern world shorn of its attachments to the previous age. 

Frater Barrabbas 

 

Some Further Thoughts About the 40 Qualified Powers

A while back I wrote an article about the 40 Qualified Powers, which are a useful set of energies and they have a comparative utility to the 16 Elementals. You can find that article here, but I have had further thoughts about these energies and I wanted to put them into an article that would work along with what I have already written. The ritual pattern that is used to generate the 40 Qualified Powers is called the “Pyramid of Powers” rite can be found in my book entitled “Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick - Omnibus Edition.” The rituals is examined in chapter 7 of Book 2, and the Qualified Powers are defined in chapter 8 of Book 2. I would recommend getting this book and adding it to your collection because there a quite a number of useful ritual patterns and open-source rituals in that work.


There are a number of different ways that one can utilize the Tarot as a magical tool, since it is a repository of quite a large number of magical and occult correspondences. The Tarot and the Qabalah are intertwined, particularly in the 19th and 20th century European occult versions of those disciplines. A magician can take a certain specific point of reference and look at the Tarot in that manner to discover all sorts of useful symbologies and practical referential correspondences. One such perspective is to look at the Tarot through the perspective of magical energy. What one would find would be three groups of magical powers. The first would be the sixteen elementals based on the court cards, the second would be the forty qualified powers, and the last would be the transformative powers of the twenty-two trumps of the major arcana. One could also split off the four aces to produce the foundational structure of the spiritual dimension of the four Elements.

Similarly, one could also look at the Tarot through the perspective of spirits, and with this perspective a whole array of a spiritual hierarchy would be revealed. There would be the hierarchy of the 36 astrological decans, the sixteen elementals spirits (as found in either the angelic or Enochian systems of magic), and the interaction of the various spirits associated with both the cycle of initiation and the cosmogonic creation/dissolution cycles of the trumps. Either approach, energy or spirit, will reveal the powerful magical underpinnings of the Tarot. The energy perspective reveals the magical powers that are available to the magician using the energy model of magic, and the spirit perspective reveals the spiritual hierarchy that is available for the magician to conjure. Additionally, the 36 decan based number or Naib cards, represent an actual spiritual domain that is grounded in the zodiacal hierarchy that permeates the three spherical levels of celestial, earth and underworld. The Tree of Life can also be mapped to this structure, although not in a very clean and concise manner unless the four Qabalistic Worlds are employed.

Therefore, the Tarot is a very powerful repository of all things occult and magical, and it could be considered the preeminent magical grimoire. I have also written about this concept in one of my articles, and you can find it here. While quite a number of magicians are examining and studying the latest in published grimoires and expounding about the latest developments in the arena of evocation and spirit conjuring, one book is typically ignored. That book is the redoubtable Tarot, which was fashioned to be the basis for all forms of magic in the Western Mystery tradition. If a student were to study the Tarot in a great deal of depth and intensity then I believe that such a person would be able to expand their magical perspective to achieve all magical objectives using both magical energies and spirits embedded within the symbolic correspondences of the humble Tarot cards. It is the most important grimoire and magical treatise of all time, and it is the source for all of the magical and occultic systems in the West. And, it can be used for divination, either to passively receive or actively project the patterns thereby randomly derived. Perhaps one of the greatest exponents of the Tarot is Aleister Crowley’s book “The Book of Thoth.” It was one the last books that he wrote, and it is one of the best, in my opinion. 


Getting back to our topic about the Qualified Powers, I have been seeking to encapsulate these magical energies in such a manner that other practitioners of magic would see their utility and usefulness. I had assumed that the Qualified Powers were called such because they were the product of a base element qualified by an attribute of Deity. However, there is more to them than that, or at least that is what I have discovered by pondering them in greater depth. Allow me to explain what I mean by this statement.

Energy magic is typically reduced to working, in some manner, with the four elements. You can readily extend this model to include a number of different qualities of energy, but they are all based on the four elements - Fire, Air, Water and Earth. You can define these four elements in many different ways, including physical, occult and spiritual qualities. In extending the definitions of the four elements you can make their utility more refined and useful. However, you can also do this by combining with other things to create hybrid energy structures. This is the basic concept regarding the energy model of magic that I have employed in my magical system. I don’t know if others have also used this mechanism, but this is what I have found to be quite efficient and useful. The occult and magical symbol for the four elements is the pentagram, which represents the four elements tied to a fifth, which is spirit. In this manner, spirit is said to be the synergetic fusion of all four of the elements - it is the quintessential element. A magician can use the pentagram to generate/invoke or dissolve/banish any of the four elements and spirit. The basic magical technique for generating element powers using a pentagram was first employed in the Golden Dawn rite of the Superior Pentagram.

Now whether these energized elements or their hybrids are seen as being generated through the vital force of the magician’s body or through some symbolic artifice is not particularly important to the energy model. In the version of the energy model of magic that I work, it would seem to me that this energy source has its origin both within my body (as a trigger) and also outside of it. One of the reasons that I believe this is that however much energy I can raise through the artifice of magic, I don’t seem to be draining my own essential energy. Once triggered, it seems as if the magical energy that I have generated for a magical working has an endless supply. I can feel this energy pass through my body, for certain, but the ecstatic results of this energy flow seems beyond what would normally just reside in my body. When using the energy magical techniques and projecting what feels like a considerable force into the material world, I feel highly charged and energized after the working instead of feeling depleted or tired. I always have to ground off the excess in order to keep myself balanced and not emotionally keyed up. Working with the energy based system of magic can make one feel “high” or even drunk because of the emotional impact of the ungrounded energies.

As far as energy hybrids are concerned, I have incorporated three different energy structures, and these can both engage magical energies and energy based spirits. The most basic structure is to be found in the sixteen elementals. These powers consist of the hybrid pair of a qualifying base element combined with the same or another element. The permutation of four produces the number sixteen, so there are sixteen elementals. These energy based entities correspond to the sixteen court cards in the Tarot. You could use just one of these cards as the focus for generating an elemental. The other two are the 28 Lunar Mansions (Talismanic Elemental), which are represented as the hybrid combination of an element and a planet, and the 40 Qualified Powers, which are represented as the hybrid of an element and a Deity attribute.

To generate an elemental I employ the pentagram device and the eight node circle octagram (consisting of a double pyramid) as the ritual pattern used to generate what I call an elemental vortex. I can further qualify this energy by using the Enochian spirit name pair and the Enochian call for a specific elemental. However, an elemental force, even when summoned using a spirit name, has to have some kind of specific magical device to link it to some external objective - known as the magical link. The energy is focused into the center of the magic circle using a deosil circumambulation spiral from the outer periphery of the magic circle to the center. The power is released through the artifice of a widdershins circumambulation spiral from the center to the outer periphery of the magic circle, where the energy is projected outside of the circle as a kind of magical “bolt.” In order for the magical energy to find its target it must first be imprinted with the link, which is usually in the form of a charged or consecrated sigil. I consider an elemental magical power to be “unqualified” because it requires a sigil to imprint and direct it to its objective. As a joke, I often say to my students that elementals are kind of dumb and need to be qualified in order to work.

While the generated elemental is considered an unqualified power, both the Lunar Mansions and the Qualified Powers are qualified powers. What this means is that these magical energies also contain archetypal qualifiers that further define the energy (with a spiritual intelligence) so that it has a specific function and objective already determined. Both of these energy systems don't require the imprint of a magical link in order to set them to a specific objective. By definition, these kinds of magical energies already have an objective, and that is why I refer to them as qualified powers. You can use a sigil to imprint and further refine their innate function, but it is not required. Once generated and released, qualified energies will automatically empower the magician’s intention to fulfill the working’s magical objective. Thus qualified powers are also intelligent magical energies, since they are imbued with an archetypal intelligence. The 28 Lunar Mansions are actually a subset of the 40 Qualified Powers, since the seven planetary archetypes are included in the 10 attributes of the Deity.

The structure used to generate one of the Qualified Power is the magical pyramid vortex, and the device is the pentagram. The focusing and exteriorizing spirals are used just as they are in the Elemental Octagram, but the focused element energy field is imprinted with a symbol and quality of attribute of the Deity. This causes a fusion, within the vortex field, of the element and attribute, thereby qualifying the magical energy. One could also further qualify it by performing an invocation of a specific polytheistic Deity, vibrating a Qabalistic Sephirah Godname, or even just using the Tarot card itself. The magician should make certain that the energy is fully imprinted so that there appears to be a kind of energized Godform in the center of the circle. Then when this qualified energy is released in the same manner as an elemental, it will intelligently and automatically proceed outward from the circle to fulfill its objective. The ritual to generate a Qualified Power is more simple than the ritual used to generate an elemental, and since there are 40 different powers, one can have a greater variety from which to choose. As I said, you can also use a sigil to give a qualified power even more of a precise focus, but it is not required. All that is required is to develop a mechanism for symbolically defining one of the ten Deity attributes.

Coincidentally, the technique for using the 40 Qualified Powers was something that I learned using a very simple cone of power augmented by setting an invoking pentagram of a specific element to the four watchtowers and then imprinting that energy using one of the 10 Qabalistic Godnames. It was a very simple version of the Pyramid of Power rite, but it was amazingly effective. I was taught this simple technique in the old Alexandrian coven in which I first learned how to work real magic. Sometimes I wonder if any other Witches perform this kind of simple but effective magic.

Frater Barrabbas

A Brief Overview of Sigil Magick

Sigil - pronounced like “sidjel.”

Sigil Magick is defined as a magickal system that makes use of occult characters, diagrams, condensed verbal intentions, geometric symbols, mystical alphabets, angular signatures of spirits and other kinds of symbolic or hieroglyphic representations. The word sigil comes from the Latin word sigilum, which means “seal.” Of additional significance is the Hebrew word SGULH or sagulah, which means “some kind of word or action” that has a specific spiritual or magickal impact. The use of sigils in magick has its roots in antiquity, possibly from Hebrew sources, since sigils often accompanied magickal squares, which were used extensively in the Jewish tradition of ceremonial magick.

Most often, sigils, or specialized characters, were incorporated into grimoires and had a traditional use, requiring the wielder to copy them exactly as depicted, even though they had to have been invented by someone at some point in history. These kinds of sigils were carefully crafted using very specific techniques (and not derived from either imagination or revelation), but the methodology used for their creation is typically missing from those same works. (A good example that shows how these sigils were developed can be found in Donald Tyson’s version of “Three Books of Occult Philosophy” originally written by Agrippa - particularly Appendix V on Magick Squares (Llewellyn 1997).)

Some believe that magickal sigils or characters have a power and potency all to themselves, others believe that a sigil has to be activated, at the very least, by the imagination and will of a trained and competent magician. Some grimoires are notorious for the sigils and characters that they contain, lending weight to the superstition that sigils have an independent volition quite separate from whoever invented or wields them. Most often, sigils are reputed to be the specialized symbolic names of angels, demons or various spirits, and the sigil is used to summon and evoke them. This makes a sigil similar in some ways to the “Veve” as found in Haitian Vodoun. Still, sigils used as the symbolic name of a spirit assumes that the sigil is a more pure and direct representation of that spirit’s true nature, and of course, whoever knows the “true” name or nature of a spirit has direct power over it.

When I perform an invocation or an evocation, I will employ a sigil crafted from the name of the target spirit. That sigil can be derived from a number of sources, but I generally use the Rose diagram from the Golden Dawn Rose Cross, which has the Hebrew letters drawn on the three concentric circles of petals, representing the triple division of those same letters (3 mother letters, 7 double letters and 12 single letters). One could also derive a spirit sigil from one of the appropriate magickal planetary squares, depending on the spirit’s hierarchical association, since there are different squares for each of the seven planets. There is also the Aiq Bkr magickal square that can be used to craft a sigil from a spirit’s name.

Essentially, a sigil is a visual magickal sign of some sort, whether it’s taken from some traditional body of magickal lore (grimoire or tradition), or created by the magician to represent the name of a spirit or to encapsulate a specific intention or desire. Manufacturing sigils became the hallmark of the famous British witch and sorcerer, Austin Osman Spare, who proposed a system of creating sigils by condensing and extracting the forms of the letters from a phrase that stated the magician’s intent. Spare called this methodology “sigilization,” and it was later adopted by Chaos magicians and others who use it as an independent system of magick. Sigilization is employed for casting spells, organizing and deploying an “alphabet of desire” for the same, or building up thought forms. However, it is probably one of the most direct and useful methods for creating a magickal link that I ever seen or experienced.

First, let me define what a magickal link is, and why it’s important in certain kinds of ritual magick. A link is employed whenever a magician seeks to make something happen in the material world. It is usually tangible in some manner and it should model or symbolize the magician’s intention. A link is a symbolic quality that establishes a connection between the magician, his desire, the magickal power raised and the intended target, whatever that happens to be.

In archaic forms of magick, the link was usually something that was directly “linked” or attached at some point to the target, such as hair, finger nail parings, blood, jewelry or clothing, if the target was to be a person. If the target was more general, then the link consisted of herbs, power objects (stones, crystals, odd shaped pieces of wood), bird or animal parts (or even human parts), bits of metal (magnets, nails) or other curious odds and ends collected while on the hunt for internal occult connections. A table of correspondences would also help the magician sort out and select analogous items consisting of colors, incense, herbs, gem stones, precious and semi-precious metals - the list is nearly endless.

These various objects would be put together in an artistic manner to symbolize the intent, such as piercing an apple with rusty nails, piercing dried organs or herbs with thorns, or creating a poppet or miniature human shape out of wax or some tuber, adorning it with bits of hair, finger nails or cloth, and then baptizing and naming it for the intended target. The objects would be blessed, charged, assembled, and the final product would be used in a spell to make something happen. The completed link object could be put in a metal container or a bottle, a leather or cloth pouch, and either kept, buried or burned. In some cases words could be printed on the object, or perhaps even a scrap of cloth or paper could be used to contain drawings and words or names. In antiquity, curses were drawn and written out on lead sheets, folded and dropped into a well or stuck between the stones of the victim’s home.

Organic or inorganic links are called “gross links” because they are made from organic or inorganic materials, where the actual physical form and structure determines its use and intended purpose. Writing something down on a parchment, paper, cloth or a thin sheet of metal is a very different kind of link. A drawing or writing represents a transitional kind of magickal object, becoming more of what I call a symbolic link, since it uses symbolic forms to depict and establish the link.

A symbolic link is more versatile than a gross link, which is normally used just once. A symbolic link often caries no trace of any previous spell on it, so it can be reused for other purposes. A link that could be fashioned to be used multiple times would require that the original intent was the same. For instance, you could fashion a symbolic link for acquiring money, use it for yourself, and then at another time, use it for a friend. So long as there were no identifying factors or names, a general symbolic link can serve multiple purposes.

In the energy model or theory of magick, a link is used to imprint the raised energy before it’s exteriorized to fulfill the magician’s intention. The raised energy can be highly qualified, or not, but it still has to be imprinted with the magician’s desire. In the system of magick that I use, a sigil is employed to facilitate the instrumentation of a link. The act of imprinting the energy is where the magician wills the link, in the form of a sigil, and the raised energy into a unified field. (This technique will be discussed in more detail later in another section.)

Crafting a sigil to be used as a link doesn’t usually trigger it’s inherent effect or cause the desire to become manifest by itself. This is because one needs to charge or consecrate the sigil after fashioning it, and then apply it as a link within a magickal working where the energy is raised. Others may perform sigil magick as an independent magickal mechanism, so in that situation it’s possible that the act of crafting it might actually trigger the spell.

Since it is my habit to always craft a sigil just prior to performing a working (and I have never, to my knowledge, crafted one without it being used in a working), it would be difficult for me to judge whether the act of crafting the sigil prematurely triggered a working. I just know that in order for a ritual working to be successful, a link must be fashioned and used to imprint the energy. The two magickal operations performed sequentially are being blended together, but it’s possible to fulfill a working with just the internalized application of the link. Now that I have explained how I use sigilization in my magickal workings, I should probably describe how to actually craft a sigil.

The general rule for crafting a sigil is to start out by writing a phrase that encapsulates the intention of the rite. It should be written in upper case, then the phrase is reduced to a simple pictographic diagram through a process of reduction and simplification, where the curves, lines, and intersected forms of those actual letters are reduced to a unique set and reassembled into a kind of logo.

Let’s go through the steps that one would typically follow to produce a sigil, keeping in mind that there are a lot of variations and methods used in this technique. How I do it may not be exactly the same as how others do it, but each practitioner will ultimately find a technique that works for them.

1. Write out a phrase of your intent; make it as simple and specific as possible. You can also eliminate words like “I” or “desire” or “will” from the phrase since that would be redundant. Just state what you intend or seek to make happen.

To make things easier, you will want to print this phrase out in all capital letters, but actually, I prefer to add the nuance of having larger and smaller letters in the mix. Using all caps actually helps to reduce the number of linear forms in the sample of extracted letters.

The act of succinctly stating one’s intention also helps to simplify and refine the intention of a work. It’s better to reduce the intention down to one thing. If you are seeking to make more than one thing happen, then you should employ more than one phrase and then build multiple sigils from them. (It might also be necessary to perform separate workings for each sigil link as well.)

2.  Looking over the phrase, from left to right, eliminate all redundant letters - or letters that occur more than once. Now the phrase should just have all of the unique letters in the order that they first occur.

3. Next, eliminate letters that are variations of each other, for instance, “M” and “W” are analogous to each other. Break out of the letters the various analogous structures, like the cross bar in the “E”, “R”, “F”, “A”, “H” or “G”, the curve in the “B”, ‘C”, “D”, “G”, “J”, “P”, “R”, “S” or “U”, and the vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines that are found in the remaining letters. All of the these forms are reduced down to a single form, or dual forms facing left or right. The “O” can become a small circle or it can be fused with the rest of the curves, being a left and right curve joined together. What you have now are just single incidences of multiple structures (essential forms) arrayed in a line, like letters.

4. Assemble the line of essential structural forms together again to create a condensed linear form, which should look something like a pictographic representation or logo of the original phrase. This last step may require several attempts to find a final structure that “looks” elegant and interesting to the eye. You can fashion a single sigil form, or multiple sigils. Using multiple iterations to build a sigil makes for a less cluttered final sigil structure. If you are going to use a name in your sigil, then I would recommend making that a separate sigil form from the actual intention.

The point of this exercise is to produce a final structure that is simplistic, looks something like a pictograph of the intention, and the letters used in the original phrase can still be perceived in the final shape, although this last condition is not as important as creating a memorable pictograph.

I usually have to make four or five passes using this process before I am able to condense the form down to something that is esthetically pleasing and interesting to look at. Austin Spare was something of a graphic genius when it came to this kind representation (he could probably do it automatically and in one pass), but you don’t have to measure your results by that very high standard.

While working out the sigil, I will use a pencil on a scrap of paper, but the final form will be rendered on parchment with a special water-proof ink. It could also be painted on a piece of board, cloth, etched on metal, or even drawn on the floor or wall of your temple. However it is finally done, it will become an important magickal instrument, so the act itself should be executed as if it were a magickal rite, with the intention of the sigil and its associated desire strongly fixated in the mind of the magician.

Once the sigil is crafted, it will need to be consecrated if it’s to be used in a magickal working. This step is not followed by many who use sigilization magick, but this is how I do it, and it keeps the sigil from being too active until its intended use. I will consecrate the sigil with just a spot of lustral water (carefully applied with a wand) and then fumigated over an incense burner just before performing the working. For the sigil of a spirit, I would use consecrated wine, leaving a small stain on the corner as a sign that the sigil parchment has been activated.

Although I don’t actually work sigil magick without also performing a working of some kind, the basic idea behind it is to fill the mind with an emotional charge associated with the desire or intention so that no other thoughts or feelings are possible. This is a type of powerful obsession, often accompanied with a deep focused trance. This mind state is gradually built up through the process of crafting the sigil and then it’s elevated once the sigil is committed to its final form, executed in ink on parchment, or in whatever media is elected. The magician holds the sigil before his sight, focusing on the image of the design (not the words that were used to build it), while the emotional sentiments associated with the spell are worked to a climax. Then the sigil is either destroyed or set aside and promptly forgotten, allowing the image of the sigil to work in one’s unconscious mind. The magician can generate an intensely focused climax in a number of different ways, such as an orgasmic release through sex magick, masturbation, or even assuming Spare’s Death Posture. Yet often just intensely focusing the mind for a period of time and then quickly releasing it, is sufficient to obtain a good result. 

I should probably mention two other methods that are used to create a sigil device. These are the methods of fashioning a mantra or using condensed pictures. The mantra technique is similar to the word based sigil, except the reduced set of letters and vowels are arranged to spell out a magickal word or formula. It will most likely (though not always) be a nonsense word, but it will symbolize a specific intent. It will function as a barbarous magickal word of power, which can be used in a chant or as a mantra. A sigil derived from a picture or symbolic images (such as the symbols for the elements, planets, astrological signs, alchemical symbols, or even international traffic signs) uses the same methodology as stated in steps 3 and 4 for building a word sigil, where the forms are broken apart, condensed and reassembled.

That’s briefly how to formulate and use sigils as links in the discipline of ritual magick. This is based completely on how I do it, so of course, there will be a lot of possible variations. I doubt that two magicians who use this technique do it exactly in the same manner, but I believe that I have revealed the basic steps that most would follow. A more thorough resource on the art of sigil magick is to be found in the book “Practical Sigil Magic” by Frater U.D. (Llewellyn, 1990), which I heartily recommend.

Frater Barrabbas