It also influenced the artist Brion Gysin, who experimented with combining Spare's sigil method with the traditional form of magic squares:Ĭalligraphic magick squares were one of the techniques most commonly applied by Gysin. Spare's technique became a cornerstone of chaos magic (see next section). The big difference with Spare's method was that he dispensed with pre-existing esoterica and external beliefs, so the sigils were no longer for controlling traditional demons, angels and what-have-you, but instead for controlling forces in the unconscious psyche of the individual operator. Essentially, Spare turned the Medieval practice of using sigils to evoke entities on its head, arguing that such supernatural beings were simply complexes in the unconscious, and could be actively created through the process of sigilization. The artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) developed his own unique method of creating and using sigils, which has had a huge effect on modern occultism. The sigil was like a signature or sign of an occult entity. The Sigil shall then serve thee for the tracing of a Current which shall call into action a certain Elemental Force') and it was used in the making of talismans. The members of the Golden Dawn were perfectly familiar with it ('combining the letters, the colours, the attributions and their Synthesis, thou mayest build up a telesmatic Image of a Force. The word sigil has a long history in Western magic. The locations were then connected by lines, forming an abstract figure.

An excerpt from Sefer Raziel HaMalakh featuring various magical sigils (or סגולות, segulot, in Hebrew).Ī common method of creating the sigils of certain spirits was to use kameas, a special use case of magic squares - the names of the spirits were converted to numbers, which were then located on the magic square.

House sigil generator