How to forget a sigil: what it means and how long

To forget a sigil, stop rehearsing the want. You are not wiping your memory, you are letting go of the chasing. You charge the mark, you release it, and you set a date to check the result instead of watching for it.

That is the whole instruction, and it is the step people trip on. Forget it, sure. But forget what, exactly.

What "forget" actually asks

Austin Osman Spare set the sigil method out in The Book of Pleasure in 1913, and the forgetting is his idea too. You take a want, turn it into a mark so the thinking mind stops reading it as words, charge it, and then stop turning it over.

You will still remember you made a sigil. That is fine. Remembering you made it is not rehearsing it, the way remembering you mailed a letter is not standing at the mailbox. What you drop is the wanting: the daily checking, the quiet worry about whether it is working, the picking at it. The wanting is the thing that keeps the want unfinished. Let the wanting go and the sigil is doing its job.

What to do when you cannot forget

Sometimes you cannot put it down. The fix is not to try harder to forget, which only rehearses it more.

• Make more of them. A sheet of sigils for small things crowds out the fixation on any one.
• Bury the detail. Use a method where the mark no longer looks like the words, so there is nothing obvious to chew on.
• Give it a date and walk away. This is the real trick, and it is next.

How a check-back date makes forgetting safe

You do not have to forget forever. You have to forget until a date you set in advance.

When you charge a sigil in the Sigil Foundry, file the working in the Log with a check-back date. Now forgetting is safe, because the result is booked. You are not dropping the want down a hole, you are handing it to a calendar and going back to your life until the calendar pings.

How long do you wait

As long as you set. There is no universal timer, and anyone who gives you an exact number of days is guessing. Pick a window that fits the want, a week for something small, a month for something slower, and write that date down when you charge it. The site files the date for you so you never have to hold it in your head.

When it "didn't work"

The date comes, you open the Log, and nothing moved. Fine. Mark it: nothing, partly, or held. That is data, not failure.

A result you logged, even a miss, teaches you something. A result you never checked teaches you nothing, and memory keeps the hits and loses the rest. Read the pattern over several workings, not one.

Start with the drawing and charging, which live in how to make a sigil. The forgetting starts the moment you finish the charge.