Spare's Sigil Method, as He Wrote It

Austin Osman Spare wrote the sigil method down himself. Four steps, in his own words.

This is Check Date, from chaosmagick.com.

Spare was an English artist, born on the thirtieth of December, eighteen eighty-six. He died on the fifteenth of May, nineteen fifty-six. He self-published The Book of Pleasure in nineteen thirteen. Wikipedia says his beliefs about sigils were a key influence on the chaos magic movement.

He defines sigils in one line. Quote: "monograms of thought, for the government of energy." Read it as a compressed file. The want goes in as a sentence. What comes out is a small form that carries the sentence without showing it.

Step one is the sentence. His example: "This my wish to obtain the strength of a tiger."

Step two is the compression. Combine the letters, he says, and simplify them. The aim, in his words: "a simple form which can be easily visualised at will, and has not too much pictorial relation to the desire." The form should not remind you of the want.

Step three is the state. He calls it vacuity. You reach it, quote, "by exhausting the mind and body by some means or another." His list of means is a strange mix. Mantras and posture. Tennis. Playing patience, the card game. Walking while you concentrate on the sigil. A personal or traditional means serves equally well, he says, depending on temperament. And he warns you not to confuse this with concentration.

Step four is the hold. At the point of exhaustion, retain only the sigil form and visualize it. Quote: "eventually it becomes vague, then vanishes." After that, when you notice the sigil outside the working time, he says to repress it. He means a deliberate striving to forget it.

His stated reason is the ego. At the magical time the form prevents thought and association on that desire. So the ego does not restrain it, or attach it to its own images, memories and worries.

Peter Carroll, writing later, adds options. Lose the sigil by burning it, burying it or casting it into the ocean. Charge it at moments of trance, high emotion or frustration. Banish it by evoking laughter. Keep a record, but not in a way that makes you think hard about the want. Spare gives you the vacuity and the vanishing. Carroll hands you a menu.

One more line from Spare. He claims, quote, "what a person believes by Sigils, is the truth, and is always fulfilled." That is his result, stated as fact. This site neither adopts it nor rejects it.

I run mine from a calm state. Spare's text says the time of exhaustion is the time of fulfilment. That is a real difference between his method and mine, and it can be tested.

Write the check date at the top of the page before you draw anything. When the date comes, read the log, mark the sigil done, and close it.