Tumblr has no idea how sigils work. If you are new to magic, sigils are one of the best places to start, and this site is hands down the worst place to learn about them. They are a mostly modern invention and one of the great breakthroughs of chaos magic, being an accessible and simple way to affect magical change in the most basic stripped down way possible. And yet, tumblr witches still found a way to water them down even more.
To learn what sigils are, read an actual chaos magic book and notice all the shit that conveniently goes unmentioned on tumblr, such as the entirely mental launching process and the vital importance of forgetting your intent.
Salty witches are not allowed to yell at me for this post until they at least SKIM the actual instructional segments of these books to see how their perception of sigils differs from the actual explanations of how to make them work and why.
To help new witches navigate tumblr without getting pulled into the worst bastardization of actual effective practice, here are some signs that a sigil/sigil post is complete bullshit or ineffective:
It’s just an image post with the statement of intent / purpose of the sigil written right smack underneath it.
As stated above, tumblr doesn’t know that you can’t use a sigil while knowing what it’s for. This is also why “focusing on the intent of the sigil” is a great way to make sure it never works. When you just give someone a sigil and tell them exactly what it’s for and write it right underneath so that you’re always reminded, it instantly becomes useless.
It’s recommending any way to “charge” your sigils that comes from anything but the human mind/perception.
If you read the above literature, I don’t need to re-explain how sigils are actually ‘charged’. If you’re just blowing smoke on it or burning it or drawing it in sand or whatever, you’re not doing anything. You can charge/launch sigils by making other people look at them or perceive them, or you can launch them with your own mental processes, but if it’s entirely physical it’s not doing jack shit except making you feel ~witchy~.
It involves randomly drawing sigils on shit and acting like that’s going to ‘enchant’ it or something.
Same reasoning as above, and also apparent if you even skimmed the books. A single use sigil you just made for some dumb shit is not going to do anything if you draw it all over yourself. Sigils like LS got that ability from years of intensive group work. Your self-love sigil is not empowered enough to do anything if you draw it in your makeup or whatever, no I don’t care how ~witchy~ it makes you feel, please stop drawing shit on your arms, it’s not a glamour it just makes you look weird.
It’s not an actual goal but just a positive phrase or affirmation.
Sigils are literal and they take the path of least resistance. If you make one out of some flowery quote or feel-good affirmation it’s not going to just make you feel better. It’s going to do exactly literally what it says. I saw someone make a sigil for “I am at peace” and like, the easiest way for that to manifest is for you to literally just get hit by a bus and die. It doesn’t care if you mean “peace” in the love and light sense. You said “at peace” and that also means “dead”.
And last but not least…..
Someone is trying to sell you ‘sigil commissions’.
Never.
Buy.
Sigils.
They are the dumbest, easiest, stupidest little things to make yourself. There is no human on earth who “doesn’t have the spoons” to make a sigil unless you have absolutely no way to move any part of your body or even picture a basic shape in your head. Determine what you want to happen. Randomly scribble on paper while you think about it. Done. That’s a valid sigil. Being ‘prettier’ doesn’t do jack shit for it, it doesn’t make it more effective, and being made by someone else sure doesn’t help it work better for you. People who sell you the same scribbles you could be making yourself are scam artists, pure and simple.
Sigils are easy. You can use them for anything. They are already the most streamlined, secular, stripped down form of magic ever devised. You cannot make them any more simple than they already are and still have a functioning technique. They are the triumph of Austin Spare’s work and the epitome of chaos magic’s goal of bringing magic to the public in the most accessible way possible. And tumblr just takes the easiest magical technique ever devised and decides it’s still too fucking hard. If you cast off all this horrible misinformation and actually read a book, you’ll be able to actually start getting results and building the skills necessary for a fulfilling practice.
Somebody said it
As someone who has read all of those books multiple times and is a member of the IOT, gotta say that’s some elitist shit. There are exceptions to all those rules. From a purely chaos magick perspective there is only one question, did it work? No? Try something else. Yes? Keep doing it and try to single out the factor that made it effective.
Sigils are chaos magick’s gift to the world, but chaos magick doesn’t own sigils anymore. The practice has gotten way bigger and more varied than that.
Just stop fucking worrying about people who may be doing it for the aesthetic. It does nothing to your magick. There have never been a lot of magi. Only a few will truly persue magick on a higher level. And that’s okay. If you know some. Just be there to teach when someone asks.
And it’s not that the information in this post is bad, it’s the approach. Myself, I always start such posts with, “this is what works for me….l
