Do You Have to Draw Circles Around Sigils

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Symbols carry an undeniable power—whether it's the Ankh, the crucifix, or the golden arches of McDonald's.

For thousands of years, runes, glyphs, and icons have been used in occult rituals and spiritual practices to mess with reality. Today, drawings imbued with the desires of their creators—called sigils—are undergoing a resurgence. Advocates insist they really piece of work, and a new app called the Sigil Engine automates the whole process, aiming to make inventing reality even more accessible.

A sigil is a symbol used for magickal practice, typically created from scratch by the practitioner, and imbued with psychic energy to influence events. (That's magick with a 1000, to differentiate these rites from pulling rabbits out of hats.) Aspiring sigil creators could already tap into a wealth of resources to learn how to depict their own magickal signs, from online libraries to how-to guides on TikTok, or influential "anarchy magick" texts similar Liber Nada and Condensed Chaos.

The sigil creation procedure usually goes similar this: write downwards whatever you want to achieve, remove any vowels and repeating letters, and then position the remaining letters into a pleasing arrangement. Finally, you've got to "charge" your creation. Methods for this vary, but you could meditate, sing at, or, most usually, masturbate to your symbol, before finally destroying or forgetting all about it and pending the results.

Skeptics might cramp at the idea of drawing our own realities, but others may besides detect themselves surprised at the results, which believers say work best when they're within the boundaries of your day-to-day life. "There's no point charging a sigil to win the lottery if you don't purchase a ticket," chaos magician and comic book writer Grant Morrison once wrote. To exam out sigils, Morrison famously modeled a character later on themselves in The Invisibles and began to see cruel events inflicted on the fictional effigy, such equally flare-up lungs, actually transpire in real life. They decided to be kinder to the character subsequently that.

Users of the Sigil Engine, though, rely on code to practise much of the legwork. When visitors land on the URL, they're greeted by a sparkling black background and a prompt to type their "intention." Doing and so will prepare the Engine in motion, drawing the sign in bright red. Co-creator Darragh Mason, who hosts the Spirit Box podcast, describes this flourish every bit "a prayer or a moment of reverence to the goddess Babalon," found inside the Thelemic system first synthesised by British occultist Aleister Crowley. The backdrop alludes to "the great expansive void from which all things spring".

"We wanted to create something that actually felt magical when you used it," Mason told Motherboard. "For a lot of people in their magickal practice, the aesthetic helps give it more potency, so we were very witting: we wanted to have the process of creating a sigil—removing the vowels, removing repeating letters, creating the bodily symbol itself—to exist experiential, something that drew you in and [gave] it a sense of wonder."

A unique sigil generated by the Sigil Engine past typing "Protect the Perseverance Rover on Mars"

To ensure the final sigil is well-nigh guaranteed to be unique, the application logs the speed of typing, the time between keystrokes, and compares these to the entirety of the Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni, a Thelemic text that'due south contained within the code.

The measurements are combined to return a unique value for each of the base characters, says co-creator David Tidman. More than number-crunching normalizes a very big effigy to betwixt 0.0 and 1.0, which is finally used to position each character on a point around the circumvolve—for example, a character with a value of betwixt 0.51 and 0.54 would be located at the 11th of 21 points in total. At the moment, whatever the user types  is stored temporarily then deleted, but Tidman says in future this information won't be stored at all, and that in that location are no personal identifiers logged when visitors blazon their intentions.

The concluding illustration generated by the Sigil Engine is placed inside a circle—a nod, its creators say, to the Goetic seals of demons in the Lesser Key of Solomon, a medieval "grimoire," or magical book, from the mid-17th century, that more recently fabricated an appearance in Ari Aster'southward Hereditary.

Released in late 2020, the Sigil Engine has now been used more than 300,000 times, with people typing their magickal intentions spread across seven continents. According to the creators, at least some of the Engine's users say information technology works, with success stories covering everything from domicile renovations to fertility, and fifty-fifty those who accept made automated sigil product function of their daily routine.

It was important for both Bricklayer and Tidman to accept the aesthetic drive the application, and keep the whole procedure feeling experiential, magickal, and attainable. "Nosotros wanted the input of the intention to feel like role of the app, so we created our own keyboard component from scratch instead — each key touch pulses red, with the key components slightly transparent so particles show through, which actually connects the keyboard to the app itself," Tidman told Motherboard..

The Sigil Engine was start conceived equally a vast, participatory art project, but the sheer corporeality of interest has made their original idea to project the sigils one afterwards the other in a public place impossible. For Mason, though, the purpose of creating the Sigil Engine was non only to build an experiential, useful tool, but to better empathize whether magick could exist made to work inside a digital context.

Belief in magick has persisted throughout history, and technological advances have changed mostly the scale, accessibility, and course in which it is executed. In antiquity, magickal rites were performed beginning through repetition of speech. And then came writing, books, the press press, and now, the internet and social media. "There's e'er been that kind of tension between the shift of applied science: does information technology devalue? Does it notwithstanding piece of work? What'due south the side by side step: can it piece of work in digital format?" said Mason.

People have tried to elevate their consciousness, influence reality, and gain special insights with signs and symbols for thousands of years. If you look closely at mod Chinese characters, for example, you can see that they're ancestrally related to something chosen 'Oracle Bone Script'—where emblems were carved into bone and used for "pyromantic divination," or fire magic—dating back to the 2d millennium BCE. The Greek Magical Papyri, a book of spells, hymns, and rituals with some components from the 100s BCE, too continues to capture the imagination of practitioners and academics today.

But sigil practice as we recognize information technology can be traced to the work of English language proto-surrealist Austin Osman Spare, one of the most "charismatic characters to come out of the occult revival of the late 19th and early 20th century," writes David Keenan in his volume England'due south Subconscious Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Surreptitious.

Spare believed that sigils enabled "effective communion with hidden levels" and the "lodging of a desire or wish at subconscious levels without the conscious mind being involved or aware". In other words, the mere creation of a sigil helps to nest the idea inside a person, who tin can then go about fulfilling their wish, perhaps automatically. "By virtue of the Sigil you lot are able to send your desire into the subconscious (the place where all dreams meet)," Spare in one case wrote.

Engineering like the printing press has allowed magick to calibration, merely the Sigil Engine is not the starting time experiment with sigils of its kind.

A collective called Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth (TOPY), formed in 1981 with Throbbing Gristle founder Genesis P-Orridge and others from England'south transgressive industrial counter-culture, held sigils at the heart of their practice. This included concerted sigil creation on the 23rd hr of the 23rd day each month, and fifty-fifty mass-masturbation events that coordinated orgasms in tandem. "[The Temple was] remarkable for setting upwardly a not-hierarchical system to explore sex magick and sigils in a co-ordinated international level," P-Orridge is quoted every bit saying in England's Subconscious Reverse. "Nobody else has synchronised literally thousand of orgasms to a unmarried purpose, merely to see what happens!"

To Owen Davies, a history professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, the latest digital iterations of magick are not far abroad from their origins. The internet and computers, he says, do not beat out conventionalities in magick, just create new ways to engage with it.

"The relationship betwixt magic and engineering science is entwined," Davies told Motherboard. "When we first motility from papyrus to books, that'south a big technological change—information technology also shapes and changes the way in which magic is written, disseminated."

"When you get the appearance of moving from carving on clay tablets to inks, that's a new technology," Davies continued. "When you introduce inks, you can have ink of all different types, and unlike types can take new meanings and potencies. Then you motility to the printing press over again, another new engineering, which one time again democratizes in the sense the product of sigils."

Equally technology marches towards an even more direct relationship with the physical world, the Sigil Engine may also follow this trend. Mason and Tidman are already because generating AutoCAD files, so that sigil designs tin be easily exported to 3D printers. They are likewise toying with the idea of creating a full mobile awarding, which would permit users to save the sigils more than easily to their devices, or "dissolve" them permanently within the app, mirroring the devastation of paper sigils in more traditional practice.

With the exception of the ultra-rich, nigh of united states of america tin can agree that reality has been particularly shitty lately. As Grant Morrison said of sigils at the 2000 Disinfo Conference: "I'm here to tell y'all to endeavor it when you become home this evening because it fucking works ... We're dealing with some kind of operating organisation that tin can be hacked, using words, and words seem to be the binding agent for this thing, whatever it is."

There's no guarantee we tin can magick our fashion out of the various crises nosotros now face up. Only with the Sigil Engine taking less than 10 seconds to spin up, at least it'southward easier than e'er to requite information technology a metaphysical shot.

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Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjp5v3/internet-occultists-are-trying-to-change-reality-with-a-magickal-algorithm

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