I LOVE sigil magick and use sigils all the time. Symbols are so important and effective. Most people don't realize how much. Anyway, I stumbled across this...



Sigil magic was my least favourite thing back in my Baby’s First Grimoire days. It offended my sense of theatre. Where was the ritual, the incense, the scary looking altars? It was also… ahh… how you say… “messy”? So I kept away from it for years.

Then I accidentally ended up with a moderately successful career in the global advertising industry.

It was here that I saw the same techniques that underpin sigil magic -backed up with a huge amount of brain studies- being put to potent use.

Advertising relies on an understanding of how images work and how they work on the brain. Just changing a word or even a colour in an ad campaign would result in thousands of dollars profit for a client. The audience is rarely if ever aware they have been impacted in some way. And you yourself are somehow never influenced.

It’s not as evil as it sounds. In fact, consciously filtering out sensory data is an evolutionary advantage. But you’re still absorbing it via ‘low attention processing’. As for your lack of individual awareness of being influenced, this is due to a psychological phenomenon called Third Person Perception: the belief that advertising affects other people more than you. If you don’t agree with it, put down your Starbucks coffee, tap your converse sneaker angrily on the ground while you get out your iPad and use it to send me an angry gmail. More on this later.

Clearly, using images and words has a huge impact. Over the last thirty years, millions and millions of dollars have been spent trying to understand precisely what sort of impact visual stimuli have on the human brain; from violence in computer games to font choices in mortgage ads.

This is the kind of research and exploration that the first exponents of modern sigil magic could only dream about.

So maybe sigils are in need of another look? Maybe there is a way to fold all this research into sigil magic and… reboot it?

It’s worth the effort. Sigils are elegant. Sigils are adaptable. They don’t replace anything in your life or spiritual practice. They aren’t either/or. Whatever your flavour, you can definitely use sigils. Even the most stringent atheists can get something out of working with sigils. They can fit into any magical system. You could teach a nun sigil magic. (Somebody please teach a nun sigil magic.)


Read more: http://runesoup.com/2012/03/ultimate-sigil-magic-guide/#ixzz1pyYYBDwn

Your URL is malformed, but I have the correct one here: Sigils Reboot: How To Get Big Magic From Little Squiggles

You have, once again, impressed me with your rational argument for magick. I'm still not a believer in magick, but I'm a huge fan of you.

Thank you for fixing my link.

It is very hard for me to explain magick to people. I thought this article did a really good job at putting forth some of the ways it works.