Also called sigil, sigilization, making a sigil
A sigil is a personal symbol made by reducing a written wish to an abstract design, charging it with focused attention, and then deliberately forgetting it. The method comes from the English artist Austin Osman Spare and became central to chaos magic.
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This grimoire gives a fixed seal for each of seventy-two spirits, drawn on metal or parchment by the magician. The seals act as signatures to call a named spirit, not as personal designs built from a wish. Spare's method reversed the idea by making the symbol from your own desire.
Agrippa printed magic squares for each planet. A name is turned into numbers and traced as a line across the square, giving a sigil for an angel or spirit. Modern magicians still trace words this way as an alternative to the letter method.
Carroll and Sherwin took Spare's method as a core technique and added pictorial and mantric sigils, where a wish becomes a picture or a chant. Grant Morrison's 'Pop Magic!' essay (2003) popularised sigils for a wider audience.
Magical seals are old. Medieval and early modern grimoires such as the Lesser Key of Solomon gave each spirit its own seal, and Agrippa's 1533 Occult Philosophy showed how to trace names across planetary number squares. These symbols were tied to named beings. The modern habit of building a sigil from your own wish began with Austin Osman Spare (1886 to 1956), a London artist who self-published The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love) in 1913.
Spare's idea was that desire works best once it sinks out of conscious thought. He reduced a statement to its letters, combined them into a glyph, charged it in a state of focus he called vacuity, and then forgot it. He died before chaos magic began, but Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, who both published in 1978, made his technique central to their movement, and chaos magicians often call him its grandfather. Sigils are now one of the most widely used methods in modern magic.
Written charms on red or yellow paper, or on peach wood, pasted at the door or carried, to keep harmful spirits out of a home in Chinese tradition.
A five-by-five Latin word square that reads the same in every direction, written on walls, plates and paper for nearly two thousand years against fire, illness and bewitchment.
An Icelandic magical stave of eight trident-tipped arms around a central point, drawn to make the bearer fearsome to enemies and shielded from harm.
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