Barbelith Advice part 3

To summarize from last week’s blog:

1. Magic is communication with the universe: develop an important theme of communication in your hypersigil.
2. Research godforms of communication, including Hermes/Mercury. Thoth, Odin, etc, as powerful symbols of what you want to accomplish in communicating with the universe.
3. Work your hypersigil into a serialized story – the more interaction from fans or other people, the better.
4. A hypersigil should reflect the spirit or trend of the times.
5. Start off with a setting that is a glamorized setting of your own world.
6. Slowly add in personal references, like people you know, things you’ve done, and places you’ve been.
7. Act like your characters.
8. Acknowledge that many of your beliefs are fiction.
9. Maintain the integrity of your story despite any need to make faster magic.
10. Keep a journal.
11. Use the third person instead of first.
12. Provide emotionally charged scenes.

To continue with more advice from Barbelith, I’m actually including names this time instead of just vague references to anonymous writers.

Sebastian comments

I mean, first you come with the magickal intention, then you design the plot, then you start writing it as a story or as a novel or whatever.

Magickal intent equals goal of the story or your life. Every story needs a dramatic need that drives the story forward. Every person’s life needs a goal or multiple goals to give their life focus. Plot is the movement and activation of your goals: how do you achieve them or try to achieve them, realistically? Writing is doing.

He continues,

At some point, you are going to pay a lot of attention to strictly literary matters, so that you go for the literary richness of the text,

By paying attention to the literary conventions of your story, you are enhancing the symbolic nature of the hypersigil. The subconscious mind and the universe doesn’t work through words because words are human creations. Your subconscious reality works through symbols and literature is about the interweaving of symbols with real life.

and you start paying attention to the length of sentences, adjectives, the order and repetition of words, so that the whole thing will look fresh and nice for publishing under the eyes of an editor, an eventual reader and the crappy literary critics we all have read from.So, at this stage, you may literally blew the plot out of your mind while becoming obssessed in finding "the precise word", the tempo, the glittering perceptions that only the writer can convey to the reader so to blast him full into the literary experience. And you re-read the whole thing one time and another, changing articles, adjectives, commas, periods, tiny details. And I think that is how the thing is charged and creates momentum.

At first I didn’t agree with what Sebastian was saying but after re-reading what he said a couple times, I got the gist of it. Normally, freewriting works best when writing a hypersigil but here Sebastian is talking about the process of editing and interacting with an editor as a way of charging the hypersigil. Interaction with others is necessary as stated in the previous blog posting, and the process of revision and preparation to meet the editor and face the critics creates emotional turbulence that like with freewriting further charges the hypersigil.

El Directo adds in:

So much of our thinking is shaped by narrative structure, practically from the moment we’re born. We map these structures onto our lives in ways we don’t even realise, and the fact that so many people are doing it creates can create the impression of vast narrative made up of everyone’s interlocking stories.

In a nutshell, what El Directo is stating is that human cognition is created mainly through loose narrative sequences, that we are composed of stories, many which we may have long forgotten about but which are still shaping our present-day behavior. If we are narrative creatures, hey, why not rewrite the story of our lives?

Since those notes were short, I’ll continue with another thread from Barbelith:

David Roel comments

Don't sigil for what you want. Sigil for what you need.

Yeah, my preliminary research on sigils has uncovered the same advice. The basic premise is the Monkey’s paw where you have to be careful what you wish for. I read a story where a guy wished for mad crazy success for his new online business and then got millions and millions of hits and orders to the point where he couldn’t fulfill them all. His business went under. Likewise, in wishing to possess a certain specific lover you are sabotaging yourself. It is best to desire to meet someone who is compatible with you rather than forcing your subconscious to fit your external desires. Who knows better, you or your subconscious?

XXII:X:II = XXX reiterates the same idea:

START with what you need. What you NEED. There are certain bare essentials that have to be in play if any sort of improvement is to come into your life. Write these down. Understand how one relates to another. From these basic elements, you can then set certain goals as long as you understand how those basics will help you reach those goals. Start simple. See it clearly. Understand the path from here to there. Believe that you WILL achieve these ends, that the end result is not in question. Envision yourself at that point; really see it clearly.

Eh, kind of New Age-y with the whole “believe you will succeed” crap, but again, part of the hypersigil is to start a life improvement program. A problem that many people have is that their life is marked by a lack of goals or a lack of understanding about what they want, why they want it, and how to go about getting what they want, or rather what they NEED. The hypersigil forces the writer to plot out goals because goals (and conflict of achievement) is necessary for the success of a story. The story goals intertwine with life goals. To properly understand the story goals, the writer has to understand and focus upon these goals in real life.

LVX23 takes the advice into a more practical area:

Do some preparatpory [sic] divination, visualization, invocation - basically anything to draw out the underlying symbols and metaphors gestating within you. Or pull from an already existing set of metaphors you're used to working with. These will be the characters of your hypersigil, as it were.

Preparation is important like when you cook, you first have to set up the ingredients so that everything is ready for the actual cooking. The initial stages of the hypersigil should be a gathering stage whereby you set up the components in stages: what characters, what settings, and what plot scene do you want to include in your hypersigil? This can take some time.

So far my hypersigil has taken several steps going in circles back to previous steps.

I started mainly with a dissection of fantasy and science fiction motifs, mainly analyzing and taking apart popular movies and books like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the Terminator, Harry Potter, and the Matrix, as well as influential comic books like the Invisibles, Planetary, Watchmen, Swamp Thing, and the like. This was a major first step where I had to go back to my original inspirations and pull them apart into a raw imaginative form. The end result was literally hundreds of scenes and conventions pulled out of respective influences.

I then began writing out my life, focusing on events in particular years but also other life-altering events that were out of chronological order. At first I portrayed these events as my life but then reworked them into separate scenes and individual stories about my characters.

Yeah, having characters would help. I made up characters that symbolized important people: some were literal like my family, while others were more symbolized, like my friends turned into gnomes and trolls. I based a lot of their characters on astrological personalities as a way of studying and portraying astrology. As of yet, I’m still developing each character.

Likewise, I am still developing setting. My first step has been to create iconic genre settings, for example, a sci-fi world where different locations represent different sub-genres, like military zones, soft sci-fi centers, hard sci-fi laboratories, apocalyptic zones, virtual reality centers, etc. My next step is to start incorporating more of my own travels into the setting.

All of the above resulted in a big mess, especially the plot, eventually resulting in over 200 stories that I wanted to combine into one novel. My current step is to organize my narrative timeline more and then actually start with the magic, freewrite the individual stories, sigilize them and start weaving them together.

LVX23 continues

When envisioning your idealized self - the self you wish to be as a result of the working - don't just think of what would be cool or how you'd like to be Spiderman.

Yes, that is a pitfall, getting too far into a fantasy self with no practical attempt at improvement. It is better to imagine yourself as a calmer, thinner, richer self than a web-spinning super-hero.

You need to honestly expose negative aspects of your self- the shadow - identify and personify them, then go about the necessary means to engage and overcome them or integrate them in more productive ways.

While reading up on sigils, I saw a similar idea related to binding demons. Since your hypersigil is autobiographical, the villains in your stories should relate to your character flaws. What are your flaws? Personify or characterize them as the enemy of your story. For example, a significant scene in my hypersigil involves taking my flaws and turning them into demons that are bound by the hero.

Conversely, look at the positive characteristics already present in your personality that you'd like to extend and further develop or integrate into your being. Work these in as the counterbalance to the Shadow, the protagonists or guiding angels, the sentinels of Light. The flow between these forces, and the ritual work necessary to invoke each will surely generate enough experience to inform your hypersigil.

The opposite, your hero or related characters should capture what is good about your personality. The positive and negative aspects of your personality battle against each other symbolically, but make sure to approach this conflict realistic through your symbolism. If you have an anger problem, how then do you conquer your anger? You must show how to realistically bind this demon of wrath.

Another writer on the Barbelith message-board codenamed FinderWolf throws in his two cents:

You can ask for the next steps to come into your life that will be part of the journey towards getting a book published: free time in which to write, research or ideas coming to you when you need them, and further down the line, contacts with folks who will help you in getting the manuscript read, etc.

If you read a good book or watch serialized television shows, you’ll notice that the plotline calls for the greater task to be broken down into smaller plotlines. The same goes for any goal. You can’t just move from beginning to end but must have a sequence of stories that each contribute to the final result. If I want to get into a PhD program, I have to figure out my area of interests, improve my GRE scores, write up my application essays, find a program to go to, have enough money to apply, get recommendation, etc. Work your magic step by step; don’t try to fly before you learn how to walk.

The Tower Always Falls gives practical advice:

What I did was write a series of journal entries. All the same date, roughly a year apart for 13 years- detailing what I would be thinking about or writing about then. I mostly wrote with some very bland, mundane events with the backdrop of certain events that I wanted to happen. Sort of in a trance state as I wrote them, not really examining what I wrote or if it was a good event or bad event so much as free-writing and letting myself drift within this future self. I then sealed these entries into a folder and put it away, never to look at again until the right year and date. Now I mostly forgot what I had written, but I remembered enough that I was worried that the whole "lust for result" would color my working. The result when I finally opened the 2003 entry was interesting. Many of the mundane details were completely off. But the main thought I used as a backdrop to the entry ended up coming somewhat rue. I wrote with the backdrop of having a new job as a "film writer" (I think there was some ad in the paper for that job as I wrote the hypersigil). Turns out I'm not writing film reviews, but I AM writing a screenplay in an oppurtunity [sic] just happened to pop up. So the hypersigil interpreted my "film writer" backdrop slightly differently, but the base result was the same.

Mm, I think he is over-reaching a little bit but the theory and practice is still coherent. What The Tower Always Falls did is write is hypersigil up in parts, like scenes or chapter, in a freewriting trance. The freewriting is where the power is. He wasn’t working with one unit but more in sections. His results were similar to his writing but only at a general level. It is better to be general rather than to focused. Instead of wishing for a specific person to fall in love with you, wish for the right person to fall in love with you, or perhaps use a specific person as simply a symbol and hope for the right partner to arrive. Write out your scenes but expect the results to be more interpretive or different. I get this result with money magic: I don’t magic to win the lotto but I get job offers from resumes a year old or from unexpected tax returns.

Lastly, Rex Feral warns

Bearing in mind that a lot of results magick involves getting laid or getting rich, I can't see how people expect to conjure for these things and have everything else in your life remain static.

Expect consequences. Changing the nature of things creates unbalance and a vacuum.

Barbelith Advice part 2

To summarize from last week's blog:

1. Hypersigil should be constructed in a third-person narrative.
2. Begin by creating a rough autobiographical sketch, perhaps through journals or diaries and then slowly work your way into future events.
3. Narrative magic works in relation to sympathetic magic and affirmation magic. Become familar with these techniques or areas of study.
4. Actively deconstruct yourself: take yourself apart and examine your most foulest parts, like a plumber or mechanic changing the oil. This is refered to as a Shamanic illness. Become familar with the process.
5. Incorporate references to other more famous works into your hypersigil plot.
6. Poetry is a good way to get started, working with raw non-linear images and poetic devices.
7. Freewriting is the best way to harness magic/creative power.
8. Revolve your hypersigil episodes around particular themes or exploratory issues.
   Shorter is better.
9. Begin by creating fictional representations of yourself (fiction suits) that you can project into your more powerful memories to rewrite these memories.
10. Contemplate the basic transformation of hypersigil: transform an experience into a picture and then the picture into words and a story/poem. Experiment with rawer forms of pictorial writing like rebus or hieroglyphics.

Continuing on from last week’s blog, I am focusing on more advice giving from Barbelith, particularly this column.

I had to sift through a lot of information so this week’s blog is less extensive than previous post and relies more upon direct quotation. In future weeks, I will return to previous blogs and summarize their content and elaborate more.

To get started,

As a first step, I'd suggest becoming a popular sci-fi author or comic book writer with a solid fan base,

At first I thought this advice was like the old Steve Martin joke: “to make a million dollars, the first thing you need to do is…get a million dollars.” If I were a successful author, why would I want to write a hypersigil? I would be successful and not need magic to change my life…

But what the advice is saying is that exposing your writing to a large fan base with high interaction is important to harness the full power of the magic. The more people who invest themselves in your writing, the more powerful the story and thus your magic. Magic is a lot about marketing. Let other people contribute to your desires. Let your stories take on a life of their own.

then come up with an idea for a serialized story that will come out every month or so and be read by thousands of people.

Why serialized? Serials allow more flexibility in storyline as well as better interaction with the audience. I also think that serials have more power to them because they provide a constant charge of energy and expectation. A book can be read in a night while a comic book or television show has that cliffhanger or twist that forces the reader to sit and wait in expectation until next month or next week.

Ideally you should develop a concept that reflects the zeitgeist of the times and resonates with so many people to such an extent that they are inspired to create places like barbelith that are still going strong almost a decade after your hypersigil is completed.

Star Wars, for example, is a product of its time. It captures the fantasy escape of a war torn era. The best works tap into the modern collective unconscious or interests of the vox populi. This again is a matter of marketing, figuring out what people want and providing a service through your writing. Easier said than done, of course.

I'd root the story in a fictional world that's not too dissimilar to our own, but perhaps a more glamorized, sexier version. The kind of world that you would most like to inhabit yourself.

Obviously, if you don’t want to live in your world, who else would, and thus your setting would have no appeal to it.

How to glamorize and sexify your world again is a matter of marketing: we’re talking James Bond, America’s Next Top Model, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous stuff that you would find in the glamour magazines. Sexy people, high fashion, fast fun and adventure, or on a different note more evident in younger reader fiction, adventure at every corner.

Get the story going and get your readership excited by it. Heat things up a bit. When you think that your fictional world has started to permeate the consciousness of several thousand people on a monthly basis, start adding subtle autobiographical elements into the narrative.

Creating a fictional world first and then adding autobiography? A little different from what I was thinking. I was presuming that the story would be based on autobiography from the beginning. Instead we are working on a type of self-insertion.

Once a successful story is created, start making it more autobiographical. Put people who you know into it.

A way to increase the autobiography but a dangerous move to do too boldly. I’ve tried that with my writing: real people don’t make good characters and have to be re-organized into actual solid characters. A name, background, description, etc, isn’t enough.

Take the characters to locations that you have visited and have them do the things that you have done. Try and reflect different aspects of your own life in this fictional world.

Work in location where you have been. I actually have never thought about that so literally. Most of my hypersigil sketches have been plot-wise similar to my life but I’ve never thought about focusing on the places I’ve been: Amsterdam, Transylvania, Germany, even smaller places like the opera or a haunted house.

At the same time, make a conscious decision to start acting like the characters. Go to places they might go, do the sort of things they might do, look for opportunities to get to know the types of people that they might know, maybe get the haircut that one of your characters has, or start wearing the type of clothes that they would wear.

I’ve noticed more directly this particular effect: if you want to be or meet a certain type of person than you have to do the things these people do or go places where they go.

Acting like your character is tricky because your character is you, but since you want to change your basic personality, you will have to start writing in character traits different from your own personality. Maybe you want to be braver. What brave things do you want your character to do? Have your character do them and then start doing it yourself. Take note of the results for verisimilitude. Perhaps you should do them first and then write about them or write about them to inspire yourself like writing a spell.

At the simplest level, give yourself a makeover so that you resemble your character instead of your character resembling you.

Where do you want to go? Writing your story gives you incentive to check out transformative places. Once you have written about places you’ve been, plot out the places you should go to.

Once you start going to the places your character goes, you will start meeting the people your character meets or who you want to meet. But first you have to find these places or make them up. Every type of character that might seem fictional exists somewhere, or if they don’t, your fiction can influence someone to mold themselves into the image of who you want. Your writing can act as a call to action for people you want to meet to seek you out. The question is, who do you want to meet?

Slowly and subtly start to dissolve the boundaries between the two worlds, and start to recognize how much of your own life and the limitations and parameters that you impose on yourself are in fact just fictions themselves. Gradually replace some of these fictions with new ones out of your hypersigil, that have more or less the same level of objective validity as, say, the fiction that dictates you need to smoke 20 cigarettes a day.

Your writing is part fiction and part reality in the same way that your own life is part fiction and part reality. By acknowledging the fictional parts of your personal reality, those fictions can be rewritten.

The hypersigil is a prompt to inspire the writer beyond normal bounds. Inspiration to enter into new territories that may have been unrealized. You become capable of previously incapable tasks, each impossible success expanding your ability to succeed at higher levels.

Be careful not to disrupt the flow of the story's narrative though. For the hypersigil to work it has to function as a consistent and engaging fictional world, you have to cultivate and nurture it so that it starts to take on a life of its own within the consciousness of your readership. You have to be careful not to push things too far too fast, or sacrifice the integrity of the narrative by being too eager to force the results you want through it. You have to be patient and let it cook in its own time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, writing a love story about an anonymous stranger suddenly falling madly in love with you and doing you on the office desk would lose it’s reality. Instant and perpetual success have no drama and lose their audience interest. Let your fictional life unfold as it goes. Instead of quick sex, look for a extended courtship. Think about the sexual tension between a lead male and lead female character like Mulder and Scully in the X-Files. The minute they hook up, the tension that made them such a good interesting pair is gone. Take it slowly. Let the plot unfold.

If we are to define a "hypersigil" (which I think is a slightly misleading term anyway...) as a method of making transformative changes to your life using the medium of fiction, then I'd suggest that the process of keeping a magical journal is a hypersigil. One of the things a journal does is help you to construct a magically empowering narrative out of the events of your life.

A relatively simple concept: keep a journal to keep track of your life. Weave these details into your fiction and assign yourself tasks in your journal based upon your fiction. I’ve tried a few different types of journals. A large sketchpad which was good for drawing but inconvenient. A smaller notebook with a Superman insignia and then a smaller green velvet covered diary: both of these were still not compact enough. Finally I bought a pocket-sized notebook from Wal-mart that I could keep comfortably on my person and pull out easily. The other journals were too big and not conveniently portable.

However, you could always just write 2000 words of wish fulfillment fantasy where you're this cool kung fu sorcerer guy who fights shoggoth powered politicians and shags loads of goth birds, then put it on the internet and just call it a hypersigil. Seems to be the done thing.

That would actually be pretty cool, but I think the advice is warning against Mary Sue fiction, all powerful characters engaging in high adventures with low risk or drama or interest.

You can also do retroactive sigils. fix (a/the) past, clarify it, maybe even alter it.

That’s my goal.

Always helpful is not listing your name directly in the story (if it's about you) and creating similar names (or names you feel evoke your essence, or the essence of whichever character you're dealing with that might be the avatar/ fiction suit/ analogue to one of your friends, family members, etc.).

It is best not using your real name or the names of friends and family members. I like to do multi-lingual translations that keep a similar meaning with a completely different name. For example, my middle name is Lauren, derived from the laurel, meaning the laurel plant. The scientific name for laurel is umbellularia, so my Lord of the Rings-style name would be Laria.

Be careful of Mary Sue names. Mary Sue’s are blatant fiction suits representing super-idealized versions of the author. Mary Sue’s can do anything, are loved by everyone, and are important over all other characters. Mary Sue’s really destroy narrative cohesion. Analysis of Mary Sue names and conventions abound.

I never sat down and said, "I will write a hypersigil". sat down, wrote an autobiographical story.

The irony of the situation is that most hypersigil, including my own, have mainly been accidental. How then does one create something accidentally but deliberately? I think the power of the hypersigil comes from its crime of passion creative spontaneity.

Try translating other techniques of magick into a textual form;

Think back to Star Wars, the Matrix, Fight Club, or Avatar. These stories are filled with instructional philosophies and magical catch phrases. The Invisibles instructs on social magic, how to summon godforms, and Banishing rituals. People need these instructional manuals in their fiction to give their life guidance. Teach and teach yourself through your hypersigil. For example, I’ve been interested in Banishing rituals so I plan on including scenes in my hypersigil with character doing Banishing rituals.

I try to make full use of the emotional effects of writing: intense anger, real arousal, genuine wonderment, calm aesthetic appreciation, outright anxiety, overpowering curiosity, all can be evoked by prose and poetry with a little forethought.

The emotion behind freewriting is the raw power of the magic, the anger, sex, wonder, serenity, anxiety, sadness, etc. Writers should run themselves through every emotion and purge these emotions into the hypersigil and the reader. Scenes and autobiography should focus on particular emotions as their theme, explore these issues.

If you do plan to have readers besides yourself, remember that what you write becomes what they read, and they do so without the benefit of knowing what will happen next. This enables you to treat the progression of your text as a sort of ritual labyrinth, where the pages are a series of chambers designed to have a specific cumulative effect, like a statuary gallery with an artfully arranged counterpoint of images and dialogue.

A beautiful metaphor for the writing process. Ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians trained themselves in a similar manner, called locational memory. Each bit of information or rather packages of information are placed within imaginary rooms in an imaginary mansion. In order to retrieve a particularly memory, the rhetorician would visualize walking through the mansion room by room. A story could be designed in a similar way with dialogue statues and character paintings.

But keep them walking - use every dirty, low-art, sensationalist, pop culture special effect technique you need to keep it riveting and them moving forward without ruining the suspension of disbelief.

True, although I hadn’t thought of that. Your goal is to keep the reader involved. Do what you have to do to keep them tuning in. What then are techniques that could be employed? Death is the first that comes to mind…maybe accidents like a car crash or plane crash. Plot twists, etc. I’ll have to explore this later.

We naturally resolve memory and history into mythic struggles, dramas, and storytelling is a powerful way to directly and purposefully inject material into the Subconscious.

Think about the deification of Roman emperors or Greek demigods. I was surprised to hear that Heracles was a real person. The exploits of life become mythologized and abstracted into greatly impossible deeds and then these real life personas weaved into allegory. Reality becomes fictions becomes myth becomes collective unconscious.

Strongly identifying with/writing as a specific character for weeks and months can lend itself to a bit of 'bleed' where the character gets confused with your own headspace... events that belong in the fictional world start to worm their way into the real, sometimes to a frightening degree.

Having written about a male character for the past several months, I find that when I close my eyes, the image of me in my imagination is of my character. The result wasn’t intentional but the result of hiding behind my character, moreso writing out fictional stories while fictionally allowing myself free reign of expression. In my fiction suit, I could act out, scream, rage and pout, go places and have conversations that the real me could never have. Eventually the real me became someone else, perhaps the realer me deep, deep inside.

In an article titled Fictive Arcanum by Don Webb, Webb theorizes about the relationship between magic and writing.

Basically the semiotic theory of magic is that man is able to effect communication with his universe, and to think ascriptively (i.e. hidden meaning is ascribed to the phenomenon of the universe and it becomes a partner in communication).

Magic is communication with the universe. Shouldn’t we then learn how to communicate?

The semiotic theory postulates three elements: the magician seeking either a change a psychological change within him/herself or an environmental change, the message which is cast in the form of cultural coded symbols, and the hidden "other side" of the universe. This goes beyond Frazier's notions of "sympathy' by actually elaborating not only a three fold process of sender-message-receiver but actually proposes a willed volition to receive communication (in either the form of a revelation or an environmental change) back from the universe.

The magician communicates with the universe. The universe communicates back through changes in reality.

Summing up this model of magic (after Flowers, Runes and Magic: Magical Formulaic Elements in the Older Runic Tradition - Lang 1986 pg.17):

Subject (Man) --> Direct Object (Symbol-symbolized) --> Indirect Object (Other reality)

An interesting linguistic metaphor. Fill in the blanks. Magician = subject. Some type of verb. Direct object is the symbol the magician uses. The indirect object is the force of the universe being communicated to.

This model suggests that for the magician the great secret is finding the correct mode of address -- that method of communication which will produce the response from the hidden realm.

Self-explanatory. Magic is about finding the correct means of communicating with the universe in order to get the universe to communicate back.

This has always be intuited in the Mediterranean school of magic, as exemplified by choosing Hermes, god of communication as its patron.

Godforms are really just personifications of a particular idea. Gods like Hermes/Mercury and Thoth were worshipped because of their representations of communication, particularly with the divine and the Underworld. Perhaps a hypersigil writer should study and understand these important symbols to develop magical communication skills.

For the magician operating in a traditional society the method of communication is generally heavily determined -- people know how to talk to the gods. But in modern and postmodern societies the quest for the method of communication is ongoing. The book ranks high as a sufficiently mysterious form of communication (video, movies, and the computer network are waiting in the wings).

Ironically, we are in a communication age, but do people have a sense of personal or spiritual communication? How do we communicate with the abstract or beyond in an era of rampant interpersonal communication changes and emphasis? I don’t even own a smartphone!

Dion Fortune didn't create her novels just as entertainment, but to actively Work the magic. By performing illustrative magic concerning the nature of initiation, of secret schools etc. she actually received (from the Hidden parts of her own psyche) such information. The simple act of visualization (i.e. daydreaming) is known to produce effects both psychological and environmental, how much greater an effect can be obtained thought the writing and publishing of magical work?

An incentive then for writing about magic is to explore how to communicate with the universe. Writing is an initiatory means of establishing these communication, the flow of creativity a form of divine inspiration or communication, much like the ancient Muses.

The precision of writing, editing, rewriting coupled with the aching wait for publication (with its inherent travails of lost MSS, marketing mistakes, fraudulent publishers) creates an unbeatable combination of passion and precision.

True that. The editorial process is emotionally draining and charging, as is the feedback received from actual interaction with editors or critiques. part of the hypersigil is to get people interacting with your work (and learning to control their negative criticism into constructive development and progress).

In fact Lovecraft was sensitive enough to this process (despite the fact his materialist attitude kept him from ever consciously expressing it) that many of his stories are "about" the desired result of receiving communication form the other side. Cthulhu sends dreams. The Fungi from Yuggoth take the seeker away on a cosmic quest, or at the very least whisper all the secrets of the cosmos via certain human appendages. The primordial ones communicate through their vast murals found in hidden Antarctica. In the most revelatory of all his work, The Shadow out of Time the hero not only sends a message to the other side (by actually writing in the library of in the library of the Great Race), but actually receives a revelation of finding the message deep below ground (i.e. in the unconscious) "written in his own hand".

Genius idea! Write stories about communicating with the universe. The Sixth Sense, for example, is all about communication.

Webb finishes his essay by recommending certain authors or books which create or illustrate a magical ambiance ripe to enhance communication techniques. Many of his suggestions are actually taken from Alistair Crowley, including Macbeth, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Webb also mentions the works of Thomas Liggoti, J. G. Ballard, Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Garcia Marquez, Fritz Leiber and the contemporary magazine Elegia. Lastly, scholars such as Grambo, Flowers, and Tambiah (I have no idea who they are – help me, somebody!) as well as J. van Baal’s Symbols for Communication: an introduction to the anthropological study of religion are alluded to.

Barbelith Advice part 1

Barbelith is a discussion board focusing mainly on pop culture and philosophy issues, named after an occult "entity" in Grant Morrison's graphic novel series The Invisibles.

Every so often, a cliched posting will pop up with someone asking how to put together a hypersigil. Over the past couple years, I've collected these posting and will now put together the responses and my commentaries, including hyperlinks to the original discussions where possible.

The first section of reflections and comments I admit I lost track of the source on Barbelith and I believe that it has been deleted. One project starts out:

I spent several weeks writing a third-person narrative of my existence, up to this point and continuing in broad strokes into the future. To make sure it worked I interwove as many details - names, dates, events, etc - as felt necessary, and then logically extended those into the immediate and distant future. I kept the details open and sometimes vague - indicating what I wanted to happen, such as a future job position, without indicating where or how it would happen.

I've been involved in a similar project, but instead going back years in my life to the beginning of a bad relationship that scarred my life. Before moving into creating the future, the writer has to start from the past in order to put together a substantial autobiography. This autobiography serves as the basis for the voodoo doll - the closer the details match your real life, the more sympathetic the magic is.

My question is, how realistic and in synch with the writer's life does the hypersigil need to be? If a hypersigil becomes too symbolic or different from real life, does it lose its power? The above author suggests that vaguer details work best because they leave the magic room for interpretation. I've had this type of effect before particularly with money magic: it's best to magic up money from a safe location and let life give you the money the way it seems fit. I've never won the lottery but I've received numerous job offers and tax returns out of the blue.

The above author focuses on third person narration, so instead of writing, "I went to work" I would write "Kristen goes to work."

Past or present events become the basis for the autobiography and then the author extends present life into the future to produce magical results. Verisimilitude in character and probability must be important here, especially in terms of narrative conflict. If you write a story about a co-worker suddenly falling in love with you and doing you on the office desk, I doubt a beginner would have such power to make that event come true. Less specific magic might lead to an attraction, then more magic to a romance, etc.

Sourcery Forge refers to this process as simple personal narrative magic:

The most simple approach would be to tell yourself a little story which you would like to become true. For example Bob tells himself this story: "Bob goes into the interview. Bob is calm and presents himself well. A little while later Bob gets a letter which says he has got the job!" OK, this is just Affirmations, but they are a simple and effective form of magick.

Affirmation magic is another type of magic which I will have to get into later.

The writer continues:

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently and it does have a multi-layered nature that reminds me of the best visual art (I say this because I've studied visual art). Those many layers allows for a real magical power to poetry. I'm trying to take my work in a devotional and invocational direction and from the little feedback I've gotten, so far so good!

This is key to the 'reconstruction' phase I'm now entering - unifying my various interests, particularly magic/spirituality and art/writing, into a juggernaut of personal and social power...

I've heard of hypersigils that work their most primaly when loaded with intertextual references. A good hypersigil should unify all of the writer's interests into one streamlined narrative. The Invisibles for example combines voodoo, time travel, urban magic, and UFOs (along with a whole bunch of other stuff) into one conspiracy theory.

The reconstruction phase needs more elaboration but it means to take apart one's self into its individual components -- our pieces, sort of -- and then bring them back together into a new form.

How to take apart the pieces is an important question for later on. More than likely, this is a shamanic journey or illness, the conflict of the story.

Delving back into poetry as the ideal form, another writer comments:

I think the reason that poetry works is that you have words working in many dimensions at once: along the denotation axis, along the connotation axis, along the narrative axis, and along the various sound axes (like rhyme, consonance, etc.). I suspect that slamming words together in such a way that they 'line up' in some other way than linearly might be interesting. You'd have spoken incantations that sounded like the lyrics for 'Come Together.'

Magic spells then are like poetry or song. The use of powerful imagery for its poetic effect enhanced by the connotations and associations of the images and words at its purest form create the most powerful effect. Poetic devices enhance that effect as does the non-linear quality of many poems.

The first writer continues:

I began a comic in January of 2002. (For reference: I knew nothing of magic, fiction suits, or The Invisibles at the time). It was the first one I intended as a "serious" work. From this intention came three titles that I didn't understand at the time but sounded like working ideas. I draughted these down and began to flesh out each story (one for each title). The result was a three-episode 16-page book, largely freewritten (a lot of sitting in clubs and the library letting ideas pour out).

The stories all focused on a late-teenage girl named Sam, who was vaguely an alter-ego character. Each story also involved some circumstances of my own life: a family death, a 'meditation' of daily activity, questions of androgeny.

Here we see the representation of the true self. Fiction, like cyberspace, is an ideal place for exploration of identity, in particularly gender-based identity, since art is often associated as a feminine ideal. Here the attempt is androgynous but still exploratory.

The hypersigil narrates and comments on personal events as the grounding framework. It's best then to keep hypersigils short and interweave them into a longer narrative. Like with poetry, the shorter, the more primal and focused.

The strongest narrative of them all was a story I had heard from a family member, that I then projected Sam into and fleshed out.

Think Quantum Leap where the main character possesses someone's body each episode and lives out the possessed person's life usually to resolve some important issue or solve a mystery. Grant Morrison makes a similar comment in an interview for Writers on Comics Scriptwriting:

[W]e are now astronauts entering fiction as a dimension. I can go into the comics world wearing a Superman body and walk around and tell them stuff like what's going to happen on page sixteen if I want. (213)

These alter-egos in our stories are often referred to as fiction suits, characters the author uses to interact with the fictional world, explore the story. The above Barbelith writer takes his fiction suit and then writes it into the narrative of his memories. The original memory is reworked with the introduction of the fiction suit.

That spring I followed it up with a sequel, much less intensely done. It was more of a pastiche of influences: Joyce Carol Oates, Tori Amos, other comic authors, and my own ruminations, but still using Sam and her story-world as a foundation. This one I worked through with a professor to get a more coherent narrative structure, and wound up being less impressive than the first.

Pastiches work better as hypersigils because they are drawing upon already well-established influences mixed with the author's personal narrative.

I would speculate that the Barbelith writer's hypersigil was less impressive because it was more tightly wound and less spontaneous. Haphazard hypersigils that are wound together from dreams and freewriting/poetry are more emotionally charged. Tight narrative is restrictive and intelectually controlled. A balance is necessary: a tightly narrated freewriting style perhaps.

A different writer from Barbelith takes hypersigil experimentation to a more philosophical level:

Language effects the manifestations itself. Experience => image => symbol => glyph => letterform

At first I didn't quite understand what the above meant until I looked at it more and developed other ideas. Basically, imagine you are snapping a picture of something (or someone important of you). You are taking an experience and converting the real life experience into something else: a picture. There is an old saying, "this is not a pipe, this is a picture of a pipe." Experience becomes image, whether photograph, painting, pencil sketch, or what-not. The image in itself is likewise a symbol or construction of the event, not the actual event itself. An image can become even more abstract to the point that it becomes iconic or abstract like Nordic runes.

Eventually a symbol could become a glyph. Think back to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was a language of pictures. Imagine also a comic book without words or even simpler, rebus - these are systems constructing meaning from images.

A glyph is an image that is turned into a linguistic unit. For example, the letter "A" is a symbol, an image, that when a part of the alphabet is used to constructed visual representations of oral communication. We see the transformation of real life into language. Can we do the opposite?

The above theorist continues:

Any use of written words is an establishing of signifiers. These connect whatever is signified to the context in which they were established.

Words are symbols to connect with real life concepts. "Apple" represents the real world apple but is not actually an apple. The word "apple" and a real apple are two different things.

I look at the bookshelf right now: all sorts of titles. Each of those words has been printed on the spine of the book in order to convey a summary of the contents. But each of those words also pulls at my particular associations with the words itself, and creates a fusion between my subjective associations and the subjective intentions of the printer.

Words are symbols but symbols have connotations, associations that go beyond their literal meaning. Furthermore, because communication involves at least two parties, the writing of a word by one agent and its reading by another agent creates multiple associations. Between connotation and association, any particular word becomes loaded with multiple meanings/symbols.

So all these interconnections form a huge network. The general purpose of communication - the exchange of complex symbols. Language is a network of agents and symbols. Narrative magic works within the network, cross-referencing various established nodes until a new node can be inserted that references a potential event or manifestation. Shorter version: you use a system of references to set up the 'context' for a new reference. You make this new reference and insert it in the existing references. That reference will then manifest to complete the net.

Uh, this is ass-talking but I kind of understand the message. When writing a hypersigil, you have to rely upon established symbols, mediums, and such to access a type of collective unconscious of communication, working with and within an established system to gain the full power of the complex network. Otherwise, imagine your magic like it was in a different language than its audience. They won't understand and the magic fails. Once the traditional system is set up, new information can be added. This is often called schema, meaning, how do you relate a new, obtuse idea? By piggybacking it to related concepts that the audience understands. Once you add something new - your magical intention - reality has to carry on with this new information. You write your reality and then throw in a monkey wrench that forces reality to re-adjust and proceed in the direction you want.

If our 'reality' is defined by the markers we lay down - ie, language - what happens if you rearrange the markers?

Exactly, although still way too philosophical to be functional.

What is a hypersigil?

Before embarking upon a desperately life-altering and life-consuming project, naturally I should explain what exactly it is I'm doing.

Beats the heck out of me.

That's the problem with magic: everything is so obscured and vague that getting some definitive definition of any magical events is like spitting into the sea.

Here's my attempt to explain what a hypersigil is.

Let's start first with the words of Grant Morrison who coined the term:

The "hypersigil" or "supersigil" develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. Results can be remarkable and shocking.

He continues:

After becoming familiar with the traditional sigil method, see if you can create your own hypersigil. The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a song, a dance or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try. This is a newly developed technology so the parameters remain to be explored. It is important to become utterly absorbed in the hypersigil as it unfolds; this requires a high degree of absorption and concentration (which can lead to obsession but so what? You can always banish at the end) like most works of art. The hypersigil is a dynamic miniature model of the magician's universe, a hologram, microcosm or "voodoo doll" which can manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of "real" life.

Let's go over the important parts in greater detail.

The "hypersigil" or "supersigil" develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama and plot.

A sigil is a symbol created for a magical purpose, originally used to bind demons or angels into service. All of those magical symbols that you’ve seen in movies are sigils. More widely known sigils are the runes of Nordic mythology. Nowadays, chaos magicians use sigils as statements of intent, taking a desire like “I am going to write a successful doctoral dissertation” and transforming that wish or desire into visual form. The symbol becomes the focus of the spell.

Obviously, learning about sigils is an important first step.

A hypersigil then takes the symbol and turns it into a story or some type of multi-component work of art. The sigil is one image, the hypersigil not only one image but a complex interaction of vitality. Setting, characterization, and plot add multiple dimensions to the sigil.

As a comic book writer, Morrison works mainly in a visual medium, each panel of a comic book becoming its own sigil. Thus with at least 4-6 panels per page of a 23 page comic book, one comic book could have as many as 140 sigils. A film which has a minimum of 33 frames per second over a two hour period would have over 200,000 sigils!

The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution.

By the fourth dimension, Morrison means that a significant amount of time needs to be invested in the creation of the hypersigil. This isn't a quick, three minute sigil but rather the result of years worth of effort. The theory might be that the investment of time increases the power of the sigil magic. The Invisibles took six years of energy.

In the latter part, Morrison comments that the purpose of the hypersigil is to change the magician's life.

The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a song, a dance or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try.

As mentioned, the form depends upon the artist. A hypersigil is a work of art so any artistic medium can be used to create it: poetry, stories, music, dance, etc.

Poetry might be a good place to start because it is pure language in raw form. Poetry isn't easy to write but it is shorter -- better for smaller experimentation -- and combines imagery (visual) with words in a different way than comic books.

My main focus would be through story-telling.

I know someone who did work incorporating dance into a writing curriculum. I'll have to get a hold of her dissertation.

This is a newly developed technology so the parameters remain to be explored.

Loosely translated, we don't know shit about how this stuff really works.

It is important to become utterly absorbed in the hypersigil as it unfolds; this requires a high degree of absorption and concentration (which can lead to obsession but so what? You can always banish at the end) like most works of art.

As mentioned before, adding the fourth dimension of time and the obsession to pursue your art project over an extended period is necessary to make the magic work.

Banishing is a magician's ritual of doing something everyday and normal to prevent the magician from becoming lost in the craziness of magical experiments. I had a temporary bought with schizophrenia after experimenting with Salvador Dali's paranoiac mode. It's important to learn how to stay normal.

The hypersigil is a dynamic miniature model of the magician's universe, a hologram, microcosm or "voodoo doll" which can manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of "real" life.

A much better if not poetically-complex definition.

When creating a hypersigil, autobiography is important. What you are creating is a multi-dimensional (that is, not flat) representation of your life. It is like a voodoo doll, a replica of yourself in poetry, narrative, dance, that by manipulating the voodoo doll you produce changes in your real life.

I wonder how important voodoo or rather sympathetic magic is to an understanding of the hypersigil mechanisms? Time to break out The Golden Bough for a re-read. I've also heard that scientists have found that atomic particles when split still have a connection with each other. Changing one half results in a change to the other half regardless of distance. Interesting: science proving magic.

A quick definition of hypersigil then would be magical fiction.

In older sources, hypersigilia is referred to as narrative magic.

My brain is frying so I'll update at another time.