Brands, Logos, and Sigils

When I first started studying sigils, or rather was first influenced by the writing of Grant Morrison, I was lead to believe that there was an ironclad connection between corporate marketing techniques and new wave/new age magick techniques. With further research into the topic, I’ve found the connection to be skeptical at best, part of either the demonizing of corporations by associating them with magical practices or perhaps over-run self-promotion, a sense of egotism in magick whereby similar practices are automatically presumed to be identical.

In the same way that few magicians use solid marketing techniques in their magic, few corporations (if any) use magick as part of their marketing strategy. However, what I have seen is an interesting blurring between the lines of magick and marketing with such pseudo-sciences as neuro-linguistic programming. Magick is updating with the times to become in itself a new pseudo-science that utilizes much of the same techniques practices in the business world, but businessmen aren't magicians. To add a final comment before moving on, when magick and marketing mix, as in the case with such geniuses like Grant Morrison, the result is spectacular!

In Anarchy for the Masses, Morrison is asked, “How much do corporations and governments use magick? Are some logos actually sigils?” His response:

Totally. I think we've overlooked it. Some of them know what they're doing; They've got access to some of the smartest minds on the planet. They're paying some of the cleverist people to develop NLPs, hypnotic strategies, to create fantasy realities so that we will buy, buy, buy or partake in these wonderful worlds they're offering. So we have to know; you've got to defend yourself against people who are trying to exploit your ignorance. Magick is actually so democratic. It's so communistic in its way, because it empowers everyone. empowers even the lowest person. I mean, get a Voodoo doll and kill your boyfriend! (254)

My question is then where does Morrison actually make the connection between corporations and magick, logos and sigils? The explanation isn’t there but rather subtly avoided.

Let’s look a little bit at the connection between logo/brands and sigils.

Logos and brands are often confused with each other but share a similarity in concept. Quickly, a brand is a label of ownership attached to a certain product which defines the value and characteristics of the product, what it does, how it is supposed to function, what type of commercial or social value it possesses, etc. The logo is a graphical representation of the brand, the symbol of the brand which conveys the before mentioned connotations of the brand. While logos are often believed to be primarily pictorial (ideogrammatic), most are actually linguistic (logotypal) or a combination of ideogram and logotype to allow cross-cultural recognition where the logotype is unrecognizable but the ideogram is recognizable.

A sigil is a magical symbol that pictorially represents a statement of desire or intent or goal of a magician.

Brands and logos are accused of being related to ancient traditions like Christian crosses or freemason symbols but the functions and origins of brand are unrelated. Branding first appeared as hot iron branding done on cattle to identify what cows belonged to what particular herder. This practice of cattle branding eventually made its way to other products such as wine, timber, and textiles. The association between brand/logos and mystic symbols is more retro-history than a true connection. Perhaps one might see a semantic drift in modern culture, however.

A connection between brand logos and sigils is that they are both symbols (which is really a stretchy connection). The difference is almost immediate because brand logos are representations of specific products while sigils are representations of desire or intent. One might wrap this idea back around and say that brand logos are representations of the desire to sell or the desire to make money, but this is a simplistic answer. The function of a brand is to represent a product with particular manufactured associations (prestige, safety, luxury); a sigil is a representation of a magical intent or a goal that the magician hopes to achieve: do sigils represent prestige, safety, or luxury? Do they build upon this same connotation between symbol and signified? What is the product behind the sigil? These are blind stupid questions that still need answering…

Brands are by nature of memetic. They are meant to be enduring (with the exception of viral companies who want to cash in and get out). They are meant to be widely distributed. Sigils are non-memetic. They are made to be disposable. They are meant to be personal. The intent and construction behind brand logos and sigils is vastly different because their life cycle is different. An enduring sigil, if not an oxymoron, becomes more Masonic, yes, indeed, but what is the difference between the caterpillar and the butterfly? How much is the basic characteristic or nature of the sigil changed if it is made more permanent?

Hypersigilia, on the other hand, more closely resemble brands. A hypersigil is a sigil which has been extended into a work of art, a magical story or film, for example. Hypersigils are meant to be memetic because the magic behind the hypersigil works strongest through a memetic cooperative interaction and investment of energy between the designer and the consumer. The more people who involve themselves in a hypersigil, the more powerful the magic. Likewise, hypersigils add in particular themes or deeper associations to promote the art or engage the consumer, similar to the product association of brands: a particular author might be associated with horror, science-fiction, creativity, high excitement.

To further complicate matter, brands are linguistic while sigils are not. Most brands promote a name as a symbol, the logotype as it is called, or add in an ideogram (symbol). The exceptions are McDonald’s, Nike, Playboy, and car companies who invest a lot of money into identifying their company with a simple logo. Sigils are by nature non-linguistic. They are subconscious. If brands are linguistic, how then can they be subconscious? I might be able to answer that later.

But what I would rather do than destroy the dreamy connection between brand logos and sigils is rather try to reinforce that connection by intermingling characteristics of brands with sigils or perhaps vice-versa. I will admit that isn’t easy. What I will do for the remainder of this blog posting is focus on the necessary characteristics of brands and then after some reflection hopefully return to make the brand-sigil connection more pronounced in another posting.

Non-Expansion: The power of a brand is in its name and whatever associations may come with that name. A common mistake that many brand names make is to over-saturate their name by applying it to every possible product to hypothetically increase profit. This brand expansion doesn’t work because it over-extends the brand name and destroys any specific associations. Think, for example, how many different American Express cards there are or how many sub-brands of Chevrolet cars.

Contraction: The more focused a market, the better the branding. Starbucks sells coffee and that’s it. The more a brand tries to sell, the less focused it is. Think about McDonald’s that currently has sixty or seventy items on the menu. How confusing is that for both consumer and employee? The less products sold by a brand, the better.

Publicity: Brands are not made through advertising; they are made through publicity and public relations. Publicity generally focuses on being the first in a new market.

Advertising: Brands are not made through advertising but need to be maintained once publicity fades. Advertising maintains a brand. Advertising generally focusing on being best and foremost.

Association: Brands must create a particular association to their name or logo. Safety, prestige, expensive, reliable, well-engineered. Once this association is made, it defines the product and cannot be crossed. Brands must also define the market, for example, a Kleenex is a type of tissue, Xerox is a type of copier, Scotch is a type of tape, Jell-O is a type of gellatin, Q-tip is a type of ear cleaning utensil, but all of these are brand names. What do you ask for when you want gellatin?

Quality: Brands are not based upon quality but rather the perception of quality. Quality of a product does not mean financial success; rather the image created by a brand name is more important. It’s all about image.

Category: The ultimate goal of a brand should be to create a new category or market. Home pizza delivery, expensive cars, roller skates, takeout only, gourmet takeout, etc.

Non-Generic: Brands need to stay away from logotypes that generally describe the product or company. General Electric, National Broadcasting, Service Merchandise, etc. Brands that use generic titles or names are begging to be ignored because no one can distinguish the brand from its advertising. Instead of an intelligent microchip, we have Intel. Instead of General Video, we have Blockbuster. Name your child Kristen and see how popular she gets: thanks, mom! Naturally, the name should reflect the product. Mountain Side Videos just doesn’t make sense. The name should be unique. Depot and Planet are too common a name. Alliteration also helps: Blockbuster, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Weight Watchers. Lastly, as a side note, names should be kept short and simple: I can’t spell Schwarzeneggar and have trouble with Abercrombie and Fitch as a URL.

Company: A company should use its name as its brand name. Think of all the fashion designers who do this. The only danger is to make sure that the company has proper brand contraction so that the name and brand back each other.

Siblings: A certain brand can only last so long and at certain times, launching a new brand is important. The risk of this is to create brand expansion, the benefit is to maintain control over a market. Wrigley’s chewing gum is the most popular brand family: Big Red, Doublemint, Freedent, Extra, Juicy Fruit, Spearmint, and Wintermint. Notice that in each of these cases, the names are different. Each sibling needs to be unique and not a Diet, Light, or New. NyQuil and DayQuil are not siblings but expansions. Time, Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, Money, People, and Entertainment Weekly are all the same company. So are Red Lobster and Olive Garden. Siblings should remain in the same market (gum, magazines, restaurants) but appeal to a different market segment (age, sex, ethnicity, flavor). The brands must be different so that they are not confused.

Shape: Logotypes should be horizontal because of the way a person’s eyes function: left to right, not up and down. Logotypes tend to be more widely used than ideograms because of recognition value. Arby’s and Mobil use vertical ideograms that complicate their logo. Similarly, logtypes work better than ideograms because a connection needs to be made between the ideogram and the logotype. Billions of dollars have been spent connecting Nike with its swoosh. Why spend the money?

Color: Red catches attention. Blue indicates stability. White means purity, black means luxury. Green is healthy and environmentally safe. Light blue or silver refers to diet foods. I’ve been meaning to talk about the use of color, particularly color magic; someday I will.

Consistency: The market is always changing so should a brand. Uh, no. A brand has to create a particular association to its name which is impossible if the brand is constantly changing. It is best to limit your brand. Think Jack Daniels beer and think about the confusion.

Mortality: Sometimes a brand needs to be killed off. The time usually comes when a market ceases to exist, for example, non-digital cameras are going the way of the dinosaurs, so what are non-digital camera companies going to do? Launch a new brand and kill their old brands.

I’m exhausted and still have maybe another half a dozen brand characteristics to go over.

If you are thinking, hey, how do any of the above characteristics relate to sigils or magick, you’re getting the idea. They don’t, not really. In my next post, I’ll finish off brand characteristics and possibly force a connection between sigils and brand logos.

Maybe you can do that for me…

Sigils part 1

A sigil is a spell in visual form.

To summarize quickly before going into greater detail, the spell-caster begins with a statement of intent, a declaration of what the spell-caster hopes to achieve, the ultimate effect or goal of the spell. This statement of intent is written down and then linguistically stripped down until it becomes a symbol rather than a sentence or even a word. The spell-caster “charges” the sigil with emotional energy and then destroys the sigil to allow it to work its effect. Sigils work best when the spell-caster forgets about the magic and lets it do its own work.

The sigil begins as a statement of intent. What is it that the spell-caster desires? In many ways the statement of intent is similar to the dramatic need of a character in a story. Every character has to be motivated by some desire to achieve a personal goal. The achievement of this goal is the resolution of the story or perhaps just a scene. As you are plotting your hypersigil, you might turn your statement of intent into your character's dramatic needs.

Like with any wish, the statement of intent needs to be thoughtfully declared to avoid any Monkey’s Paw. Make sure you are asking for what you really want. For example, wanting a new boyfriend or girlfriend may be an obvious need but do you really want a new significant other? I admit that right now I simply do not have the time or energy to invest in an intimate relationship so a new boyfriend would be counter-productive to my life. Sex is always a goal but as much as I fantasize about sexual encounters, I don’t think about them realistically. Perhaps I would like more of an activity partner with benefits but I am so stressed that my creative drives are at their lowest: I wouldn’t even know what to do on a date. My statement of intent would be less looking for a new boyfriend and more about looking for things to do, either by myself or with some type of heterosexual partner.

Statement of intents best start out small and practical. Otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure. Casting a spell to lose 10 lbs in one week is asking for failure, and even asking to lose 10 lbs in two months is too ambitious a goal. How might you go about losing that weight? Through exercise, dieting, changes in life-style? It is better to set a series of subgoals rather than one larger goal. It is better to cast a spell like “I want to eat healthy for a week” and then follow up with the same spell again along with an additional “I want to exercise properly for a week.”

Joseph Max comments

First there is the need for absolute precision and lack of ambiguity. I've heard of a test that is used in military officer's training schools, in which the squad leader is assigned a mission and required to cut a set of orders for the squad that he or she thinks is totally unambiguous. Then those under his or her command will try to follow those orders to the letter, but in such a way that is NOT what the leader really intended -- they try to purposely misinterpret the orders. If they find it impossible to do so, the leader passes the test. So a good way to test one's Sentence of Desire is to see if you can come up with any alternative meaning other than what was intended. If so, try formulating it in another way.

The simpler the statement of intent, the better the effect. Max continues,

Also, the sentence must be expressed only in positive, not negative terms. The subconscious has the annoying habit of perceiving everything positively. For example, if you want to create a Sentence to protect you from traffic accidents, do not express it as "I will not be in a traffic accident" -- the deep mind ignores the "not" and hears this as "I will be in a traffic accident"! Instead, express it as something like "I will drive safely".

Instead of focusing on negative aspects, it is better to focus on positive solutions. These positive solutions provide more probable solutions to the negative behavior. If your statement of intent goes something like, “I will not eat like a pig today” the question will pop up, well, how exactly do you plan to not do that? What is your plan of action?

Once a statement of intent is formulated, write it down. Always write your magic down. Writing it down makes it real.

The statement of intent must then be stripped down linguistically until it is in its rawest form.

Begin by removing all letters except for the first letter of each word, eliminating any repeated letters. For example, a statement of intent like “I want to eat healthy for one week” would become i w t e h f o or possibly i w t e h 4 1 or i w t e h f 1 or whatever strikes your fancy with capitalization and other grammatical issues depending upon your creative whim.

Next, combine the letters into one shape, keeping the shape as simple as possible.

The process of creating the sigil is part of the process of empowering it. Care, effort, and creativity should be exercised while fashioning a sigil. Simply scratching it out on a slip of paper isn’t the best thing to do. I usually use a photoshop program to construct mine after experimenting with different hand-drawn forms.

Keep streamlining your sigil until it gets to a pleasing shape. The sigil I drew above eventually looked like this:

The sigil needs to be kept as simple as possible but also artistically satisfying and unique so that the sigil can be easily visualized. I’ve read many magicians who recommend enclosing a sigil within a greater geometric form such as a circle or square. I’ve yet to do that but see no harm or reason not to.

By investing time and organization into the creation of the sigil, we are temporarily changing our psychic makeup. We are unintentionally meditating and focusing upon a desire and the result is a greater focus on the achievement of that desire. We clear our heads, concentrate, and meditate into the right state of mind required to actualize our goal. We’re getting ourselves together.

I’ve seen a couple sigil generators online. The Rose Cross Sigil Creator uses a calendar like tool that draws zig-zag lines from letter to letter. I don’t like the shape of these sigils but if I ever become bored, I may use it for variety. Also, the XaoGnosis Sigiliser automatically creates sigils from statement of intents. I used this for awhile because it allowed me to create a quick sigil and to forget what the sigil was for. However, the sigils that the XaoGnosis Sigiliser creates are too complex and too un-artistic for me.

Max adds that a more complex sigil can be less of a symbol and more of an actual picture of the ultimate intent. I will fantasize about this later but in anticipating a transition from sigil to hypersigil, a picture form is more easily translatable into some type of structure or system, like the panels of a comic book. I’m not quote sure how to turn ordinary sigils into a sentence.

The reason the statement of intent is stripped down in such a fashion is to destroy its linguistic representation. Magic stems from what is called the collective unconscious which is part of our psychic landscape made up with all intelligent beings and their thoughts in harmony with the universe. When we cast a spell, we are synchronizing with the universe and asking it to fulfill our desires. However, the universe does not understand language because language is a human technology. The universe only understands communication through symbols. The statement of intent is reduced to symbolic form that the universe can understand.

Once a sigil is created, the hardest part is to forget about the statement of intent. By focusing on the results, the spell-caster is being counter-productive. This is called lust for result. Have you ever watched a pot boil or downloaded a movie off the internet? These things take forever but if you walk away and come back later on, you’ll find the task finished. Similarly, if you start growing a garden and then sit there waiting for it to grow, you’ll go bonkers. You plant your seed, water it occasionally, tend to it, and let the garden grow on its own.

Likewise, psychologically speaking, the more you focus on the results of the sigil the more you pressurize your results. Have you ever had someone looking over your shoulder while you’re doing something and you find it impossible to concentrate on even an easy task? Or perhaps you suddenly become self-conscious, aware that an audience of friends and strangers is watching you perform and you choke? The best performances ignore the audience. Don’t think about the magic – that is your conscious mind working, not your subconscious – just do the magic. The sigil becomes like a subliminal message acting without you knowing.

The best way to reduce the lust for results tendency is to work on simultaneous sigils. Create a lesser sigil whose ultimate outcome you could care less about. Keep your focus on that sigil and forget about the more important one. I did that once where I made a sigil to help me stay in control of my mood swings and another sigil love spell. I got so caught up in the control sigil that I forgot what the love sigil was for.

Your goal is to forget the original statement of intent and visualize only the sigil. Although I am recommending forgetting the sigil, I don’t necessarily mean forget about it but rather forget its linguistic form and visualize on its symbolic subconscious form. I generally keep new sigils nearby so that I can visually cram their image into my imagination. Most often, I’ll draw a sigil on the back of my hand. It becomes a part of everyday life like the sun or the moon, but when was the last time you really noticed the sun or the moon?

A period of time from roughly three days to a week should be taken between creating a sigil and “charging” the sigil.

I call this the RAP period. RAP stands for

R = Subconscious Resistance
A = Conscious Awareness
P = Probability of results

During this period, you will want to look at various factors related to the success of your sigil and actively reduce negative influences.

Subconscious Resistance (R) means that there are a variety of blocks to power hidden in your subconscious. Your subconscious is part of the true power of magic and from whence comes the creative faculties and potential of magic and art. However, events well-hidden and forgotten in the past put blocks on our ability to access our subconscious power. These blocks are generally some type of powerful feeling related to a repressed event, like shame or embarrassment or feelings or rejection that have affected your behavior. We have forgotten about the events associated with these lingering feelings but they are still there. Once the gates to the subconscious are opened through magic, these repressed feelings swim down the stream of consciousness and block the water-flow. For example, I find that I constantly pick losers for boyfriends and every time my relationship turns to hell, I curse all men for being losers, but in truth I am subconsciously choosing my boyfriends for their self-destructive potential as a way of escaping from relationship commitment. Likewise, when I first started real estate, I was afraid of being successful because success lead me into areas that were beyond my familiarity and thus, scary. In both, and many more, circumstances, I was subconsciously sabotaging myself.

At another time, I will go over ways to reduce this subconscious resistance, but in the meanwhile, be aware, and focus within this RAP time on possibilities of sabotage in order to decrease resistance to sabotaging your magic and increase the likelihood of the magic succeeding.

Conscious Awareness (A) refers to the above “forgetting” of your sigil. You want to take time to forget your statement of intent. Once it’s forgotten then you can prepare for the charging.

Probability of results (P) simply means, what are the chances of your sigil actually working? You need to increase the probability of the magic working through mundane actions. You’ll never win the lottery if you never play. How will you lose weight? Do you know anything about eating healthy or exercise? Take time to bone up on necessary information, tasks, and/or skills that will make your success more likely. Connecting this with hypersigilia, a character has a dramatic need (statement of intent) but plot and conflict occur as the character is trying to realize this goal. How will the character achieve his goal?

Bear in mind that magic isn’t always instant and may take days, weeks, months, or more to take effect. The rule of thumb is that sigils work within a period of three: 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, even 3 years. One particular love sigil took three months to work.

Charging a sigil requires a change in consciousness. The two methods can be Hermetic or Orphic. Hermetic charging involves quiet meditative states like, uh, well, naturally, meditation, tai chi, sleep, juggling, and the like. Orphic charging involves high emotional stimulation, usually a heightened emotional state: laughing until you cry at a comedy movie, being frightened while watching a horror film or bungee jumping, getting the adrenaline pumping or blood flowing while dancing, spinning, exercise, etc. One author recommended playing the bongo in a dance routine: whatever floats your boat but that sounds a little too retarded to me.

The most commonly recommended method of charging a sigil is, sigh, help me, the wank method. For those of you not familiar with the term wank, it is British slang for masturbation. Yes, this is true: that dizzy pleasure at the moment of orgasm is perhaps the most powerful way to charge a sigil.

The key is to visualize the sigil throughout Hermetic meditation or at the moment of emotional Orphic intensity. I re-draw the sigil in my imagination. This visualization at the moment of temporary transcendence symbolically shoots the sigil from your conscious to your subconscious.

Once the sigil is charged, it must be destroyed. Sigils dealing with creativity and action should be destroyed by fire. Sigils involving emotional states should be disposed of in water, during a rainy night or thrown in a river. Sigils involving practical, material, or financial issues should be buried. Sigils involving intellectual pursuits, honestly, I don’t know what to do with them; these are air sigils so something more creative involving the air is needed.

I had a situation occur a couple times where I forgot what a sigil was for and then couldn’t dispose of it properly because I couldn’t remember what its intent was. A trick around this is to color code your sigils. I’ve studied a little bit of color magic and admit that I’m not fond of it. When I’m in a different mood I will delve more deeply into color magic and graphic design but for now I tend to focus on the four basic colors or range of colors: red for “fire”-based sigils, blues for emotion sigils, earth tones for earth sigils obviously, and lighter colors or pastels for air signs. I admit I am being lazy and I will come back to this topic and flesh it out better at another time.

Once you have charged and disposed of your sigil, you must Banish. Banishing is important to shut the door between your conscious and subconscious and return to your normal life. You'll find particularly that once you have entered into an Orphic state, calming yourself down is difficult.

I'll continue with more focused uses for sigils in next week's post.

Barbelith Advice part last

To review from last week’s posting,

1. Have goals in your writing and life
2. Study literary conventions to help increase the symbolic power of your hypersigil
3. Study cognitive psychology to get an understanding of how cognition and narration interact
4. Do preparatory work: find your influences, bind your demons, etc, before you start your hypersigil
5. Focus on a realistic fiction suit rather than an impractical fantasy suit
6. Focus on your negative aspects, your demons, and personify them as your enemies
7. Focus on your positive aspects and summarize them into your hero
8. Work your writing into smaller steps of accomplishment
9. Expect consequences and imbalance in your life at each stage

Today I’m finishing off a review of advice from Barbelith.

RiffRaff advices

Don't use generic characters,

I’m not quite sure what generic characters mean. Perhaps he means stock characters, don’t use stock characters, instead using characters based upon people important in the life of the hypersigil writer or perhaps focusing on characters that the writer wants to meet. The characters have to have some type of personal meaning or motive.

and don't do bad things to characters based in any way on yourself or people you like.

Another point of contemplation: magic is continuously about self-destruction, it seems. Grant Morrison’s experience with his King Mob torture scene related illness is an example of what can go wrong in writing a hypersigil. The Shamanic illness, whereby a magician is torn apart and reconstructed and enhanced is a traditional theme of magic. Stories themselves are based upon conflict so bad things happening to the hero is almost impossible to avoid. A good writer should do the worst to the hero, kill and destroy everything he loves!

However, looking at my own writing and the Mary Sue writing of many beginning authors, I can see that some writing is psychoanalytically self-destructive. This self-destruct may be a defense mechanism within the writer that will only come out during the writing process.

How then does one promote conflict but not self-destruction?

If you must write a greek tragedy, base the hero on someone you hate.

I had never thought about that. I tend to get obsessed with ex-boyfriends and write stories about them. A friend asked me recently if I have every cursed anyone. Even though I am a volatile, spiteful, vengeful person, I’ve never focused my magic to hurt anyone. The thought simply isn’t there. I’m more concerned with destroying myself or improving myself rather than hurting other. Hmmn, some insight there about me.

You could also, perhaps, create servitors of recurring characters, and then whatever you write about would be directed at the servitor instead of yourself or whoever the character was based on.

Self-destructive hypersigils directed at a fake fiction suit does seem interesting. It is the classic scapegoat, sin-eater style of magic. This is something I will need to mope on, but since stories often have a rival to the hero, and since all characters in a story are reflections of the unconscious of the writer or main character, a good scapegoat in a hypersigil story might be a rival or enemy.

Mordant Carnival refers to the Nine Muses

I'm thinking of chumming up to one or other of the Nine Muses on this- not sure which one though. Calliope, maybe. (Although... how epic do I really want my life to get?)

As mentioned before, becoming aware and attuned with godforms of communication is an important step of magic. In addition to Thoth, Mercury/Hermes, and Odin, the Nine Muses of classical mythology can act as inspirational figures. The Nine Muses and their reflective spheres of influence are:

1. Calliope: muse of epic poetry
2. Clio: muse of history
3. Erato: muse of love poetry
4. Euterpe: muse of music
5. Melpomene: muse of tragedy
6. Polyhymnia: muse of sacred song
7. Terpsichore: muse of dance
8. Thalia: muse of comedy
9. Urania: muse of astronomy

In addition, other figures like Orpheus or Morpheus may be added to the list of magical godforms.

Next week, hopefully, I start going over the basics behind sigils themselves. Start from the bottom and work our way up.

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.