Basic Sigil Construction

Sigils are a great way to identify your intent when you’re working magic. A sigil is simply a symbol of your purpose – for instance, you could use a heart to identify love, or a dollar sign to indicate money. Those are the easy ones – and certainly, there are a floppity-million other symbols you can use. If you want to do the standard issue symbols, pick up a copy of Raymond Buckland’s Signs, Symbols, and Omens – it’s chock full of great suggestions.

That being said, one way to connect your intent to your working even more effectively is to create a unique symbol of your own. This sort of “locks the magic in,” or at least, it does in a number of modern magical traditions. The very act of creation is part of the magical process.

So, I thought I’d share my tried-and-true method of sigil construction. This is a pretty bare bones method, but it works. It’s a great way to create a symbol that’s unique to you and your purpose, and you can utilize it for ANY magical working at all.

Let’s say you want to do a working for love. Start by taking a piece of paper and writing the word love on it, like so:

Next, eliminate the consonants, so what you have left is this:

For the final step, take these remaining letters, and combine them to create a single symbol that you can use in your workings:

When you use it, even if someone else sees it, you’re the only person who knows what it means.

Okay, let’s do another one, that’s a little more complicated – how about protection?

Just like before, we’re going to eliminate the vowels. There are also two letter T’s, so we’re going to get rid of the second one. Ditch any duplicate letters, so you get this:

Then, for the last step, we’ll combine these remaining five letters into a single symbol:

It doesn’t look like much of anything, except maybe Tolkien’s Tengwar script, or perhaps the symbol for a musician formerly known as something else. But you know it means protection… and that means you can write it, draw it, or paint it anywhere you like, and no one will ever know.