Navigating (Part 3)

I am doing the 40 day sigil challenge with the chaos magicians. I like them. "40 days of ooga booga," as my friend Rocks called it.

Today was the first day of the sigil challenge. A sigil is a symbol that you create and charge (or activate). The standard form of charging is masturbation, so you can see why it might appeal to a lot of people. There's something charming about chaos magicians, I promise. The guy who runs the server where we hang out has a youtube video where he talks about what to do when you're down, he says (a paraphrasing) "think about the fact that maybe you haven't even seen your favorite movie or read your favorite book yet."

Every day you make one sigil. You may also make a robofish. A robofish is a sigil that says something which is already definitely true such as "I have a cat." The best method for activating sigils is to do multiple at a time -- because your conscious mind will not be able to remember what every sigil is and thus theoretically your subconscious has easier access to it -- these groups of sigils are called shoals. I didn't even know the word shoal, but it turns out it means "a large number of fish swimming together." Shoaling is the act of charging or activating multiple sigils at once. Robofish are there as guides for the subconscious. The general idea is that if the subconscious takes the regular sigils in the same vein as the robofish sigils, the sigils will work by manifesting the results the way the robofish are already manifested: as a given.

I doubt you will be surprised to learn that another way to activate a sigil is through attention. If you were to, for example, reply to a viral Twitter thread with a jpg of your sigil, or put a sticker of your sigil on a lamp post, then by definition the random passerby, even if he did recognize it as a sigil, would not be able to discern what it was a sigil for. Thus it goes straight to the subconscious skipping the layer of conscious meaning. Tens, hundreds or thousands of people looking at your sigil is a significant charge -- and truly, there are probably a lot of people who would prefer the attention of a thousand people to a thousand orgasms even without a sigil. A "hypersigil," is a sigil, often in the form of a work like a comic book or piece of music, that gets consumed by many people.

Making a sigil is fun. And -- it's ridiculous that I know this -- but Austin Osman Spare, an (quite probably random but then it is chaos magic) occultist from England whose work forms a lot of the basis for the original chaos magicians, felt that the best way to start a sigil was "THIS MY WILL TO"

THIS MY WILL TO HAVE MORE PIZZA IN MY LIFE

is okay, but you want to be reasonably specific.

THIS MY WILL TO RECEIVE TWO PIZZAS FOR FREE THIS MONTH

then you want to get rid of repeat letters and spaces.

THISMYWLORECVPZAFN

Then you draw a sigil in which each of these letters is present, and you should give it a border -- a circle, triangle, square, etc -- to contain it or give it structure.

I really don't want to draw a pizza sigil, but here's an example of a sigil I found on the internet just now that'll do great for demonstration[1]:

The letters are all there - note that there isn't a technical correctness necessary here. there are no closed circles, so the "o" is just most of an "o," and "a" and "h" are in roughly the same place. There's a very common sigil'd "m" there, on the left (with the top of the "m" facing to the left), and also an "E" in the same place (where the left of the E is the left of the sigil as well). You could interpret a lower case "e" encompassing almost the entire sigil, and you can see the Q, the circle that is around the entire sigil, and the downward curve creating the little line coming out of the bottom right of the Q. I won't do all the letters, but if you look, you can trace some semblance of all of them. This of course is the opposite of charging a sigil, it is deconstructing one. When you create a sigil, put it away for a little while before you charge it -- so that each individual letter you've incorporated won't jump out at you when you get it goin'. Conscious deconstruction is not what the subconscious thrives off of (but we've agreed not to discuss that).

And you can create yourself a sigil alphabet, by for example, creating a sigil component for THIS MY WILL TO to reuse in every sigil.

Lastly, you can instead use automatic drawing to create a sigil or sigil segment. For example, think "THIS MY WILL TO" with your eyes closed while you free roam with a pencil on the paper. When you feel you are done, you simplify whatever scribbles you've come up with into a shape, and that shape become your sigil segment for THIS MY WILL TO.

This is the simplest way. But there are people who create picture symbols instead -- that don't start with language -- artists who use colors and different media. There can be music sigils. I bought a hypersigil from an artist I found, a sigil for "grieving your lost futures," in the form of a pin. I put it on the bulletin board facing my bed. Grief is a familiar feeling, in grief I find the shape of what we are losing.

Now I submit that creating a sigil is like zentangling  - not that I would know, nobody sensible would zentagle. But it enters you into a flow state very easily, it's relaxing even if you can't draw and it's also engaging. Time will slip away in great quantities, so settle in. It's a little bit like mindfulness because your sigil cannot simply be any forming of the letters into a shape, it has to feel right.

[the following paragraph has mention of actual animal abuse that occurred in real life, but it does have a happy ending]

Today I found out that somebody shot my friend's cat, the bullet lodged in his spine and he lost the use of his back legs but dragged himself through the rain to my friend's porch, where she found him. She took him to the emergency vet where they performed a 3 hour surgery, and he's going to be okay. The surgery cost ten thousand dollars. She set up a gofundme and I donated. I was quite distressed by the story and I told my friend Rocks -- and I told him about the 40 days of ooga booga and I said I'm gonna hex that fucker who shot Yugi. Rocks said, "that's bad juju - just give me the gofundme link."

Rocks reminds me of those places in stories that appear out of nowhere, where you go in and the chef or shop owner or whoever it is, is very down to earth and not at all wooey but when you leave something that was troubling you is better or a good transition has been made. I believe in messages from Rocks. So I am not hexing anyone, instead I am doing a sigil of protection for the vulnerable, and a sigil of protection for all animals against abuse. I am also doing one to see lots of new birds and take their pictures. Sometimes you just need some levity, and my mom got me a really nice pair of binoculars for my birthday.

I just realized it's pretty funny that dungeons and dragons inspired a moral panic that people would get into occult stuff, and here I am playing my first ever campaign of D&D and also hanging out with chaos magicians. Anyway, the thing is, there's something that D&D and sigils and fat family ladies and bath & body works products in the Winter all have in common. If you can see what I mean, then maybe you can begin to see what I'm trying to draw the shape of here. I'm not trying to be coy. I cannot take you there. I would if I could. But there's no escorts allowed and it is as far as I have ever known, the only way forward, the only way in, and the only way out.

I cannot write about it. I can only show it. Then if you can see it, you will see that you know this geography, that it isn't Atlantis; it's home.

[1] Sigil Source: https://sigilathenaeum.tumblr.com/post/129675325087/i-heal-quickly-and-completely-sigil-requested

** Can I confess something? I'm gonna confess something. During Dungeons and Dragons, I wrote a poem out of the player dialog. I would like to tell you there's a high brow/low brow interchange that delights my intellect and that I am constantly engaging in connecting the small with the divine. But actually, what happened is Gorthog was like "Do we we feel things here?" and I was like "this is gonna be a great poem" and that's where it started and ended.

RADIANT DAMAGE

Do we feel things here?

I think we need to get rid of these vultures. Which one do you want?

Third level bless. Plus I'm gonna smite.

This one is in range.