Q&A: How should I use Sigil Daily’s sigils?

“Hey, I was wondering how should I use one of your sigils? Like, should I just draw them?” ~ itsherpeacestudent via Tumblr

Great question! After all, if you’re supposed to be making your own sigils, what’s the deal with the sigils you see here? Isn’t the idea that sigils are expressions of truly personal desires?

Short answer: Yes. Use these sigils as starting point, so just redraw them or trace them until you get the hang of making your own. Change them or tweak them as needed if you want them to feel more personal. When it looks right to you, it is right. Then do the activation ritual. If you need a little help with that, check out the Sigil Daily guide here: http://sigildaily.com/activating-rituals/

Long answer: The goal with Sigil Daily is to provide a starting point. It’s like learning to draw: When you start out, you trace. You want to see that it’s even possible for your hands to reproduce the thing you love to look at. You don’t know the theory behind stuff like shape and proportion, and you may not even realize the value of line weight or stroke consistency. You just want to draw your favorite manga character, so you trace.

As you learn more of the theory behind sigilcraft, you can take those training wheels off and start making your own. Unlike learning to draw, which can easily take years, sigilcraft is relatively simple stuff. You can pick up the basics in an afternoon. What Sigil Daily is showing you, ultimately, are examples of completed sigils to serve as inspirations for your own work.

It’s like those “Learn to draw” tutorials that you used to see in kid’s magazines. It wasn’t really teaching you how to draw a sad puppy or an a silly otter, it was teaching you to the basics of drawing.

It’s important to remember that sigils aren’t hard to make. The tricky thing, which was once the biggest and most “occult” part of the process, is simply knowing how to write. It’s easy to forget, but it took all of us years to learn how to write. In the pre-literate era, only the most educated people could even consider trying something like sigil magick.

You don’t have that problem. You can write. You’re already a master student of the art. This is just a new technique. If you need to trace a few sigils to get the hang out of, go for it. It won’t hurt a thing. If you just like the look of the sigils I’ve created, and want to activate those instead, the same principle applies. This is magick. It’s supposed to be fun!