Sigils
A sigil is a drawn sign that magical practitioners believe carries power. In the old books of magic it is the seal of a named spirit or angel; since the artist Austin Osman Spare published his method in 1913, it is more often a monogram a practitioner makes from the letters of a written wish.
Meaning
The word came into English in the mid-fifteenth century as “a sign, mark, or seal”, through Late Latin sigillum from the Latin sigilla, “little images, seal”, a diminutive of signum, a sign; by the 1650s it also meant an occult device thought to have great power (Online Etymology Dictionary). The sigils of the grimoires belong to spirits: the Goetia, the first part of the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon, gives each of its 72 spirits a seal. The modern sigil is Austin Osman Spare’s. In The Book of Pleasure (1913) he wrote that sigils “are made by combining the letters of the alphabet simplified”, and the chaos magic of the late 1970s drew on his work. Sigils are used today in chaos magic and by modern witches, and what they are said to do is those practitioners’ belief.
Origin and history
The Goetia survives in a manuscript in the British Library, Sloane MS 3825, which Joseph H. Peterson has transcribed. Each spirit’s entry ends with its sign. Of the first spirit the manuscript says “this is [his] seale or Charecter w ch is to be worne as [a] Lamen”; of the third, Vassago, only “This is his seal.” Peterson traces the catalogue of spirits through Abraham Fleming’s English in Reginald Scot’s Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584) to Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, which listed 69 spirits. He notes that the spirits’ sigils appear in no earlier manuscript of that catalogue he knows, though they resemble the sigils in other catalogues of spirits.
Angels had seals too. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, holds a copper disc engraved with the Seal of God, Sigillum Dei Aemeth, a talisman for inducing visions and invoking spirits. The museum’s record says the seal was first described in the thirteenth-century Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes, and that the Elizabethan magician John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley drew up their own version: a crystal rested on the Seal of God on their Holy Table, with wax seals under its four legs.
Austin Osman Spare was born in Smithfield, London, in 1886, and by eighteen was the youngest exhibitor at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (London SE1). He set out his sigils in The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, published with an introduction by Ernest H. R. Collings in 1913. He called sigils “monograms of thought, for the government of energy” and made them from the words of a desire, and he dismissed the older apparatus: there was no need to “dress up as a traditional magician, wizard or priest, build expensive temples, obtain virgin parchment”.
Chaos magic took Spare’s sigils further. John Michael Greer’s Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (2006) dates the Illuminates of Thanateros, the first magical order of chaos magic, to 1978, and says it drew on Spare’s Zos Kia Cultus and on Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Chaos magic, Greer writes, keeps traditional magic’s techniques for changing consciousness and discards its philosophy. Peter J. Carroll, author of Liber Null & Psychonaut, is described on his own website as instrumental in the birth of Chaos Magick.
How practitioners describe making one
Spare’s account is the one later writers build on. A wish is written as a sentence (his example is “This my wish to obtain the strength of a tiger”) and its letters, simplified, are combined into one sign, “a simple form which can be easily visualised at will”. Spare says the sigil then reaches the subconscious at a moment of “vacuity”, which comes from exhausting mind and body; his list of ways runs from mantras and posture to tennis and the playing of patience. Paul Newman, writing on Spare after Tate St Ives’s exhibition The Dark Monarch (2009), describes how Spare concentrated on a sigil until it was the only thing he perceived, then threw it aside and made himself forget it. Spare was clear what kind of thing this was: “Sigils are the art of believing.”
Grimoire seals and modern sigils
A Goetia seal belongs to one named spirit and is copied from the book. A sigil in Spare’s sense is made by the person who uses it, from the words of their own wish, and is meant to have “not too much pictorial relation to the desire”.
Where you’ll see them
In Spare’s own art: Vice, reviewing the Spare exhibition at the Last Tuesday Society in London in 2017, notes the sigils that appear in many of his works, and the Cuming Museum in Southwark gave him an exhibition in 2010. And online: in 2019 The Outline found the witch Lola Miles, with 50,000 TikTok followers, posting short explainers on creating sigils among her other videos.
See also
Schrödinger’s cat, Infinity symbol (∞), Autism infinity symbol, Neurodiversity symbol, Semicolon tattoo.
Sources
- sigil (n.), Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary
- Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis Rex, Part 1: Goetia, Digital edition by Joseph H. Peterson, 1999, updated 2026; transcribed from British Library Sloane MS 3825, Esoteric Archives, Introduction; spirits 1 and 3
- 2030 - Seal of God, Object record, Cecil Williamson collection, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle
- The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, by Austin Osman Spare, First published London, 1913; sacred-texts.com transcription (Internet Archive copy, January 2025), sacred-texts.com, Chapter “Sigils. Belief with protection”
- The Book of Pleasure, Publisher’s page for its edition of Spare’s book, Jerusalem Press
- Forgotten Southwark artist Austin Osman Spare honoured, 30 September 2010, London SE1
- The Forgotten Occult Artist Who Refused to Paint for Hitler, 2017, Vice
- Satyrs and sigils: notes on artist-occultist Austin Osman Spare, Paul Newman, written in response to ‘The Dark Monarch’ at Tate St Ives, artcornwall.org
- Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT), From John Michael Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (2006), Occult World
- Specularium: the website of Peter J. Carroll, Specularium
- The TikTok school of witchcraft and wizardry, Riley Leight, 28 October 2019, The Outline
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research