Crafting Sigils

Since I’ve included a sigil on one of the flaps of the tuck box of my new deck, the Life Line Tarot, I thought it would be a good time to explain sigils to those who want to use them.

Sigils as I understand and use them are letter-based designs intended to provide a magical effect, such as a blessing, a form of protection, or an ongoing effect. They typically look like geometric line drawings, but they are made of letter forms rather than other kinds of shapes or designs. What letters go into the form are based on the intention that you express. It’s a kind of spell very much in the tradition of the Magician-as-writer. What you articulate is what you will into being. Words matter in spellwork and magic (even in divination), but you’re not using entire words in a sigil. Instead, the words are condensed in some form to allow for a design. They take on an intention as expressed by the words, but they aren’t them exactly.

To start, you write out your intentions for the sigil in fully articulated form, usually one sentence. Then you condense them in some way. I have seen and used different methods, and I don’t know that one is inherently better than another, but I like two of them in particular:

• in one, you take the first letter of each word in the sentence and use all of those (even duplicate letters) to create the sigil; and

• in the other, you strip out the vowels of each word and use all of the remaining consonants once to create the sigil.

You then design and place the letters in a way that feels magical to you and feels right to your intentions. Often, people will try to achieve some kind of symmetry, but that isn’t any more necessary for sigils than for other designs. There are times when it’s appropriate and times when it’s not. We’ll look at some examples below, but there are two important notes that may apply to the way you use or create sigils.

After (or as part of) that design process, you create, by your own hand, the specific design. This is important, especially for those who want to activate the sigil printed on one of the flaps of the Life Line Tarot tuck box. From my understanding, just having a sigil design doesn’t help you. I’ve heard (via via) that people who have tried to get sigil tattoos found them lacking because they weren’t the ones to actually inscribe the magical symbol. You have to create or recreate the sigil by hand as you infuse it with your intent.

The other important consideration that some people (I am one of them) think is important is that you should burn the original paper (or similar) and forget the precise words of the sigil. Why? I suspect that “reading” the sigil unravels it and returns it to just a bunch of mundane letters, but I don’t actually know. What this means is that a common phrase or affirmation probably isn’t a good choice because you’ll be unraveling the sigil design every time you look at it.

Now let’s look at some examples.

I’ll start with the sigil in the Life Line Tarot tuck box. To me, it looks like a jester first and foremost, which ties to my love of Mercury (a trickster) and this deck’s playing card vibes. But it could also easily be seen as a person in a crown, a devil, or an egg-shaped rocket ship. Some of those ideas might work for you, but they may not. If they don’t, don’t recreate that specific sigil design.

What does it stand for? Given the reasons above, I can’t tell you exactly what it stands for, but the original inscription was something like “May those who use this deck of cards with good intent receive divine wisdom and prosperity.”

For demonstration purposes, let’s say that that was the actual inscription.

If I were following the first method of keeping only first letters, I would be left with the following letters to turn into a design: 

M T W U T D O C W G I R D W A P

If I were following the second method of keeping all unique consonants, I would be left with the following consonants to turn into a design:

M T H S W D C K F R G N V P

In this sentence, the ys were used as vowels or vowel digraphs, but y can be a consonant when it starts a syllable (e.g., yellow, young). 

You might also choose to use graphemes for digraphs and silent letter patterns (TH, CH, WH) rather than separated letters if you find more magic in speaking (sounds) than in writing (letters). For example, you might keep TH from those and WH from who or have both and add extra Hs.

Now to get back to the sigil on the Life Line Tarot tuck box, I went with the second method. I wanted something small, and that method reduces the number of letters (even if only a little). My preference for that method with the sigil is one of the reasons why the major arcana titles in the deck are missing all of their vowels. (The other reason is that the deck’s imagery in general is meant to be missing some of the details without being unreadable.)

So what do you do if you have a sigil that you didn’t create but want to imbue with magical intent? I recommend that you pull the sigil apart to identify letters that form the design and then write out your own intention. Note that you will likely end up with a different spell. You may even end up with different letter-forms because a lot of lines in sigils overlap or curve in ways that are not part of a typical letter-form. And remember that you can always add or drop letters to create a slightly different design.

In the case of the sigil on the Life Line Tarot tuck box flap, I encourage you to either trace it while thinking of the general intention I described above or try to pull the design apart and recreate it. If the design is the exact same, you can just trace over the original sigil with your own ink (that’s what I did for my copy—I’m not the printer after all). If the design isn’t quite the same or you just want to create your own sigil, there’s a blank flap for just that purpose. It’s one of the reasons that the tuck box has a matte finish!

But if the sigil on the Life Line Tarot tuck box weirds you out, or you don’t trust it, you can tear that flap off. The box will still hold the cards. I put the sigil in that exact spot instead of somewhere else for that exact reason. (I don’t know why you would give me money to buy the deck if you don’t trust my intentions, but I generally think a certain amount of skepticism and self-protection is healthy.)

Happy sigil crafting!