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Means to an end

13:47 / 26.01.04

Is there a fatality rate in sigil magick? Charging a sigil, what means are your unconscious/the force/god/tyler durden or whatever you prefer willing to use to get to your prefered goal? Is there a potential danger to sigil magick, if so, how can fatal results be prevented? Are the fatality rate affected by your current state of mind or experience with magick in general?

Boy in a Suitcase

14:20 / 26.01.04

Some recent (and, uh, worrying to say the least) data released by the Esalen Istitute suggests that people with a thin corpus callosum (a small must still significant percentage of the population; that membrane has been growing measurably larger even in the last couple thousand years) can risk aneurysm when combining sigil magick with excictatory gnosis, ie orgasm, spinning, dancing or sudden shock. I'll have to dig up the article but it suggests that the two sides of the brain are not meant to be used in tandem and that sigil magick can harm certain neural pathways (in my estimation these are symbolized by the Tunnels of Set in the Typhonian Tradition which accounts for the high rate of burnout and untimely events occuring to those who work with these paths of "nonexistence"--ie parts of your brain you're not meant to use) leading to slight leakage in some areas of the brain, which, as they suggest, can manifest as slight psychosis (synchronicity, delusions of grandeur, seeing omens) leading up to leakage between folds of fatty tissue (seeing entities--remember that in magick all results tend to be a sign that something is wrong) and possibly blot clot (anuerysm) if leakage is excessive; obviously this can be triggered by the shock of excictatory gnosis.

This report is obviously a little upsetting especially as it suggests certain unpleasant things about my own neurochemistry and those of my friends who practice sigil magick and other Spare or otherwise-derived shortcut techniques. I'm not sure it invalidates magick per se but it certainly has me questioning what's been real and what isn't.

Luckily, the Institute states that with certain safeguards, psychic processes (whatever you want to call them) can in fact be rendered less or not at all harmful to the practitioner. They have included a checklist for safe magick which includes old standbys such as using the circle and triangle of Solomon in exact detail, making sure all godnames and barbarous terms are vibrated perfectly, having the entire works of A.E. Waite committed to memory, owning a castle on top of a foreboding hill somewhere in Eastern Europe that is subject to electrical storms on an at least semi-regular basis, and regularly bathing in and drinking the blood of infants to appease your dark master.

Remember: safe magick is smart magick.

23:56 / 26.01.04

Does the Pope shit in the woods??? If my memory serves me rite the UK Bizarre mag had this blasphemous diorama eee gaaddss advertised - mass sympathetic magick - like the rumours of Italian satanists making bleeding Mary statues to discredit the Vatican. There's a certain danger to everything, depends how supersticious and how programmed you have been. I for one practise the mighty word of power to launch the sigils with dramatic flair in undertaking a mudra so dapper even Sherlock Holmes would give he his last stash so he could goto hospital again and hallicinate Moriarty again!!!! My latest model is one of ultra-hypnotick implanting........ Practise regular and put it all down in a diary.

08:13 / 27.01.04

IMO sigil magick perse is not dangerous. Certainly some forms of excitatory gnosis can be, if ,theyv raise blood pressure to a high and sustained level. Hey, there's danger in everything. One time when practicing martial arts, I decided to take my BP during certain exercises. The results were pretty scary. I'm pretty certain that certain methods of attaniing gnosis do ,the same thing. Ecstatic trances can produce a feeling of "pounding" in the head.

Personally, the most dangerous experience that I had didn't occur through magick, but occured through excessive spiritual training. I began to have psychic visins, but was unable as yet to shut down the experience. It was as if an energy leakage occured. My immune system collapsed, I became emotionally unstable, my heart was tripping strange rythms. I truly felt like I was dying. Since then, I've learned to do things in cycles. I train awhile. I stop training if I'm beginning to get depleted. I think that the concept of "forgetting" after imprinting a sigil is important in that aspect, because it has a grounding effect. It allows one to recharge and get some stability back. So yes, I think that there are some dangers. Are they potentially fatal? Maybe. But hey, life is about risk, utimately. I don't know anyone who is immortal.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

11:10 / 27.01.04

Dangerous? Well, yeah. For a whole lot of reasons, not least the fact that you're trying to pop the back cover off of Reality and make it do new stuff for you.

Proceed with caution, don't get too full of your self, and scry scry scry. And keep at least one non-magickal journal so that you can see what sort of impact your magick is having on your health, your friendships, your work.

Boy in a Suitcase: do you have any links to that data? I'd be very interested to read it.

14:01 / 27.01.04

I seriously doubt sigil magick can really mess you up at all. I mean, seeing and experiencing synchronicity, for example, is part of magickal consciousness in my book, not some faulty neurochemical thing. If we want to get really specific, stimulating the recently discovered "God spot" in the brain can induce a spiritual/mystical experience, but does that mean mystical experiences are all chemical and the product of a chemical 'glitch' in the brain in some way?

I don't mean to sound excessively contrary to BoyinA - I just think more along the lines of mordant carnival and Z deS. Plus, we're talking sigil magick here, not a ten-day intense working in the desert to summon Babalon like a certain mystic we all know.

18:58 / 27.01.04

Ahem.

BiS.

Joke.

If I needed to have the entire works of A.E. Waite committed to memory to be safe, I'd rather risk the aneurysm.

20:11 / 27.01.04

Are you saying that Bis' post was a joke? I thought it was a joke at first, seriously, but his post seemed so serious and detailed and the responses were so earnest that I began to doubt my first impression and think he was serious.

20:22 / 27.01.04

I was thinking more around result oriented stuff..could the results, even though they did lead to your goal, also have "fatal consequences" for your or others life(without it being incoded in your statement of intent)?

Less searchable M0rd4nt

22:10 / 27.01.04

HunterWolf: I suggest a careful re-reading of the final paragraph of BiS's post if you're still unsure.

Skeleton Camera

04:05 / 28.01.04

Running in a different direction... sigil magic, is it just down-n-dirty or is it a 'sacred' act? Not to jumpstart the entire 'sacred-profane' same-different argument, but are sigils just to accomplish something? Or do you invoke various beings, ask their assistance, etc? Do you self-consciously sanctify the act?

trouser the trouserian

04:12 / 28.01.04

I do not believe the process of creating/casting a sigil is inherently 'dangerous', other than the general point that by using such a process one is trying to provoke a change in one's circumstances, which may well give rise to unpredictable events. So one is in danger of being surprised, at the very least.

One's chosen method of achieving a state of mind conducive to loosing the sigil from conscious attachment may in itself be dangerous - such as bungee jumping or self-strangulation but that's another matter.

Surprisingly enough the Home Office have not (to my knowledge at least) issued any statistics pertaining to the number of people who have died as a result of casting a sigil, as opposed to invoking the Bornless One or simply just reading Liber Null (I read Liber Null and my house caught fire). So all we have is anecdotal evidence. I cannot recall hearing of anyone who's seriously come to grief from doing a sigil. Occasionally I meet people who claim to have been responsible for various storms, wars, etc., but really, all one needs to do is just look at the people making these claim and think "yeah, right..."

I was thinking more around result oriented stuff..could the results, even though they did lead to your goal, also have "fatal consequences" for your or others life(without it being incoded in your statement of intent)?

It's possible, but IMO extremely unlikely. There's several moralistic legends flying around along the lines of "oh I did a sigil for money and the next day all my family were killed horribly and I got a legacy blah blah." If you're seriously worried about this I'd say think about what you want to achieve and ensure that there is a 'pathway' (or indeed several) for the desire to manifest along, if that makes sense. So for example if I am after [more] money, then I might pop along to my boss and say "What's that? You can't get into your files on the server? Your internet connection is slow as a snail and your telephone makes buzzing noises. Yes, I can do something about it. By the way, isn't it pay review time?"

remember that in magick all results tend to be a sign that something is wrong. Good joke, BiS!

08:45 / 28.01.04

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my mum several years ago. It was more about psycho-theraputic stuff than sigils (my mum's never liked them, she's a more robes and incense, screaming bornless one Thelemic type of magician. Not really.) I remember her saying that there probably "was something in it" but it was risky because you never knew what you might bring up. While I don't want to knock me mum's advice (mum's generally being fonts of infinite wisdom and so on), this is an interesting reaction that comes up a lot whenever you start dealing with "the unknown" - people have a certain nervousness before becoming engaged. We seem to have a general bit of discomfort/distrust directed towards our psyche's and magick. Personally, I think this is a bit fallacious and shouldn't be used as an excuse to avoid jumping in. Though a bit of caution should be advised, with whatever you're doing, it shouldn't freeze you totally.

09:52 / 28.01.04

cottonmouth: I was thinking more around result oriented stuff..could the results, even though they did lead to your goal, also have "fatal consequences" for your or others life(without it being incoded in your statement of intent)?

That certainly could happen I suppose. In all honesty, due to the fact that I have a mother with a number of physical conditions who has written me a sizable inheritance in her will, when I do money spells, I "seal off" her probability tunnel. There's no shame in playing it safe. If you are worried about hurting someone unintentionally in a working, simply set up protection for them. As far as hurting yourself, that is actually much less likely, the reason being that survival instincts are deeply coded into the human animal, (in all animals for that matter), and that buried desire effects magick powerfully. Now if you are suicidal, however, I would be very careful.

13:06 / 28.01.04

I've recently got back into sigils- I've learned to do them without really thinking much about it, which is maybe part of the trick.
A slight tangent but the whole notion of ‘kickback’ seems a strange one to me – that doing a sigil or spell will often cause something untoward to happen, as the universe asserts its no-free-lunches disclaimer, or whatever… Do people routinely dedicate some kind of sacrifice to each sigil or spell-casting situation?

14:11 / 28.01.04

Thanks, Mordant Carnvial --

most of the Lith reading and posting I do is at an office job, so I don't always read everything as carefully as I should. My dark master, indeed. Boy, do I feel silly.

This one's even worse:

>> remember that in magick all results tend to be a sign that something is wrong.

>> Good joke, BiS!

18:02 / 28.01.04

Z.deScathach- interesting..how do you go about creating this protection? thats exactly what I need really, my working being very probable to hurt another person..

Boy in a Suitcase

19:09 / 28.01.04

No, actually I just got a bit carried away with that last paragraph, everything else is true.

Boy in a Suitcase

19:13 / 28.01.04

Here's the link:

Esalen.org: Austin Spare and Neural Damage

19:17 / 28.01.04

damn..finally had an excuse to actually bath in the blood of infants..

19:21 / 28.01.04

I must admit,the relation of the Tunnels of Set to the neural pathways has escaped me 'till this point. Cheers, BiaS! Could the same be related to the Tree of Knowledge?

I create my sigils as flash animations - a fluid,animated intention tracing the invisible symbol over and over again on my desktop.

19:22 / 28.01.04

I don't think that is the link,BiaS - unless you are trying to sell us something...?

12:30 / 29.01.04

cottonmouth: Z.deScathach- interesting..how do you go about creating this protection? thats exactly what I need really, my working being very probable to hurt another person..

Risking thread-rot here, I think. I view causality as probability tunnels inter-connecting various nodes, so what I do is go into gnosis, follow the thread to the individual that I'm concerned about, and then wall off their thread with a wall. I do this during the working in question, to srongly link the protection intent with the working intent. Really, it's all just symbolic, the primary intent to prevent harm to individual "x". IMO, the best way to do something like that is to use a symbol set that you are comfortable with. One person may set up a servitor to "divert" the magickal energy, or another person may create a "detour", (my method). What's really important is the intent, because it will provide you with the symbols that are unique to you.

12:32 / 29.01.04

cottonmouth: Z.deScathach- interesting..how do you go about creating this protection? thats exactly what I need really, my working being very probable to hurt another person..

Risking thread-rot here, I think. I view causality as probability tunnels inter-connecting various nodes, so what I do is go into gnosis, follow the thread to the individual that I'm concerned about, and then wall off their thread with a wall. I do this during the working in question, to srongly link the protection intent with the working intent. Really, it's all just symbolic, the primary intent to prevent harm to individual "x". IMO, the best way to do something like that is to use a symbol set that you are comfortable with. One person may set up a servitor to "divert" the magickal energy, or another person may create a "detour", (my method). What's really important is the intent, because it will provide you with the symbols that are unique to you.

12:38 / 29.01.04

err...sorry about that, for some reason the post form locked up on me

22:13 / 29.01.04

I don't think that is the link,BiaS - unless you are trying to sell us something...?

Yeah...If we believe that Esalen wants us to bathe in the blood of infants, then he's got a really sweet bridge to sell us.

Seriously though, I'd love to see that article, if indeed it exists.

trouser the trouserian

04:36 / 30.01.04

Seriously though, I'd love to see that article, if indeed it exists.

Well BiS, you're just gonna have to write that article now!

I agree with meme buggerer - I do sigils without dwelling overmuch on them - usually doing them at times when I've "too many other thinks to think about".