BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Public Sigil...

 
 
mikeh
18:56 / 13.09.01
ok, i'm new to casting sigils - i've done only about 8-10 and none of them have really worked (no doubt due to inexperience...) the only info i have on how to make them is gleaned from this board and from phillip coopers Basic Magick (which i thought was terrible)...anyhow, i'm interested in learning about how/if public sigils work

i've made two, using coopers method of writing out a desire, crossing out repeating letters and then making symbols out of the remaining letters. both desires do not specifically relate to me, but have wide ranging outcomes in mind...one i'm going to place in an area of downtown where i want its effect to take place....now, does this work - putting symbols in places where thousands of people unrelated to them will see them - does this work to charge the sigil?

any help/suggestions would be appreciated
mikeh
 
 
Mordant Carnival
19:13 / 13.09.01
Current thinking would appear to be that it would work. However, not entirley comfortable with the whole non-consensual aspect of this.

Ditto the phone-random-strangers-and-chant-mantras-at-them thang I've seen suggested by various ppl (not 'Lithers, I hasten to add.) That's just selfish.
 
 
Tamayyurt
00:59 / 14.09.01
oooh, that prank call charge sounds like a good idea thanks!
 
 
Mister Snee
01:04 / 14.09.01
I've had distressingly good luck just throwing my sigils up on my web page. Nothing subtle, just blatted into the middle of an update, with a caption like "Thanks, come again!"...
 
 
Mordant Carnival
18:16 / 14.09.01
quote:Originally posted by impulsivelad:
oooh, that prank call charge sounds like a good idea thanks!


Doh! Me and my big mouth.

Given that you're going to do this anyway, I suppose there's no point asking you to concentrate your efforts on ppl you are reasonably sure won't suffer a major paranoiac episode when a complete stranger phones them up talking mystical sounding gibberish? No?
Oh, well. It was worth a try.
 
 
Seth
18:27 / 14.09.01
My favourite prank call involves insomnia, the directory and a dictaphone.

The evil individual calls someone at random at 3.00am (ETERNAL) and records their weary, bewildered voice answering. Half an hour later they call back, only this time pressing play.

Imagine waking up to answer the phone only to hear your own disembodied voice floating back. Twisted.
 
 
Mordant Carnival
20:12 / 14.09.01
Well, I think it's bloody iniquitous, is what I think. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. It's as bad as putting a subliminal SNDCRNVLMNY mantra into your posts so that people SNDCRNVLMNY will charge the thing when they SNDCRNVLMNY read it.

Only a completely SNDCRNVLMNY selfish, goal-oriented SNDCRNVLMNY lazy dilletant, a typical SNDCRNVLMNY bloody Low Magickian.

I hope you're all suitably SNDCRNVLMNY ashamed of yourselves.

[ 14-09-2001: Message edited by: Mordant Carnival ]
 
 
Naked Flame
20:26 / 14.09.01
must.... eat.... brains....
 
 
Mordant Carnival
20:39 / 14.09.01
Damned if I didn't see a link on one of the threads here a while back to some chap's sigil-exchange site. Idea was for ppl to submit sigils, and passers-by could give'em a charge if they felt generous. I charged a couple I thought were kind'v pretty, then promptly forgot all about it. Maybe someone can be bothered looking for the link.
 
 
Janusian
12:30 / 13.10.01
Actually I did something like that when I ran for President of my Student's Union. Since I was able to print one thousand copies of my manifesto, I decided that I would use it to manifest a demon(of a psychodynamic brand). I introduced the sigil of the thoughtform(the nasty bugger) some pseudoreligious bullshit about Sirian prophets as well as a manifesto blaring out something quite similar to what the demon would probably say if somebody could hear it.

Did I suceed? Well, not as stunningly as I would wanted to, but it was great fun.
 
 
Lucianna Drake
12:46 / 13.10.01
Hello? Hello?......*rubs sleep from eyes*..did I read that correctly, you want me to vitalise your sigil for you..hmm okay no problem, and if you wish to phone random strangers, please feel free to phone me, at 416 738 7602, I would be happy to help you out. I may not be a random, or even a perfect stranger, but I am a stranger none the less.
 
 
Lucianna Drake
12:51 / 13.10.01
Oh, and before I forget, I don't really mind who calls me, but if you could make during the evening hours, say after six pm EST, since you'll be calling my cell phone and I get a better rate at that time, thank you, oh, and Brenden Simpson, and Mordant Carnival, I think I got that last one correct, you two are especially humourous, thanks for the smiles in times of trial.
 
 
Lionheart
03:16 / 14.10.01
mikeh: did you charge the sigil? give it a reasonable time limit? and did you fire-and forgtet? well, not actually forget, just not pay attention to it?
 
 
mikeh
17:23 / 17.10.01
nope, i didn't charge it myself before hand...should i have? we gave it about 3 or 4 days (there was a specific date that it had to work on). i didn't forget about it, but i didn't think that would matter, since i wasn't the one who charged it (1000s of people walk by it everday).
give me some idears/pointers for next time
mikeh
 
 
Tamayyurt
19:12 / 17.10.01
no, it's good that you didn't charge it yourself first, cause if you had then when it comes true (if it hasn't already) you wouldn't know if it was cause you charged it or the strangers.
 
 
nul
01:57 / 18.10.01
What've I done now? You can't pin this one on me. You can't prove a thing. It was Lothar!
 
 
Lothar Tuppan
02:11 / 18.10.01
Damn Straight!

Uh... what am I taking credit for again?
 
 
nul
02:30 / 18.10.01
Something bad, I have no doubt. Bad Lothar.
 
 
Lothar Tuppan
12:36 / 18.10.01
Boom baby BOOM!

I'm the midnight sigilizer that sigilizes at midnight!

My private sigils are less than effective so maybe public ones would work better for me.

Or maybe I should just stick to other things that work better.

Or maybe I should go to people's homes and paint the sigils on the foreheads of their favorite pets.

That'd be bad wouldn't it.
 
 
A. Machine
09:50 / 19.10.01
quote:Originally posted by Mister Snee:
I've had distressingly good luck just throwing my sigils up on my web page. Nothing subtle, just blatted into the middle of an update, with a caption like "Thanks, come again!"...


This reminds me of a funny and probably effective, but terribly loathesome idea that CUSM had a while back. Email spamming sigils.
I think a danger of this sort of gimmickry is that it's so damn amusing that you get caught up in it overmuch.
 
 
Mister Snee
15:18 / 19.10.01
quote:Originally posted by A. Machine:
Email spamming sigils.


Brilliance!

And here's how I'd do it. People get so many insanely-worded spam messages every day they'd skim it and delete it, while being hopelessly infected with my ultramemetic hypersigil!

Makes you wonder how much of the spam you get each day is in fact just spam. ^-^

... and not just some guy trying to get laid, I guess.

I just couldn't think of a way to gracefully end that train of thought...
 
 
mikeh
19:25 / 19.10.01
ok, for clarification, heres exactly what i did.

the other day there was a huge demo in the financial district of my city, led by an organization i belong to, OCAP. 3 weeks before the action i drew up a sigil for "for this to be the place of OCAPs victory" in class. 2 days before the action, me and a friend, who knew what the sigil meant, put a bunch of enlarged and photocopied symbols in the 4 corners of a symbolic intersection in the district (king and bay), and various other places around the area. said intersection gets tons of human traffic each day, so we thought there would be sufficient numbers to charge the sigil.
i didn't go to the demo, but the general consensus was that it was kind of a failure, and i'm not even sure if the march got to the intersection where the sigils were.

any ideas on what i might have done wrong?
mikeh
 
 
Anathema
07:25 / 07.11.01
quote:Originally posted by mikeh:
ok, i'm new to casting sigils - i've done only about 8-10 and none of them have really worked (no doubt due to inexperience...)
...
any help/suggestions would be appreciated
mikeh


Hi Mikeh-

You might find this website of value:
www.SIGILGARDEN.com
 
 
penitentvandal
07:25 / 07.11.01
'OCAP's victory' sounds too vague to really work. How do you define 'victory'? Unless you have a clear definition of that in mind that you're just using 'victory' as a short-hand analogy for, then it ain't gonna work, sorry.

To be honest I think if you're going to stick something in public you need to put it somewhere where people are imprint-vulnerable and where there's a chance of them being in a state of mind to charge it. The logical best place for this sort of thing is a cathedral or somesuch, but for some reason deacons tend to frown on people graffing witchy-looking glyphs all over their premises...Spoilsports.
 
 
Mordant Carnival
15:23 / 07.11.01
The basis for my forthcoming multimedia project will be ramdomly generated abstract images and abstract, mantra-like spoken phrases. The idea is to challenge the veiwer's relationship with their audiovisual environment and encourage them to question the fundamental nature of sound and vision and the information that it is used to convey.

(Actually, I'm going to stand in front of the class tomorrow and stick a bunch of sigils on the OHP, with pre-recorded mantras chanted over the top. But I'm not going to tell them that. Bwahahahahaha.)
 
 
Emilio Burns
17:09 / 07.11.01
Is every-one here serious? I find some of the posts humorous.
 
 
Mordant Carnival
17:32 / 07.11.01
Oh, look. He's back.

(Message edited because I think I was channelling my Paranioa demon when I wrote it.)

[ 07-11-2001: Message edited by: Mordant Carnival ]
 
 
A. Machine
17:44 / 07.11.01
quote:Originally posted by Emilio Burns:
Is every-one here serious? I find some of the posts humorous.


Could you be more specific? What do you find funny? What parts of the posts are you asking about?
 
 
Emilio Burns
04:30 / 08.11.01
A. Machine,
I liked the idea of Impulsive Lad's crank calls and Lucianna Drake gives her phone number for some to use. Then there is Lothar Tuppan's "BOOM BABY BOOM- I'm The Midnight Sigilizer that sigilizes at midnight." Topped off by Mordant Carnival's sinister laughter. No offense intended A. Machine.
 
  
Add Your Reply