Sigil

A sign you draw yourself from the letters of an intention.

A sigil is a small sign that stands for an intention. The witch writes her intention as one sentence, takes its letters apart and joins them into a single figure that nobody else can read. She then draws it where she will see it: in her notebook, on a slip of paper in her purse, with a finger on a fogged mirror.

The word comes from the Latin sigillum, "little seal". The books of magick of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are full of such seals, each said to belong to a spirit or a planet. The sigil of today is different. The English artist Austin Osman Spare described in the early twentieth century how to build one from the letters of your own wish, and the method became widely known in the 1970s and 1980s.

A sigil is made for yourself. Do not draw one on another person, on their belongings or on walls and trees that are not yours.

Related: intention, charm, talisman.