The modern world of craft practice is inundated with symbols. From the myriad of cultural religious and sacred imagery that has been appropriated by various magical practices over the centuries to the ever evolving stable of geometric drawings that have long been held to hold some innate metaphysical knowledge, the world of magic is full of symbols.
The sigil, originally a term meaning the signature of a spirit entity, has evolved since the 19th century, through the work of Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant and later UK based chaos magicians, to be a symbolic representation of a spell or goal oriented magic working.
Thus modern magical practice often incorporates the creation of ever further symbols to represent our magical desires, formulations, and contemplations. These sigils have become central to magic in a world of screens, where every grimoire is able to be accessed instantly and the commodity of the symbol, a rarification of knowledge, is lost in the ubiquitousness of the internet age. No symbol is rare, no sigil unique.
Yet as we move through this era of data overstimulation and increasingly thinner language barriers we as magic practitioners have long understood that the true and underlying power of the symbol is in the thing it represents, not the ink on the parchment. The map is not the territory on this side of the mirror of the landscape, nor the other.
When we look for the foundation of symbols like the pentacle and hexagram, geometric forms that outline mathematical truths, we find them everywhere in nature. Their power is in the root of life itself, expressions in plants and animal matter that count themselves innumerably. From the pattern of flower petals to the digits of a human hand, from the forking twists of tree branches to the roots of sacred herbs the mathematical expression that is symbolized in a pentagram, hexagram, squiggly line, pointed arrow, all are found in the natural world. Our sigils are merely representations of things, much as is our language. A pale and dim reflection of a radiant thing of complex arrangement.
As magicians we must return to the land and give less credence to the map. We must let our sigils be the shapes we find in nature, the forking of a leaf, the vein of a stone, a spiral of a shell, the fracture of a bone. The trace of an ancient river our spirit symbol for its essence, the pentate of flower petals the warning of its hidden power.
Language is at best discarded when we enter upon the threshold of that realm beyond. By bringing language into the space of the other we dilute our ability to grasp its architecture. Carrying language with us is baggage best left behind, for as we attempt to categorize and compartmentalize the experiences of the other those experiences move away from us, like a willow the wisp fading in the forest ahead.
When we mistake the map for the territory we lose sight of our path, looking to be guided by the map we are no longer explorers of our own lives but merely commuters on the way to some self perceived goal. The practice of magic and the role it has in our perception of “reality” is one that affords us subtle understandings of the architecture of reality. The reduction of these things to mere symbols and sigils robs them of their agency, reduces and diminishes their power and awe.
It is through a meditative understanding of the expression of these symbols in nature that we as witches will come to grasp the invisible realm of otherness. That beyond, that is part and parcel of the mundane world and yet so often ignored by the masses in their search for comfort and stability. We see the true landscape through the veil, and the symbols that point the way are merely signposts on our path.
Let the sigils of nature manifest in our craft, as stewards of the landscape in which we work, as journeyers along a path through the beyond. Let the flower represent itself without the pentagram, the crossroads reveal itself without the hexengram. The unfolding magnificence of the natural world is the territory we seek to ensnare in our symbols, let them stand for themselves on our altar and in our path. The landscape will reveal those sigils for which all things may be bound, all spirits may be called. We must merely learn to see them in our midst.
fair--y backup 