The Return of the Tower of Babel, Chapter 5, Chaos Magic, Part 4
Sigils
4. SIGILS
Sigils are symbols in that they stand for more or other than themselves, but they don’t remain static like literary or artistic symbols; they are also chaos drivers. They are signs too, in a phenomenological—per Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—sense: they create meaning out of an undivided whole. They are not only symbols and signs; they are tulpas, visualizations for accessing deities and linking bardos. In Paracelsus’ hermetic science, they are signatures, links between the microcosm and macrocosm based on the shapes and characteristics of plants, stones, animals, and other found items in nature. In chaos magic, sigils are activators, runes, or radionic-like grids to set a particular magical intention or operation in motion. Sixteenth-century occultists Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Oswald Croll made lists of sigils and their uses resembling those that, a century later, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton made of arcs, orbits, and gravitational algebras.
Radionic devices use sigil-like grids for transmission, replacing metals and transistors with runes. These send and receive other-dimensional energy rather than electrons. Instead of being run like phone lines, printed circuits, and motherboards, radionic networks are drawn like sacred geometries in two dimensions and then hieroglyphically potentized. Radionic bracelets, rings, coins, and medallions look like the guts of an old portable radio, but the stations they purport to receive are clairaudient.
If we were to imagine the signatures or crystalline transmissions of homeopathic medicine’s microdoses enlarged to visibility, they might look like snowflakes, radionic circuits, and molecular hydroglyphs.
The Renaissance sigil was a magical tool repurposed by modern-day chaotes. It includes glyphs, emblems, mascots, even asymmetrical squiggles and psychic pictures that encapsulate a particular intention. As with Paracelsus and Agrippa, they function as microcosm-to-macrocosm signals for opening magical negotiations with the universe.
Signifiers to transduce and transmit nonlocal realities hearken back to the Stone Ages. It is one thing for a hominid to jiggle a stick into an anthill to draw out a tasty meal or to hurl a rounded stone at a large lagomorph; it is another to exchange mutually understood codes about matters not at hand. That requires synesthesia: the shift of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body to another sensation or organ, from sight or smell to thought and sound. In this case, stimulation goes from sight and feeling to imagination, mantra, and psycholinguistic chirp.
Eight million years ago, hominoids that were still biologically apes but mentally proto-human migrated through forests and across the plains of South Africa. Humanoid bones from Olduvai Gorge (initially dubbed Australopithecus) have been recovered from 1.8-to-2 million-year-old soils. We don’t know if Africanus, archaeologically renamed Homo transvaalensis, used symbols, but he, she (and “they”) made pebble tools: 3-D symbols by hand. Spreading across Eurasia, Africanus mutated into Pithecanthropus: Homo erectus. A shell from Java, inscribed 500,000 years ago, bears the sort of abstract zigzags that came to signify linguistic rows—petroglyphs prefiguring runes, alphabets, and gematria.40
The earliest known scripts appeared on cave walls alongside as well as in painted herds of animals. Letter-like marks from 40,000 years ago suggest a sophisticated abstract sign system of 20,000+ prior years depth. According to palaeoanthropologist Genevieve Von Petzinger, this code included “dots, triangles, lines, squares and zigzags [as well as] more complex forms like ladder shapes, hand stencils, something called a tectiform that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feather shapes called penniforms. . . .” She adds, “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new invention.”41
Forty thousand years is fifteen times the length of recorded history. Though time was experienced differently in the Stone Age, the development of alphabets, symbols, and signs must have included a deep meditation on the symbol before it burst into lances, telescopes, and cyclotrons, perhaps enhanced early on by entheogens, a theory of ethnobotanical brothers Terence and Dennis McKenna. During that epochal span, many different hominid species became “sapient,” most of them contributing strands to our genome before becoming extinct. “Adam” alone survived his genus’ territorial imperative.
The earliest known writing system is the cuneiform script found in excavations of the Iraqi city of Uruk from around 5,000 years ago. Its letters represented constellations, heavenly bodies, trees, flowers, tools, and counting devices as well as reifications of life, death, birth, and self in spirts, deities, and passages. Other alphabets used “stars, crosses (Phoenician taw), segments of a circle (Greek omicron), triangles (Greek delta), forks (Arabic waw), and houses (Hebrew beth).42
The first sigils likely arose with alphabets, even as hunt magic arose with cave paintings of the animals hunted. A sigil like a stone tool was meant to help accomplish a goal but, like later radionics, it was imprinted on a two-dimensional representation of undivided spaciousness. European Rosicrucian versions encompassed their own Egyptian, Celtic, Germanic, and Cro Magnon precursors while gathering affines from totems and thoughtforms throughout Eurasia and then Native America, Aboriginal Australia, Polynesia, and Africa, as England, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands expanded from their coastlines colonially.
A popular form of sigil is devised by writing down a desire, then condensing its letters into a monogram, anagram, or composite signet or emblem. All subsequent operations using the sigil are visualized, projected, or received imaginally through the glyph. Synchromystic adept David Lee proffered similar sigils in keeping with sympathetic witchcraft: e.g., cutting together images of two people to form a love spell.43 His modus operandi is as old as Sappho’s poems and a lover’s jealousy.
More bioenergetic sigils are fashioned by sluicing visualizations into composite images. Such talismans can also be made by superimposing feeling states, memories, and constructs into mental-emotional bubbles (like tulpas on a Buddhist altars, which empower lotus flowers and theriomorphs). Some practitioners set these on or in placeholder Rosicrucian roses or lotuses—visualized florescences—to contain as well as charge an operating tulpa.
A magician then projects the energy of his or her desire and its residue of symbols into the visualization. From there, she uses intention to activate its artifacts, weaving them into a form of cipher or spell while plunging it into her subconscious where it can begin to work on reality.
After activating the sigil, she also commits to "a deliberate striving to forget it.” The thoughtform’s field has been subliminally launched toward its target or goal.44 As noted earlier, it bypasses the conscious mind while clearing the static of its own greedy “want” energy. Results that follow such an operation may startle even their operator. Magic that tries to override its unconscious loops almost always flips or washes out.
Tibetan Buddhist tulpas can be utilized, if they live up to their operating manuals, for travel into bodies and spirits of animals, trips in astral bodies between astral continents or world tiers, and future incarnations. That echelon of magic indicates that the symbolic nature of the universe may be more real than its so-called real aspect, and that reality is a collective projection of thoughtforms, a presumption that binds all magical and shamanic systems. Changing oneself does change the universe, though (again) not always in the manner presumed. Magic is creation, not control, as it might be in a simpler hypothetical universe.
A primitive grade of sigil magic is practiced subconsciously and unconsciously everyday by people in routine social interactions. It is how charisma, personal influence, and power function in a social and political world.
Avant-garde writers Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs pioneered a literary method of sigilization.45 A book or page was cut up and rearranged, usually at random, to create a new “nonsense” text with evocatory or divinatory power. This aleatory technique was later adapted for other media: film, photography, audio, choreography, even websites. A diligent magician—Burroughs was inducted into The Illuminates of Thanateros in the early 1990s46—he insisted that his technique had a solely magical function: "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes . . . [they are for] political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration.” Contending that they themselves "break down the barriers that surround consciousness,”47 he added:
I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened. . . . Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.48
If sigils override the flow of time, then they are precognitive as well as telekinetic. They mean something because meaning is deeply imbedded in ongoing actions in the broadest sense, stuff that can’t be interrogated extrinsically or deposed. It combines Merleau-Pontry’s signs with Heinrich Agrippa’s signatures and planetary sublunations.
Nowadays angels and spirit guides address mortals through billboards, marketing jingles, iPod shuffles, t.v. shows, synchronicities, and overheard conversations; anything can be a hot link. Spirits adore technology, for they are already a projection of human intentions into electromagnetic and higher fields.
There were 22 John Prine bands out of 4858 on my iPod in 2019, meaning that one should come up every 221 plays. After Prine’s premature death from COVID-19 on April 7, he made 6 appearances in the next 58 plays. That could have been coincidence, a shift in algorithms, or diffuse poltergeist activity. Numbers, names, and words are willy-nilly, all-over-the-place and random, but the ones you notice are the ones that contain messages for you.
David Bowie used cut-ups to enhance his own divinations from the I Ching and tarot.49 Genesis P-Orridge, a nearer disciple of Burroughs, described the aleatory technique as a way to "identify and short circuit control, life being a stream of cut-ups on every level. They are a means to describe and reveal reality and the multi-faceted individual in which/from which reality is generated."50 It is a cosmic shuffle. Here chaos magic also expresses its nihilistic—Satanic, punk-tantric, transgressive—side. Lachman elucidates:
Perhaps the most famous chaos organization was Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth (TOPY), formed by the performance artist Genesis P-Orridge. P-Orridge was part of the “industrial” music group Throbbing Gristle, which spiced their performances with hard pornography and Nazi imagery. TOPY was a kind of cult-cum-fan club and magical organization, geared toward exploring the “transgressive” side of magic. Among its antimonian influences were the Process Church of the Final Judgment—big in the 1960s—Burroughs, Gysin, Crowley, Anton LaVey of Church of Satan fame, the “love and death” guru Charles Manson, and chaos magick. P-Orridge is a proponent of “occulture,” a portmanteau expressing the blend of occultism and popular culture that has come to characterize chaos magick. The meme magick that helped put Trump—himself a popular culture icon—in the White House was, we can say, a work of occulture.51
Note how renaming and altering spelling is a form of sigilization.
Remember, your subtle body is much larger and more dimensionally complex than your physical one. Consider the solar cloud out of which planets, moons, comets, and meteors formed as a gigantic sigil or aura. Friedlander noted that the aggregate transpersonal entity that manifested to medium Jane Roberts as Seth casually confided, “’I was part of a group to put your Earth together.’”52
John extolled what a remarkable universe we must live in— “something that helped create the Earth itself could later sail one of its seas and smoke oregano without diminishment.”53
This also shows how thoughtforms can take on any size and scale, operate in any medium, and instantly change mediums and manifestations—one day the whole Earth, the next day a man in a boat.
Consider too the possibility that this whole universe—stars, galaxies, planets, seas, winds, nations, interstellar and intergalactic space—can be summarized in a single globule the size of a droplet as it is passed into the Etheric and then the Astral plane. By the same measure, a droplet in the Astral can explode into the hologram in which we emerge: the so-called Big Bang. Likewise, all the beings on Planet Earth, that are now or ever were or to be, can be synopsized in a single gall on a leaf such that each discrete meaning transforms the whole like a shape-shifting ruby fording space-time.
That’s its own deep breath!
In the Middle Ages, individual sigils became associated with particular angels or demons. Byzantine Platonist Michael Pselius, one of the first scholars to transmit the pre-Christian Greek Hermetic Corpus to the West, advised readers that demons “are surprisingly numerous: ‘all the air above and around us, the whole earth, the sea and the bowels of the earth are full of demons.’ There are six categories: those who live in the fire that borders upon the higher zone of air . . . (‘igneous [or] sublunary demons’), demons that are aerial, terrestrial, aquatic, subterranean, and finally demons of a kind ‘who flee the light, who are invisible, wholly dark, causing destruction by cold passions.’”54
The demons or daemons of neo-Platonism return as the hidden persuaders and subliminal kelpies of modern advertising. Grant Morrison cites corporate logos like “the McDonald's Golden Arches, the Nike swoosh and the Virgin autograph" as a viral form of sigil he calls “super-breeders,” adding that corporate sigils “attack unbranded imaginative space.”
By translating subliminal marketing pitches into magical agents—in effect, making the public realm psychic—corporate sigils instigate mass behavioral shifts. That’s the purpose of sigilization and why so much money is invested in branding, marketing, and propaganda; sigils are cheaper and more efficient than airtime. In fact, they are free as well as subliminal and stealth. Morrison expounds:
They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hairstyles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings. . . . The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summoning up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent. . . . Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance.55
Because sigilization is not named in our culture, most people regard its effects as mere brands that they are free to take or leave. Not so. Sigilization activates brands and styles to take over minds and wills. You don’t have to know what meme magic is to enact it.
Our world is overwhelmed with not only Disney characters but intruders from precincts of Madison Avenue, comix, television, sports, politics. Original icons as well as their sigilized progeny infest our inner life and thoughtforms. In dreams and fantasies, people interact lucidly with Little Lulu, Donald Trump, John Wayne, Madonna, Taylor Swift, Meryl Streep, Blutto, or a leprechaun, sylph, or chupacabra.
Kathleen Roberts, a British woman who professes to be the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, claims that she and Michael Jackson’s ghost were married by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He seized the moment one evening as she was stepping out of the bathtub. She also confided that “the late music icon . . . likes to eat in with me. He loves cookies. He cusses a lot more than I’d expect him to as a former fan.” She added that he “‘doesn’t like being touched back. . . . He scares me with spider visions and dead corpse visions if I kiss him or try to initiate romance physically.’”56
I believe that she is talking about sigils and thoughtforms, not egoic spirits or souls.
Icelandic pop artist and surrealist Erró, British assemblage sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, Brooklyn-American neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Bristol-based street artist Banksy are among sigilists who fashioned curative counter-sigils and graffiti against kitsch system controls.
The advertising Weltanschauung, epitomized by the Don Draper character in the series Madmen, provided a robust premise that has been adopted by narco gangs and Jihadist groups alike. You don’t just sell statins and SUVs with sigils; you create cults and religions. Daesh didn’t invent weaponized scripture, a theology of rape, or necrophiliac street art; it appropriated them, producing hip-hop-like videos of ecstatically apocalyptic beheadings and live incinerations by applying the techniques of George Lucas and Notorious B.I.G. to a death cult. It knew how to game the Internet and dominate Instagram and YouTube, blasting its sigils into the young Islamic world as “advanced terrorism” brands and a global recruiting tool.
The Islamic State used a “sigil barrage” similar to a “shoaling” technique perfected by chaote Gordon White. For psychically “promoting” related goals, instead of sigilizing individually for each—finding a new house, developing a customer base, and investing successfully—you sigilize them collectively to send an overall probability wave toward your goal: for instance, a modern caliphate.57 By that definition, Daesh shoaled itself into dominion over chunks of Iraq and Syria. Amateur chaos magician Steve Bannon shoaled his client, Mr. Trump, into high office.
As a corollary, White developed the “robofish”: a sigil for something that a magician thinks is sure to happen. By inserting an event that doesn’t require telekinesis for its execution, the chaote tries to positively pendulate the rest of the wished-for school: so-called “follow the leader.”58. In Synchromysticism as Kabbalah, White attributes this sort of chaos magic to David Bohm’s implicate order and the “strange attractors” of bifurcating systems:
How does the Technical Hermetica ‘work’? How did Ficino's system of planetary ritual magic “work”? Simply put, both work because some things are associated with other things. Symbols recur, patterns repeat, sounds heard on a radio associate with similar outcomes in your life. An Animist universe speaks a language of symbol and synchronicity. To you, to itself, to the birds. This awareness underpins systems of magical correspondence the world over—such as practical Kabbalah or Technical Hermetica . . . . These systems are indications that the universe speaks in a symbolic language . . . in a wider synchromystic context.59
A total rearrangement of reality according to synchromysticism is necessary to understand events in modernity, especially post-Trump. Whereas POTUS 45 was only interested in his own personal gains and elevation from chaos magic practiced on his behalf, he opened the floodgates, and other politicians realized that sigils and shoaling were far more effective than old-fashioned campaigns. But that’s just the banal application of chaos; those background sounds from radios like Bon Iver bands or birds listening to and sigilizing human and industrial background noise, not crows or parrots or other talking birds, but common flocks of pigeons and jays, begins to show the complexity of the universe and it myriad interdependent thoughtforms, however sourced and conducted—not only human but animal, and not only animate but machine-made.
Fellow chaote Morrison used the term “hypersigil” to refer to an extended sigilization that is charged with magical meaning. Politicians, movie stars, cartoon characters all contribute to hypersigilization and egregores (collective sigils—see Part 5). Morrison personified his hypersigils in a postmodern comix series The Invisibles. A transgender Brazilian shaman, a refugee Boy, a telepath named Ragged Robin, and Liverpool hooligan Jack Frost comprise an undermanned team of Invisibles defending Earth against Archons of the Outer Church, interdimensional agents who have enslaved most of the human race without their knowing it—shades of David Icke’s Robots’ Rebellion. In one Invisibles dialogue, “boy” asks, “Do I really turn into a pigeon? I mean how does it happen? Was it real? It was more like a dream?”
Old Street Buddha answers, “When you dream, what makes you think it’s not real?”
“It’s a fucking dream. You can’t touch it, can you?”
After Street Buddha puts “boy” through a demonstration, boy says, “It’s like . . . real or something. I feel fucking amazing, man.”60
These days, psychics routinely project into owls, wolves, butterflies, and other creatures.
The same concepts were employed by graphic novelist Neil Gaiman in 1989 and the early 1990s, as he created Sandman or Dream of the Endless. Drawing from his small pouch of self-replacing sand, the Sandman opens portals between dreams and waking-world realities such that they get turned into each other. Scale disappears. A single dream can become a universe or distort, disrupt, or destroy a universe.
In the serial Netflix adaptation of The Sandman, when Dream of the Endless engages in a battle with Lucifer Morningstar in Hell in order to regain his clairvoyant helmet from the demon who has come to possess it, he and she (Gaiman’s Lucifer is a woman) engage in a battle of creative visualizations—sigils—that start out as small as a wolf and snake, then switch scale down to a bacterium before becoming planets, stars, supernovas, galaxies, and an entire universe. But the psychic energy driving this series of transformation is greater than even the universe, so when Lucifer destroys everything with anti-life, Dream of the Endless restores it with hope. This is chaos magic supreme!
The hypersigil performed by Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 hijackers ruptured history and set a clock ticking as surely as the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Its vibration penetrated history far deeper than airliners and toxic fires.
According to modern chaote David “Avocado” Wolfe, owner and overseer of a diverse superfood plantation on the north Hawaiian island of Kauai, magic is the mangosteen of traditionary sciences.
When a sigil begins to operate autonomously, it is sometimes referred to as a servitor, literally a “servant.” A servitor is a psychological (psychic) construct created for a specific magical goal that takes on life and volition beyond the agency tagged by its maker.61 The monster set loose by Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein as well as the golem of Hebrew folklore that was animated by letters of the Hebrew alphabet were servitors. When AI—artificial intelligence—assumes volition like Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot,” the computer HAL in Arthur Clarke’s Space Odyssey, or current programs and deep fakes that are powerful enough to fool or take over populations and countries, the servitor has replaced the magician. Additionally, “when such a being becomes large enough that it exists independently of any one individual, as a form of group mind, then it is referred to as an egregore.62
Terminology fissions here as it navigates the unseen universe. Totems, tulpas, sigils, hypersigils, shoals, servitors, and psychoids are all, according to Steampunk goblin-creatress Jaq D Hawkins, “animated thoughtforms that take on autonomous existence . . . [and] can gain a certain amount of functional vitality and longevity for a specific purpose.”63 They encompass hallucinations, ectoplasmic projections, and holograms, each providing its own agency of mobility. Whether secularand existential or esoteric and etiological, they open channels—psychic lei lines—through which specified energies and destinies transmute. That becomes clear when they get loose as giant balloons, hyperobjects, or metaverses: MAGA, Stop the Steal, the Red Army, vaccines, cryptocurrencies, a Taliban caliphate.
Endnotes
40. Helen Thompson, “Zigzags on a Shell from Java Are the Oldest Human Engravings,” Smithsonianmag.com, December 3, 2014.
41. Alison George, “Codes Hidden in Stone Age Art may be the root of human writing,” New Scientist, November 9, 2016; internal quote from Von Petzinger, The First Signs.
42. Hugh A. Moran and David H. Kelley, The Alphabet and the Ancient Calendar Signs, pp. 9 and 11 (adapted by me).
43. Dave Lee, “Cut Up and Collage in Magic.”
44. Ray Sherwin, The Book of Results.
45. Rona Cran, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture.
46. Matthew Levi Stevens, “The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs,” Reality Sandwich, June 8, 2018.
47. William Burroughs, The Job.
48. William Burroughs, The Job.
49. Peter Doggett, The Man Who Sold the World.
50. P-Orridge, THEE PSYCHIC BIBLE: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.
51. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 46-47.
52. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 135.
53. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 153.
54. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 148.
55. Grant Morrison, Pop Magic!
56. Samantha Ibrahim, “Woman Claims She’s Married to Michael Jackson’s Ghost: ‘He Stays Possessed in Me,” New York Post, August 17, 2021.
57. Gordon White, “Sigils Reboot: How to get Big Magic from Little Squiggles.”
58. Gordon White, “Magic Secrets as Taught by Robot Fish.”
59. Gordon White, Pieces of Eight.
60. Grant Morrison, Invisibles, Book One, no page numbers.
61. Marik, “Servitors” in Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms,
http://thespiraloakgrove.weebly.com.
62. Chaos Magic, Wikipedia.
63. Jaq D.Hawkins, Understanding Chaos Magic.
See also my forthcoming book Homeopathy: Nanoscience, Energy Medicine, and Life Code (Inner Traditions, 2024) for a discussion of signatures, Similars, and medicinally potentized thoughtforms. This is a revision of my 1990s book Homeopathy: The Great Riddle.
