Sigil Magic, Can two sigils cancel each other out? Options

Hi guys,

I've been working on a career change for a while now and, having meditated on it, I created a sigil about this career change.

After a couple of months I re-sigilised the intent, i felt that i wanted to expedite the career change, but months later, progress is slow and steady, but not approaching the speed of change I had focussed my intent on. I was wondering if the second sigil would have:

1) reinforced the first sigil
2) overwrittern the first sigil or,
3) cancelled out the first sigil?

Anybody got any advice?

Cheers

ps - the second sigil was VERY different from the first, the statement of intent was slightly different, but had the same 'gist' (i know that you have to be very specific when sigilising so I changed it slightly in order to speed up the change)

This post has been edited by Tom Foolery: Feb 27 2011, 05:21 AM

Here's a question, with the first sigil, did you afterwards eagerly await the magic to start creating changes, or did you forget it and go on about your life? It sounds to me, if you decided to re-sigilize, that you never really let go of your conscious hold on the sigil in the first place. So now, you've created a second sigil and if you're asking this now, you're doing the same thing again - hanging on to it.

Sigil magic is a kind that works by seeding your unconscious with an intention that then propagates that seed into a series of unconscious connections which result in the fulfillment of the original intention. However, if after creating a sigil we hang on to it with out conscious mind, it's effect is greatly reduced and sometimes inhibited all together. As you hang onto it, you feed that original intention with all of the accidental 'instructions' that occur when we begin to imagine how it will happen, and direct our attention around us to look for clues that it is working, etc. All of that plays into the 'seed' that isn't properly buried.

Having re-sigilized, my opinion is that you have two not-quite-buried seeds that may well be in conflict with one another. That is one reason why it is best to make one sigil for on intention and then let it alone. They could be in conflict. If it were my own experiment, I would wipe them both by recreating the sigilization in reverse - you might even reverse the sigil itself - and focus the work on extricating that intention instead. Then give that process time to clean up your unconscious: don't do any kind of sigil magic for some period of time significant to you. For instance one lunar cycle if you are, say, wiccan, or 40 days if you were catholic, and so on for your own tradition. Most traditions have significant time-frames for different things, so consider it a purification period. Then do a proper sigil working and this time let it go afterwards and go on about your life.

There's a certain kind of Zen attitude that goes into sigil work. Whatever you're doing, continue as though you have no expectation of what it will be, or any care about what it once was - what it is, is what it is right now, and you must be one with that present process. Sigilization is a way of seeding future changes, but then returning to the present to ride the current as it develops. By sigilizing once, and then doing so again on the same matter, you're showing a particular attachment to the course further down river, and may miss the changes in the currents right under you in the present. Your unconscious mind gets mixed signals from your conscious mind. If you only care about altering the future, at one point do you alter the present to create that future?

That's my thoughts on the matter.

peace

Maybe your not letting go and its not working because you haven't drawn the sigil in appropriate places..
Thats the beauty of them, placing them in different areas give them a different effect, burning them is quite a good finishing move as-well.

Failing all that you might simply be better of where you are.

Draw, if you burn a sigil how do you cancel it if something goes wrong, especially if you've done it right and consciously forgotten the details?

Draw, if you burn a sigil how do you cancel it if something goes wrong, especially if you've done it right and consciously forgotten the details?

A method I have been apprised of in the past but have not personally used is to create a sigil book, which is only opened in order to record a new sigil, ideally, or if some later work requires that a sigil be re-used in some way. This way all of the mystery and psychic tension of wanting to go back and go over the sigils again produces a kind of 'book of power' effect, whereby recording the sigil in the book becomes, in itself, and ongoing meta-sigilization process. And when a sigil has outlived its usefulness or gone wrong, you tear out its page.

However, ideally a sigil should be a one shot, one purpose deal. The strength of sigil magic is in it's fire-and-forget manifestation of individual intentions. You will not normally have multiple sigils that somehow interfere with one another. In OP's example, one sigil to improve a job condition, get a promotion, etc., should be sufficient, if executed and then forgotten.

I personally disagree with Draw's implied method of posting sigils around in different places, at least in this particular case. Other kinds of sigils for other more long-term purposes might be well executed in this way, but I find sigil magic to be ineffective when treated as a 'mass ritual'. The development of an egregore through sigilization and mass dissemination of that sigil can work, but assumes also that at least some sufficiently large group of individuals is able to recognize and name that sigil in order to give the growing egregore a hold in the cultural consciousness. For a bystander or stranger to view the sigil, even if they exert some psychic force, i.e. attention, at it for some length of time, is of no benefit or consequence to the function of a sigil in OP's specific case because the end function is not a shared function but a privatized and personal one. Thus there is an implied intention operating to shield itself from psychic influences aside from OP's.

I have found burning a sigil after the initial charging to be an effective way of banishing it from the conscious mind. In the case of keeping a sigil book, the sigil is recorded there after it is charged, never before - whilst it remains inert - either from memory or as part of the ritual and before burning/disposing of the sigil. Another method is to instead of burning the sigil, to place it in a small black box, with no explanation, among all the other sigils that have been used. The box then serves the same purpose as the book. In either case, usually no description of the purpose of the sigil is given, or if there is it is encoded in some way. The prime directive of sigil magic is that the purpose of the sigil must be obscured and entirely forgotten and, almost more importantly, to remain thereafter unreachable by the mind of the magician.

peace

Yeah, I burned both sigils after doing them, although with the first one It did stay in my mind and I found myself picturing it at different times. Sometimes I took the initiative and tried to use the visualisation to re-inforce the intent. The second sigil I just burned it and forgot it. I couldn't even remember it if i tried now.