Related Terms • Shemhamforash • Babalon • Nuit • Chaos magick • Thelema Related Resources • The Pentacle • Sabbat Gallery • Alchemy • The Tarot Glossaries • Symbol Glossary • Alternative Religions Glossary • Glossary of Magick and the Occult

The word sigil means a seal or device (like a personal seal, a printer's mark, etc.), but the word today usually denotes a magical sigil, a glyph used in ritual or sympathetic magick as a focus, or for summoning angels, demons, or spirits. Sigils as the signature of 'mark' of a spirit began in antiquity and reached a peak of popularity in during the Renaissance. The seal or signature of an angel, spirit, or demon was thought to contain the essence of that being's name, and give one power to summon that entity.

There are several methods of devising sigils for this use, usually involving special arrangements (planetary squares, Enochian tables, etc.) of letters or numbers, and tracing the desired word over this pattern to reveal a symbol (the detailed center of the Golden Dawn Cross is such a pattern), or reducing alphabetical characters into a single glyph.

Pronunciation: Sij-ill • (noun)

Sigil of Goetic Spirit

Sigils from Levi's "Transcendental Magic."

Related Resources:

• Hermetic Tradition
  Named after Hermes Trismigestus (Hermes the three times great), the Greek moniker of the Egyptian God Tehuti (Thoth), alleged author of hundreds of mystical tractates, the Hermetic tradition is an eclectic spiritual tradition that encompasses elements from from many religions.
• Esoteric Kabbalah
  The Western, or Esoteric Kabbalah was created and utilized by Western magicians and Hermetic students for hundreds of years, and is a spiritual tradition in its own right.
• Gnostic scriptures, Texts
  The Gnostics were early Pagans and Christians with a very unique theology. Gnostic texts were found to be so threatening that many were destroyed or hidden, only to be rediscovered two thousand years later. Gnostic scriptures and source materials including the a gospel attributed to Mary Magdalen, and Gnostic exegesis of Canonical texts.