#sigilization

[mauvais--sang]

"Supposedly one can devise one’s own sigilesque thing, then take the basic principle of the sigil and run. Thanks to the acid, I’m sure, it sounds half-plausible—or charismatic, at least. So I space out around the idea that the alphabet’s just a collection of secretive forms, i.e., Aladdin’s lampettes. That would explain some of history’s eerier twists. I mean, if you factored in magical tweaks. Then I remember what I do when I’m not stoned. You know, write novels that are essentially long, involved wishes for offbeat utopian worlds that I can’t realistically enter. And within a few seconds I have this idea, which, if it’s not obvious, involves writing a novel/sigil that has a wish neatly embedded inside it. I guess it can’t hurt."

— Dennis Cooper, Guide, 1997

[hermeticlibrary]

Curious bit of sigilization technique from "What I Learned About My Writing By Seeing Only The Punctuation" applied to Liber 1, Liber 77, and Confessions, Chapter 1, for fun.

[justanotherwitchygirl]

Just curious as if anyone out there has any good spells or anything similar for bringing romance back into a relationship?

I've seen some things and have asked around but I figured why not ask the community!

[yourlocalchaoswitch]

can i have a sigil for focus and motivation please?

Here you go!

[holy-mountaineering]

Wishgils: A Proposition

I propose a new word to differentiate “sigilization”, which actually has a specific magical theory behind it, from the “technique” of people who are making wishes in the form of a symbol: Wishgil.

Since sigilization and the form of sigil-making exclusively used on tumblr (at least as far as I can tell) are very different, this makes the most sense to me. The only theory I can find behind the tumblr trend of making a pretty picture, writing what you want to happen under it, and then being like “likes charge, reblogs cast” is that “it works because I want it to” which is what a wish is. Hence, Wishgil (pronounced “wish-jull” in an American accent) instead of sigil.

If you’re considering attacking me because you just looked up “sigil” and found out it can be used as a synonym for “symbol” please stop and continue not doing that. Did you know that in different contexts, especially technical ones, words can have different meanings? Like if I said, “angle” in a conversation such as “What’s your angle on this business?” You wouldn’t say “90 degrees” unless you were the funniest dad alive.

If the above ruffles your feathers, feel free to not use the excellent word “Wishgil” or interact with this post. If you would like to disagree please explain in a coherent way that doesn’t rely on telling me how hurt your feelings are.

[aur-ochs]

Idea: Binary Sigilization

I thought of this during a boring lecture today - I once saw an online ARG hide text by converting it into binary, converting the binary into black/white pixels, and then arranging those pixels into a square.

This resulting image encodes almost half a page of text.

It got me thinking about how it demonstrated the ability to convert letters into shapes using binary notation. It’s more or less a simplified version of how QR codes are generated, with less compression and more emphasis on the form the pixels take. So, I wanted to see what kind of shapes would result if you converted short words or phrases into visual binary in this way. For example, “OV23″ in binary is:

O - 01001111

V - 01010110

2 - 00110010

3 - 00110011

We make an 8x4 grid and fill in every slot where a 1 is present, like so:

When we strip it down, we have a final shape:

Because the shapes are most visible at the level of individual letters, this would probably be best suited to short words and phrases. Here’s an example of a slightly longer one, my OV23 signature.

You could either keep space-separated parts together as a vertical string, like so, where the blank lines are the space between words:

Or separate them horizontally, like so, which makes the image harder to decode:

You can see how they start looking like snippets of QR codes. I think this has potential to be a simplistic and aesthetically pleasing way to sigilize small words or phrases in such a way that they can theoretically be decoded back into words, but don’t have the disadvantage of forming recognizable letters for your brain to instinctively read. Thoughts? 

[templeofthevoid-blog]

“Spirits answer my calls” and “Spirits attend my calls”  Just a couple sigils to introduce myself in spiritworking