[This is an article originally published in Horus/Maat Lodge's The Silver Star vol. 6, the 2006 Fall Equinox issue.]

This essay is a reworking and expansion of parts of two old, unpublished articles written in the late nineties. The article presupposes that the reader is already familiar with the methods of compound-letter sigil-craft, and is meant to suggest methods of building upon practices discussed elsewhere. It is neither intended nor recommended for those not already acquainted with the subject.

It occured to me one day that sigils might be made in such a way that they will self-replicate. By creating a pair of sigils, one masculine and one feminine, and imbuing them with life through charging, they may reproduce by themselves on the plane of images, or what certain people refer to as the astral plane.

To create a pair of masculine and feminine sigils, one needs to look at their will-idea and create a positive and a negative statement based upon it. The positive statement is formed into a male sigil and the negative statement is created into a female sigil. One can be very creative in how they make a sigil masculine or feminine, but I prefer to go straight for symbolic genitalia. A study of religious symbolism will aid in your compositions.

An example of a positive and negative pair could run as follows:

Positive = "Will be safe on plane ride."

Negative = "Will not get hurt on plane ride."

It seems that the closer the statements can be in composition to each other, the easier they will be able to reproduce. A similarity in the wording of the two statements means that the letters composing the two statements will also be similar. This means that the two resulting sigils will be built from a similar set of glyphs, resulting in the possibility of very similar forms. The intended result of creating this similarity is the creation of what may be thought of as a species of sigils. This created species may mate more easily than two dissimilar sigils, in the same way that animals reproduce best between similar species.

For my first experiments with this method, I created male and female insectoid sigils (see illustration). By creating the sigils in this method, they are already imbued with the appendages of movement and have clear areas to imbue with sexual organs. The sigils are then intended to develop the natural inclination to reproduce as their insectoid archetypes would.

The gender of these particular sigils is symbolized by opposing triangles, a symbol-set at least as old as the Babylonians. They were given pincers with the intention that their young might be able to better grasp their intentions. The primary operational model used was based on the idea of a large-scale cockroach infestation, given the single-mindedness of a bee or ant collective.

So far, all of my experimental workings with this system have been successful. That said, I must point out that the system is not without its potential pitfalls. The primary potential pitfall involved in this method seems to be the use of negative statements. Most works on sigil-craft advise against using negative statements, and not without good reasons.

The most apparent reason for wanting a positive statement instead of a negative one is that the negative may get lost in the translation, so to speak. I think it is best to illustrate this point. Using, for example, the negative statement of will: "will not go to prison," it can be seen that the letters W I L N O T G P R S scrambled into a sigil could easily be reconstructed "will go to prison" since not is contained in to and prison. A much better phrase would be "will be a free man." The problem is not just restricted to no and not words. For example, the statement: "will for dreamless sleep" equals the same reduced letters as "will for dream sleep" since less is directly contained in sleep. Either phrase comes to the combination W I L F O R D R E A M L S P. It should also be noted that this reduction starts with will for dream. The message is not as clear as it could be.

Returning to the idea of mating sigils, the drawbacks of negative statements should be kept in mind. From my experience, however, the difficulties are usually overcome simply by making the positive statement unmistakable. The positive statement may be made the inherently dominant one. All other considerations aside, it makes for a safer operation. The difficulties may still remain and should be watched for. So far, I have not found a method that completely bypasses this potential difficulty. Since two positive sigils are not likely to mate, one of them should therefore be negative.

While the potential for problems with negative will-statements is recognized, I have not seen such problems arise in practice. It seems that the difficulty is also bypassed by the fact that it is not the constructed "parent" sigils that do the work, but the "children" created by their mating. Of course, anyone familiar with the quirks of genetics should know that this might also lead into unexpected territories.

In summary, the system has shown enormous potential to create powerful workings, but an objective analysis shows that the system might also have an enormous potential for unforeseen consequences and results. I advise that anyone experimenting with it does so with all due caution.

Gendler.

Return to Phurba

Return to Panikon