A history of magical signs: from charaktêres to sigils

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

When I make a sigil today, I am using a modern method. But the signs behind it are old, and I think the history makes the practice richer and kinder. This page follows magical signs from the Greek papyri of Roman Egypt, through medieval astral magic and Renaissance number squares, to the grimoire seals and finally to Austin Osman Spare and the chaos magicians who made the personal sigil popular.

None of this history is a ready-made method. If you want to make a sigil now, start with the beginner’s guide or the ten design methods.

Charaktêres in the Greek magical papyri

Historical The Greek Magical Papyri are working magical texts from Roman Egypt, written mostly in Greek with some Egyptian (Demotic and Coptic). Most date from roughly the second century BCE to the fifth century CE. They are spellbooks and single spells: instructions for divination, healing, protection, love magic, binding, and calling on gods and spirits. The best-known English translation is the collection edited by Hans Dieter Betz (1986). It is under copyright, so this site describes the texts rather than quoting it.

Historical Scattered through these texts are strange signs that scholars call charaktêres, from the Greek word for an engraved or stamped mark. They look like letters, but they are not letters of any alphabet. They have no sound value and no fixed meaning. Many are built from straight strokes, crosses, and stars, and a great many have small circles at the ends of their lines. Scholars call these ring letters, or “ring signs,” because the circles make the strokes look as if they end in tiny rings.

Historical These signs were not a code. A careful survey by the scholar Kirsten Dzwiza found around 699 different charaktêres across 94 texts. Most appear only once or twice. Richard Gordon, another specialist in ancient magic, has argued that their power lay in their strangeness: they were signs from outside ordinary writing, a script that only gods and spirits could read. Each scribe or magician seems to have felt free to create new ones.

Charaktêres also appear on lead curse tablets. These were thin sheets of metal on which people in the Greek and Roman world wrote spells to bind rivals in love, law, sport, or business. The tablets were then folded, pierced, and buried or dropped into wells and graves. They appear on protective amulets of metal and papyrus, and on engraved gems. In some texts the charaktêres are invoked directly, almost as if they were beings themselves: the spell addresses “holy characters” and asks them to act.

It is worth being honest about the content of these spells. Many of them, especially the curse tablets, aim to bind, silence, or harm another person. That is part of the history. It is also part of why this site does not reproduce them for practice, and why my practical pages never ask you to make a sign aimed at another person.

The Picatrix and astral magic

Historical One of the most important channels between Arabic and Latin magic is a book known in Arabic as the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, “The Goal of the Sage,” and in Latin as the Picatrix. It was compiled in Arabic in the second half of the tenth century, from more than two hundred earlier sources. In 1256, according to the usual account, it was translated into Castilian at the court of Alfonso X of Castile, and from Castilian into Latin.

Historical The Picatrix is a large book of astral magic. It teaches how to make images and talismans under the right celestial conditions, which materials, colors, and incenses belong to which planet, and how to address the planetary spirits. It describes images for each planet and for the degrees of the zodiac, and it treats the talisman as a way of capturing the influence of the heavens in a physical object. Some later manuscripts of the Latin Picatrix, such as one in Kraków, include the planetary number squares from three-by-three to nine-by-nine.

You do not need to read the Picatrix to make a sigil. It is enough to know that much Renaissance thinking about planetary talismans came through books like this one. The planetary “table” or square also had a long Arabic history before Agrippa printed it. A modern English translation by Dan Attrell and David Porreca (2019) is listed in Further Reading.

Signs in Christian Europe

Historical Medieval Christian Europe had its own world of protective and holy signs, and it would be misleading to leave it out. Churches, books, and homes were full of them: the sign of the cross traced on the body and over doorways, the Chi-Rho monogram of Christ, the letters IHS, the sacred monograms on altar cloths and bells. Prayer charms on small strips of parchment, sometimes folded and worn, combined prayers, saints’ names, and strings of letters standing for longer phrases. Many such charms survive, and scholars have studied how they were made, carried, and sometimes condemned.

Historical Alongside these approved signs ran the learned ritual magic of the later Middle Ages, written down in Latin by clerics and scholars. Texts such as the Ars Notoria, a medieval art of gaining knowledge through prayers and figures, used elaborate diagrams called notae. Books of conjuration included seals and characters of angels and spirits, and some of them would eventually feed into the grimoires discussed on the page on grimoire seals. Church authorities often treated such texts with suspicion, and some copies were burned.

The point for a modern reader is that the line between “religious sign” and “magical sign” was drawn differently in different times, and often argued over. A sign of the cross on a door and a seal of an angel in a grimoire could both be meant as protection. Whether a given sign counted as devotion, superstition, or forbidden magic depended on who was judging.

Agrippa and the planetary squares (1533)

Historical Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486 to 1535) was a German scholar, physician, soldier, lawyer, and writer who spent his life moving between cities and patrons across Germany, France, Italy, and the Low Countries. He was brilliant, restless, often in debt, and frequently in trouble with authorities. He wrote on theology, on the nobility of women, and on the vanity of all the sciences, as well as on magic.

Historical His great work on magic, De occulta philosophia libri tres, “Three Books of Occult Philosophy,” was drafted in his early twenties and revised for decades. The first book was printed in Antwerp in 1531. The complete work, all three books, was printed in Cologne in 1533. That date matters for this page: the planetary squares appear in the second book, so they were first printed in 1533, not 1531, as some popular sources say.

The Three Books gather an enormous range of earlier material, ancient, medieval, Arabic, Jewish, and Christian, into a single system. Book One deals with natural magic: the hidden virtues of stones, plants, animals, and the elements. Book Two deals with celestial magic: number, geometry, music, astrology, and the planets. Book Three deals with ceremonial magic: religion, divine names, angels, spirits, and the soul.

In 1651 an English translation appeared in London, credited to “J.F.,” usually identified as John French. This translation is in the public domain, and it is the source of the Agrippa quotations on this site, with the old spelling kept. Like any translation, it has errors, and some of them matter for sigil work. You will meet two of them below.

What Agrippa printed, and what he did not say

Historical Under the lists of names, Agrippa prints the tables twice, once in ordinary numerals and once “in Hebrew notes,” with the numbers written as Hebrew letters. Then he prints the seals, or “Characters”: a seal of the planet itself, and seals of its intelligence and its spirit, with extra seals for the Moon and Venus. These are intricate line drawings, some symmetrical and some not.

And then he stops. After describing all seven tables, Agrippa writes:

“Now how the seals, and Characters of the Stars, and spirits are drawn from these tables, the wise searcher, and he which shall understand the verifying of these tables, shall easily find out.”

Historical In other words, he tells you that the seals come from the squares, and he does not tell you how. Popular books often say that Agrippa taught the method of tracing names on the squares. He did not. Whatever method lay behind his seals, he left it for the reader to discover.

The seals of the Lesser Key

Historical The Lesser Key of Solomon, or Lemegeton, is a seventeenth-century English compilation of five magical books. Its first book, the Ars Goetia, lists 72 spirits, each with a rank, a description, a list of “offices” (what the spirit can do), and a seal. The best-known edition is the 1904 text published by Aleister Crowley from Mathers’s transcription, now in the public domain.

The Goetic seals look different from the Key’s pentacles. Most are built from a central design of lines, curves, small circles, and crosses, often enclosed in a double circle with the spirit’s name written in the band. Some are almost symmetrical. Others look like a cluster of stylized letters or a diagram of interlocking paths. Several features recur:

• Small circles at the ends of lines, like the ring letters of the ancient world.
• Crosses and crossbars, sometimes at the ends of lines.
• Curved hooks and loops, sometimes paired.
• A central axis, giving many seals a rough left-right balance.

Why do they look like this? Nobody knows for certain, and the honest answer is that we have more theories than evidence. Some seals may have been built from letters or names, in the spirit of the tracing methods described on the history of sigils. Some may descend from older seals in other lists of spirits. Some were probably shaped, simplified, or decorated by copyists. The ring-and-line style shows a family resemblance with much older magical writing, but a family resemblance is not a direct line of descent.

Historical What we can say is that the Goetic seals are not ancient. The scholar Joseph H. Peterson, who edited the Lemegeton from the manuscripts, has observed that the spirit seals do not appear in the earlier manuscripts of the Offices of Spirits, the older lists of demons from which the Goetia’s catalog descends, as far as he knows. The printed catalog of Johann Weyer (1577), which shares much of its list of spirits with the Goetia, has no seals at all. The seals seem to have joined the catalog fairly late, perhaps in the seventeenth century. They resemble the seals in some other spirit lists, so the Goetia’s compilers may have borrowed or adapted them.

Austin Osman Spare and The Book of Pleasure (1913)

Historical The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy was published by Spare himself in 1913. It was a large, expensive book with his drawings, an introduction by his friend Ernest Collings, and a short, difficult text. It sold poorly. Today it is the foundation of almost every modern sigil method.

Most of the book is a philosophy of desire, belief, and what Spare calls Kia, a kind of free, formless consciousness. Only a small part is about sigils, and it is surprisingly brief. Here is a paraphrase of his method, staying close to what he wrote.

• Spare says that sigils are made by combining the letters of the alphabet in simplified form. He describes them as a kind of monogram of thought, a way of governing energy, and he compares them to heraldry and other signs.
• His example is a sentence beginning with “This my wish,” followed by a wish to have the strength of a tiger. He writes out the sentence, takes its letters, and combines them into a single design.
• He does not give a rule about crossing out repeated letters. He combines the letters and simplifies the result until it becomes a shape, rather than a word.
• A wish can be split into parts, each made into a sigil, and the parts combined.
• Once made, the sigil is to be impressed on the mind and then deliberately forgotten. Spare speaks of a conscious effort to forget the desire, so that it can sink into what he sees as the deeper, non-thinking self.

Spare also notes, in his own terms, that the book uses several methods of sigils, and he discusses ways to empty the mind, from mantras and postures to ordinary distractions. His list of ways to reach that blankness is famous for including, among more esoteric methods, card games of patience (what Americans call solitaire) and tennis.

Notice two things. First, the method is short and loose. Spare gives an example, not a step-by-step procedure. Second, the “eliminate repeated letters” step that most modern books call “Spare’s method” is not in his text. It appears in Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null: the instruction is documented in the 1987 Weiser edition and probably goes back to the first edition of 1978. The method I teach on the design methods page is therefore called letter reduction after Spare, as later formalized by chaos magicians.

What chaos magic changed

It is worth pausing to list what chaos magic actually did to the sigil, because so much of it is now taken for granted.

1. It made the statement of intent a formal step. Spare wrote a sentence. The chaos magicians made the sentence a rule, with advice about wording, and later writers added rules of their own, such as present tense and positive phrasing.
2. It turned simplification into a procedure. “Eliminate repeated letters” gave beginners a clear first move. Later writers added variations, such as also removing vowels.
3. It separated the sigil from any tradition. No planets, angels, or Hebrew were required. A sigil could be made by anyone, from any background, with any beliefs or none.
4. It made forgetting central. Spare’s idea of hiding the desire from the conscious mind became a standard step, often with advice about how to forget, such as making several sigils at once and putting them away until you no longer remember which is which.
5. It linked charging to altered states. The word gnosis, borrowed from much older religious vocabulary, came to mean a state of intense focus or emptiness in which a sigil was charged.
6. It added a habit of record and review. Chaos magicians, at their best, kept diaries and treated sigil work as an experiment.

Some of these changes are helpful to a beginner, especially the clear steps and the habit of keeping records. Some, especially the more extreme ways of reaching gnosis, are not. The practical pages on this site keep the first kind and replaces the second with safer methods.

What we know, and what we guess

It is easy to read a chapter like this and come away with a single story: ancient sigils, passed down in secret, arriving intact in modern practice. The evidence does not support that story. Here is a fairer summary.

We know that:

• ancient Mediterranean magicians used letter-like signs with no sound or meaning, many of them ring letters, on papyri, curse tablets, gems, and amulets;
• the idea that a seal can give power over spirits is old, and the Solomon legend carried it into later magic;
• ring-letter scripts reappear in medieval and Renaissance magical alphabets;
• magic squares were studied mathematically and used on talismans in the Arabic and Islamic world, in surviving texts from the tenth century, and were later linked to the seven planets;
• the Picatrix and other Arabic works carried astral talismanic magic into Latin Europe;
• Jewish amulet traditions used divine and angelic names and signs, and the Sefer Raziel collects some of them.

We guess, or do not know:

• what most individual charaktêres were thought to mean, if anything beyond their strangeness;
• how continuous the chain of copying was between ancient and medieval signs;
• exactly when and where the planetary squares were first linked to the seven planets;
• how ordinary people, as opposed to scholars and scribes, used most of these signs.

We know that none of these sources describes the modern method of turning a personal sentence into a sign. That method has roots here, but it was assembled much later.

Where to go next

Read how to make your first sigil, try ten design methods, or learn about the seals of the Goetia in their historical context.