Cutting Up Reality - How words and art can become powerful spells

I’ve always been a writer and an artist. I started writing when I was a pre-teen and I started painting when I was 18. Writing and art are essential mediums of expression for me and one of the main ways I weave my magical workings.

I first became inspired to experiment with writing and art as a result of taking a class in college on the writing of William S. Burroughs. At the time I had been practicing magic for a few years and had just started learning about chaos magic. As I read his various books, I began to see the underlying occult themes and it inspired me to apply his practices to my writing and art.

What I discovered as a result is that I could create powerful magic without the usual ritual rigamarole and this allowed me to downsize my magical tool box significantly. You can do the same. And it doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of everything altogether, but you may discover a potent route for magical work that comes through your creativity.

What Burroughs really inspired me to recognize is that it is possible to cut-up reality. Reality isn’t a seamless container or experience. It offers us a rich and multi-faceted experience AND there are cracks in reality that can be explored, discovered and played with through the different mediums of expression that are available to all of us.

What might stop you from applying art and writing to magic

If you’ve ever had the thought that you’re not an artist or a writer or you’ve had a limiting belief that what you put out there isn’t artistic enough, that will get in the way of applying art and writing to magic.

And here’s the truth: You don’t have to be an award winning author or professional artist to apply your creativity to magic.

Give yourself permission to:

• pick up the paint brush, crayon, colored pencil, pen, etc., and work with it as a magical tool.

• treat your creative activities as sacred acts of magic that can change reality.

• know that perfection isn’t the aim, but connecting with the possibilities of reality is.

Something that I learned from the class on Burroughs was that the writing didn’t have to be good (a lot of his wasn’t good); it just had to be something that could invite you in to discovering the possibilities.

Writing, art, music and other creative activities are inherently magical. They invite us into discovering both our inner potential and the possibilities that await in reality. If we treat reality as an immutable and unchangeable experience we are doing ourselves a disfavor. If, on the other hand, we use our creative imagination as an extension of our magical practice, we can create powerful magic with our artistic skills!

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One Practice you can apply today to create magical writing and art

Getting started with applying your magic to your creative pursuits isn’t too complicated. If you already have your supplies in the form of artistic materials, pen and paper, scissors, etc., you already have your magical tools. The following three practices can help get started on the actual application.

Practice 1: Create a Collage Sigil

One the aspects of Burroughs writing and magical practice that stood out to me was how he applied artistic collage techniques to writing. He would cut up a magazine page into 4 sections and then splice the sentences from one section with another section to create a new narrative.

I’ll admit I found some of that writing hard to read, but that was actually the point. What Burroughs was doing was showing how writing could be used to either program someone’s experience or break them free of conformative experience through the writing. By cutting up writing, what Burroughs doing was breaking the original message and its hold on the consciousness of the reader.

I took this practice in a different direction. I created a collage sigil using the cut-up methodology to cut away the original meanings from both words and images and then reorganizing them around a central theme of my own.

You can do the same practice:

1. Choose a theme to use as the base of the collage…this is the intent of the sigil.

2. Next, take some newspapers, magazines, mail, and other print media as well as some of your own writing cut it up with a pair of scissors. You’ll want to cut the words and images that call to you.

3. Grab some glue and paste the words and images together to form new messages. They don’t have to make sense or be complete sentences. They just need to be relevant to what you are creating.

4. Hang the collage sigil on the wall, where you can see it, so that it embeds its messages in you…that becomes the firing mechanism for the magic.

This practice combines your art and magic together. In a future post, I’ll share some other ways you can apply writing and art to your magical practice, but give this one a try and see what you come up with.

In magically perfect space and time,

Taylor

P.S. I’ve written 2 books about my magical practices for art and writing.

The Magic of Art walks you through how to turn your art into magical workings.

Get it in paperback here and e-book here.

The Magic of Writing walks you through how to turn your writing into magical workings.

Get it in paperback here and e-book here.

Each book comes with exercises and practices like the one I shared here that show you how to change reality through your writing and art.

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What's underneath the Squiggle: An Exploration of Sigils

picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2024

Lately I’ve been finding myself fascinating by sigils and symbols again. Whether you’re conjuring a spirit with a sigil or creating a custom sigil for the purposes of manifesting a desire into reality, what makes sigils so versatile is how they can symbolically represent and mediate specific transmissions of information. Yet what’s underneath the sigil?

What’s underneath is something the sigil can’t quite describe or represent. The sigil presents a face to the world that allows us to make sense of the intangible and give it a form we can relate to. It allows us to pack ideas and concepts into the shape and recall them and it allows us to send them out into the world, to create a path of manifestation that turns essence into form and imagination into reality.

Yet a sigil is more even than that. It is a structure that creates a container to describe the essence that is being worked with, whether that’s a spirit’s essence or the essence of a desired result. The sigil becomes a key to unlock that essence and also learn the essence and make it part of your being. The symbol internalizes the essence within you and it becomes manifest through you.

The reason sigils work so well is become of how they work through us. The sigils embed themselves in our consciousness which in turn is acted upon through our actions. It’s a chain of manifestation that acts on the path of least resistance. The sigils, as symbols, are accepted more readily by our consciousness and seed the mind with possibility which then becomes reality, by the convergence of the outer variables of the world and the inner actions of the person.

The sigil is a story as well. We can get to the heart of the story by meditating on the sigil. If the sigil is for the spirit then it becomes path to the spirit that allows the practitioner to interface with the story. If the sigil is for a possibility it speaks to all the variables of the possibility. What’s underneath the squiggle? A universe waiting to be explored.

Common problems with sigil magic

Picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2023

With any type of magical working there can be challenges that occur which need to be addressed if you’re going to become proficient in that magical working. For this article I’m going to address issues that can occur with sigil magic that may cause your sigils to fail and suggest possible actions you can take to help you improve the efficacy of your sigil magic. Context: When I refer to sigil in this article I’m referring to the chaos magic method of sigil, as opposed to a spirit’s sigil.

I also want to note that with any type of magical working, it can be normal to encounter failures as you learn how to do a given magical working. As with any discipline you learn, it takes time, practice and experiences to develop the expertise and skillset that produces better results. with that said, let’s explore the common problems that can occur with a sigil.

1. You don’t have a well defined statement of desire. The basis of any sigil is the creation of a statement of desire. The statement of desire establishes the intent and defines the desired result, ideally in concrete terms. A well defined statement of desire not only defines the result but also ties up any loose ends. A poorly defined statement of desire leaves room for interpretation and in my experience when there is room for interpretation there is also room for results not manifesting exactly what you want.

For example the statement I want a job is a very broad statement. We can use that statement, but unless we’ve put some thought into the programming of it we are leaving a lot of room for interpretation and that room for interpretation can leave the door open for not getting the result you want or getting one that seems to fit the bill but has aspects you don’t care for.

I treat sigils as programs so when I create a statement of desire. The statement of desire should be the finalized expression of your thought process and include what you want, as well as excluding what you don’t want. When I create a sigil from the statement of desire I put all of that programming into the sigil, in order to define, focus and crystallize the sigil.

Explore related entries in the Library

• Daemonic Sigil Tower Work
• Project Sigil Entity
• Tzaphkiel
• Fotamecus

How to create and activate collage sigils

For new years I decided to revive an old art magical practice that I haven't done for a few years. I decided to create a collage sigil.

First I needed to decide on the theme. I chose the theme of YES, specifically saying yes to myself.

The theme is what ties a given collage together. It informs what images you use, what words you'll be drawn to, and what it is that you're ultimately calling into your life.

It's not all that different from any other themed work I've done in my life, and what I find with themed magical work in general is that the theme WILL show up in your life, but often in ways you don't expect. This is because when you utilize magic to call a theme into your life, you are calling in that theme but in a way that is needed.

Sigil Walking

Picture courtesy of pexels

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Sigil walking is a technique I’ve developed based off Bua Gua, which is a martial arts moving meditation of circle walking. I recently had the opportunity to learn the basics of Bua Gua and it occurred to me that the principles of circle walking could be applied to charging and firing sigils for practical magic, or for invoking and working with a spirit. It is suggested that for you to get the possible use out of this technique, you should make yourself familiar with some type of walking meditation that moves the energy.

In Bua Gua, when you walk, you are pushing your internal energy to the Earth to connect with the Earth energy and then bringing that energy back up through your body and connecting it with the Stellar energy. Or at least that’s my experience when I do the walking. Since you are raising energy in this way, it occurred to me that you could also direct that energy accordingly, either for a practical magical working, or as a way to connect with a spirit.

To do this technique, first you need to come up with the sigil that you’ll walk. If you’re working with a spirit, then you would walk it’s sigil. If you’re creating a practical magic working, then you’ll create the sigil. For my initial experiment with this process, I created a sigil using the classic chaos magic approach of taking a statement of intent and getting rid of the repeating letters. I then got rid of the consonants, which left me with two vowels, which allowed me to create a simple shape to walk. I would suggest, at least initially, keeping your sigils simple to make the sigil walk easy, because you want to memorize the pattern you are going to walk. A complicated pattern will be harder to remember, whereas an easy pattern to remember will allow you to focus on the actual process.

The basic walk that I’m doing is only using three hand positions, and is mostly just straight line walking, which works well for this process. I would imagine that a more developed version of the walk could be applied to this technique, but I’m presenting this based on my experience and what I know.

I start the sigil walk with my palms pointing to the ground. I walk the pattern once that way, and the focus is on accumulating the energy that will be used to charge and fire the sigil. The next time I walk the pattern, I raise my hands to my chest, with the palms facing inward, like I’m carrying a ball. At this point I’m charging the sigil as I walk. The third time I walk the sigil, my hands and arms are raised to my left and right, with palms facing upward. At this point I am firing the sigil.

You don’t have to limit your walk to three repetitions. Instead you can walk it as many times as you want and do whatever hand position feels appropriate. You should do the sigil walking until you no longer think about the sigil, but instead of achieved a state of blank mind, where you are just doing the walk and letting the sigil go.

If you do this process to invoke a spirit, you would still walk the sigil pattern of the spirit, but instead the focus would be on achieving communion with the spirit. You’ll use the same hand positions, but when you raise your hands to the heavens, you’re welcoming the spirit and inviting it to walk and talk with you in sacred communion. You will walk the sigil pattern of the spirit for as long as you are in communion with it. I’ve done this process with the archangel Suvuviel.

As I continue to learn more about Bua Gua, this technique will undoubtedly be refined. I have shared more about this technique in my ultimate sigil magic course if you want to learn more.

Explore related entries in the Library

• Project Sigil Entity
• Daemonic Sigil Tower Work

Planetary Magic update

A while back I'd written about my work to connect with Jupiter and its planetary energy. Since that working I've done similar connection workings with the other planets, including Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto. I didn't stick with the "classical" model of planets because its outdated and inaccurate, but it also meant I had to do some research to find the correspondences for the other planets.

At this point I've gotten symbols for each of the planets from the archangels. My encounters with the various archangels was interesting because of how focused they were on their own functions as it related to the planets, so they didn't provide much information, instead encouraging me to make my connection with the planets via the symbols.

I debated a bit on my next step, but I decided to settle on creating individual paintings for each symbol. I'll use the paintings as gateways that use the symbols to open up or shut down access to the planetary energies. The act of painting the symbols will be a good exercise for connecting with the planetary energies and learning more about them and how I can work with them. But I'm also going to experiment with specific placements of the paintings in specific rooms of the house, with the idea being to enhance specific characteristics of those rooms with planetary energy. I'll post more information once I've proceeded to the next step.

I paint to forget

I paint to forget sometimes, on a conscious level the desires, the wants, the needs, etc. I have. The paintings are sigils usually, though in someways I don't really think of them as that so much as mindscapes, which allow me to express what's going on in my mind and then let it go. I paint to forget, but also to free my mind. Once something is expressed, if you have a place to direct any further attention or energy toward that expression, you can can then remove the desire from conscious thought. It becomes part of the background. And once its part of the background, that desire can then work because it's not being pushed into the future by the conscious mind.

It's a reason to paint. Funny thing about painting for me. It's the one creative skill, where I'll never make it a product to sell. It's a magical work for me, but more than that it's something I need to keep for myself, as an outlet I use for both my magical expression and artistic/creative expression divorced from any form of compensation (beyond my satisfaction). I don't paint often, but I love to do it. The state of no-mind, the rustle of the brush, the colors that I use, and the shapes that come forth, all of it created in a place that is the secret part of my soul, and even when shared, it's still a place only I'm really intimate with.