The book officially released

So, I have finally released the book called Liber Azag: The Book of Sigils.
The book is available as always on Scribd at https://www.scribd.com/doc/261643751/Liber-Azag-The-Book-of-Sigils

It is not fully finished, yet, as I didn't manage to fix the problem with ToC I was talking about earlier on my blog, but I am working on it and it should be fully up and ready sometimes next week. So for now there is a book without table of contents.

Book of Sigils: Still in progress

Yeah, so I have somehow underestimated the amount of work needed to finish the book. One of the reasons is I somehow misplaced the original Astro Magick Essentials document so I have to rewrite all Magick squares from zero.

So far I have finished the book cver art and most of the illustrations including Nine Chambers sigilization methods. What I still have to do is to make an example of use of Nine Chambers, then example of the pictorial method and aforementioned Magick Squares. I have chosen to depict the traditional squares in the book, for my modern version check Astro Magick Essentials.

There is also a weird problem with the current release of LibreOffice where it cannot generate the Table of Contents properly. I have already found a workaround on this problem where you first export the document to Microsoft Word file format which should fix the internal XML and allow LibreOffice to generate the Table of Contents but I have yet to try this solution.

Progress on books

I know many of you are waiting for the new book being released, especially when the Book of Sigils need only editorial stuff to be finished, I just had bad luck with my schedule recently.

This weekend will be prolonged due to Easters so I should have time to complete the book.

Liber Azag: Book of Sigils, part 4

Servitors

It's time to speak about servitors and their use in Sigil Magick. A word servitor was originally intended to mean any kind of entity, from an elemental being to a demon. Modern definition is an artificial entity created by the practitioner, but I personally prefer the original meaning so I will use it more broadly in this book. One of the reasons is that Sigil Magick would be too limited if you didn't know how to apply its philosophy to modern and traditional systems of Magick, Spare's original intention was to re-discover Magick in its purest state, not to create an independent system that's not compatible with the rest.

So, what is a servitor? Servitor is a type of non-physical lifeform with some level of consciousness and intelligence. The biggest difference between a servitor and a sigil is the working mechanics. By using a sigil, we can shift a probability to our advantage, but if the gate is closed, our desire won't be fulfilled. A servitor that is given a task makes conscious decisions to meet its goal and when there is no apparent gate to the goal, it can learn about how to climb the wall or lockpick the door. In other words a servitor can learn new things to meet its goals. Servitors are also suitable for more complex tasks where a couple of factors have to be manipulated or when we search for something, servitors are e.g.  good finders of rare occult books.

Before we speak about how to create our own servitors, let's take a look into those already existing, there is a good number of grimoires consisting of countless spirits ready for our use. Grimoires are like phone book, you get a spirit's name, seal, correspondences and descriptions of its abilities including means of summoning these. It is great to have a set of entities one can work with, just remember that most of these are egregores, entities created by a great deal of practitioners and worshippers during the ages and their consciousness is usually culturally specific. For example when an entity was crafted by a blood cult, it will require you to sacrifice blood as an offering or if the spirit is specific to some hidden tradition, it will require you to be initiate of that same tradition. I say this because many egregores come from Goetia where it is normal to threaten the spirit with God's wrath to comply, and some of these spirits really need this behavior to work. On the other side some of the Goetic spirits are deities from much older religions and treating them like God's servants will bring some unfortunate consequences, if the egregore was created while being worshipped as a god, you shouldn't threaten it like a hobo wanting some spare change, enough said.

So, we know there are some pre-made servitors, but where? You can pick from Goetia, Clavicula Solomonis, Faust's grimoire, Grimorium Verum, New Avatar Power, Simon's Necronomicon and many many more. I personally prefer Necronomicon but I worked with others before. You can off course follow rituals and procedures as described in these grimoires (Necronomicon's spellbook, second book of Necronomicon, has a pretty nice and straightforward ritual) or you can take Spare's approach and use gnostic practices to contact the spirits, death postures used over the seals is an especially effective method of conjuring the entity). You can also try to put a seal of an entity under the black mirror, think about the seal while performing the death posture and on the verge of excitatory gnosis look into the mirror.

When speaking about conjuration, we should also mention the most amazing way of doing so with Sigil Magick, meeting spirits in dreams. As easy as sigilizing I WANT TO MEET A SUCCUBUS IN MY DREAM and charging it. By the way, the dream state spirit work is the only one where you want to use beginnings of the desire like THIS MY WILL, I WISH or I WANT TO. Reason is that servitors have their own consciousness and intelligence and you rather request them to come than commanding them. You also want to avoid this to be permanent, who would want to meet succubi in each of his dreams and always wake up tired? Just few hints, before working with spirits in your dreams you should practice a dream recollection first. Simply repeat I REMEMBER ALL MY DREAMS as a mantra till you fall asleep or sigilize it and use the sigil before going to sleep, a charged sigil can also hang on the wall just above your bed to increase its effects. Speaking of working with entities, you can sigilize the I WANT TO MEET THE SPIRIT IN MY DREAM in a fashion of a circle, then you just put the seal or sigilized name of the spirit inside the circle and charge it. This way you save time and also each of your dream evocations will be more and more successful.You can do the same with remembering all your dreams and make it as the outer circle for the dream spirit work. So, in the end you will have a seal of a spirit enclosed in a circle saying you want to meet that spirit in a dream and that will be enclosed in another circle stating you remember all your dreams. These circular, rectangular or triangular hollow sigils are used  by practitioners quite frequently, they just don't speak much about it. But we can of course find these in traditional magick as well, magick circles and triangles of evocation are hollow sigils. Same goes to planetary intelligences, if we have e.g. a mercurial spirit, we will enclose its seal within an octagon, because 8 is a number of Mercury in Chaldean sequence (more about it in Astro Magick Essentials).

While still speaking about pre-made servitors it is also worth to mention something. A servitor doesn't need to be only invoked or evoked, the biggest beauty of servitors is their multi-functional use. Let's say you pick some entity from a grimoire that has some ability or knowledge that you want. We have already spoken about Goetia so let's use some goetic entity as an example, let's speak about Marbas. Marbas is a expert in healing and mechanical arts. A healing, meaning an ability to heal others and improve's one own health dramatically, that is useful skill. Mechanical arts doesn't mean only small geared machines, it's general for household work, when you need to fix anything from a clogged toilet up to the electricity problems, Marbas is the entity for that. Now tell me, what handy man would refuse such a gift, an ability to fix nearly anything and an unique mentality of solving problems that only Marbas can give to you? Everything without a need to even evoke this entity. How? If we read Goetia, we will find out that each antity has a name, a seal, description and correspondences. These all are sigils. All we have to do is to draw Marbas' sigil on the paper and use it regularly for focal meditation to suck in his characteristics. Of course death postures with intention to do so will have the same effect. We can also strap his seal to a piece of thread and use it as a talisman or amulet of sorts. Now comes the beautiful part, we can be really creative, take a piece of wood or metal, engrave his seal on it charge it and use that as your talisman, or use his seal as a latte art, charge it and then drink it. Or go old school, charge his sigil on a piece of soft paper, charge it, then let the paper dissolve in water or tea and then drink it. There is really no limit stating how you can or cannot work with servitors and their sigils. You can also draw Marbas' seal on your body with a pen, best directly on the wounded area or on the chest right in front of the heart and use this as a centering and magnifying gateway for your healing, or draw it on the body of the sick person you wish to heal.

To create your own servitor you have to specify his goals first. Should the servitor be a one-time type for a specific task or should he be the multi-use type? In case of one-timers you have to specify an expiration for the servitor, whether when the task is finished or in some reasonable time frame. Let's make an example of a servitor now. Let's say I want my servitor to aid me in meditations, clarity of mind and ability to make correct decisions. What shape could be the best for such a purpose? The servitor can be short as there is no need for him to rush anywhere, he should have long white beard representing wisdom and mystery. He should have a scroll or parchment, representing wisdom and knowledge, also some form of pen or feather, representing writing notes and writing definite decisions. We can use parchment for the written notes and scroll for a gained knowledge, scroll should probably be on his back to make it ready for use, parchment and feather should be in his hands. When the purpose and ideal form of the servitor is decided, we should take some time visualizing the servitor and our communication with him/her to make sure this combination is really what we want. Remember that when we do a mistake now, our servitor will be less able to accomplish his future tasks.

Next we should create the name and activation formula for our servitor. Let's use his set of abilities as a desire statement:

MEDITATION INSIGHT DECISION MAKING CLARITY

Let's erase all vowels and repeating letters now:

MDTNSGHCKLR

Turn it into a sigil mantra:

MADATAN SIGI HOCEK LIER

Now we can either turn his mantra into a word of power to gain his name or we can use the original desire statement for this. From mantra it would be MASIHOLI and from the statement MEINDEMA. I personally like MEINDEMA more.

As the next part we should create a seal of our entity to have some nice focal point for meditations. We can either sigilize the name, mantra or the desire statement, choose what you like. We can also use any method of sigilization we like. Frankly, our MEINDEMA possesses a lot of Mercurial qualities, so let's use the square of Mercury to create his seal.

Once we have the description, form, name, mantra and seal, we are pretty much ready to create our very first servitor, easiest way to do so is to use his seal for focal meditation while vibrating his name and his mantra. Coincidentally this is also the method we will use on regular basis to feed our servitor. And, because our servitor is meditation based, this process will also automatically become easier for us as the time goes and our artifical spirit grows in power, everything depends on the practice. It is also a good experience to visualize the form of your servitor and repeat his name a couple of times when falling asleep. This way you can call your servitor into your dreams and get to know your creation. Servitors also like to lurk around a lot, so if you share a bed with your partner, it can happen that the very next day your fiance will describe a very strangely looking creature from his/her dreams that will be suspiciously similar to your servitor. This happened to me the very day I have created my very first servitor, a fox-like creature named Erlis, the morning after that my wife has told me about her dream where I was sleeping while leaning back on a tree and a weirdly looking "dog" was protecting me against something. She described the "dog" exactly the way I built Erlis to the closest detail and she didn't even know about my little experiment with servitor creation.

It can happen that your servitor creation won't work the way you would expect and the spirit will be too weak or too vague to even communicate. Sometimes this happens. The very usual reason is that our unconsciousness didn't join the separate pieces like name, mantra and seal together, so they exist separately, but do not enhance each other. In fact it can even happen that these separate pieces will negate each other. This situation tends to be very troublesome, often even annoying. Fortunately there is a quite quick and easy fix for that. Write servitor's name and mantra on separate pieces of paper, draw his seal on another piece of paper and you can also draw your servitor's form on yet another piece of paper. Once you did that put all pieces together and secure them with a piece of thread. Once that is finished, simply burn them together. Occult lodges usually use this method to associate your real name with your name given to you by the lodge. The basic belief is that this way your name and your lodge name does merge together on astral level, as you can see the very same thing can be done as a quick fix in case of servitor creation. What also helps is to visualise your servitor right next to you during the day, imagine that your servitors are always with you, all the time, they are sitting right next to you in bus, they are attending the same meetings as you are, they are walking right by your side, etc. And when you are already visualising that, remember to talk to them in your thoughts. This helps to develop a relationship with your creation. Sometimes when you are communicating with your servitors, they will talk back to you. People tend to role-play a bit in this case so they are just chatting with themselves thinking they speak with their own creation, but once your creation really talks to you, you will be able to easily differentiate that from your internal voice. Servitors also tend to develop a sort of personality unique to them. This personality will also affect your visualisations and your inner talks with them. Their personality will also affect the way they do things, they will develop a very specific personal style of their own. This style will have some resemblance to your own, after all you play a creator in this process, and the same way as your servitor is affecting your thoughts about him, same way you are affecting your servitor's personality. This is also one of the reasons why some egregores are hard to work with, there is a big cultural gap between you and their "creators". This gap makes it a bit hard to decide, you either have to work with old and powerful entity but with cultural problems, or make your own entity that will be easier for you to work with, but results will be harder to achieve due to the age and inexperience of the servitor.

So far we have described only permanent servitors, but what about those limited by time or by task accomplishment? This information can be part of the desire statement, simply adding ONE WEEK, ONE MONTH or TILL something IS ACCOMPLISHED should do the trick. There is only one problem with this scenario, the time needed for the task won't fit the expiration date of the servitor or if the servitor becomes too intelligent, he will figure out not doing the task will prolong his existence. But there is a simple solution to the problem, create a permanent servitor for a specific task and when the task is finished, simply dissolve the servitor. Easiest way to do this is the burning method described before, simply write servitor's name, mantra and draw the seal all on one piece of paper and your name on another piece. Tie these two pieces together and burn them,  merging the servitor back into yourself. The very same thing can be done with various other methods, including a ritual to draw all already created servitors back, we will speak about these methods later, for now it is important that you know the basics of servitor creation, manipulation and dissolving.

Liber Azag: Book of Sigils: part 3

Different methods of sigilization

Let's speak about few different methods of sigilization now. In the beginning I have mentioned 3 basic methods used in Sigil Magick: Meshing letters together, pictorial method and automatic drawing. These 3 methods were used by Spare and are commonly used by Sigil Magicians across the globe. There is nothing wrong with these methods, but we must understand is that these methods are quite modern. If we go back into the past, into the history of Magick, we will find much older methods of sigilization. These methods can also be used in the modern Sigil Magick.

First of all we have the Nine Chambers system. In this system we have a table with 3 rows and 3 columns, giving us a total of 9 cells. In each cell there is a set of letters, outer border of the table is non-existent, giving us a variety for the sigilization.

To create a Nine Chambers we can use a common numerology system, where we write numbers 1 to 9. Under each number we then write a letter of the alphabet, A under 1, B under 2, C under 3, D under 4, etc. When we finish writing a letter under 9, we then continue writing under letter A.

Once this is finished, we have a set of letters and their numeric representation. Now we draw the table for Ine Chambers and letters under number 1 goes to the first cell (first row, first column), letters under 2 go to the second cell (first row, second column), till the whole table is finished.

To use Nine Chambers, we simply cross out all repeating letters in our desire statement and then we follow the letters one by one in the table, except of drawing the letter, we draw the outline of its cell, meshing these outlines together as we go. This makes our sigils a little bit less original, but we don't need to spend too much time with our artistic side and due to the limited variety of shapes it is much easier to mesh these outlines together to make a sigil. This is the Aiq Beqar (nine chambers) method.

Next method we can speak about is the Rose Croix method. This method is really simple, you just take the rose croix and connect the letters on it in the sequence matching with your desire statement. These connected lines then represent your sigil. It is quite unclear what's the true origin of the rose cross in this particular design, it officially appeared in Golden Dawn but of course a much older heritage was claimed. What is not ancient in the systems of traditional magick like it wasn't worth the effort. It's partially due to the human nature, trying to find the lost wisdom of ancient races, partially also caused by the arrogance of members of these "ancient" lodges. But this method is used quite often and there actually exist even variations, Here is one from the TOHO order:

Another system we can speak about uses the planetary Magick square. I have described this method very deeply in the Astro Magick Essentials, so I will be rather give a summary here. It is believed that there are cosmic energies affecting our little planet and these cosmic energies can also be used to enhance our Magick if we follow a set of rules and observe the stars and planets to find out which energies are currently available for us to use. Planets we normally observe are Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn (yes, in astrology Sun and Moon are considered planets). A certain occultist named Agrippa has derived a set of Magick squares for these plaets to be used for sigilization, namely to derive signature of intelligences and spirits of these planetary energies. But what else is a signature than a sigil?

First of all we need a conversion table between numbers and letters:

1. A: 1
2. B: 2
3. C: 3
4. D: 4
5. E: 5
6. F: 6
7. G: 7
8. H: 8
9. I: 9
10. J: 10
11. K: 20
12. L: 30
13. M: 40
14. N: 50
15. O: 60
16. P: 70
17. Q: 80
18. R: 90
19. S: 100
20. T: 200
21. U: 300
22. V: 400
23. W: 500
24. X: 600
25. Y: 700
26. Z: 800

Now, let's say we want to create a sigil for money, then we create our desire statement:

I ATTRACT A LOT OF MONEY

then we cross out all repeating letters:

IATRCLOFMNEY

Now let's convert it into numbers:

9, 1, 200, 90, 3, 30, 60, 6, 40, 50, 5, 700

Now we want to use a planetary Magick square of Jupiter, as our request is money related. But if you take a closer look then this square contains 16 as its biggest numbers so some of our numbers do not match. For that purpose we have to cut down zeroes to the point when our numbers match:

9, 1, 2, 9, 3, 3, 6, 6, 4, 5, 5, 7

Now our numbers match but some repeating in the sequence. When you have one number twice in a row (e.g. 6,6), you make a mark on the number, usually a small arc. It is also a good custom to start the sigil with a small circle and end it with a dash.

Here I am going to give you a list of planetary correspondences and their Magick square so you know which square is good for which outcome. Squares themselves are also symbols so their understanding is part of Sigil Magick, this is unfortunately out of the scope of this book, still, if you are interested about what these squares represent and how to build them, I can only recommend you to read my book named Astro Magick Essentials where you have all the information about these squares and how to create them that you will ever need, with both traditional squares as described by Agrippa and their modern versions made by me.

Alphabet of Desire

It's time to speak about the AoD, the final stage of A. O. Spare's system, the beauty of Sigil Magick and the most powerful tool of al sigil magicians. AoD, as we mentioned earlier is a set of re-usable sigils that can be combined together to create new ones. This explanation sounds kinda interesting, but what does it really mean? With AoD you create your own set of correspondences, these correspondences can then be used even outside the scope of Sigil Magick. As we said before, a sigil can be anything from a symbol to the position of the whole body, it can actually be a combination of one or more of these. Now, if you ever tried Rune Magick, you would see a similarity here, as each rune has its own meaning, it also has a sound, a gesture and a position of a body. Visual depiction of runes is usually used for divination, body positions are used for meditation and gestures are used for spell casting (together with its sound). With AoD you can easily re-invent the whole Rune Magick and obtain a system that is good for meditation, divination and spell casting, also creation of charms, talismans, amulets, as I said before, this is a complete system of Magick on its own.

To start with the creation of AoD we first need a set of opposite emotions, of dualities. Write down as much as you can in a following format:

1. Love - Hate
2. Anger - Passion
3. Fear - Courage
4. Happines - Lust
5. Luck - Poverty
6. Nudity - Security
7. ...

Write down as much as you can, any pair of whatever seems to be dual opposites to you based on your subjective feeling. This AoD is yours and yours only, fit it for yourself. Once our list is finished, we can proceed to the next part, remember if at any time you figure out another pair of duality, you can always add it later. For the next part we now take each word from the pairs and sigilize it, using our favorite method of choice, so you make sigils for LOVE, for HATE, for ANGER, till you have sigils for all of your "emotions". Once sigils are finished, we should pre-charge them, we can either use a death posture for each of the sigils or we can use each sigil for a focal meditation while we mentally invoke and experience its emotion. That means that during focal meditation on e.g. LOVE you try to feel the love during the whole operation, this is all the pre-charging that is needed.

After the pre-charging is done, we ca try to use our AoD for the first time. Build your desire statement from the emotions from AoD and then either merge the sigils together into one big sigil or write/say/draw/use them in a sequence, building your very first sigil sentence. You can either use your AoD in the archaic manner, then all you need will be your basic AoD, or you can sigilize new words, verbs and nouns, expanding your AoD. This expansion is not limited to words only, whole phrases can be used for sigils if this can make your work easier. For example when I still used THIS MY WILL as the beginning of my desire statements, I had it ready as just one sigil in my AoD so I could built my formulae very quickly. It is also fair to say that if you use mudras (gestures) or asanas (body postures) as your AoD sigils, you should draw some archaic depictions of these as a reminder of what is what. It is also fair to say that more you use your AoD in your work, more powerful it gets as each use of your sigils will charge them, making them stronger. Now, if you used the very same method, but instead of drawing your sigils, you would carve them into a wood or metal, you could easily create a persistent holder of their energy, a charm of sorts. Same goes to amulets and talismans, only difference is their purpose. A charm is for luck, amulet for protection and talismans are to bring fourth something into your life, whether love, money, fortune. Just choose right sigils and engrave them into their holder. The holder can be made from wood, stone, metal or wax and can also be artistically shaped and decorated to enhance its "mystical" value. In other words more "magickal" the holder looks, more easily you will be able to charge it after sigils are engraved.

The next we should describe how to use AoD for divination purposes. For this use we will need our sigils on a separate pieces of paper. These pieces should be small enough to be easily manipulated. Certain companies like Bicycle sell blank cards, these are perfect for our occult endeavors, but whether you choose paper, stones, pieces of wood or blank cards, the output is same. Simply shuffle the deck, select a couple of cards at random with your left hand and place them into a spread just like if you did with tarot cards. Simplest spread contains 3 cards, for past, present and future. If you intend to use these cards purely for divination, you can also write the "emotion" word under each sigil, making the interpretation easier. To learn about more spreads that can be used, read my book named Liber Azag: The Book of Tarot. If you omit the word of sigil on cards, having purely sigils on your cards, you can easily use these cards to create your sigil statement, just placing down cards you want and using them for dynamic charging or death postures, this is the fastest and the most ultimate way of spell casting, always ready to use as long as you have your AoD deck with you.

So far we have described how to create our Alphabet of Desire and how to use it for spell casting, talisman creation and divination. What are other uses? Well, you can also use AoD for scrying. A sigil built from a statement I SEE THE FUTURE can be easily used for focal meditation to bring forth the visions of future. This sigil can be also placed under the black mirror or built directly within the frame of the blac mirror to enhance its power, aiding in black mirror's ability to see the Astral and bring visions.

AoD can also be used to attain power, statements like I AM VERY POWERFUL MAGICIAN turned into a sigil can be used repeatedly to enhance one's own Magickal potential. Now, if such a sigil existed as a visual sigil, mantra, gesture and posture, you would gain a very nice meditative ritual for a self development. Speaking of that if each of your sigils also contained a word of power, you would get your own very effective Magickal language even with its own alphabet, add gestures and postures to it and use it on regular basis and you will one-handedly overpower any rune magician as the AoD will be your very own, not borrowed from some distant culture.

New year, new design

New year brings a couple of changes and news.

First of all, you might have noticed the new layout and design of this blog, I hope you will like this minimalistic approach. It's probably the last of this year's changes, starting with the removal of all ads and ending with the integrated Twitter account.

As of 2015, I am currently working on a Sumerian spellbook and when that is finished, I will start writing a book about sigils. What topic will I pick after these two books are finished is still unknown, if you wish, you can give me your suggestions in comments or via e-mail or twitter.

Let's return to the design changes of the blog. I personally still think this solution is not perfect and during the next year I want to finally finish my own Content Management System and run a separate site, that will work not only as a blog, but also as a nicely categorized article storage, course in Magick for registered users (including their own blogs for them) and as a sort of a site where practitioners can meet and exchange their experiences (less forum-like, more group-like).

Speaking of forums I recently found a great forum named Wizard Forums, this forum can be located here: http://wizardforums.com/member.php?action=register&referrer=5799

So, I wish to all of you to safely survive the New Year celebrations, drink responsibly, keep loyal to your practices and have some fun during the process :).

What's new

Well, a lot of stuff, actually. First of all I am happy I published the first part of the book about tarot. Firstly because I have some recent achievement in terms of publications and secondly I can start writing something else and get back to it when in mood.

Also in two days my vacation starts and because I have been slacking physically for a few months now, I plan to be very hard at myself for next 3 weeks (my vacation time) and get solidly ripped. In the mean time I also want to start working on some other book, either a Sumerian spellbook or a book about sigil magick (specify in comments if you care).

I am also working on an essay about atheism and why it is a belief like anything else (might take some time before I publish it, I want to make it as clear as possible).

I am not also going to publish the first level of my game as I promised earlier this year, simply because my computer is too old to handle the graphics and the development is too slow because of that (I am going to buy a better PC next year).