Sigils, Circles, and Practical Magic

Practical magic is the working end of ceremonial magic: the part that gets performed. The texts of the grimoire tradition describe operations that can in principle be carried out in a few hours of focused work in a prepared space, with a defined set of tools and a defined sequence of actions. The four great instruments of the working are the magical circle, the triangle of manifestation, the elemental weapons, and the words of power. Once the operator has mastered these, the rest of the tradition — the hierarchies of angels, the ranks of demons, the planetary hours, the Enochian tables — is a matter of which specific spirits to contact and which specific names to vibrate. The art of making and using sigils, treated separately in the article on what a sigil is and how it is made, is a minimalist contrast to this apparatus, and the broader history is in the article on ritual and ceremonial magic.

The magical circle

The circle is the foundational tool. Its purpose is twofold. First, it defines a space that is set apart from ordinary space; the operator standing inside the circle is, symbolically and in many traditions literally, between the four corners of the world and at the centre of creation. Second, it protects the operator, providing a barrier that the summoned spirit cannot cross. In the Goetia, the circle is drawn in consecrated chalk, salt, or even coal, often as a double line with the operator’s name and the names of the angels written in the ring between the lines (Peterson 2001, 7–12).

The standard ceremonial circle is about nine feet in diameter, drawn with the tip of the magical sword or the finger of the operator’s consecrated hand. Each cardinal point is associated with an element, a colour, an archangel, and a Hebrew divine name. In the Golden Dawn tradition the operator first performs the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, which traces a five-pointed star at each cardinal direction using the divine names YHVH, Adonai, Eheieh, and Agla, vibrates them in turn, and recites the Qabalistic Cross (a five-point gesture: forehead, breast, right shoulder, left shoulder, breast). Only after the space has been “banished” in this way is the main circle drawn, with the operator standing in the centre facing east (Regardie 1989, 65–82).

The circle is more than a diagram. In the operator’s experience, the act of drawing and consecrating the circle is a transformation of attention. The prepared space becomes a place in which ordinary distractions fade and the symbolic content of the work becomes the only reality. This is the technical reason the texts give such detailed instructions: the procedures of banishing, drawing, and vibrating are designed to put the operator into a particular state, and the elaborate stage directions are not superstitions. Skinner makes this point with characteristic directness in his edition of the Goetia: “The ritual is a technique. Take it seriously or leave it alone” (Skinner 2011, xxii).

The triangle of manifestation

Outside the circle, the triangle of manifestation is drawn. In the Goetic tradition the triangle is typically about three feet on each side, drawn pointing away from the circle, with the seal of the desired spirit in its centre. The operator conjures the spirit into the triangle, never into the circle; the demon, angel, or other entity appears within the triangle and is questioned from within the circle. The principle is consistent across the tradition: the spirit is constrained to a defined geometric space and the operator is separated from it by another.

The triangle has a long history in the grimoire tradition. The medieval Sworn Book of Honorius (the Liber Juratus, thirteenth century) uses a triangle outside the circle for the appearance of the spirit. The Golden Dawn adapts the triangle into the “Triangle of the Art,” a small triangular device that the operator holds in the left hand during certain rituals of invocation. In modern practice the triangle is sometimes replaced by a black mirror, a crystal, or a small chest of the kind used in Tibetan Buddhist chaitya divination. The medium changes; the function is the same — to provide a defined locus in which the spirit is to appear, and to keep the operator out of immediate contact with it. The fact that the principle is the same across very different traditions is one of the most striking things about the grimoire literature, and one of the things that gives it its enduring fascination.

The four elemental weapons

Within the circle the operator holds, wears, or is surrounded by the four elemental weapons of the Hermetic tradition — sometimes called the quattuor enses or the four magical implements. The weapons are taken from the four suits of the Tarot, which in turn are taken from the four elements. The wand, often of wood, corresponds to fire and the direction of the South. The cup, often of silver or glass, corresponds to water and the West. The sword (or, in some orders, the dagger or athame), often of steel, corresponds to air and the East. The pentacle, a flat disc of wood, clay, or metal, corresponds to earth and the North.

In a working, each weapon is consecrated at the appropriate cardinal direction. The operator traces the appropriate pentagram or invoking sign with the weapon, names the angel and the divine name of that element, and then places the weapon on the altar. During the conjuration, the operator may pick up the weapon and trace the symbol of the spirit in the air, “vibrating” the divine names as the weapon is drawn. The connections between the elemental weapons and the astrological foundations of the tradition are systematic: each element corresponds to three signs of the zodiac and to a group of three Tarot trumps.

The same four-quadrant structure recurs in slightly different forms across Western esotericism. In the Thelemic tradition, the four implements are sometimes referred to as the Four Hallows — a term derived from the Irish Ceithir Treasanach (the Four Jewels of the Tuatha Dé Danann) and used in Crowley’s Liber V vel Reguli and the related Wiccan tradition. The term is not the standard Golden Dawn designation, and a careful writer will not use it as a synonym for the four elemental weapons. King, in his Modern Ritual Magic (1989), traces the parallel carefully, and a student who wants to follow the history should keep the two traditions separate.

Names of power and the practice of vibration

A “name of power” is a word whose pronunciation, in the tradition, is held to act on the world. Names of power may be divine — YHVH, Adonai, El Shaddai — angelic — Michael, Raphael, Metatron — demonic in the technical sense of the Goetia — Asmodeus, Beleth, Bael — or compounded of letters of the Hebrew alphabet, as in the Shem HaMephorash. The Lesser Key of Solomon is a treasury of such names.

The traditional method of pronouncing a name of power is vibration. The operator draws breath, holds the syllable in the throat, and lets it out in a slow, drawn-out tone, often with a slight tremor or vibrato in the voice and a corresponding tension in the body. The effect is intended to be physical: the syllable is felt in the chest, the skull, the solar plexus. The Latin vocabulum (vocable, “call-able”) and the Hebrew shem (name) are both treated as living powers, not as arbitrary signs. Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (Book II, chapters 3–4) is the most thorough early-modern discussion of why the name and its pronunciation are inseparable in the theory of magical operation, and Hanegraaff has analysed Agrippa’s argument in detail (Agrippa 1993; Hanegraaff 2013, 162–168).

The texts that give the names of power usually also give the exact pronunciation. This is why early modern magic texts pay close attention to the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin letters, including debates about whether to pronounce the divine name “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” or only the vowels of “Adonai.” The pronunciation is the name. A mispronounced name is, in the tradition, not the same name. Modern scholarship has not vindicated this claim, of course, but it has shown how seriously the theorists of the tradition meant it, and how much of the working of ceremonial magic depends on a discipline of accurate vocalisation.

Evocation and invocation

Two technical operations structure the practice, and the difference between them is one of the most often confused points in popular accounts. Evocation is the summoning of a spirit from outside the operator, into the triangle or other locus, so that it can be seen, heard, and questioned. The Solomonic grimoires are almost entirely evocations. The operator, safely inside the circle, calls the spirit, the spirit appears in the triangle, the operator asks the spirit to perform a service or give a true answer, and the operator dismisses the spirit. The relation is contractual: the operator pays nothing, the spirit gives something, the divine names enforce the contract.

Invocation is the calling of a power into the operator. The operator assumes the god-form — in the Golden Dawn, often through the “assumption of the godhead,” a formula in which the operator visualises the appropriate divine image, takes on the divine posture, and vibrates the divine name — and then performs the work from within the identity of the invoked being. The relation is participatory: the operator becomes the invoked power for the duration of the ritual. Skinner argues that the distinction maps onto two different theories of how the ritual “works,” and that the modern reader of the literature has to be careful to keep them separate (Skinner 2011, xv–xviii).

The two operations are often combined. A common structure in the Golden Dawn is to begin with an invocation, proceed to an evocation (a vision is conjured), and end with a meditation or interpretation. The risk in invocation is greater because the operator is the vessel of the work. The risk in evocation is also real because the operator must not break the circle or the binding. The two have different failure modes, and a student of the tradition has to know which mode they are working in before they begin.

The grimoire as script vs. improvisation

The grimoire tradition is mostly written: the operator follows a script, often word for word. The advantage of the script is that it has been tested; many of the operations in the Goetia, the Heptameron, and the Arbatel have been performed, in some form, for centuries. The disadvantage is that the script can become a recitation, with the operator mouthing the words without entering the state the words are meant to induce. The most experienced operators report that the script can become a trap: read it as a piece of text and the operation goes nowhere; inhabit it as a discipline of attention and the operation can be done.

Most contemporary orders recommend a balance. The script is learned, internalised, and performed as a form; within the form, the operator is free to follow the promptings of the work. Some operations — particularly the Enochian calls of the Golden Dawn, with their long strings of untranslated syllables recovered by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s — are notoriously hard to inhabit as a script, and the orders have developed various techniques for entering the state: rhythmic breathing, posture, visualisation, and the preliminary banishings. The point is that the script is a vehicle, not a substitute.

The grimoire tradition has also produced, by reaction, traditions of improvisation. The “free-form” ritual, in which the operator designs the work from the ground up, drawing on the symbolic structure of the tradition but not following any given text, is a twentieth-century development. The chaos magic of the 1970s extended this in a self-conscious direction, treating the grimoire as one possible “belief system” the operator can adopt, and improvisation as the default. Peter Carroll’s Liber Null (1978) and Ray Sherwin’s The Book of Results (1978) are the founding texts of this current, and the work of the Fraternitas Saturni (a German magical order founded by Eugen Grosche in 1926, which used a sigil system based on astrological and geometric figures) is the closest historical precursor within the German ceremonial tradition.

Austin Osman Spare and the sigil

The most minimalist form of practical magic is the sigil, developed by the English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) in The Book of Pleasure (1913) and refined through the 1920s and 1930s. Spare’s reaction against the elaborate apparatus of the Golden Dawn was a method by which any desire could be made into a magical operation in a few minutes, using only a piece of paper and a pen. The method is treated in detail in the article on what a sigil is and how it is made; in the present context, what matters is that Spare’s sigil method stands as a deliberate contrast to the ceremonial tradition. Where the Golden Dawn requires a temple, robes, weapons, and a graded curriculum, the sigil requires a desire, a sheet of paper, a quiet hour, and a way of dismissing the sigil from the conscious mind.

The contrast is illuminating. Spare believed that the elaborate apparatus of ceremonial magic was, in his formulation, an “instantaneous discharge of the creative will” that could in principle be done without the apparatus. The traditional ceremonial order, by contrast, holds that the apparatus is itself transformative: that the discipline of constructing the circle, of tracing the elemental weapons, and of vibrating the divine names is the very means by which the operator’s will is sharpened and the operation is grounded. Both positions have merit, and many modern practitioners use the sigil method for small everyday works and reserve the ceremonial apparatus for works of greater weight. Spare’s recent biographer, Phil Baker, treats the philosophical and practical relationship between Spare and the Golden Dawn at length (Baker 2011).

A note on safety

The grimoire tradition takes safety seriously, and the repeated warnings about purity, abstinence, fasting, the use of divine names, the correct orientation of the circle, and the proper dismissal of the spirit are not window-dressing. They are instructions for a state of attention, and the cost of failing in them, in the tradition, is the loss of the operation. Modern practitioners, working without the theological commitments, are typically less strict, but the principle remains: the operation requires a state, and the state requires preparation.

The single most important rule, in the grimoire tradition, is do not break the circle. The circle is the operator’s protection; if the operator steps out of it before dismissing the spirit, the spirit is free to act. Texts of the Goetic tradition report that a broken circle ends the operation at best and exposes the operator at worst. The discipline of staying within the circle, even when the work is done, even when the body is tired, is the practical test of the operator’s seriousness. The same principle, in different forms, is present in the Tibetan chaitya tradition and in many indigenous ritual practices, and a comparative anthropologist would have no difficulty recognising the common structure.

The relation to folk magic and religion

Practical magic overlaps with folk magic in many of its techniques: the drawing of a circle, the lighting of a candle, the use of a sympathetic object. It overlaps with religion in its use of prayer, divine names, and the invocation of holy figures. What distinguishes it, in most definitions, is the explicit technology of the work: the operator proceeds by a written method, with a defined apparatus, toward a defined result. Folk magic, by contrast, is oral and adaptive; religion is communal and worshipful. The article on the history of the occult treats these distinctions in their historical development, and Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) remains the indispensable study of how the boundary was policed in early modern England.

Sources and further reading

The standard encyclopaedic account of the Golden Dawn curriculum is Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites & Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order (6th ed., St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1989), still the working manual most often used outside the original order. The best short introduction to the rise of modern Western occultism is Francis King, Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism (Dorset Press, 1989). On the grimoire tradition as a whole, see Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford University Press, 2003), and the older but still useful work of Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926; rpt. University Books, 1956). The indispensable modern edition of the Solomonic text is Joseph H. Peterson, ed. and trans., The Lesser Key of Solomon (York Beach: Weiser, 2001), and for a working edition of the Goetia with explanatory notes, see Stephen Skinner, The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (Ibis Press, 2011). On the Agrippan and Renaissance background, see the critical edition of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy trans. by Donald Tyson (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1993), and the more scholarly study by Chris Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (Brill, 2003). For the academic field, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), and Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (London: Equinox, 2010). On Spare and the sigil tradition, see Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (Strange Attractor Press, 2011), and the recent scholarly study by Mark Foster, Austin Osman Spare: The Singular Artist (Hippocrene, 2017). On chaos magic, see Peter Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut (York Beach: Weiser, 1978/1981), and Ray Sherwin, The Book of Results (1978; rpt. Scarlet Imprint, 2008). On the Enochian tradition, see the older but still useful account by W. Wynn Westcott, The Rosicrucians, the Realities and Occult Truths (1887), and the more recent scholarship of Lon Milo DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley (Weiser, 2003). On the social and religious history of magic in the West, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), and the more recent essays in Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 5: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Athlone, 2000).