The Sigil Engine was first conceived as a vast, participatory art project, but the sheer amount of interest has made their original idea to project the sigils one after the other in a public place impossible. "We wanted the input of the intention to feel like part of the app, so we created our own keyboard component from scratch instead - each key touch pulses red, with the key components slightly transparent so particles show through, which really connects the keyboard to the app itself," Tidman told Motherboard. It was important for both Mason and Tidman to have the aesthetic drive the application, and keep the whole process feeling experiential, magickal, and accessible. According to the creators, at least some of the Engine's users say it works, with success stories covering everything from home renovations to fertility, and even those who have made automated sigil production part of their daily routine. Released in late 2020, the Sigil Engine has now been used more than 300,000 times, with people typing their magickal intentions spread across seven continents. The final illustration generated by the Sigil Engine is placed within a circle-a nod, its creators say, to the Goetic seals of demons in the Lesser Key of Solomon, a medieval "grimoire," or magical book, from the mid-17th century, that more recently made an appearance in Ari Aster's Hereditary. "For a lot of people in their magickal practice, the aesthetic helps give it more potency, so we were very conscious: we wanted to have the process of creating a sigil-removing the vowels, removing repeating letters, creating the actual symbol itself-to be experiential, something that drew you in and it a sense of wonder." "We wanted to create something that actually felt magical when you used it," Mason told Motherboard. The backdrop alludes to "the great expansive void from which all things spring". Co-creator Darragh Mason, who hosts the Spirit Box podcast, describes this flourish as "a prayer or a moment of reverence to the goddess Babalon," found within the Thelemic system first synthesised by British occultist Aleister Crowley. When visitors land on the URL, they're greeted by a sparkling black background and a prompt to type their "intention." Doing so will set the Engine in motion, drawing the sign in bright red. Users of the Sigil Engine, though, rely on code to do much of the legwork. They decided to be kinder to the character after that. To test out sigils, Morrison famously modeled a character after themselves in The Invisibles and began to see cruel events inflicted on the fictional figure, such as burst lungs, actually transpire in real life. "There's no point charging a sigil to win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket," chaos magician and comic book writer Grant Morrison once wrote. Skeptics might balk at the idea of drawing our own realities, but others may also find themselves surprised at the results, which believers say work best when they're within the boundaries of your day-to-day life. Methods for this vary, but you could meditate, sing at, or, most commonly, masturbate to your symbol, before finally destroying or forgetting all about it and awaiting the results. Finally, you've got to "charge" your creation. The sigil creation process usually goes like this: write down whatever you want to achieve, remove any vowels and repeating letters, and then position the remaining letters into a pleasing arrangement. (That's magick with a k, to differentiate these rites from pulling rabbits out of hats.) Aspiring sigil creators could already tap into a wealth of resources to learn how to draw their own magickal signs, from online libraries to how-to guides on TikTok, or influential "chaos magick" texts like Liber Null and Condensed Chaos. A sigil is a symbol used for magickal practice, typically created from scratch by the practitioner, and imbued with psychic energy to influence events.
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