Coach Moon. Errin & that little room 2012.
In my previous post, A Beginners Guide to Magick, I talked about how magick works from a psychological model, and the basics steps to doing any magical operation. This time around, I’m going to make a brief tutorial getting into the basics of abstracting your magickal intent, step 3 in my guide. I will cover the basic steps to creating a mantra, sigil, or other form of abstracted intent for all your spell casting needs.
The Basics:
In the last guide, I talked about how important it is to obscure your intent from the conscious mind, so let’s get into the details of some of the ways you can do this. I will be discussing three ways to go this: creating a sigil, creating a mantra, and creating a full ritual.
The first step: Write out a statement of intent
First, we want to take that intent or desire, and write it out in full. There’s a few nuances to this. We really want to communicate to the subconscious that the desire exists in the present. Therefore, if our spell is for getting a job, you wouldn’t write: “I want to get this job,” rather, you would write something like “I have this job” We want to convince out subconscious mind that this desire is real and manifest. In the previous example, if you wrote that you wanted the job, you would just cast a spell to make you *want* the job. That’s no good. One other nuance, is try try to avoid using negatives in the statement of intent. The subconscious can be kind of weird about those, and it might end up giving you the opposite of what you want. Let’s use an example statement to show how we go about the next steps. Say we want to lucid dream? For this example, let’s make a statement of intent for that.

Alright, now we have that. Lets start with the sigil method.
The Sigil Method
In this method, we take our statement, and turn it into a cryptic pictogram or symbol. It won’t obviously signify the intent to our conscious mind, but our subconscious will know what’s up.
First, we take all the consonants from our statement of intent, and cross out any that repeat. You should get something like this:

Now, after we have this, we take those remaining letters and connect them together into some sort of symbol, like this:

Now, we take this symbol, and draw it out a few times until we like how it ends up, simplify it, and make it look a little big “magickal.” this is the most fun part:

And there you have it! The sigil’s complete! You you can go ahead and cast it!
The Mantra Method
This one’s even easier than the sigil method. First, let’s go back to that statement of intent with all the repeating consonants taken out:

Now, a super simple easy way to create a mantra is to just add some sort of vowel in between each of these consonants, for example:
HAVALAC DOROMAS FOQUANATIY
Another method, is to go back to your original statement of intent, and just simplify it down into a mantra. For example, with: I HAVE LUCID DREAMS FREQUENTLY, we can simplify this down to something like: HAVEL CIDRAM FREQ NETEL
Now for an added bonus, you can totally use both methods, and chant the mantra whilst charging the sigil!
Creating a full Ritual
Now, with the previous methods under our belt, we can move on to creating a full ritual. This would normally be for a larger, more intense spell, and would likely incorporate both of the previous methods. Rituals can be pretty free form and creative, so I’ll only cover briefly some of the things to keep in mind.
1. Plan the day.
This can be based on a magical correspondence relating to your intent, or simply a day you have the best time to do the ritual.
2. Plan what you will include.
We have to think about everything that we want to put into the ritual. Will we be using incense, candles? Sigils, mantras? Which way are we going to try and use to get into gnosis? How can we design the ritual to make that form of gnosis easiest to attain? This is where we flesh out the ritual, and figure out exactly what we want to incorporate and how to go about doing it.
3. Design the ritual.
Here we take everything we’ve planned to incorporate, and actually put it all together in the way we like best.
4. Perform the ritual.
Now we go ahead and do it. This is normally the most fun part, or at least, it should be.
And that’s that! That covers at least the biggest common methods of abstracting intent. Now give it a go yourself, try it out and find what works best for you!
