The Sigil Oracle
Type what you want and pick how to draw it. On a planetary square the oracle strikes the letters down, turns them into numbers, and walks them across that planet’s magic square. With Spare’s letters it fuses the letters themselves into one shape, a different one every time you ask. Either way, what it leaves is your sigil.
Dedicated to Peter J. Carroll, 1953–2026.
Say it like it already happened. I sleep well beats I don’t want insomnia. The example in the box is just an example; type over it.
Austin Osman Spare’s way, from 1913: strike the letters that repeat, then fuse what is left into a single shape. No square, so no one right answer. Ask for another until a shape feels like yours.
Spare kept them. Striking them too, the later habit, makes long sentences cleaner.
Where two letters draw the same line, draw it once, and drop the scraps. Lots also drops a line or curve that repeats one beside it.
The Ellis linking sigil, from the foot of the Nick Nova letterhead.
How the oracle drew it
Nothing here is random. The same words on the same planet make the same sigil every time, on any device, so you can check the oracle’s work by hand.
The shape is a throw of the dice, but a fair one. The same words and the same number draw the same sigil every time, on any device, so No. 1 is always No. 1 and you can come back to it.
Strike the letters
One stroke a letter
Each letter that is left, as plain as it can be drawn.
Fuse them
The first letter with an upright stands tallest on a shared spine. The other upright letters share it, smaller, their arms turned to alternate sides. Letters with no upright, like O, S and V, hang off the sides, turned. A letter with three or more strokes can lose one it does not need. A mark or two goes on, and sometimes the whole thing leans. The number picks how all of that falls.
Reduce it
Keep the shape, lose the words
That is the sigil. Redraw it by hand a few times. Simplify it, change it, until it stops looking like letters. Then look at it until it is just a shape, and let yourself forget what it said. That last part is the whole trick.
Letters become numbers
Walk the square
Keep the line, lose the words
Lift the path off the square and that is the sigil. The circle marks where it starts and the bar where it stops, so it can be walked again. Now draw it out by hand a few times, look at it until it is just a shape, and let yourself forget what it said. That last part is the whole trick.