Planetary Sigils For Dummies

A planetary sigil is a connect-the-dots drawing. The dots are numbers on a magic grid. Each of the seven old planets has its own grid. Your wish picks which dots, and the line you draw between them is your sigil.

That’s it. You can do it with a pencil. Or you can make the Sigil Oracle do it.

Same terms as the other memos: I asked for it, Claude drafted it, and the pictures come from the Oracle.

Pick a planet

Pick the one that sounds like your wish. Can’t decide? Pick the one you like the look of. Nobody’s grading this.

Planet	Its grid	Good for	Numbers on it
♄ Saturn	3 × 3	limits, endings, the long slow thing	1 to 9
♃ Jupiter	4 × 4	growth, luck, having more	1 to 16
♂ Mars	5 × 5	force, conflict, getting it done	1 to 25
☉ Sun	6 × 6	health, success, being seen	1 to 36
♀ Venus	7 × 7	attraction, art, pleasure	1 to 49
☿ Mercury	8 × 8	words, travel, cleverness	1 to 64
☽ Moon	9 × 9	dreams, tides, what is hidden	1 to 81

The grids are magic squares: every row, every column and both diagonals add up to the same number. Saturn’s all add to 15. Nobody made them up last week; they’ve been printed since 1533. The smallest grid is the easiest to do by hand, so that’s the one we’ll practice on.

Make one

We’ll make I sleep well on Saturn’s little 3 × 3 grid. (The Moon is the sleepy one, but Saturn’s grid is the smallest, so it’s the easiest to learn on.)

1. Say your wish. Short. Like it already came true. I sleep well.
2. Cross out the vowels. A, E, I, O, U go away. I SLEEP WELL → S L P W L L
3. Cross out the repeats. Keep each letter once. → S L P W
4. Turn letters into numbers. A is 1, B is 2, C is 3, all the way to Z at 26. → S 19, L 12, P 16, W 23
5. Too big? Shrink it. Saturn’s grid only goes up to 9. So take away 9 until the number fits. S: 19 → 10 → 1. L: 12 → 3. P: 16 → 7. W: 23 → 14 → 5. (On a bigger grid you take away that grid’s biggest number instead: 16 for Jupiter, 81 for the Moon.)
6. Connect the dots. Find 1 on the grid. Draw a little circle on it. Draw a line to 3, then to 7, then to 5. Draw a short bar across the end. If the line runs back over itself, that’s fine.
7. Lift it off. Draw just the line on a clean piece of paper, no grid. That’s your sigil.

Here’s the cheat sheet for step 4:

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13
N	O	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z
14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26

Two letters can land on the same number on a small grid. That’s fine too. If a number lands on the dot you’re already on, you just don’t move.

The lazy way

Don’t want to do math? Fair. The Sigil Oracle does every step for you.

1. Type your wish.
2. Tap a planet.
3. Pick how it looks: bare, in a circle, on wet paint, or with every letter kept.
4. Save it as a picture.

It shows its work underneath, the crossed-out letters, the numbers, the grid with the line walked across it, so you can check it by hand if you want. It also shows your wish on all seven planets at once, so you can pick the shape you like best. Same words, same planet, same sigil, every time. Nothing you type leaves your browser.

Then what?

A sigil sitting in a drawer is just a drawing. To use it:

1. Write down what counts as it working, and a day to check. Seal that note.
2. Look at the sigil while your head is empty (staring till your eyes go soft) or totally full (music loud, dancing). Just the shape. Not the words.
3. Laugh. Out loud. Then put it away.
4. Forget about it. Don’t keep checking. Open your note on the day and write down what happened.

Why any of that, and the way to make sigils with no planets, no grids and no math at all, is in Sigils, Terms Declared.