In The Hour of Venus, on The Day of Bechaud, the Moon a Crescent:

On Friday I woke up groggy, and even moreso when I remembered what my task for the day was. I wrenched myself out of bed, Artie leading me to the kitchen, and I laid out her tuna and kibble. As she munched the meal I couldn't get over how funny it was that I get to live with a hyper-predatory muppet. Like a fluffy xenomorph. I watched her eat while I sipped my morning mug of coffee and doodled the sigil from my notes that I was to charge that evening.

Artie was one of a pair of black kittens I had adopted after my dad died a few years ago, along with her brother, Apollo, who lived with my mom out east. Apollo is a big dopey dog-cat who meows and trudges around gracelessly. He's nice to everybody.

Artie, however, was my own best friend. She just loved spending time with me in particular and would snuggle with me all day, but besides that she was an absolute little beast. She was a huntress, a tracker and a slayer of mice. Outside of her sweet affections, a primordial bloodlust surged within the fluffy little muppet.

I stopped watching my cat chow down and brought my attention back to the journal. Sigils are a particularly simple and effective form of magick. The key is to take a conscious desire, a will to do something, externalize it, and then and to lodge it back into the subconscious mind through external stimulus. That way you trick yourself into receiving your own will as something not of your own.

Sigils are easily made by taking a voiced desire, spoken affirmatively rather than tentatively, e.g. "I got the promotion" "I am lucky" "I made a million dollars.", removing the vowels, which are shown to be ultimately superfluous to our mind's ability to decipher speech from writing, and then rearranging the letters into a single image that your mind could grasp.

The process is to couple that hidden message with what the anthropologist Stanislaw Bronislowski, in his ethnographic study of religion and magic in Melanesian societies, called "The Coefficient of Weirdness." Malinowski observed that the magical spells and incantations of the sorcerers of the various tribes he visited were not only strange and alien to him, but designed to be strange and otherworldly to the sensibilities of the practitioners themselves, which Malinowski identified as a defining characteristic of magick in virtually every culture context in which it emerges.

Through sigilization, the cut-up consonants of your desire are thereby rearranged into something that seems weird, or strange, or out of the ordinary. Something that shocks your own mind and forces it to process it as something new and impressive.

I usually would try to space out the process over a week, often hiding notes to construct future sigils, like a squirrel forgetting where its nuts are buried over the winter and accidentally seeding several trees.

I had a bad habit of forming sigils that were a little too complicated, so I would often try to take an extra step and 'narrativize' them in my head. I selected one from my magickal notebook that I had made a few weeks ago. I had forgotten what the sigil itself literally meant, but I knew it was the one I had started when I decided to begin the ritual cycle.

I'd gotten the inspiration for the basic shape of this one from one of the diagrams in the Goetia- a symbol that looked like an interlocking sequence of triangles and wedges that reminded me of cuneiform or the Tibetan script- and through it I tried to tease out the vague impression of meaning or imagery- lovers in ecstatic coitus, their orgasm opens the doors of the moon, through the devil's key. No, it didn't make much sense, but it overwhelmed me with a sense of the mystic and made the relatively complicated image a little easier to compress into a single thought.

Of course for any sigil to work it needs to be charged. It requires some moment of heightened or sustained concentration upon it. You can charge a sigil lots of ways- concentrating upon it in meditation, putting it somewhere in plain view every day, burning it, jerking off to it.

But I was desperate. This had to work. I was throwing the kitchen sink approach at my problems. I wanted to go all in and do this the classic old-fashioned way.