Discovering Sigil Magic

I got interested in sigil magic in a roundabout way.

It began last month when I attended the Hay House Writers’ Workshop. On Day 3 of the online conference, Colette Baron Reid was a featured speaker. As part of her presentation she led us in an exercise to connect us with the spirit of our book.

We were told to get a piece of paper, and were led in a meditation. Then Colette asked us to make a dot on a piece of paper, ask the spirit of our book a question and draw whatever we saw or felt.

I was working on The Spirit Dream then and I knew that book had a spirit—a real one, or as real as these things get. So I asked my question.

What do you want for this book?

I didn’t hear anything. But I did see something—which happens rarely due to my aphantasia.

An 8 pointed star.

A symbol I associate with the spirit of dream.

I take symbols seriously because I believe that they’re how spirit talks to us. So the star meant something too me and the fact that I saw it meant something, too.

Though I was not clear on the details.

What Happened Next

I followed Colette’s instructions, drawing the 8 pointed star, enclosing it within rectangle and then drawing waves of energy emanating out into the ether—not even knowing that I had drawn my first sigil.

And while I didn't get an immediate answer to my question, answers did come.

By the time the workshop ended, I knew that I needed to put the source of my project first.

Not long after, I had a clear insight into what the spirit of my book really wanted.

To be heard.

So I started publishing it to my AuDHD Author Substack where it would be free to read.

And with that decided, I decided to explore the process Colette had given us.

I bought her book, The Art of Manifesting, and did some online reading about drawing and intention setting.

And that's how I found out about sigil magic.

What is a Sigil?

Just to be clear, Sigil magic doesn’t have to be some dark Seal of Solomon kind of thing. In it’s modern applications, in fact, it’s really just another way of manifesting.

I know that manifesting is controversial and my feelings about it are mixed. I was a critic of The Secret and I think New Thought is simplistic, at best. But this feels different.

In contemporary practice, a sigil is created from a statement of intent. All you have to do is formulate your intention, write it down, cross out the repeating letters and create a design from the letters that are left. This provides a symbol or focus point that you empower and release.

Sigils are popular in chaos magic, which teaches that there is no single way to empower a sigil. As in other forms of magic, a practitioner can choose whatever energy they want. Personal intent. Deities. Spirits. Sacred places. Ritual. Correspondences. Creative imagination.

The list goes on which is why sigil magic is sometimes considered gray. But it doesn’t have to be.

People have been using sigils in the form of amulets and talismans since Sumer and probably before. The 8 pointed star I drew is a symbol of Inanna, who I’ve associated with the spirit of my dream.

In ancient Sumer the 8 pointed star was used in amulets of Inanna. This is what convinced me that sigil magic is something I want to explore.

These are the books I’m working with:

• The Art of Manifesting: A Meditative Drawing Practice to Rewire Your Brain and Create Your Reality by Colette Baron Reid
• Practical Sigil Magic: Creating Personal Symbols for Success by Frater UD
• Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic by Phil Hine
• Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian by Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis

Ur-Nammu dedication tablet for the Temple of Inanna in Uruk (public domain)

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

📖 The Backstory 

I started this blog in 2010. 

Three years after my life imploded. Deep in what I would later learn was autistic burnout. A state that was the inevitable result of a lifetime spent pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

This was not my first experience of burnout, named or not, and I knew what to do with it. I returned to the spiritual and creative interests I’d left behind years earlier.

I did yoga. I wrote stories. I went back to school for graphic design. I read mythology and literature and vampire stories. I got a job at our local paper.

But it wasn’t enough money, and I had kids to think of. So I went back to my old life. And this time, when I burnt out I sought help and was immediately misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Heavily medicated and unable to engage with the things that I loved, I sunk into a deep depression. And then I had a dream.

🌙 The Dream

The dream was unlike any dream I’d ever had before. It was complex and vivid and remarkably coherent. It was so numinous and beautiful I knew it came from somewhere else—somewhere not-me.

I called it the Spirit Dream. And while I had no idea what to do with it things were different in its wake. I had other unusual dreams. I had spiritual experiences. I noticed synchronicities I could not dismiss.

Nobody in my day to day life understood what was happening to me then, or cared, so I started The Mystic Review because I needed a place where I could make sense of my experience.

I blogged my way through the New Age, Spiritualism, earth-based practices, and everything in between. I loved everything I was doing but I did it too hard. Things went wrong. I got burnt out again. I went back to the church.

I set The Mystic Review to private. I stopped writing down my dreams. When something seemed synchronistic, I dismissed it.

Until I couldn’t.

Because spirit wasn’t done with me yet.

✨ What Happened

In 2022 I was diagnosed with autism. In 2023 I hit a wall with my writing and took my first parapsychology course.

I began my first Substack newsletter, Writing on the Spectrum, in 2023 in an attempt to make sense of my autism and later ADHD diagnoses.

In 2024, I returned to dreamwork. Later that same year, I discovered Carl Gustav Jung. Synchronistically.

I saw the Spirit Dream in a whole new way—and I knew it was time to come back here to The Mystic Review.

I set the blog to public. I republished many of my old posts. And I started sharing some of those posts to substack at Writing on the Spectrum.

I finished a novel in 2025 and started another. And in between I wrote a neurodivergent spiritual memoir I called The Spirit Dream.

In 2026 I finished my paranormal romance novel and the memoir.

📝 What I’m Writing Now

With two books finished, I was interested in learning more about publishing so I took a workshop through Hay House. On day 3 of the workshop  Colette Baron Reid led us in a connect-with-the-spirit-of-your book meditation. I saw an 8 pointed star—a symbol I strongly associated with the spirit of the spirit dream.

I had been going back and forth on what to do with the memoir, knowing it probably wouldn’t get read on Amazon. The meditation brought me back to source and source seemed to be saying what the spirit of my book really wants is to be heard.

So I started serializing it to Writing on the Spectrum.

Then I started thinking about what The Mystic Review might want. And my intuition was that it would like its own space on Substack. So that’s what I’m doing.

The Mystic Review will continue here at this URL indefinitely, but all of the content will also be availble in the Mystic Review Newsletter. 

You can sign up for it here: