the reality warp of story
If your life was going to be made into a film for millions - what scene would it open with?
I ask this question not just because it's fun - but because thinking about our lives as epic stories is a key to hypersigil magic.
A conventional sigil in magic - popularized by the Chaos Magic movement of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s - is a drawn symbol designed to manifest a specific intention...
... and then "charged" with focus at a moment of gnosis (often achieved via climax in masturbation).
Try it - it works.
The famous author of the Invisibles, Grant Morrison, explains how in this video in his charming, super-thick Scottish accent.
A hypersigil though isn't just one symbol - it's a matrix of symbols - a story, a work of art - which isn't charged via masturbation...
.... instead, it's charged via the prolonged attention of the artist as she creates it...
... and - importantly - via the attention of the audience who receives it.
Sigils work well, but hypersigils work about a thousand times better for the simple reason that they're more densely layered with meaning...
... and since magic works via synchronicity, which is a resonance of shared meaning - the more densely and coherently you layer your magic with meaning, the more synchronous potential it can invoke.
My favorite example of a hypersigil is Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.
The main character of V for Vendetta, V, wears a Guy Fawkes mask as he sets out to fight a tyrannical government in a dystopian version of England.
At the end of the story, V can't be found by police because he's inspired thousands of other people to wear the same Guy Fawkes mask - rendering him invisible.
And of course, wearing Guy Fawkes masks - is exactly what thousands of people did in association with Anonymous during the Occupy movement in 2011, a large-scale protest against a tyrannical system.
Would the Occupy movement have happened if Alan Moore hadn't published V for Vendetta?
Maybe - but not with the same style and energy and anonymity bestowed by the elegant mischief of the Guy Fawkes mask.
So here's another question, in complement to my last one:
if you were going to weave your life story as a large-scale spell...
.... one that would dramatically transform the lives of everyone who encountered it...
...how would you shape the story? What would be the scary parts? How would the hero or heroine find a revelation or redemption?