Yesterday’s Full Moon at 16°21' Cancer illuminated the night sky hours before the Sun conjunct Mercury allowing for the Saturn-ruled Capricorn SUN to pour eternal ethereal waters of love and life into the heart of Mercury. A wonderful weekend to get clear on a 2023 intention and make a sigil.
YOUR 2023 SIGIL
My spiritual name is Shobha. I love the act of taking a new name. This practice is rooted in some cultures of our world as a right of passage and adopted by others as a means of rebirth. A technique where you write, hear, speak and see a new way of being. A hopeful act of stepping into a new frequency that you lovingly embrace in your life or a firm cutting off where you no longer answer to or identify by the old name, the dead name.
Swami Vishnu Devanada gave me the name Shobha as part of my Siromani yoga initiation when I was 16. In this initiation, I sat before my guru and he gave me a mantra and a name and put some kumkum on my forehead. The energy transfer overcame me and like a straight-up sci-fi movie, whamo I fell over. LOL, I promise you this alarmed him as much as me. I’m apparently an energetic lightweight.
In Sanskrit, Shobha is the effulgence and splendor of the soul (all souls) and the name is associated with the Devi Saraswati. When I hear someone call me Shobha, even to this day, I am filled with a quick bump of the excitement of that original transfer of energy I felt 35 years ago. For a split second, I am filled with a primal recollection of the unspeakable beauty that animates us all. So for me, this renaming custom works as it is meant to - to remind the aspirant of their divinity. A simple and constant means of returning the inner gaze to the root of their spiritual connection in this life.
As the slow roll-in of 2023 brings us time to build an intention by reviewing last year's happenings and also the astrology of the year to come; I wish to create a powerful new tool that gives me instantaneous redirection and an energetic bump like the one I feel when I see my spiritual name. One way I am doing this is visually, by creating a SIGIL to serve as a new frequency, a simple key meant to instantly return my inner gaze to my intention of the year.
Magic, but less creepy
Sigil making is an ancient practice of creating a visual anchor for your intention. Lines scratched or drawn give an air of mystery as if from another place, another world. The practice is historically recorded as beginning in the middle ages and tinkered with by occultists Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley to be then picked up by the chaos magicians of the west. But I believe this practice is much older. Many sources that I see nowadays don’t include eastern timelines, and they should. So really who knows when the practice began? The mystery continues!
To translate this year's intention visually, into literal shapes and markings, calls you to up your game in the larger practice of using your life as the script to create your very own dictionary of terms. Pulling concepts through the ethers to the material world is possible because we are human and both perceive and germinate to create. Connecting the primal action of mark-making with your understanding of an energetic impression you have personally experienced can beautifully support your own unfolding expression of uniqueness.
“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” - Marianne Williamson
STEP BY STEP SIGIL MAKING
Write down your 2023 intention (by hand)
Ideas to spark insight include looking at the greater astrological themes of 2023, making note of your personal goals based on course corrections from last year, and calling in support for where you know you’ll experience intensity based on profections and progressed moon.
I offer a year-ahead astrology reading through Wise Skies Collective if you are looking for help parsing through your own astrology. You can check that out here: Wise Skies Collective | Services
If you do not yet have an intention for the year and want to spend some time in that process, I recommend the free podcast From the Heart with Rachel Brathen: 2023 Intention Setting Ceremony: How to Create A Beautiful Year. This is not astrological but an effective practice.
Whatever path you choose, the destination is an authentic intention.
2. Identify the keywords of your intention
I boiled my 2023 intention to ‘I am safe radiating my legacy’ from the word soup I began with: safety, grounding, legacy, art, garden, boundaries, responsibility, self-discipline, strength, compassion, and peace.
Keywords I will sigil: radiate, legacy
3. Draw a symbolic element to represent each keyword.
4. Style, design and tweak the most basic element of your drawing until you feel the result emotionally resonates.
You can play by looking at the image upside down, see its negative space, and play with the weight of the lines and shapes until you physically feel the image “sing” to you. This may feel like lighting a fire or welcoming in a hug, but you should feel a sense of buoyancy as a result of a sigil that is effective.
CONGRATULATIONS!!
Your final image IS your sigil. This image does not have to have meaning or emotional residue to anyone but you. Some people now charge/activate their sigil through astrological timing and astromagic, but that is a lesson for the future. <3
Use your sigil in your journal, on your wall, for a tattoo or in a ritual bath as wonderfully explained in Sphere and Sundry’s very detailed Guide to Personal Energetic Cleansing + Ritual Bathing at sphereandsundry.com/cleansing.
I am using my sigil in place of my normal yearly vision board, I’ll report at year-end how it went, and I’d love to hear stories of your adventures too!
I wish you a year filled with serendipity and clarity.
Hugs,
Sasha