The Storyteller's Tongue: Words become Flesh

Part 3 of 3 by Chaise Levy

We have been reading David Abram again in my classes at the school. What a joy it is to see students struggle and succeed in tracking the labyrinthine trails of his texts. In his study of oral cultures, Abram flourishes to us again and again that to the oral mind, speech is an event, and words are enfleshed. When they flow out of the chamber of the body on the small piece of the world’s wind that we breathe in to maintain life:

“Speech—the sense that spoken words are structured breath (try speaking a word without exhaling at the same time), and indeed that spoken phrases take their communicative power from this invisible medium that moves between us.”

To make an utterance is to build an architecture of wind and send it out back into the world. When we tell stories or incant spells, we are building arabesques of wind that shift perception and shift the world. Notice what happens when you focus on this building, holding it in your mind's eye while you chant the incantation we have been working through in this series. You might envision building—a building in the medium of the air—each architectural element influenced by the elements being called upon. You might envision cooking in a massive cauldron with a dash of each element added to be served in a magical and potent brew of resource and support. When we work with these kinds of incantations as practitioners of sorcery, this story that we bring to what we are doing is of no small import. Today we will be looking at two ways to anchor the structured air of this incantation into material and give body to the magic, so that its work can be done in the world.

Sigils as the Flesh of Spirits

One way to work with sigils is as the creation of a physical anchor point for these beings in the realm of air. To craft a sigil for our incantation is to move it from the “virtual” world of the air into the “actual” realm of material (the “virtual” and the “actual” here are used in the vein of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze). In the process of art-making, we are translating the spirit from the realm of the virtual, which is boundless and ephemeral, into the physical realm of the “actual,” where it takes a shape to be engaged with. This is not to say that the shape of the “actual” is any more real than the “virtual”—it is more like a snapshot of the plenti-potential of the “virtual” that we can use to engage more effectively.

In our sigil-making process, we will follow the style and advice of maverick London magician Austin Osman Spare, who any budding sorcerer would be advised to spend some time studying. I highly recommend Frater Acher’s ideas on the importance of Spare in Goetic Atavisms as a place to start.