To begin with, let me clarify that this is a collection of my own personal spiritual beliefs, written up here to share with others.This isn't supposed to be taken as a gospel, and while I'll try to back up my beliefs where possible, ultimately, this is just that; my beliefs.
The first thing you need to know about is the concept of a sigil, and how it relates to magic. A sigil is a collections of lines put together into a single image that you empower, and use to channel energy to a specific goal. The easiest way to create a sigil is to write out a word related to something you want to achieve, let's say we want to get more money, so we pick a word that resonates with us that's related to that concept. For this example, I chose the word "CASH". The easiest way to translate the word into a sigil is usually to break down all the straight lines, and put them together in an overlapping way, something like this:
Then, you can use that sigil to empower the idea, and channel your energy into the concept. You can do that by drawing it a bunch, tracing it over and over, focusing on it while burning it, whatever makes you feel like you're putting the most energy into it. Then, once you've finished, you destroy it, and never use it again.
This is because anyone who has a sigil, or knows what it is and how it's used, can put their own energy into it, and cause the energy to shift. This can be done to fuck over the original user, or just out of laziness, but it can and will seriously mess up your own spell, so please do not share any of your sigil work with anyone. The example above was not used at all, and in fact, was destroyed without any energy into it at all; it's just a doodle at that point. However, if you use it, and someone else reads this blog sees it and uses it as well, they could end up hurting you through it, so please don't use my example.
If you don't destroy it, and make it more complicated, you put more ideas into it, make it more complicated, and keep using it for a long time, it becomes a "servitor", which is like a personal computer of magic. You can put a sort of personality into it, and while it's still a part of yourself, it can act on its own based on the rules you give it. Personally, I think they're a bit dangerous, and I don't recommend using them, but some people I know have had luck with them, so use them at your discretion.
The next level of sigil up from a servitor is technically a type of egregore, or a god, in that if you have a group of people all empowering a single sigil with the same ideas and power, it becomes a sort of living force that can act out the will of the group, and if enough people worship a god, that god will eventually gain enough power to be real.
I've never actually seen anyone try to create an egregore, but through my spiritual connections, I have found that several gods, like Queen Mab (who was NOT originally a god, but rather a human mortal queen) have been worshiped and fed to the point where there IS actually now a god named Queen Mab. This is a very interesting concept, and I will revisit it in a later essay, but for now, we need to move on to a parallel sigil to the egregore, one that uses the same general idea of many people feeding a single sigil, the hypersigil.
The danger behind sigils being shared is that individuals can put their own energy into them and corrupt them, and the danger behind servitors is that they will act as they do, based on the rules you've set, and can become dangerous if left unchecked, but the idea of the hypersigil manages to counteract both of these issues with one simple concept binding them together; art.
Hypersigils were famously named and described first by the comic book artist Grant Morrison, who claimed to be told by aliens during a trip to Katmandu how to create them [4]. He was on drugs at the time, and while I do believe that drugs CAN help you spiritually, I also think that his story is a bit far fetched. His idea, however, is one that has been evident and used by great thinkers for ages, I see him as just the namer and popularizer of an old concept, not the origin.
The idea is that if you can put a complex sigil into a work of art and push the ideas and meaning of that sigil into the art itself, that everyone who engages with that art will be pushing energy into the change you want to create, powering your sigil. In order to make sure the energy doesn't get corrupted, the sigil is inherent to the art itself, and the art guides the energy to the end goal.
In a more "scientific" way, it's a MORE "mysterious and metaphysical" interpretation of Jung's Transcendent Function theory, in that it is the connection of the subconscious and the waking mind, the imaginary come to life, as Jung described in 1916 [5], but applied to spiritual concepts rather than Ego. It isn't perfectly the same, but it is a close enough comparison that I believe the two are connected.
The way that most people have found easiest to create a hypersigil, is to create a work of art that is a parallel to (or draws from) your own life, and then change enough of it to make it "better" or closer to what you want YOUR life to be. The most famous work that does this explicitly is of course the "Grant Morrison Hypersigil Trilogy", which is just his works "The Invisibles", "Flex Mentallo", and "The Filth", as one unit.
There are other, pre Morrison examples of this concept though, the most obvious being Dante's "Divine Comedy", where the author, Dante, wrote himself traveling through the three layers of the afterlife, and injected his own politics, beliefs, and desires into the story, going as far as to CREATE the idea of purgatory, which is now an accepted part of many facets of the christian faith. He also changed public perception on public figures by having his character interact with them and show his own idea of how they were, in some cases, modern political perception has shifted concerning these figures due entirely to how he portrayed them.
Another, more controversial hypersigil, is, in my humble opinion, "The Gospel According To John". John was written around 20-40 years after the other three, and while the first three books focus on the miracle of the virgin birth, John instead goes back to chapter one of the bible, and injects Jesus into the creation myth, telling us he's been here all along. Jesus in the first three gospels dances around the idea that he's divine or holy, and simply teaches as a man who was born of divine intervention, but in John, he declares himself as a god without any kind of ambiguity. Of course, most telling that this is a hypersigil, there's the inclusion of the mysterious "beloved disciple" character in just this gospel, none of the other three, who is very obviously an author self insert for John[7,8].
These changes had a huge impact on the belief system and directly changed and redirected christianity to a new era, one where Jesus wasn't just the son of god, he WAS god. I think these changes were deliberately made by John in order to change the public perception and spiritual energy around Jesus, and take him from a teacher and a sign from god to a god himself to be worshiped. And it did work;Jesus is now a god in the christian canon!
While writing an autofictional account or purely fictional story about yourself and your life is the easiest way to go about making a hypersigil, there are many, many ways to do it if you put enough structure into it. One person I remember from a group I was in was making a game in RPGMaker2003 to be a hypersigil, another on a forum I used to go to was writing a music album, and the author of the book Weaving Fate: Hypersigils, Changing the Past, & Telling True Lies [1] used a diary format to great success (although, I believe his work was more focused on manifestation instead of a true hypersigil).
All it takes for something to be a hypersigil is for it to represent your life, for it to be complex and self sustainable, and for it to have energy put into it by yourself and preferably others to empower it. In that line of thinking, I propose that social media accounts are a form of hypersigil. They match the criteria, and the energy people put into them is enough to push and shape a true hypersigil by itself.
On social media, you put your best face forward, you share what or who you want to be, you try to make your online self be the best version of you out there, and you put your own energy into it, and you also receive energy from those around you as they interact and give you likes or comments, or as you like or comment on their pages.
This creates the perfect layout for a spiritual change, a way to focus your energy into who you want to be, and to get others to energize that idea themselves, helping you even more. The issue comes with the fact that you can't actually interact with others without letting them interact with you, and they do have the power to post on your page, leave comments on your pictures, or even talk about you on their own page, and change public perception of you and the image you've set up. This will directly change your hypersigil, and in turn, change and effect your own life.
This would be dangerous enough on its own, but according to a Yale study [9] (and a very helpful breakdown of the algo itself by Buffer.com [11]), the twitter algo is designed to make users engage more with as many users as they can, and what is the content most likely to get people to engage?
Bad stuff. Stuff you hate, or disagree with.
If people see a post they agree with, they will like it, and scroll past on most occasions, which is rated as low engagement, but if a user sees misinformation and responds, that's seen as HIGH engagement. Even just seeing a post from someone who posted something you dislike and opening the "likes" to go through and block the users who disagree with you makes the algo think you liked the post, and gives that more weight than a like (22x more weight than a like, in fact) [11]. That means the more you're online, the more you try and fight against the ideas and hatred that you see, the more and more you'll be pushed to engage with it.
This has a direct and negative effect on your hypersigil. It attacks you and breaks down not only what you engage with, but also who sees you and who gives you power, and if it's all people you disagree with (because remember, the algo is sharing YOUR stuff with people who hate YOU too) then the energy you get back will be bad energy, and directly go against the ideal self you're trying to make.
There's another aspect to scrolling as well; if you're not using a blocker or paying for social media, you will be flooded with ads, constantly. Owlcation's study on advertisement's effects on the human brain describes the purpose of advertising as "altering the human mind", and I think that's a very succinct way to say "Ads are literally designed to break us down and manipulate us". They not only physically change the makeup of our prefrontal cortex to trick us into thinking we like something we otherwise wouldn't, they also are proven to have a massive negative impact on the mental and physical health of the viewers [12]. Ads create a 'need' by tearing you down, by saying "you're not pretty enough, use this makeup!" or "You're not safe, use this VPN!" or the ever classic "You're unhealthy, try our miracle food!". This destroys self esteem, and causes unhealthy self images, trapping you in an ever changing cycle of needing this thing that will help you next. This leads to eating disorders, depression, and overspending.
But even if you do block ads and pay for social media, the companies have found a way around that; they hire "influencers" to slip into your feed through retweets and shares, and they are walking billboards for everything from water bottles to clothes to new food. I don't blame the influencers themselves, they're making money they need to pay rent, same as anyone, and while I'd prefer they have a different job, the real villain is the company that hired them.
These influencers and advertisements infect your hypersigil in a deep way, just as deep as the hate filled people you can't get away from, but while those people hurt your hypersigil because they are sending you bad energy, the ads and influencers are hurting it because they're causing YOUR energy to go bad. You see yourself as "less than" the influencers, you see yourself as needing the new products, your brain chemistry literally changes to make you enjoy things more in order to manipulate you, and it's all directly connected to the spiritual manifestation of yourself, the hypersigil you've been creating for yourself.
The scariest part about all this is that it's not some global plan to infect people, there's not group trying to corrupt people spiritually. It just so happens that the best way to make the most money from people on social media is to break them down and hurt them, and in the end, that's all that matters. You don't even have to understand what a hypersigil is to create one. Dante didn't, John didn't, and Morrison realized he'd created his first one years after he started work on it. If you have a social media account, even if you just absorb everything on the app, and rarely interact, it's still a representation of you, to you, to your followers. You have a hypersigil, and it's in danger.
Works referenced:
[1] Weaving Fate: Hypersigils, Changing the Past, & Telling True Lies by Aidan Wachter
[2] The Psychonaut Field Manual
[3] Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits
[4] Morrison, Grant. “Magick.” Disinfo Con. New York. Lecture.
[5] https://iaap.org/jung-analytical-psychology/short-articles-on-analytical-psychology/the-transcendent-function/
[6] https://dantesociety.org/publicationsdante-notes/authentically-speaking-dante-and-politics-language-melonis-italy
[7] https://www.bartehrman.com/the-synoptic-gospels/
[8] https://stpaulcenter.com/when-were-the-gospels-written/?srsltid=AfmBOoo-3TmJwi8jDA3W9P3VX1b49oQYGQSLzwZdS0FLQnhjbentKakM
[9] https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/430608-trending-science-social-media-making-us-angrier-study-reveals
[10] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59011271
[11] https://buffer.com/library/twitter-timeline-algorithm/
[12] https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/The-Effects-of-Advertising-on-the-Human-Brain