A Powerful Magick Ritual That Changed Everything — My Experience
Forty days with a Spare-derived sigil working: what moved, what didn’t, and what I think was actually happening
- I ran a 40-day Spare-method sigil working. Three of four stated intentions resolved — two within the working, one three months later.
- The mechanism I now suspect: sustained symbolic focus restructures attention allocation, which changes behaviour, which changes outcomes.
- The uncomfortable part: I cannot rule out that the same outcomes would have occurred without the ritual. Neither can I rule them in.
- What I’d do differently: shorter working, sharper single intention, stricter lust-for-result management from day one.
Should You Even Attempt This?
A 40-day working is not a weekend experiment. Before I describe mine, I want to give you the honest filter I wish someone had given me.
- Commit a fixed daily window (15–30 min) for the full duration
- State your intention in one specific, verifiable sentence
- Maintain the working without compulsively checking for results
- Keep notes — you will not remember subtle shifts accurately
- Sit with the possibility that nothing externally measurable happens
- In acute mental health crisis — ritual amplifies, it does not resolve
- Seeking a substitute for medical, legal, or professional help
- Unable to separate the working from daily outcome-checking
- Working multiple major intentions simultaneously
- Expecting guaranteed causation rather than possible correlation
Why I Started: The Inciting Situation
I want to be precise about this because vagueness is where most first-person ritual accounts fail. They open with atmospheric prose and never tell you what they actually wanted, which makes it impossible to assess whether the working did anything at all.
In late 2024 I was in a stall — not a crisis, a stall. A professional project I’d invested two years in had plateaued badly. Three specific outcomes I needed weren’t moving: a key relationship (professional, not romantic) that had gone cold, a creative block that had persisted for four months, and a financial variable tied to the project’s next phase. I had tried conventional approaches to all three. Some had made marginal progress; none had resolved.
I’d worked with sigils before — shorter bursts, single intentions, casual method. This time I wanted to run something sustained, structured, and documented. I chose the Spare-derived method because it has the longest lineage of documented use, it doesn’t require any materials I don’t have, and — critically — it has a falsifiable structure. You state an intention, you track outcomes, you get a result or you don’t.
The Working: Method, Materials, Schedule
The Spare-Derived Sigil Protocol I Used
Austin Osman Spare’s sigilisation method, as refined through Phil Hine and Peter Carroll’s Chaos Magick lineage, reduces to a tight sequence: intention statement → letter reduction → graphic composition → charging → lust-for-result management → release. The innovation Spare made — and what distinguishes this from simple affirmation practice — is the deliberate bypass of the analytical conscious mind during charging. You’re not reinforcing a belief. You’re attempting to seat an intent below the threshold where critical evaluation fires.
Whether that mechanism is literally what’s happening neurologically, I don’t know. What I know is that the practice structure differs meaningfully from journaling or visualisation in ways that seem to affect outcomes.
- Intention drafting (Day 0): Write the statement of intent in the present tense, as if occurring. Remove all emotional charge from the phrasing — flat declarative, not longing. Eliminate letters that repeat, then compose remaining letters into an abstract glyph. Burn the original statement immediately.
- Daily charging window: 15–20 minutes at the same time each day. I used 3:00–3:30 AM for the first 14 days, then shifted to dusk. Both worked. The liminal hour choice is preference, not requirement — consistency matters more than time.
- Charging method: Gnosis via breath control and physical stillness. I avoided sexual gnosis for this working — too much emotional investment in outcomes made that method unstable here. See gnosis technique options for comparison.
- Interval structuring: Days 1–7 (establishment), Days 8–21 (maintenance with minimal engagement), Days 22–33 (deliberate neglect — I worked the sigil less frequently), Days 34–40 (final charge and release).
- Lust-for-result management: The hardest part. I kept a separate log for intrusive outcome-checking thoughts. Naming them explicitly (“I just checked again mentally”) reduced their frequency more than any other technique.
- Release: On Day 40 I burned the sigil object, closed my notes for 30 days, and deliberately saturated myself with unrelated work.
Materials
Sparse by design: black ink on cartridge paper, a single candle for atmosphere (not magical function), a locked physical notebook I did not re-read during the working, and a clock. No elaborate altar, no sourced materials, no cost beyond time.
What Happened Across 40 Days
| Phase | Days | What I Noticed | Confidence Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 1–7 | Unusual alertness during charging. Heightened awareness of relevant information in peripheral life (may simply be confirmation bias activating). No external events yet. | Probable |
| II | 8–14 | The cold professional relationship reopened — not dramatically, a brief message. I’d been thinking about it but hadn’t contacted them. They contacted me. Coincidence window or not: I noted it. | Speculative |
| III | 15–21 | Creative block showed a genuine crack. I produced four thousand words in three days after a four-month drought. I cannot attribute this cleanly to the ritual — I’d also changed my sleep schedule two weeks prior. | Probable |
| IV | 22–33 | The deliberate neglect phase felt important. Reducing engagement seemed to reduce anxiety about outcomes. The professional relationship developed further — three substantive exchanges. Financial variable still flat. | Established |
| V | 34–40 | Final charging felt ceremonially satisfying regardless of outcome. On Day 40, I released and closed. Financial variable resolved three months later — outside my 40-day frame entirely. | Speculative |
The Results — Honest Accounting
Three of four stated intentions resolved. One — the professional relationship — resolved inside the working window and has since become one of the most productive collaborations of my career. One — the creative block — broke on Day 17 and has not returned in the same form. One — the financial variable — resolved three months post-working. One minor intention I’d folded in as a test case did not resolve in any observable way.
I want to be explicit: these are correlations, not causations. The professional relationship may have reignited because I had, by then, produced something genuinely worth sharing with them. The creative block may have broken because rest and a changed sleep schedule reset something. The financial variable resolved due to external market conditions I could have predicted at Day 0 if I’d mapped the situation more carefully.
What I Think Was Actually Happening
Here is my best current model, stated plainly. I am not committed to it as fact.
Sustained ritual practice appears to function as a structured attention allocation protocol. You are not summoning external forces. You are repeatedly directing cognitive resources toward a specific intention-object, in a state of reduced analytical interference (gnosis), over a long enough period that the intention begins to influence unconscious pattern-matching — what you notice, what you reach for, what you initiate.
This is not a weak claim. Unconscious pattern-matching drives the vast majority of human decision-making. A forty-day intervention that successfully loads an intention into that substrate should, on Bayesian grounds, produce different decisions than you would have made without it. Different decisions → different outcomes.
The Spare method’s letter-reduction and glyph composition may serve as a compression layer — converting a complex, emotionally loaded intention into a symbol abstract enough to hold at the pre-conceptual level. The deliberate forgetting (lust-for-result management) may function as the equivalent of sleeping on a problem: removing top-down interference so the substrate can work.
Does this explanation exhaust all possibilities? No. I cannot fully account for the timing of the cold contact — it arrived before I had produced anything new to send them. I note this not to invoke the supernatural, but to note the limits of my explanatory model. I do not know what I do not know.
What Could Be Wrong With My Conclusions
- Confirmation bias: I may have unconsciously attributed unrelated positive events to the working and not noticed confirming non-events. My tracking was careful but not blinded.
- Regression to mean: Stallings often end naturally. My project plateau may have been resolving regardless; the working merely coincided with the resolution window.
- Behavioural confounds: The sleep schedule change, the reduced anxiety about outcomes (itself a function of the ritual structure), and the deliberate decision to focus only on this project — any of these could account for the improvements independently.
- Survivor reporting: I am writing this because the working produced interesting results. I would be less likely to write a detailed account if it had produced nothing. This selection effect inflates apparent efficacy across all practitioner reports.
- Sample of one: My situation, psychology, experience level, and specific intentions may not generalise. Treat this as one data point, not evidence for a method’s universal efficacy.
FAQ
Final Thoughts
The most useful thing a 40-day working did was not produce outcomes. It produced a sustained, structured relationship with an intention over time — something most people never actually maintain with anything they say they want.
In ordinary life, intentions are thin and permeable. We want things the way we want breakfast: urgently for a moment, then forgotten the instant something demands our attention. A sustained working forces a different relationship. You are not allowed to forget. You are not allowed to check compulsively. You are forced, daily, into a narrow contact with what you actually want and how much you’re willing to do with the time you actually have.
Whether that produces results through psychological mechanism or something stranger, I hold loosely. What I don’t hold loosely is that the practice changed how I operated across 40 days — and that change was visible in the record I kept, not just in the outcomes that followed.
If you do this, keep the record. The most valuable data from a working is not what resolved, but how you thought about the intention as the days accumulated. That’s where the real information lives.
The uncomfortable trade-off no one advertises: a working that genuinely changes your behaviour will also expose how much of what you didn’t achieve before was structurally available to you all along, waiting only for sustained, undistracted attention.
Sources
- Spare, Austin Osman. The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy. 1913. Public domain. archive.org
- Carroll, Peter J. Liber Null & Psychonaut. Weiser Books, 1987. Foundational text for Chaos Magick method. weiserbooks.com
- Hine, Phil. Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. New Falcon Publications, 1995. Practical protocol source for the Spare derivation used here.
- Dijksterhuis, Ap & Meurs, Teun. “Where Creativity Resides: The Generative Power of Unconscious Thought.” Consciousness and Cognition, 2006. Academic basis for unconscious incubation mechanisms. doi.org
- Mlodinow, Leonard. Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Pantheon, 2012. Mainstream framework for unconscious decision-making, relevant to the attention-allocation mechanism posited here.