You have drawn your sigil. Now every source tells you something different — charge it, burn it, forget it, wear it, put it under your pillow, never look at it again.
This is the most contradictory advice in modern witchcraft, and there is a clean reason for it that almost nobody explains.
Where the "you must forget it" rule comes from
That rule is specific. It comes from Austin Osman Spare in the early twentieth century, and through him into chaos magic.
The model is psychological. The desire is encoded into an abstract glyph so the conscious mind can no longer read it as a wish, charged at a moment of peak intensity, and then deliberately let go — so it sinks past what Spare called the psychic censor and works from underneath. Conscious remembering re-engages the censor and, in that model, undoes it.
Inside chaos magic, this is coherent and it matters.
Where the opposite is true
In folk magic, in traditional witchcraft, in Wicca and in most of the older systems, sigils and seals are not forgotten at all. They are drawn, kept, worn, carved into candles, painted over doorways, sewn into clothing and consulted deliberately for years.
The seals in the grimoire tradition are meant to be looked at. A protective symbol over a threshold works by being there. Nobody in these traditions has ever thought a sigil stopped working because you remembered it.
Different model entirely: the sigil is a focus and a container, not a smuggling operation past your own mind.
So which one applies to you?
Ask what the sigil is for.
A specific outcome you are anxious about — a result, a decision, a person's answer — behaves like the chaos model. Anxiety is exactly the thing that keeps you gripping it, and a sigil you check daily becomes another surface for the worry. Charge it, release it, put it away.
An ongoing state — protection, confidence, clarity, a household — behaves like the traditional model. It wants to be present. Wear it, keep it visible, let it be part of the room.
That distinction resolves nearly every argument you will read about this.
If you are still not sure which model your sigil belongs to, ask in our live chat. It takes one question about what you made it for, and getting it wrong is why most sigils underperform.
"How am I supposed to forget on purpose?"
The obvious objection, and the honest answer is that you do not.
Forgetting is not the instruction. Ceasing to charge it is. You stop feeding it attention, stop turning it over, stop pulling it out to check. If the glyph crosses your mind and you let it pass without engaging, that is the practice working correctly.
Burning or burying it afterwards is popular precisely because it removes the object you would otherwise keep looking at. It is a practical aid, not a metaphysical requirement.
Charging it
Whichever model you are in, the sigil needs energy put into it. The methods, all legitimate:
Concentration. Gaze at it until the shape stops reading as lines and becomes a single object, then release. The oldest and least dramatic method, and the most reliable.
Breath and sound. Breathing onto it, humming or chanting over it.
Elements. Passing it through candle smoke, holding it over water, burying it in earth, leaving it in the sun or under a full moon.
Peak states. Any moment of intense focus — exhaustion at the end of a long effort, the point of physical exertion, laughter, the edge of sleep. This is the chaos magic staple and it works because the ordinary chatter of the mind briefly stops.
Time and repetition. Drawing it daily, wearing it, tracing it on a window. Suits the traditional model.
Sigils for other people
Commonly asked and rarely addressed. Yes, it can be done. The consent question is real and it is the same question as any other working aimed at a person.
Protection and healing for someone who would want it is generally considered clean. Anything that shapes another person's choices is not, and the fact that a sigil looks abstract does not change what it is.
Afterwards
If it worked, thank it and retire it — burn, bury, or put it away deliberately. Leaving spent sigils floating around a notebook clutters a practice.
If nothing happened, the usual causes are a statement phrased as a negative, no charging beyond drawing, or the wrong model for the goal.
Check yours with us
Most sigils that underperform do so because the intent statement was wrong before a single line was drawn — negatives, vagueness, two goals in one glyph.
Open the live chat at the bottom of this page and tell us what you made and what for. We will tell you which model your sigil belongs in, whether to keep it or release it, and whether the statement underneath it will actually hold.
Two minutes, free, and it is the difference between a sigil that does something and a nice drawing.
Or browse our full range of workings.