On the night the moon shows nothing, the sky is a clean slate, and so is the self. A sigil drawn in that darkness begins as the moon begins, small and hidden and swelling toward fullness.
A sigil is a wish folded into a shape until the wanting is forgotten and only the mark remains to do its quiet work. This one reaches toward slow, sure healing, not the sudden cure but the patient closing, the mending that happens while you look away.
The Working
- On the new moon, light a single candle and sit with paper and pen in the small ring of its light.
- Write your need for healing as a plain sentence, then strike out every letter that repeats.
- From the letters that remain, draw a single mark, joining and curving them until the words are wholly lost in the shape.
- Trace a ring of salt around the paper on the table to hold the working while it wakes.
- Hold the sigil to the candle’s warmth, not its flame, and breathe upon it three times to give it life.
- Fold it small and keep it against your skin or beneath your pillow until the moon comes round to full.
- On the full moon, burn the sigil in the same candle’s flame and give the salt to running water.
The Incantation
Dark of the moon and dark of me,
here is the mark of what will be.
Hidden small and growing slow,
mend the hurt as the moon grows.
What I wrote is set aside;
let the sign become my guide.
Do not look at the sigil again once it is folded, for a watched thing grows slowly, if at all. Trust the dark, and by the full moon the mending will have done itself.