sub inter mutandis

Edmund Leach writes a ghastly description of religious practices of the Kachins. "The supreme manifestation of this is when a woman dies in childbirth; such a woman is deemed to be a witch of the most noxious kind and in former days all the possessions of her husband's household, including the house itself, had to be burnt so as to disinfect the community". His work is challenging, as in you have to look something up about once a page. He is fond of using Latin such as sub specie aeternitatis, mutatis mutandis, inter alia. You could make yourself an excellent vocabulary building word list by going through Leach and listing the words you do not know. I may do just that.

I have a recipe for sigil construction which has garnered much praise, and one person even used the method to design a tatoo for themself. It is based on a method that was probably invented the week after they invented letters back in the Levant in the beginnings of the Iron Age. First you begin with your spell. (I have never used this spell, but it will serve to illustrate the method.)

I intend to shag Angelina Jolie.

Rewrite this with all duplicate letters omitted:

Inteoshaglj

Capitalize:

INTEOSHAGLJ

Now strike all duplicate strokes; for example the T contains the I; the E and N contain the H:

NTEA OSGJ (Also I have separated the letters containing curvature from the ones that do not.)

Now fire up your word processor. Type the OSGJ in 70 or 80 point font, one letter per page, with a different pastel color for each letter--pink, light orange, yellow, light green, &c. Type the NTEA in 70 or 80 point font, one letter per page, the lightest gray you have got. Now print the letters all on top of each other. Print the first letter, put the printout back into the feeder tray; print the second letter, put the printout back into the feeder tray. And so on.

Now you have a sigil you can use as you please. I have four of these and I cycle through them to give me a different intention to be mindful of every fourth day. You can mount them on poster stock, or the way I have done is to use some styrofoam poster board cut up into four inch squares. Lastly do not tell anybody what your sigil is, what it signifies, not a word. Supposedly part of the magic is that this is a secret you take to your grave.