A Kind of Magic

“In the beginning was the Word,” declares the Gospel of John. This biblical word – or Logos, from the Greek – is something quite mysterious: not just any word, but an utterance that creates life.

Worldly manifestation as a flux of seminal power was elegantly described by the Stoics, in the third century BCE, as logos spermatikos; originally defined in the philosophy of Heraclitus (c.540 – c.480 BCE) as the cosmic order which connects, animates and governs all things. Through logos, opposites are unified.

Aristotle developed the idea of logos in a secular context, over a century later, in his Art of Rhetoric. He cited it as one of three modes of persuasion which should be used by an orator to influence their audience: logos (the wording of facts), ethos (the credibility of character), and pathos (the rousing of emotion). Logos is the fundamental thing that holds all of these together: the very substance of the speech itself.

Carl Jung examined the concept of logos in religious and alchemical contexts, drawing it into his psychology as an analogy for the rational, conscious human mind: light, to the dark unconscious, or order from chaos.

Today, we can think of logos simply – and rather more lightly – as thought taking form. It gives us our ability to structure communication. It’s how we put the letters that we need into the words that we want, to tell the story that must be told. It’s the root word of logotype, and of logo – describing the creative styling of letterforms.

A logo artfully represents a brand. The best logos are deliberately, and craftily, simple. Our eyes and brains love visual cues, so they act subliminally upon us, and there’s no resisting their power. Think of a logo, and what pops to mind? A well-known company? Something you see regularly on TV? Whatever jumps into our thoughts has done its job well. It’s been implanted to associate itself with us, so we buy in to its persuasive promise.

The artist and sorcerer Austin Osman Spare (1886 – 1956) explored this power magically, using letterforms to deliberately entrance himself. He would make a wish, write it down, and arrange the letters into an abstract design. This, he called a sigil – from the Latin sigillum, meaning ‘sign’. Spare would stare at the sigil, using a heightened state of consciousness to cast it deeply into his mind. Once lost to his subconscious, he believed it would bring about his will.

Spare’s method of crafting sigils was popularised by occultists after his death as a shortcut to results-orientated magic, bypassing the need for pomp and ceremony – a practice that is still recognised today. The idea is that the creation of the design encapsulates a wish, hence a degree of sentience, which is disassociated and acts independently of the operator. Sigils are traditionally either destroyed after use, or hung as works of art, with the meaning forgotten, and the power remaining – creating a subliminal effect not unlike that of the logos used by commercial brands.

Whatever we believe, there is clearly a natural magic at play – an artful working of wishes – in words and their forms. They influence and convince, turning us toward or against them, playing with our emotions, making us laugh or moving us to tears. We are all at liberty to use them and experiment with them. They really do connect and order all things.

To unearth their power, we need only remember one thing. In the beginning is the word. It is thought becoming form. There’s magic in that. To make it ours, all we have to do is write it down.