The Sigil Project

by Thomas LeRoy, Founder of The Sect of the Horned God

Demons, angels, gods and monsters originate from within. They are aspects of our character. According to the psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, the subconscious and what goes on therein, can not be fully explained in words, for the lower reaches of the psyche does not communicate in words, it speaks to us in symbols and metaphors. So in the dark depths of the subconscious our personal demon, or “daemon”, resides. Aleister Crowley had Aiwass, Jung had Philemon. These are special metaphors that relay messages to us, conduits between our conscious mind and the deeper layers of the subconscious, all the way down into collective unconscious.
For years I have had dreams of a silhouetted “hooded” figure standing at the foot of my bed. I would find myself sitting up, heart racing, thinking it was real, but always the dream would end and the strange specter would vanish. In the early part of 2015 I was sick with the flu and had a very vivid, feverish dream. I dreamt I was watching a documentary on a rather large television. On the screen I could see a rocky hill-side, cliffs and great boulders, the sky the color of slate. And there among the rocks was a battered wooden cart pulled by a team of six dead goats, re-animated, rotted flesh hanging, eyes glazed, mouths stretched tight in a perpetual grin of malice. And in the back of the cart stood a tall figure in a robe of gray. Protruding from within the robe where a neck should be was a wrist, and at the end of the wrist was a large claw-like hand, or talon, clutching a head, the claws like a hood around the head. And upon that head was a face, neither male nor female, blank and serene, its eyes and mouth were closed, and stayed closed even as that androgynous being spoke. For some unknown reason I knew this was that same entity that had visited me over and over, but this time I could see it in its full glory. As I marveled at this, a name came on the screen: “SOTER”.

A couple of weeks after that dream I was listening to a podcast on gnostic philosophy. Being interviewed was a women who had written a book on the Greek god Dionysus, and as she described the god of “wine and revelry”, she used the ancient Greek word for savior: soter! I felt my brain flip in my skull when I heard that word. The podcast was recorded so I played it over and over again. I had heard it correctly. The word was soter. Not long after that I had another dream where I was visited by a certain long dead German dictator. The man with the Chaplinesque mustache was begging me to get in touch with SOTER so that he may ask him for advice. What the fuck was going on? I can only guess that I had read the word soter before and buried it somewhere deep in my subconscious. But now, what was my psyche trying to tell me? While brooding over this conundrum, I came up with an idea. Most use in their ritualistic workings the gods and demons manifested by the subconscious of others from the ancient past. But why play someone else’s music when you can create your own?

I asked the other members of The Sect to visualize their own special entity, that aspect of the subconscious self that comes to them in their dreams and/or visions. Many responded. I then asked them to describe that being — convey its essence — in a single word. That word was then translated into Latin, Greek, or Enochian, and then put through certain Chaos techniques by The Sect’s “Master of Rituals”, The Dark Fool. Over time he converted that word into a sigil. The sigil was handed over to The Sect’s art-director, Anton Wolf, and given it’s final appearance along with a detailed illustration of that “daemon”.

Thus began what is simply called, The Sigil Project. This endeavor has turned out to be more than a simple psychological art project. It has actually helped some of or members to get in touch with aspects of themselves they have either shunned, or repressed. Their deeper selves now have a face, and a voice. The members that participated have a personal tool, their own song, to utilize in their own personal workings.
Time will tell where this project will lead, but I do know this — it has only just begun.