Daimon Sigil Generator

The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy was originally purported to be by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. This would make sense, because he is, after all, the author of The Three Books of Occult Philosophy. The Fourth Book (FBOP) was released after Agrippa’s death, however, and one of his closest students was adamant that it was not written by the same person.

Whether penned by Agrippa or Pseudo-Agrippa, FBOP contains a wealth of delightful gems. You can learn more about it in this podcast episode with Douglas Batchelor from What Magic is This?. In one section of FBOP, there is a method for transforming a spirit name into a sigil or character that uses a very primitive type of cryptographic hash. Though written in very obtuse Latin, the formula ends up being:

3nc + v \;\mathrm{mod}\; 24 = x

where:

  • n is the current position in the name (starting at 1)
  • c is the number of letters in the name
  • v is the numerical value of the current letter (starting at 1)

The output, x, is an index into a table of characters, which you can view online. Since this algorithm is a lot of work, here is a tool that will do it all for you.

How to Use This Tool

Take a spirit name—either an established name like a planetary archangel, or a name calculated using the Daimon Name Generator. Plug it into the tool below, and go!

Limitations

The FBOP version of this method was originally written in 16th century Latin, but the algorithm should work with any ordered alphabet. This first version has a few limitations, however:

  • Uppercase Latin letters only (A through Z)
  • No Hebrew or Greek (yet?)

Using the Sigil

The string of symbols will probably need to be massaged together into a line. I believe this was intended to produce sigils similar to the angelic sigils in the Heptameron, such as this one:
Gabriel sigil from the Heptameron
I also believe that this sigil was supposed to somehow be connected with “The manner of making characters” earlier in FBOP, but the instructions are unclear. I will leave that as an excercise for the individual. But here is an example of my sigil for Gabriel, so you can get an idea of how I use it:
Gabriel generated sigil

Learn More

Curious about learning more?

Support This Work

This tool is open source and you can check out the source code. Please report bugs, contribute bugfixes, and suggest features!

You can also find ways to support my work on this page.