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By Taylor Ellwood

Everyday, we get tons of spam in our inboxes. Instead of deleting those emails right away in a fit of frustration, take a look at the title lines and the bodies of the messages. The titles and content for the spam emails are almost inevitably a mixture of randomly put together words. You can, with enough of these emails, create a collage sigil that can be used to represent your desires, as well as acting as a viral messenger of your meme. Given that spam is essentially viral, instead of letting the spammers win, why not take their techniques and actually make them useful for doing magickal work. Take the contents of the spam and make a collage that represents what you really want, as opposed to what they are selling.

The collage is easy enough to make. Write down the titles and contents or just copy them wholesale into your word processor and then randomly delete words, add other words, and even images. This is a contemporary reworking of William S. Burroughs cut-up technique in that like his technique we do cut words out and add others in, with no overt agenda in mind, but we use contemporary technology to do it. You can not only add or delete words, but do the same as well with pictures and images you find on the web. Blank your mind and just type, letting the words spill forth, altering the alchemy of the spam into a useful word sigil message that can transmit your own virus back to the spammers. When you're ready put the spam collage up on your website, or send it to people. You'll take the tool of the spammers and achieve your own reality.

When you send the spam sigil out, the way it'll work will involve what usually happens to spam. The spam sigil will be charged by your creation of it and the act of sending it on the web. It'll be fired when people delete it, as the act of deletion will not represent the cut-off of energy, but rather the destruction of the material, so that the energy can ripple outward into reality. Of course, another more conscientious and netiquette way of charging and firing the sigil is available. If you don't wish to offend people with spam, send the spam sigil to your friends or people you work magick with. Tell them ahead of time what they are receiving. Then ask them to change the spam sigil, cutting out words randomly and adding in random words, and send it out to other people, notifying those people ahead of time as well. In this way the spam sigil becomes a collection of sigils passed around online to other people. Eventually of course you want it to fire, so you have to designate when it'll be deleted, but you won't violate netiquette and will be avoiding the practices of spammers everywhere. In that sense the practitioner is perverting the energy of spam, turning it against itself, a worthy goal in and of itself. If it becomes a collection of sigils it'll likely take a while for the result to manifest into reality, but the drawn out procedure of charging the sigil will give the manifestation of your desired reality a lot of power.

As for what the uses of a spam sigil are... it depends on what you want the spam sigil to do for you. If you choose to, you can conceal deliberate phrases of intent in the overall spam that spell out your desire. A spam sigil can be used to ferret out information as spam represents the transmittal of information, as well as being a form of marketing and advertising. The spam sigil is also excellent as a viral meme, particularly if you put the meme in the subject line of the email. A person might delete the spam sigil, but if the meme for the sigil is in the subject line, chances are s/he will end of reading the meme and thus virally implanting the energy of the spam sigil in the person. Really the possibilities for a spam sigil are endless, much like spam itself. Everyday the spam you receive vomits forth a variety of information and so too can your spam sigil focus on a variety of desires that you want manifested. All it really requires is some creative editing of existing spam, a desire or multiple desires you seek to manifest and a click on the send button. Happy spamming!

Author Bio: Taylor Ellwood is currently pursuing his PH.D in Literacy, Rhetoric, and Social Practice at Kent State University. He is the author of 'Pop Culture Magick' (available September 2004) and co-author of Creating Magickal Entities. Taylor is currently writing his third book 'Space/Time Magick' as well as more articles. Check out Taylor's webpage at http://taylorellwood.chaosmagic.com or his livejournal at http://www.livejournal.com/users/teriel. Taylor can also be contacted at ashmage@hotmail.com.

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