Sigils used as a cipher.
Homemade sigils.
The image above shows my attempt to produce sigils similar to those used during the medieval and early modern periods. These were used in manuscripts by Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee amongst others. They usually held the names of angels and were used to summon those angels during magical ceremonies. At least that is what history tells us.
A very concise explanation of the construction and use of these sigils can be found here. Whereas the instructions on the site mentioned uses only one magic square, I use three. This is to allow an unambiguous decoding of enciphered words. My sigils like those of John Dee and others are not square but rectangular. The image below shows my arrangement. If you look carefully you can see the pen traces still present as indentations.
There are three magic squares in all. The first is the original shown on the sigils site, the second is rotated 90 degrees, the third is rotated 180 degrees from the original. If we now examine the letter correspondences table at the bottom of the image we see the numbers 1 to 9 that represent the letters in the columns below each number. In this case we do not have one number for three letters. We have three magic squares so the row position of the letter indicates which magic square it will fall into. I leave decipherment of the sigils as an exercise for the reader. The message itself may or may not hold any significance. :-)