Nice post! I’ll say, when it comes to learning the occult, it’s important to look at the essence behind things.
For example, study a lot of banishing rituals and you will find this: Evil spirits are repelled by holiness.
Put into traditional esoteric philosophy, it suddenly also becomes clearer why evil spirits are weakened and even repelled by Fire.
Now, with the above regarding sigils, you will see in all these methods of creating them, there is one thing common to all: There is something in the sigil that relates to the essence of the spirit.
With the first method, you obtain the sigil directly from the spirit, and I believe that if you study the sigil closely, you will find a link between the sigil itself and the essence and power of the spirit. If the sigil is for a God, then you may even find part of the sigil within the things the God generates in the world.
With the second method, the sigil is an image of the name of the spirit, holding their essence. The seals and sigils Agrippa gives is an espscially good example of making an image that embodies the essence of a being in this way.
With the third method, regarding chaos magick sigils, of course it embodies the entire essence of the petition! It’s made from the whole sentence. Even with methods of making chaos magick sigils like in Adam Blackthorn’s ‘The Master Works of Chaos Magick’, which don’t use any sentence but simply feeling emotion while making squiggles and lines, don’t think that it bears no resemblance to emotion or thought. When you draw or paint and listen to heavy metal music and feel aggression, and then draw or pain while listening to something much calmer and feeling relaxed, you will notice the difference this makes in what is made.
When you look at a lot of Greek “Barbarous words”, these words don’t mean anything in language, but if you look at the letters using Isopsephy, you often find the letters by extension the sound of the word itself relates esoterically to the power of the word, as though by “coincidence” (of course, this is not a coincidence).
Anything that embodies the essence of a being can be used as a sigil of them. In the Renaissance and before, it was more common to have “images” of Gods and Spirits. Look closely, and you will find a link between the image and the God or Spirit. Look closely, and you will find the link!
And from my contemplations of the Night, here is an image I believe I recieved of the Night in this post:
Sometimes, the Sigils we see can also be a simplified form of the image relating to a being. It’s possible some of the Sigils of the Celestial Gods we have had their origin like this.
What I don’t like quite like about what Miller says here is that often the sigil is linked to the spirit because the magician has the authority to make it so, as if it is a forced connection. An arbitrary connection. But I have a feeling that upon closer expection, you will find this is not the case.
But, those are just my thoughts on the matter.