[Tutorial] Getting a sigil from a tree

Ask a tree to give you a sigil

1. Visit tree. Ideally a tree you know pretty well and have visited before. Bring phone and/or sketchpad

2. Sit with back against trunk and meditate for a while and try to sync with its energies (or whatever makes sense to you).

3. Tell tree what you need a sigil for (what problem you're having, how you plan to use the sigil, etc).

4. Give offerings if you intend to

5. Step back and look for sigil.

Places to look: patterns on bark. Flowers. Leaves. Seedpods. Arrangement of leaves. Stand next to trunk and look up: arrangement of branches against sky.

Try to stop seeing the whole picture and just see shapes and lines, as though you were looking at a 2D image.

6. Take photo of part of tree. Use phone app to trace over the photo to get your sigil. (Or do sketch if you're good at that - I'm not).

The photo below is me standing about 20 feet away from tree and taking a photo, zoomed in (sorry about the glow-pen, it was a new phone at the time and I couldn't find the normal one)

I traced over some of the criss-crossing branches patterns, then put a dot at the end of each line (I don't have a "pre-sigil" copy of the photo for comparison, but I've traced exactly over branches that are there, no creative liberties taken, except for where to stop/start tracing).

7. (Optional) Copy sigil onto paper and refine it and stylise it, add flourishes or simplify (There's something nice about using a tree-gifted sigil in it's unadulterated form, but I mainly did not do this due to lack of skillz)

8. Do whatever you were going to do with the sigil, paint on amulet, inscribe on candle, etc etc

9. Upon success, return and thank tree, offerings, etc

This idea comes from Dana O'Driscoll, who did the Tarot of Trees (which I love but find impossible to read with). She's a druid and approaches this in a slightly more involved and devotional way.

The image below is from her blog post (to give an idea of a bark sigil).

She also shows the "refine and stylise" steps

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Post automatically merged: Jan 9, 2024

When turning photo into sigil, for "branches against sky" specifically, you can also need with the settings on your phone (eg making it black and white and drastically increasing in the contrast) so it turns into a silhouette

Post automatically merged: Jan 9, 2024

* mess with

 

[Yazata]

I like the idea and assume this would be for qualities you'd associate with a tree, like resilience, growth and longevity. Using a sigil for a new house probably would be counter intuitive (to me).
But this then could be extended to other natural things, like patterns in a riverbed for movement, clouds for dreams, or rocks for strength. I think.

 

[pixel_fortune]

assume this would be for qualities you'd associate with a tree, like resilience, growth and longevity

for me personally, I would want to get a bit more specific. Because Australian trees don't tend to have googlable folklore,* I'm in the habit of figuring out correspondences myself based on botanical info about the tree

For example, eucalyptus trees have phoenix-like attributes - their seeds require fire to germinate, they're filled with flammable oil and they resprout after seemingly devastating fires. The Scribbly Gum literally

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, so I'd associate that with art, writing, distance communication etc. The Box Brush (in the photo) is hugely attractive to insects, birds, and fruit-bats, and it's a popular street tree because it never drops widowmaker branches, so I see it as very benevolent and community-oriented, especially as that one is in a park next to a kid's playground.

but that's personal practice, everyone has different levels of detail they get into for different categories of correspondence

* for better or worse, Australian Aboriginal culture hasn't received the same romanticisation and commercialisation treatment as First Nations Americans have.

 

[Yazata]

That's a great answer, thank you very much. I don't think we have any of those trees here in the Netherlands, but I appreciate that you specified their individual strengths / qualities

 

[Rowena]

Just a suggestion - as well as 'branches against the sky', you can also use shadows of branches on the ground.
That has much more mythic resonance for me - given the obvious parallels to Óðinn's discovery of the runes.

 

[pixel_fortune]

I don't think we have any of those trees here in the Netherlands

Nah but you have the classics! Oak/ash/willow etc. It's quite strange living in a country that has all the culture / literature / inherited symbolism of Europe, but none of the things it's referring to. Like we say "north star" as a metaphor but it's not visible from the southern hemisphere, we know the symbolism of an oak/acorn but may never have seen one, we have snowy scenes on our christmas cards when it's midsummer out, we celebrate the "new year" just as the year is dying, seasonally speaking. I'm convinced it's not healthy for the national psyche

but yeah, i just meant them as examples of how you can learn about the biology of a tree to make symbolic inferences, even though the specifics won't apply to you