The magic of making art and art of making magic: An exploration of Laura Tempest Zakroff’s sigil work

Papers inscribed with sigils, created by and with Laura Tempest Zakroff. Photo courtesy of Zakroff.  

BY EMMA CIESLIK October 25, 2025

The concept of making art as a spiritual practice is not new. In fact, for centuries, patronage through the arts came from wealthy religious institutions and leaders who dictated that the art they commissioned featured sacred stories, figures, and symbolism. Today, there are a number of artists who consider the process of painting, sculpting, and drawing a spiritual practice, but what if the art produced was in fact the byproduct--not the goal? 

For Laura Tempest Zakroff, a queer New England artist and author of Sigil Witchery, the sigils or drawn symbols that she creates are the end result of a magical, often collaborative process. Unlike some ceremonial or  chaos magic methods, where sigils are destroyed after they are used, Zakroff shares many of her collective sigils on her blog as resources for people seeking social justice and community growth as magical resistance. 

A Sigil to Protect Protesters (ICE Sigil), by Laura Tempest Zakroff. Photo courtesy of Zakroff.  

Sigils for reproductive justice, trangender rights, and protecting protestors can easily be printed onto shirts, painted onto signs, or even carved into the dirt or sprinkled in blessed water before a protest even begins. Perhaps her best known sigil was created back in 2017 in Portland to protect protestors facing ICE. The sigil remains available for people on her website, but is now broadened to protect protestors facing any oppressive authorities. 

Despite her 30 years of experience as a practicing witch, Zakroff was not raised in the craft. She is the daughter of a Sicilian/Italian Catholic mother and a Russian/Baltic Jewish father sent to various art schools, solidifying art as a key piece of her self expression and the way she engages with the world. Starting when she was a pre-teen, she became fascinated in using lines to tell stories, inspired by ancient art including cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian cuneiform, feeding into her fascination with magical marks.

While she has years of experience crafting sigils and the process is deeply intuitive, she did break down their creation into four steps in order to share her approach with others. First, she identifies the goal or task that the sigil is needed for. Next in the brainstorming phase, she creates a list with specific attributes or elements of what she is striving for. For example, if someone was looking for a new job, brainstorming would include how much money they would like to make, included benefits, and other specifications that match what they are seeking for the best outcome.

With this list, “look at each of those items and see what would be the proper shape, symbol, mark that reminds you of that,” Zakroff said. “So if you want upward mobility in your job, [think]  an arrow pointing up. If you want your own personal space, maybe it’s a circle or square.” You then put all of these pieces together to create the sigil design. Once the design is finalized, the sigil can be applied. People can put their sigils on candles, tattoo it on their skin (although she doesn’t recommend this if it’s just a temporary goal), print or embroidery it and hang it in your home. 

“Or you don’t have to do anything because once your brain has acknowledged this is the key I just made to open the door of what I’d like to accomplish that is enough because magic starts with thought,” she said. And unlike other artforms that require special materials and spaces, sigils can be created anywhere. When she is done with a workshop, where she teaches people across the world to make their own sigils, she may redraw it at home,adding a design finesse before unleashing it on the Internet for more people to utilize. 

Sigil for the Protection of Transgender Rights, by Laura Tempest Zakroff. Photo courtesy of Zakroff.  

“If you have the back of a post-in note or a receipt and a pen, you can do a sigil anywhere because it’s so immediate,” she explains, “and you don’t even need those things, you can dance it with your body or draw it in the air.” Sometimes with protest sigils, these inscriptions can intentionally stand out, but during times of violence and chaos, sigils can be subtle and hidden ways to carry and wear intention through art on the body or the land. 

Zakroff talks about her book Sigil Witch. Photo courtesy of Zakroff.  

Sigilmaking for Zakroff is not only about independently and collaboratively creating sigils but also teaching and empowering others to learn how to make sigils. She regularly hosts sigil workshops and this past year, created the Sigil Witchery Oracle to help others engage with art as a personal meditative and magical practice. She openly shares that her follow-up to Sigil Witchery, titled Visual Alchemy: A Witch’s Guide to Sigils, Art & Magic openly explores the connection between art and magic. 

Visual Alchemy serves as “I like to say, I went to RISD so you don’t have to. It covers deeper design aspects of sigil crafting as well as getting over our fears of making art,” Zakroff said. 

What she creates is an art form in of itself, and the esoteric and occult arts--including what people may consider traditional artwork (painting, drawing, sculpture)--is increasingly explored by larger museums and galleries. In the past year, the Tate featured an exhibition focused on British surrealistic artist Ithell Colquhoun’s work. Other recent exhibitions include Lévy Govy Dayan’s Enchanted Alchemies (2024) and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s Like Magic which closed this past September. 

Zakroff presented at the Texts and Traditions Colloquium in Seattle, Washington. Photo courtesy of Zakroff.  

“We are seeing the intersection of the traditional art world and the esoteric world, so I think we’re going to see more of it,” Zakroff said, but as art at the intersections of occultism and expression gain interest in the museum field, Zakroff cautions that museums need to be intentional in the ways they are presented. Not only in terms of application, practicality and historical context, but also energetically and intellectually. 

Within chaos magic, sigils are usually destroyed after use, but she explains that one of the most well-known sigil creators who inspired modern  chaos magic, the English artist Austin Osman Spare, covered his own works with sigils and this art can be found still in n collections across the world. Like Spare, Zakroff does not destroy her art; instead, she promotes radical access--to education and inspiration about creating sigils and to the sigils that she has created with others. 

Reproductive Rights Sigil, by Laura Tempest Zakroff. Photo courtesy of Zakroff.  

In terms of displaying art featuring sigils (her work is now in the collection of the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft in Cleveland and has been featured in numerous galleries across the United States), she pointed to an exhibition that opened last June at the Museum of International Folk Art in Sante Fe. Sandroing: Tracing Kastom in Vanuatu featured the artform of sanddrawing mostly within the South Pacific archipelago region. 

Zakroff saw the exhibition last month and applauded the museum for being on the frontline of innovative curatorial practices, for pairing videos of Pentecostal Island cultural knowledge practitioner Edgar Hinge practices his craft with blank sand displays with guides so that people could learn and engage physically with the practice of telling stories through drawing. Zakroff suggests that museums could follow this model, especially for exhibitions with sigils, so that people can learn and practice the craft and also know what they are creating--so as not to conjure anything they weren’t intending in the galleries and learn to respect the process and beliefs.

She also suggests that museums understand how this art has new, distinct lives in the galleries outside of their creators. “There’s the process that happens for me in the creation of the art, and I think that is the key spiritual thing that happens, right the art almost is a byproduct. While my sigils are often crafted in a different way than my paintings, with both kinds of art there is the process of creation and then the second life of the art where people interact with it. The art takes on new meaning and impact outside of the artist’s initial journey,” Zakroff said. 

“What’s amazing for me and continually humbling and astounding is when I go to a pagan/witch/occultconference or festival and people will walk into the booth area and just have that [experience of]‘I’m in church. I’m in a temple right now’ because they pick up on what is happening in the experience and to me, that is so incredibly powerful,” she continued. Not everyone is going to recognize the spiritual meaning behind the art on display, and that is okay. Even someone who is a practicing witch may not see or interpret her sigil with the same intention that she created it. 

“My art is my conversation with the universe,” Zakroff said. 

Zakroff does urge people eager to paint, inscribe, or wear sigils to know the histories of the art. As we near Samhain, an autumnal holiday celebrated by many within the witchcraft and pagan communities, many people are drawn to sigils out of intention to connect with deceased ancestors and sometimes because of their commodification within Halloween decorations. 

Zakroff standing next to a sigil and visual key at a tour stop in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo courtesy of Zakroff.  

“Everything that has been created in a workshop that I put on my blog,” Zakroff said, includes “a shot of the classroom whiteboard and how we worked it out. I also translate that into text that says this is exactly what went into it. This is why we created it, and I think it’s vital that people understand what was the intention, what are the elements, the ingredients that go into this and then suggestions on how to use it. That way, you are fully educated--you know the how, what, when, and why of the sigil versus some random thing that you found on Tumblr that says it’s for love.”

Like other art that contains human and non-human living beings according to their communities, sigils contain immense magical power to people like Zakroff. Acknowledging the magic of the ways in which she creates art is just as important as copying, wearing, and utilizing the beautiful “byproduct” of her practice.