This latest post from New World Border very succinctly sums up how magic spells work through the use of sigils. It's not the hocus pocus as you might think, and it happens with all of us every day.

Anybody who participates on even the fringe of any culture is both recipient and participant to this sorcery. A good introduction to what may be a shocking idea is the concept of sigils. As Grant Morrison puts it in his excellent essay Pop Magic: The sigil takes a magical desire or intent … and folds it down, creating a highly-charged symbol. The desire is then forgotten. Only the symbol remains and can then be charged to full potency when the magician chooses.

The sentence, a desire or goal [is] condensed into a graphic symbol. [...] There is not a wrong way to do this. Next comes the important part. It is important to internalize this symbol in order to make the "sigil" cast the "spell" and thus cause the desired effect. The purpose of this is to create a link to the symbol that operates on a subconscious level. Morrison states that there are a number of ways to take a symbol and "charge" it to this effect. All involve ritual, which have the stated effect of creating a "no-mind state." Recommended foremost for the beginner is masturbation, assumedly due to convenience and universality. There are any number of other techniques: [T]he human body has various mechanisms for inducing brief ‘no-mind’ states. Fasting, spinning, intense exhaustion, fear, sex, the fight-or-flight response will all do the trick. I have charged sigils while bungee-jumping, lying dying in a hospital bed, experiencing a total solar eclipse and dancing to Techno.

He then goes on to give several examples familiar to anyone in our culture, including corporate logos. This reminds me of a speech I listened to a while back by Hakim Bey, in which he suggested that the path to discovering how modern corporate mind control affects all of us would be to dig back into the workings of sorcery and runes of ancient times. It's really the same techniques, and by learning how these things originated, we might better understand the patterns so we can be more effective at fighting it.