Of Sigils

Mystical symbols have always held a fascination with the human mind, to the extent that they are an integral part of most major world religions. Consider the star and crescent of Islam, the Christian cross, or the eight-spoke wheel of the Buddha, for instance. Voodoo uses “veves”—symbols representing the loa spirits—in its rituals, believing that the placement of a veve beneath a sacrifice links the sacrifice to the loa of the veve.

A number of pagan superstitions have combined in the modern age to form the idea of a sigil—a symbol used to invoke magical power. Medieval magicians believed they could use sigils to summon specific angels or demons, while the Jewish practice of Kaballah uses them for everything from protective spells to representative names for God to the creation of healing amulets.

While the efficacy of sigils in the physical world has yet to be proven, there is another realm in which they have an undisputed power.

That realm is art. The greatest artists in human history, whether literary or visual, have used sigils to shape the thoughts and emotions of their audiences in powerful ways. There are two basic kinds of sigil: imagistic and poetic.

What about music? an observer might ask. Excellent question, and easily answered; music doesn’t need to incorporate sigils, simply because music is itself a sigil. Music shapes the subconscious from within in exactly the same way a powerful artistic sigil does. A combination of the two, in a lyrical composition or musical play, can be staggering in its effect.

Imagistic sigils are those images which are powerful in and of themselves. A red rose is an imagistic sigil, as is a craggy mountain, a thunderstorm, a sword, a skull, or a raven, to name just a few. Combinations of these images—a raven perched on a skull, say, or a red rose growing atop a mountain beneath a sky of lowering thunderheads—have a subconscious effect to all observers, no matter what his or her language and background.

Poetic sigils, on the other hand, are linguistically powerful; the sound of the word is the effective element rather than its meaning. Latin is full of poetic sigils; consider “requiem” and “veritas,” to name just a few. There is a reason so many mottos are converted into Latin; doing so gives them a sigilistic power they lack in common English. Certain combinations of words also have the effect of poetic sigils; “something wicked this way comes” and “these are the times that try men’s souls” are two famous literary examples. Poetic sigils depend heavily on the rhythm and tone of individual syllables; again, note the relationship to music.

Artists have always used sigils to great effect, but they are especially visible in literature. Poe, for example, was a master at the use of dark and ominous sigils throughout his writing—The Raven, for example, makes use of both imagistic sigils (the raven, the doorway) as well as poetic sigils (“quoth the raven: nevermore”) to great effect.

To take a more recent example, Stephen King makes heavy use of imagistic sigils in his Dark Tower series to instill the work with a sense of legend and antiquity it would not otherwise have. The book opens with a lone gunslinger crossing a barren desert; both the figure of the American-style gunslinger and a desolate desert are powerful imagistic sigils. The entire series is about a great black tower built in a field of red roses. Again, both are very powerful imagistic sigils—Tolkein also uses the dark tower sigil in his Lord of the Rings series.

Perhaps the purest use of both imagistic and poetic sigils is in the field of poetry. There have been few masters greater in this regard than the immortal T.S. Eliot; consider the following lines from The Wasteland.

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Eliot uses several imagistic sigils to convey a feeling of desolation—the desert, the shadow, the dead tree, and dust—combined with a poetic structure so strong as to be a poetic sigil in and of itself. The result is the almost overpowering—and almost unexplainable—effect of reading Eliot’s work.

The audience comes to an artist to be changed. The indescribable way in which a reader’s subconscious is shaped is a direct effect—like the emotions of one listening to a great symphony—by the powerful magic of artistic sigils.