Symbols & seals

The sign for 'life', held to the nose of a king by a god. Not an amulet first — a hieroglyph that got carried into three dimensions.

Isis, Osiris, Ra, Ptah

A four-tiered column meaning stability, later read as the backbone of Osiris and raised upright at festival as a resurrection.

Osiris, Ptah

Eight points for the planet Venus, and the standard way of writing a goddess into a scene without drawing her.

Ishtar

A cobra rearing at the front of a crown, understood as the eye of the sun placed where it can spit at whatever approaches the wearer's face.

Ra, Sekhmet, Apep

An auspicious mark used continuously for four and a half thousand years across most of the world, and destroyed as a public sign in the West by twelve years of one European party's use of it.

The eye Set tore out and Thoth made whole. Wedjat means 'the sound one' — the amulet is named for the repair, not the injury.

Horus, Set, Osiris, Thoth

A sun with wings, borrowed by every empire in the region in turn — and the direct ancestor of the Persian faravahar.

Horus, Ahura Mazda

A single ostrich plume — the counterweight the heart is measured against, and the lightest object in the corpus to carry that much weight.

Anubis, Ma'at, Ammit, Thoth

The standard way of saying a god is strong — and, at Sinai and at Bethel, the standard way of getting it wrong.

Moloch, El, Baal Hadad

An upright unworked stone marking a place where something happened — the oldest kind of monument, and one the Bible both erects and forbids.

El

A looped knot cut in red jasper and laid at the throat of the dead, with a spell that puts the protection of Isis around the body.

Isis, Horus

A stone beetle laid over the heart, inscribed with an instruction to that heart: do not testify against me.

Ma'at, Ammit, The Forty-Two Assessors, Atum

Blue glass with a white and black eye at its centre, worn on the theory that a look can be sent back.

A builder's tool as a god's signature — Marduk is identified on boundary stones by a spade, not by a weapon.

Marduk, Tiamat

Indra's thunderbolt, forged from a sage's bones, and later the ritual sceptre of Tibetan Buddhism — a weapon that changed sides.

Indra, Vritra

A wooden pole or stylised tree beside an altar, mentioned about forty times in the Hebrew Bible and almost always in the course of ordering its destruction.

Asherah, El

A scaled dragon with a lion's forelegs and an eagle's hind claws, set in glazed brick along the processional way into Babylon.

Marduk, Tiamat

A human-headed winged bull carved at palace gates, up to five metres high, and given a fifth leg so it reads correctly from two angles.

A healing standard that stood in the Temple for centuries until a reforming king smashed it — the Hebrew Bible's own account of a symbol going wrong.

Hermes, Nehushtan

Two snakes twined on a winged staff — the badge of a herald under safe conduct, and, through a filing error, the emblem of American military medicine.

Hermes, Nehushtan

A small stela of the child Horus standing on crocodiles, gripping snakes and scorpions, covered front and back in spells — and designed so that water poured over it could be drunk.

Set

A stepped stone plinth with fire on top — the only image on Sasanian coinage for four centuries, and not an object of worship in Zoroastrian terms.

Ahura Mazda, Angra Mainyu

A severed monster's face on a shield, a roof tile, an oven and a coin — the most-produced apotropaic image of the ancient Mediterranean.

Athena, The Erinyes

A demon's face worn to keep a demon out — the clearest surviving case of a malevolent spirit hired as a doorman.

Pazuzu, Lamashtu

A man in a winged disc, carved above Persian kings and identified as Ahura Mazda by nearly everyone except the inscriptions.

Ahura Mazda

A seven-branched lampstand specified to the almond blossom in Exodus, and carved on a Roman arch as loot.

A triangle, a bar and a disc — a schematic figure with raised arms, cut into thousands of Punic stelae and mosaics across the western Mediterranean.

Beelzebub

A three-pronged spear carried by Shiva and by the goddess in her killing aspect, with the three points read as everything that comes in threes.

Rudra, Kali

A rolled parchment in a case on a doorpost, containing the verses that instruct you to put it there.

A snake with quetzal plumage, carved at Teotihuacan a thousand years before the Aztecs — a symbol that outlasted several of the states that used it.

Quetzalcoatl

A bronze right hand raised in blessing, crowded with small figures — a pine cone, a snake, a frog, a lizard — mounted on a pole and carried in the rites of a Thracian god at Rome.

A plain clay bowl with writing spiralling inward across the inside, buried upside down under the floor of a house. Around two thousand survive, and they name demons by name.

Lamashtu, Lilith

Hung over a birthing bed, naming three angels — a ward that works by holding a demon to something she agreed to.

Lilith

A twisted rice-straw rope with folded paper streamers, tied around a tree, a rock, a wrestler or a doorway to mark it as not ordinary.

Amaterasu

Three interlocking triangles on picture stones and ship burials, always near Odin, and never once explained by a surviving text.

Odin

The hammer that hallows — worn as silver pendants in exactly the century Christian cross pendants were spreading through the same region.

Thor, Jormungandr

Two uprights and two crossbars marking where ordinary ground stops — a gate with no door, no wall and nothing to keep out.

Amaterasu

A six-petalled rosette scratched into roof beams to stop lightning — a compass-and-straightedge figure any carpenter can lay out.

Perun, Veles

An open hand against the evil eye, claimed in nearly identical form by Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities across the same geography.

Nothing to do with the Qur'an and everything to do with Constantinople — a Byzantine city emblem inherited by the empire that took the city.

Compass-drawn flowers, interlocking Vs and burn marks scratched into beams beside doors, windows and hearths in ordinary English buildings — protection with no text and no clergy attached.

Eight tridents radiating from a point, drawn between the eyebrows before a fight — an Icelandic magical stave with an Eddic name attached to it.

Fenrir

Not an image but a material: worked iron itself — machete, anvil, nails, and now car parts — is Ògún's presence.

Ogun

A double-headed axe carried on the head of a dancer — and, in practice, the neolithic stone celts that turn up in fields after a storm.

Shango

Three joined spirals cut into a kerbstone at Newgrange five thousand years ago — older than the pyramids, and completely unexplained.

A five-pointed star drawn in one unbroken line — an accounting mark, a Pythagorean password, a Christian emblem of the five wounds, and only recently a sign of evil.

A serpent swallowing its own tail, first drawn around the sun god in an Egyptian tomb and still in use three thousand years later as a diagram of a closed system.

Apep, Ra

Eight stacks of three broken or unbroken lines — a complete three-bit notation, arranged in a ring and hung over doorways.

An eight-spoked wheel for an eightfold path — the emblem Buddhism used for its founder for four centuries before it would depict him at all.

Mara

Six realms in one circle, held in the jaws of the lord of death — a cosmological diagram painted at monastery entrances so that everyone entering has read it.

Yama, Mara, The Preta

Three interlaced arcs from Insular manuscript art — read as the Trinity by the people who drew it, and as pre-Christian by nearly everyone since.

Two interlocking halves, each carrying a dot of the other — a Song-dynasty diagram of a much older idea, not an ancient emblem.

Two interlocked triangles that were ornament almost everywhere before they were a Jewish emblem anywhere — and a spirit-binding seal in between.

Ten spheres on twenty-two paths. The doctrine is medieval; the diagram everyone draws is early modern and printed.

Samael, Metatron, The Qliphoth

A syllable before it was ever a shape — recited at the opening and close of Vedic utterance, and only much later written as the mark everyone recognises.

Four letters that stopped being pronounced and became, in consequence, the most powerful thing you could write on a piece of equipment.

Six meaningless Greek words, said to have been written on the statue of Artemis at Ephesus, and spoken or worn as protection for a thousand years.

Five Latin words in a grid that reads the same in four directions, scratched on a wall at Pompeii and still being cut into churches a thousand years later.

First and last letters of the Greek alphabet, used in Revelation as a name — a claim about extent made out of the ordering of a writing system.

A number given in Revelation as a puzzle with a stated solution method — 'let him that hath understanding count' — and now the single most recognisable mark in the whole subject.

An instrument of public execution adopted as the emblem of the executed — and avoided in Christian art for as long as the punishment was still in use.

Two arcs making a fish, standing for an acrostic — ΙΧΘΥΣ, 'Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour'. A symbol that is really a sentence.

An alphabet that the poems say Odin obtained by hanging himself on a tree for nine nights — writing acquired as an ordeal.

Odin

A word written as a shrinking triangle, one letter dropped per line, so that the fever it is written against diminishes with it.

The first three letters of ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, read for centuries afterwards as the initials of a Latin sentence that was invented to explain them.

The first two letters of ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ overlaid, put on a Roman army standard in 312 — the first Christian symbol with state power behind it.

Notches cut across the edge of a standing stone — an alphabet designed to be written on a corner rather than a face.

One verse, recited at night and inscribed on doorways and pendants, and named in hadith as what keeps a guard over you until morning.

Iblis, The Ifrit, The Ghul

An acronym, not a word: Atah Gibor Le-olam Adonai, 'Thou art mighty forever, Lord', compressed to four letters and written on almost everything.

Seventy-two three-letter names extracted from three verses of Exodus — and the reason the number seventy-two keeps appearing on both sides of this corpus.

Three alphabets Agrippa prints for writing the names of angels — Hebrew letters redrawn with rings at the joints, so that a script becomes a set of sigils.

Twenty-one letters dictated square by square from lettered grids, in a script the sessions claimed was the language Adam spoke.

A straight staff with a forked foot and an animal head — and the animal, on the best reading, is Set's.

Set, Ptah

The objects a seated god hands to a standing king at the top of Hammurabi's stele — most likely a measuring rod and a coiled line.

Marduk, Shamash

A three-legged bronze stand and the seat of the Pythia — the piece of furniture that authorised more Greek political decisions than any assembly.

Apollo

A strip of yellow paper carrying characters that are not quite characters — a written order to the spirit bureaucracy, issued under seal.

Yanluo Wang

A signet ring, not a shape. The Testament of Solomon makes it the instrument by which every demon in the book is compelled to give its name.

Michael, Asmoday, Beelzebub

A rooster-headed figure with snakes for legs, cut into jasper by the thousand, and the numerological reason a magic word means 365.

The Daimones

The container the legend says Solomon sealed the spirits into, thrown into a lake and opened by Babylonians who expected treasure. It is where the Ars Goetia says its seventy-two came from.

A drawn boundary with names written into it — the oldest continuously used device in the Western operative tradition, and the one that defines everything else on the floor.

A mirror, a curved jewel and a sword — each one a prop from a specific myth, and together the objects that make an emperor.

Amaterasu, Susanoo, Yamata-no-Orochi

A polished obsidian disc that shows smoke as well as a face — a god's name, his missing foot, and a working divination instrument at once.

Tezcatlipoca

The one piece of Solomonic equipment worn rather than drawn: a disc at the breast carrying the divine names, and the operator's own credential rather than the spirit's.

A rule rather than a picture: plot the spirit's name on a numbered grid, and the line you trace is its sigil.

Forty-four engraved discs, seven planets, one purpose each — the Key of Solomon's answer to what the Testament left undrawn.

A nine-inch wax disc of nested heptagons carrying angel names, made to stand under the legs of a table — the physical foundation of the Enochian sessions.

A carved wooden tray dusted with powder, marked in sixteen possible figures — and with Èṣù's face cut into the rim, watching the border.

Eshu

One drawn seal per spirit, and the strongest single piece of evidence that the Goetia's seventy-two are a compiled list rather than an inherited one.

Asmoday, Belial, Astaroth, Bael +68

Drawn two feet outside the circle, and the reason the Goetia's spirits are visible at all: the triangle is where they are required to appear.

Michael

A chalice-and-cross figure from the Grimorium Verum, drawn no differently from the dozens of spirit seals beside it, and now reproduced more than any of them.

Lucifer

An inverted pentagram, a goat's head fitted inside it, and the Hebrew letters of Leviathan around the rim — three separate nineteenth- and twentieth-century additions, presented as one ancient mark.

Leviathan

A stylised Greek zeta for Zeus. The sign of increase, favour and judgment in one's favour — the grimoires' preferred authority for asking.

Jupiter

Shield and spear, iron, Tuesday — and, since Linnaeus, the biological sign for male, which is a much later and quite separate job.

Ares, Mars

A caduceus drawn as a glyph — the one sign in the set that names a metal, a planet and a god that all behave the same way.

Hermes

The scythe. Slowest planet, heaviest metal, and the authority a grimoire invokes for work involving binding, decay and the dead.

Saturn

A crescent, silver, Monday — the planetary authority for anything involving dreams, water, change and things done at night.

A circle with a point at its centre — the oldest form in the set, and the one the alchemists used for gold without further explanation.

Copper, Friday, and every operation to do with love and favour — the counterpart to Mars in the grimoires long before it was in biology.

Sulphur, salt and mercury — the three signs Paracelsus put underneath the seven planetary metals as the components everything else is made of.

Four triangles, two pointing up and two down, two barred and two not — the whole classical element scheme in a single notation.