First, a little background:
A couple of years ago, I posted to this board some experiments I'd been working with about "magic as programming" under the name Formatting my head-drive.
Now, for various reasons (including two long stretches of unemployment) I haven't been working on it as deeply as I'dve liked, but things are a bit freer now, and I've since come back to it.
Now, one concept I've really become interested is in whether there are universal symbols for the fundamental forces of magic, sort of like icons for my magical toolbar. Not so much sigils, as focal points for meditation.
(Interestingly, I've seen similar concepts crop up recently in superheroic contexts [specifically, the new take on the "Firestorm Matrix" and the opening credits of the Legion cartoon]. But in those cases, the images are a little more detailed than I'd like, and associate with more complex ideas.)
As a first pass, I focused on the classical elements, Fire, Water, Earth, and Air:
Fire was easy, as the alchemic symbol is a point-up triangle, and the Chinese letter has a similar core element. So I decided the "icon" for fire was /\, and probably colored red.
Water was almost as easy. Water suggests a cup, and the simplest image of that is \/ (although an open semicircle is good too), which also works in opposition to fire. And, naturally, fire is blue.
Earth wasn't too hard. The associations are all about strength, solidity and support, and the simplest image for that is a green pillar/tree: ||.
Air... Air is a problem. Mainly because the associated color _should_ be either yellow or purple, but neither really fits. And air is invisible, so what image evokes it best? I've decided it's either a circle, a dot, a lightning bolt (simplified as two slashes above each other) or an equal sign. But none of them feel quite right.
If anyone has suggestions for Air, or other archetypal forces that suggest iconic images, I'm open to them. |
