Occult Symbols and Where They Come From

What this is

Forty-eight figures, grouped by where they come from. Open any of them and you get three separate statements: where the thing is first actually attested, what the tradition using it says it means, and, for seventeen of them, what gets claimed about it elsewhere.

Keeping those three apart is the whole method, and most writing on this subject doesn't bother. Give only the first two and you've written a grimoire appendix. Give only the third and you've written the tract. The interesting material sits in the gap between them, and the gap is nearly always a date.

Almost nothing here is as old as it is said to be

The commonest claim about an occult symbol is a claim about its age. It is wrong more often than it's right.

Take the Vegvísir, sold everywhere as a Viking navigational symbol. Its earliest known appearance is page 60 of the Huld Manuscript, compiled by Geir Vigfússon at Akureyri in 1860. That is roughly eight hundred years after the Viking Age ended. The Ægishjálmur does better, because the word really is in the Poetic Edda, where Fáfnir boasts of wearing one. But the Edda describes no design at all, and the figure people draw comes from Icelandic grimoires of the seventeenth century and later.

The inverted pentagram is supposed to be an ancient inversion of a Christian sign. The distinction between one point up and two points up is set out by Éliphas Lévi in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie in the 1850s, and he is where it starts. The Sigil of Baphomet is supposed to be a Templar device. Baphomet enters the record as a name in the Templar trial testimony of 1307-12, extracted under torture, with no image attached to it; the goat-headed figure is Lévi's drawing of 1856, and the sigil is Stanislas de Guaita's, from La Clef de la Magie Noire in 1897. The Triple Moon stands for a Maiden, Mother and Crone triad that Robert Graves put into circulation with The White Goddess in 1948, a book that announced itself as poetic mythography rather than history.

Set against all that, a few of these are genuinely as old as advertised. The ankh and the Eye of Horus are Egyptian and attested in quantity. The ouroboros is in Tutankhamun's tomb before it is in any alchemical manuscript. The pentagram turns up as a potter's mark in Mesopotamia. The swastika is Neolithic and has been in continuous religious use across Asia for millennia. The valknut is properly Viking Age, carved on Gotland stones and on the Oseberg burial, and it is the one symbol here where the age is solid and the meaning is the part nobody can supply, because no Norse text explains it.

Worth being clear about what that pattern is and isn't. It isn't that occult symbols are modern frauds. It's that the ones carrying the most confident stories tend to be the youngest.

They are made out of each other

Open the planetary glyphs, then open Mercury. Crescent over circle over cross, and alchemy read it exactly that way: soul over spirit over matter. Now open the Monas Hieroglyphica, which John Dee published in 1564 with twenty-four theorems explaining it, and presented to the Holy Roman Emperor as a key to the cosmos. A crescent, a circle with a central point, a cross, and the two arcs of Aries. Every component of it is somewhere else in this index.

The same holds going forward. Sulphur is the fire triangle set on the cross of matter. The Leviathan Cross is a double cross over a lemniscate, and in alchemical notation it signs black sulphur, the residue left by purifying sulphur, which the twentieth century reread as "brimstone". Anton LaVey used it in The Satanic Bible to head the Nine Satanic Statements, and the Church of Satan's own account is that it was decorative and meant nothing more than that.

This is the most useful thing the index shows and it's hard to see one symbol at a time. The vocabulary is small. A crescent, a circle, a point, a cross, a triangle, a line through a triangle. Nearly everything else is those six recombined, and the later and more dramatic a symbol looks, the likelier it is to be an assembly of much older parts.

The argument is usually about which way up it is

A pentagram and an inverted pentagram are the same five lines. The swastika rotates both ways throughout the ancient record. A barred triangle is air; unbarred it's fire.

Where a symbol carries a real dispute, the dispute tends to be about orientation rather than about what the thing depicts, which means you can often settle it by asking when the orientation acquired its meaning and from whom. For the pentagram that's Lévi, in the 1850s. Several Wiccan traditions use the two-points-up form for a second-degree initiation and mean nothing adversarial by it whatsoever.

Where the date settles it

The Eye of Providence is the clearest case on the page. An eye in a triangle with rays is Christian, common in European religious art from the sixteenth century; Pontormo paints one above three faces in 1525. The United States put it on the reverse of the Great Seal in 1782. It became standard Masonic iconography fifteen years after that, with Thomas Smith Webb's Freemason's Monitor of 1797. Only one member of the seal's design committees was a Freemason, and his proposals weren't the ones adopted.

So the sequence runs Christian art, then the Great Seal, then Freemasonry. The claim that the dollar carries a Masonic mark needs that order reversed, and it wasn't.

A gentler version of the same thing is the caduceus. American medical organisations have used the two-snake winged staff of Hermes as a healing emblem since the nineteenth century, and the US Army Medical Corps adopted it in 1902, when the healing emblem proper is the single-snake Rod of Asclepius. The substitution is real, documented and visible on letterheads across the country. It is also a mistake rather than a signal, and the difference between those two readings is most of what this archive is for.

Three of these are hate symbols now

The swastika, the Sonnenrad and the Othala rune are in the index because they belong there. One is Neolithic and in daily religious use by about a fifth of the world. One was invented in the 1930s. One is a letter of the Elder Futhark with the sound value /o/.

All three carry a warning in the panel and none of the warnings are softened. The ADL classifies the Sonnenrad as a white supremacist symbol; it appeared in the 2022 Buffalo shooter's manifesto and on the 2019 Christchurch attacker's vest. The Othala rune was adopted by the SS and is now common among neo-Nazis as a swastika substitute. Displaying a swastika is a criminal offence in several countries.

None of that cancels the older meanings and the older meanings don't cancel any of it. A Hindu drawing a swastika at a threshold and a militant wearing one are not doing the same thing, and the only way to say so is to record both facts instead of picking whichever is convenient. The ADL's own guidance says the same: context is what separates the uses.

What this index won't do

It won't tell you what a symbol means on a building, a record sleeve or a politician's lapel. Symbols belong to whoever picks them up. The Elder Futhark didn't consent to the SS any more than the pentagram consented to Lévi.

It also records no meaning the record doesn't carry. The valknut's entry says the meaning is unknown, because it is: the name is a nineteenth-century coinage and no Norse source explains the figure. The Sonnenrad's entry says nothing survives from the period about why the mosaic was laid. Where a tradition publishes its own account — the Church of Satan on the Leviathan Cross, the Huld Manuscript's short gloss on the Vegvísir, Masonic monitors on the square and compasses — that account is the citation, because an organisation is the authority on its own symbol.

The dates are the part to take away. They're in the index, under every drawing, and they do more work than any of the meanings.