Sigils: An Alphabet of Emotions

By Andreas Kornevall

A preamble first. This article provides ideas concerning deep psychological processes and engages with emotional states. If you are receiving therapy, first speak to your psychologist before attempting any of this work.

Below is a wheel of emotions.

The central tenet of this wheel is to transform emotions into sigils, just like the spirit sigils we find in the old grimoires or other ancient magical books.

Emotional sigils can be used to gain insights and understanding into oneself when allowing the sigil to be the teacher. The sigil becomes a living and animated symbol that guides us further into our emotional inner architecture.

The alphabet which is a sigilised-marking system gives us imagery early in our lives to which we learn to perceive the world around us. But we often forget that it's the power of the physical "graphical lines and elements" that offers the incendiary spark of image making. The letter is the PRIMAL thing, the first, and what is revealed after comes second. Lines and shapes, like a biological organ, are the first tools of our perceptions.

I have drawn here sigils that we find in the cracks on pavements. It's an immense lettering of the Earth herself and an alphabet spanning all over the world as there is a crack on every street. What I love about these lines is that they reveals how the Earth is pushing and surging upwards from underneath our human made roads and tarmacs, she writes as she resists.

This is a post-literate graphical texture and "a surrealism of the written word." To make it post-literate means we have to be ready to answer the question: can nature also transcribe her own "thoughts" through writing and sigils? Can the spots of the leopard be an entire new Latin waiting to be discovered and does it have its own grammatical rules? The runes at the back of the tortoise shell, can they whisper to us another perception which may offer us a new understanding of the world? How can those marks be anything else but a language?

What would it take to become post-literate and engage with the presumed illegible shapes and lines of the world to create new forms? How do we become literate in reading tortoise shells or the leaves of the Elm tree, all to create meaning, especially poetic meaning and depth, how do we use lines and form to understand our drives and ideas?

What happens when we create a language of emotions and what can this exploration reveal?