Before the Word — How Sigils Shaped Language

We live in a world fluent in symbols. A stop sign. A skull and crossbones. A heart emoji. These are efficient, institutional, fixed — they tell you what to do and mean only what they’re assigned to mean.
But before symbols were standardized, there were sigils.
In this episode, I’m exploring the fundamental difference between a symbol and a sigil — and why that distinction matters far more than most people realize. A symbol is flat. It communicates one thing, in one context, to anyone who knows the code. A sigil is something else entirely. It either lands in you or it doesn’t. It evokes. It interacts. And crucially, what it means is alive — it shifts with time, with context, and most importantly, with the person encountering it.
This isn’t mysticism for mysticism’s sake. I believe sigils represent an earlier, more organic layer of human meaning-making — one that informed the very development of written language. Letters, characters, glyphs: many have roots in marks that were never meant to be decoded. They were meant to be felt.
What does it mean to communicate in a living language? And what did we lose — or flatten — when we standardized it?
Come think this through with me.

Find more at dianalynnmayorga.ca

Questions or thoughts?    Email: intuition@dianalynnmayorga.ca

If this resonated, please share and follow The Unwritten wherever you listen.
The Unwritten — Archives of the Realm

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello again. Thank you for tuning in to The Unwritten. My name is Diana, and I'm really looking forward to talking more about the realm. I'd like to talk about language for this episode, communication, and the very tiny little bit that I have been working through. I've been considering contemplating in relation to this work in the realm. One of my first mentors that I had as an adolescent was to, I think they more often than not went by druids, but that was very much communicated to the few of us that were working with them. A friend friend of mine got me involved. And I was already since about six, seven years old when I started collecting semi-precious stones. You know, it just sort of, it's such a gateway drug. It's like you get rose quartz and amethyst, and then you like, you know, upgrade to like Lapis Lazuli, and it's like, oh dang. It's like jumping from marijuana to psilocy. And suddenly in the the realm of Celtic runes and magic and all the fun things. So that had been part of my world for a few years. And in grade seven, one of my friends said, Oh, yeah, well, so and so's parents are basically druids. Druid and druidess. They're both from, like one's from Ireland and Scotland, and that's just part of their ancestry, their heritage, these Celtic pagan practitioners. And so I'm like, yeah, I'm in for three years. I mentored with them very much in the old ways, very much in the unwritten ways. No point was there any um books that we read from or notes that we took. It was really authentic, as far as I could tell, as far as I still can tell. I think it would be unfair to say it was authentic to the tradition in general, because there's such a dynamic sort of spectrum to Celtic practices. So pagan practices we can say, Celtic pagan practices. So I was really lucky to learn about ritual, and within ritual we have sigils. So the first thing that I'll share is how I understand the contrast between a symbol and a sigil. When I teach a Sui Reiki at Mount Royal University here in Alberta, this is something we talk a lot about because in a Sui Reiki practice we have sigils. But most books will speak about them as symbols, which isn't innately wrong by any means, but because I was introduced to the idea of sigils at a very young age, I immediately picked up on that contrast. So I wanted to first introduce the idea that there is a difference between sigils and symbols, and the very way that this was described to me says it all. It has dimensionality. A sigil has a sort of history, heritage to it that some of us will feel, will respond to immediately. Some of us won't at all, and there'll be some sigils that will take time, like building a relationship with them. There's so many examples I can use with this. If you have a relationship and experience with dogs or cats, let's say, and you loved a dog or a cat in your life and lost one, and let's say you relate to the sigil of a paw print, you might even have it as a memento of that beloved family member that will elicit something in you for a very long time, if not the rest of your life. If you have religious or spiritual beliefs, there may be certain sigils that elicit a sort of emotional, spiritual response in you. That is a sigil. A sigil communicates as much as you have given it. So sigils are these, while they're sigils, it's hard for me to put other words for them. It is communication and language, but more in an artistic way, sigils have stories and history behind them, and they could be very much personal. You could have a sigil that's just between you and the sigil. You could have sigils that connect back to some sort of family heritage, like a tartan, a blending of lines and colors. You could have a coat of arms that whether you've seen it even before or not, the sigils within that coat of arms might elicit some sort of, even if it's very subtle response in you, and maybe you're of the belief that it's like an inherited sort of knowing and ancestral response. So, how this all comes back to language, just really planting a seed, food for thought. There are many ancient, and some of them are still very much around, but we'll we'll use that word for now. Many traditions from around the world that go back thousands, tens of thousands of years, that believed that our voice box, our ability to make sound, was to be used for a sort of healing, a vibrational exchange, as abstract as that very likely sounds, versus language. Language in so many ways is miraculous. It can also be really limiting. And how we have different relationships with words. Everyone's going to have a different response. It's going to elicit something different within you if I say something like argument, the word argument, the word debate, the word conflict. We're all going to respond to these words differently. Or if I were to say words like soulmate, twin flame is a very interesting concept right now. And this is just the thing. So they don't mean much of anything in particular. They just have such history behind them. But that history is only applicable to those that know the history and that have a relationship to the history. So sigils allow us to interact with them in a way that's very personal, for better or worse, really. So when I look at language and I get really curious about the origin of words, the etymology. When I look at words like magic or intuition, and I find those words fascinating if you look into the origin, the etymology of those words. Like all language, they've shifted so much throughout time. So what magic meant 100, 200, 300 years ago, further back, is very different than how we relate to it now. And not only is this obviously okay, that's what happens. For me internally, it highlights how powerful words are. Sigils, on the other hand, the impact is well, the impact is very much no matter the language that that person knows or the culture that they're from, if met if a sigil is met with curiosity and personal neutrality, a sigil can be a really powerful thing to interact with. Because conceptually I understand that how I view a word or a phrase, a concept is different from others. Like if you listen to young kids, close friends, you know, maybe playing a video game together or something, and they'll say to each other often, oh my god, you're so stupid, you know. Oh that's so lame, you got cooked. My kids would be mortified. But it's not from a malicious place. Those comments are very rarely harmful to one another. It's just the sort of language they use very often. It's just a silly example. And many may disagree, you know, that it's not, and although I'm not suggesting those words are neutral and non-impactful, I'm actually in a way suggesting the opposite that all words are impactful. And just challenging myself to pause and consider my own confirmation bias, my own programming, and how I relate and react to vocabulary. So if you take anything out of this, this very brief, likely abstract conversation around vocabulary, symbols and sigils, communication. If you take anything from this, I hope it's that you walk away a bit more curious about your relationship to language, to symbols and sigils. I found a lot of value, a lot of magic, healing, wisdom, and even a reprieve from the weight of words. And and I will one of the things I'll end with here is I don't have an inner monologue. So my inner realm is like primarily very much like 95 plus percent visual and feeling-based. And I'm very dyslexic, and I didn't read and write until I was nine. It took me a long time to catch up. So I perceive the world, I interact with my inner world through visuals and through feelings. So words for me have weight and they've been challenging. And I have to, you'll hear me pause a lot, although I may successfully edit some of that out. My pauses more often than not are due to the need to visualize a word before I can say it. And even if I have to change the spelling to a phonetic version so I can say it properly, I'll do that. The reason I'm mentioning this is that in itself changes everything for me personally in my relationship to language. And as I will mention to a point of unease, I will nauseate any listeners with how often I say this. That doesn't make anything better or worse. Okay, it's just different. So for me, I've had this fascination with words because they require such effort. Where sigils, they're visual. A sigil has to be visual. If it's often there's mantras with sigils, like if you listen to some of my episodes I'm going to be recording on Reiki, particularly Asui Reiki, I'll talk about how in Asui Reiki, the in the West, what is often the level one power symbol, and in level two the harmony symbol, the mantras that go along with the sigils are different. So the the sigil doesn't have a fixed name because it's a sigil. Sigils rarely have fixed names, and sigils will often have different versions of themselves throughout the world, throughout ancient history. So sigils are these visual, I would call them tools, possibly medicine, depending on your own personal reference to them. And the mantra, the words, how they sound, how they're written, is different, different sensory experience. So my hope for whomever listens to this is that you just get curious about how you relate to sigils, shapes, and things that you see that mean something, that elicit something, but don't necessarily communicate a fixed message, okay, and how you relate to vocabulary, to words. In a way, you'll hear me talk about this at length. This is part and parcel to do with one of, I guess you could say, one of my life goals, part of my in Zazen meditation practice. It would be such a big part of my purpose, my journey to enlightenment, even. If ever even remotely achieved. This aligns with the Socrates, the oracles of Delphi, that the quote, know yourself and you will know all of God in the universe. That could be a paraphrase depending on who you talk to. Anyways. So the remarkable thing about life itself, whether it's a sigil, a symbol, vocabulary, all that we interface with within this matrix, this dimensional reality, all that we interact with is an immediate reflection of our inner world. As above, below, as within, without hermetic law. So you might walk away from this getting curious about why certain sigils, symbols, and words trigger particular responses within yourself or others. And I would say that's a really healthy thing. And if you give it some time, if you put some effort into it, it might, and not for everybody. Everyone has different tools in their toolbox, and that's a good thing. This particular exercise may allow a different way to get to know yourself. And for me, that's a that's a big deal. That's a pretty cool thing. Thank you for listening. This is what I would call a bit of an intro to some of the concepts I find really valuable around language and sigils. I hope you enjoyed. Please. Please comment as little or as much as you like.