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.caQuestions or thoughts?    Email: [email protected] this resonated, please share and follow The Unwritten wherever you listen.The Unwritten — Archives of the Realm