We use language every day, and generally don't give it a second thought. From the time we're toddlers and our first thoughts form and we can finally give voice to what we want or need...all the way to adulthood, where our language is stretched to include our professional lives, our presence on social media, our relationships with friends and loved ones, to our private thoughts kept safely within our own brains...and including our prayers to our chosen deity or something 'greater' than us, whatever you perceive that to be. In the morning, we may tell our significant other "I love you" as we leave the house, tell off the person who cut us off in traffic in a colorful manner, and then spend time slogging through emails...and so on. Think about the sheer number of interactions you have, linguistically, throughout your own day.
Words are just words, right? Who hasn't heard the childhood taunt "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me?" I know my mom told me that. I'm sure someone in all our lives probably told us that, and it's true - to a point. That guy I flipped off in traffic for cutting me off and nearly causing a multi-car accident, and called him rude names that he didn't hear? Yeah, he won't get a bloody nose to go along with the epithets he didn't hear, or the 'bird' he probably didn't see. (It made me feel better, though, lol.)
Words are more than words, they really are. They're pure, unadulterated magic, if you think about it.
Even just the basic function of language: I can tell you something - anything, really - from something as simple as directions to someplace you're looking for, to explaining a spell, to telling you a story. I can convey something that had energy and frequency in MY brain, use my voice - and convey that to you, where it now resides in your brain. Spiffy, right? But the problem is, you might not remember it in exactly the way I told you. You might add something, or more likely, leave something out. Our spoken words carry both power and intent - but our minds are chock full of other things that compete for space and resources, so what we hear, while powerful, may get partially lost or shuffled as our brains try to file them.
For me, the true magic of language lies within the written word. I was having a lovely conversation with my longtime friend Cyndy on language yesterday. She reminded me of a quote from Carl Sagan that - lol, I'd heard before, but completely forgot. To quote him,
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years."
Or, to quote my friend Cyndy:
"It's like two minds connecting - and a world you created now exists in the mind of someone else. People, places and things only imagined come alive when you open a book."
Where exactly does the magic inherent in our words lie?
Right now, you're reading words that were digitally formed by me, on my computer as I sit in my living room here in Central PA. You're reading them, wherever you currently sit. You understand what's written because you can either see it, or you have a device that converts it to something you can understand, and you are able to read English. If you don't understand English, then what you see might as well be gibberish.
Gibberish, as it turns out, can be really problematic. Egyptian archaeologists would dig up artifacts with writing on them, or see intricately painted tomb walls with hieroglyphics or demotic, and had no way of knowing what any of the writing meant. Scholars worked for years trying to figure the Ancient Egyptian language out, until they found the Rosetta Stone. It had two Egyptian languages (hieroglyphic and demotic) that archaeologists couldn't understand -- and Ancient Greek, which they could. Finding the Rosetta Stone allowed a previously unknown language to be understood again.
Rosetta Stone, British Museum. Photo credit: Hans Hillewaert
Information that resides in written form - be it carved in stone, printed on a page, or displayed digitally (like this is) doesn't really contain any actual information. The information is actually wrapped up in the symbolism we attach to the squiggles that are written, in whatever form, and all the meaning of those squiggles and words is carried in our brains in the form of language.
Written words are symbols. We are taught what they mean. Beyond that, each letter and every word you read are sigils, in their most basic form. When you look at how language has evolved, you can see that what we so casually string into words, each letter, and in some cases, each stroke had meaning originally attached to it. Guess what? They still do. Words have the capability of meaning something different to each person who reads them; what meanings a word carries depends on our individual experiences and perspectives, and may take negative or positive connotations. It all comes down to symbolism....and magic loves symbolism, and symbolism is highly magical.
Back into antiquity, most ordinary folks didn't know how to read...and that was on purpose. The folks in charge weren't so worried about magic. They were more worried about ideas spreading, and upsetting the status quo. Nobody thought to teach the rank and file average person how to read until the industrial age came along, and they needed to teach us how to run the machines in factories. Learning to read helped facilitate that.
When we learn to read, we learn to recognize each letter in turn, and then learn how to say it, and then learn how to write it ourselves. We begin to associate letters with certain words, and with other groupings of letters. Are we learning to read, or are we learning symbolism?
The simple answer? Both.
For example, I'm willing to bet if I say the letter "A", you'll likely also think "red" and "apple." Somewhere later down the line as you get older, you'll also associate the color red with "stop," "blood," and "danger."
Language - all language - is coded. It's 'occult' (meaning hidden) until you learn it. We live in an age and time where most of the people around us know how to read and write - but even a hundred years ago, that wasn't the case. Some people could only write their names. Those who couldn't "made their mark."
We take both language and the written word for granted these days. We shouldn't. If you're magically inclined, you know that sigils can be quite powerful. Our thoughts, and the emotion and intent behind them, and the symbolism that underpins all of it is powerful as well. Ever think about the fact that when we're learning our ABC's, we're also learning how to spell words? You don't want your sigil grouping to be incorrect, now do you?
Every time we read something, there's a little bit of magic going on - even for people who don't believe in magic. Like Carl Sagan said, you can pick up a book, and know what someone a thousand years earlier thought. To me? That's magical. Every time we write something, we create. To my mind, it is when we create that we are our most magical. When I write - no matter what genre of book - it is a deliberate act of magic on my part, from my brain, straight into the brain of another, characters and all.
My grandmother told me once that "We don't DO magic. We ARE magic." Imagine, then, what we, all of us - as inherently magical human beings could do when we consciously add our own meaning and magic to the words we write, knowing that they are sigils, and pure symbolism.....
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