ThinkingSkull.com

I love finding little secret symbols throughout the world and, on occasion, I personally adopt one as a sort of signature. In my younger years, I was enthralled with the British metal band Iron Maiden (and still retain all of their original ‘heyday’ posters from “Powerslave” all the way to “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”). For those in the know, in addition to the skinless character of “Eddie,” there was a hidden little alchemical-like symbol on every poster. It later turned out be little more than a clever signature design by cover artist Derek Riggs.

Thinking it meant very little other than that (but still overjoyed that I had “discovered” it on my own), I started including the doodle design in the margin of homework papers and exams until one of the teaching assistants at my college started discovering them, too, and became convinced I was into worshipping the devil. This prompted a discussion with the instructor of my course, with whom I shared a laugh about the entire thing once I revealed the symbol’s source and intent, but the assistant was apparently genuinely frightened at the prospect. Interestingly, there are still people that contend that Riggs is a Satanist and that somehow his exploited signature logo is somehow a legitimate symbol for true Satanists. Funnier still, the band Iron Maiden itself wrote the song “The Number of the Beast” as an answer to critics that termed their self-involved heavy metal “The Devil’s Music.”

It was interesting to see that the power of symbology (or iconography) still persisted in the imagination, especially the ones who imagine a meaning rather than doing the research to discover the truth. I still have to laugh at the “professor of symbology” that Tom Hanks portrayed for the Ron Howard film The Da Vinci Code, but it did renew public interest in the thinking that went behind certain images. For my RPG project Kindling Moon, I designed an entire alphabet set and six elemental symbols to help define the look of the game and world setting and give it a fantasy Arabian flavor without simply stealing an established language.

For my movie review site MovieCrypt, I added an inverted star symbol behind the logo to give the word design a little extra styling. Why did I choose an inverted star? Hollywood has always depicted a five-pointed star as synonymous with celebrity (just look at the Hollywood Walk of Fame), but the horror genre has always been treated as the seedy underbelly of the industry (even lower than porn, but that’s a different story). Now, a pentagram (which is five interconnected lines and not merely five points) is considered a blessing or symbol of protection when upright (one point up) and a symbol of destruction (or “Satanic”) when turned down. So what better symbol for a horror/thriller review site than an inverted Hollywood star? Being as there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I like to ask people who point out the Satanic possibilities of the logo, “Don’t you have to sell your soul to make it in Hollywood?”

This brings me to my current pursuit. Writer Nancy Kilpatrick recently authored a book called “The goth Bible” (little ‘g’ in goth, and the book explains why), a work that goes a long way toward answering the question “Am I goth?” without merely resorting to the canned answer “If you think you might be goth, then you’re goth.” Among compilations of dark and twisty music, comics, movies, and other media, I came across, well, crosses, and lots of them. As it turns out, The Da Vinci Code left out a few dozen factual symbolic images that I’d imagine only the most devout Catholics are aware of. Apparently, the image of a crucifix as a symbol of Christianity is by no means the only cross in existence and, point in fact, the Vatican has a separate cross design representing their entire hierarchy, even a “Cross of Keys” representing the Vatican itself.

In this listing of crosses, however, I came across one particular image that stood out labeled only “Death.” Had the Vatican assigned a cross specifically to the Angel of Death, or was there an older meaning behind the image? Most crosses are viewed on horizontal and vertical planes, but this cross, like the St. Julian cross known more commonly as the symbol for multiplication, is a diagonal cross but with markings that look representationally like two crossed swords. The image of two crossed swords (hilts down) has also had historic meaning, specifically on the Jolly Roger, the infamous pirate flag, and the symbol for poison, being a Skull and Crossbones. Is it possible that the origin of the embattled crossed swords and/or the crossbones are actually a bastardization of this supposed Death Cross?

I haven’t found the answer yet, but the hunt is on!

Update: the hunt is over! Yep, “Death” has his own little representation as illustrated at Symbols.com, a very cool website for this kind of research. The Jolly Roger reference may be distant, but is certainly a close cousin since there is mention of the crossed swords and battlefield death associated with the emblem. Fortunately, no monks in robes have made an attempt on my life since the confirmation of this emblem, but then again no one had died in The Louvre after hours, ether…we think.