About this lexicon

What a page is for

Each page answers a plain question first: what the mark is, and where that use starts. Later meanings are dated as later. A tattoo, a logo, and a temple relief can share a shape without sharing a century. The gloss under the name is a reading. The sentences under “meaning” are the claim a search can check.

Sources

A source is listed when the entry depends on a named text, a dated object, or a standard such as Unicode. Pages without a list are not unsourced inventions. They are readings of public tradition where pinning a single shelfmark would be false precision. Catalog numbers are not invented to look cited.

The site does not pretend to be a wiki you can edit. Notes you write stay on your device. They are not the canon and they are not indexed.

Hard histories

Some marks were occupied. The svastika page keeps the older religious use and says, in the same entry, what the twentieth century did with a related emblem. Vegvísir is a nineteenth-century manuscript sign, not a Viking archaeological find. Elder Futhark is an alphabet; a few of its letters were later used as slogans, including by the SS. Baphomet as a picture is Lévi in the 1850s; the inverted pentagram with a goat is a 1960s sigil, not a medieval idol. The inverted cross here is Peter’s, from the tradition that he was crucified head-down, not a general confession of Satanism.

Drawings

The line drawings are made for this lexicon. You may reuse one if you link back to its page on symbol.wiki. They are not museum photographs, and they are not copies of a living organization’s logo.