Modern symbolism

Symbols and beliefs that have taken on new meaning in recent decades, and where each one came from.

Every symbol in this collection is an older sign that took on a new meaning in the twentieth or twenty-first century, and each page says who gave it that meaning and when. Angel numbers are repeating sequences such as 111 that some people read as messages. Modern symbols has six pages on signs from magic, physics and recent movements.

Numbers read as messages

In Healing with the Angels (1999), Doreen Virtue wrote that angels “subtly whisper in your ear so you’ll look up in time to notice the clock’s time”. The number pages, beginning with 111, give what Virtue and later writers say each sequence means, as their belief.

From a spirit’s seal to a personal sigil

The Goetia, a catalogue of spirits, gives each one a fixed seal: “This is his seal.” In The Book of Pleasure (1913), Austin Osman Spare made the sigil something each practitioner draws from the letters of a wish: “Sigils are monograms of thought”. The Illuminates of Thanateros, a chaos magic order founded in 1978, drew on his work.

A thought experiment turned shorthand

Erwin Schrödinger’s 1935 paper put a cat in a steel chamber, as one of the “quite ridiculous cases” the theory allows. Paul Halpern, writing for NOVA, found that the cat was scarcely mentioned from then until Schrödinger’s death in 1961. It now turns up in The Big Bang Theory and Futurama and on T-shirts.

Signs taken up by movements

John Wallis first used the infinity sign in 1655. In 2005 autistic advocates developed a rainbow version, which Aimee Grant says stands for the neurodivergent community; the gold autism infinity symbol takes its colour from Au, the chemical symbol for gold. In April 2013 Amy Bleuel asked anyone who had struggled with mental illness to draw a semicolon on their wrist; as The Washington Post put it, the semicolon “symbolized that a sentence wasn’t over yet, and neither was their life.” In the United States, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is free and confidential: call, text or chat 988, at any hour.

The evil eye and the hamsa today

Two older symbols have their own pages elsewhere on this site. Curationist reports that the blue evil eye bead has become more commercially popular in recent years, particularly in North America. My Jewish Learning says that the hamsa, an open hand, “today has become a Jewish and Israeli symbol”.

Sources

Number Sequences From The Angels, Doreen Virtue; the page gives it as a book excerpt from Healing with the Angels (Hay House, 1999), Spirit Library (spiritlibrary.com), Number Sequences; Number Combinations
Healing with the angels: how the angels can assist you in every area of your life, Doreen Virtue; Internet Archive catalogue record, Internet Archive, Catalogue record (publication date, publisher)
Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis Rex, Part 1: Goetia, Digital edition by Joseph H. Peterson, 1999, updated 2026; transcribed from British Library Sloane MS 3825, Esoteric Archives, Introduction; spirits 1 and 3
The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, by Austin Osman Spare, First published London, 1913; sacred-texts.com transcription (Internet Archive copy, January 2025), sacred-texts.com, Chapter “Sigils. Belief with protection”
The Book of Pleasure, Publisher’s page for its edition of Spare’s book, Jerusalem Press
Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT), From John Michael Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (2006), Occult World
The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s “Cat Paradox” Paper, John D. Trimmer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (5), 1980, pp. 323–338, American Philosophical Society (copy hosted by the Universidade Estadual de Campinas), Introduction and §5
Schrödinger’s Cat Lives On (Or Not) at the Age of 80, Paul Halpern, 10 November 2015, NOVA, PBS
Infinity, J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
Why the autism jigsaw puzzle piece is such a problematic symbol, Aimee Grant, Swansea University, 10 April 2025, The Conversation
‘And your story will live on’: Remembering Amy Bleuel, mental health advocate and founder of Project Semicolon, Colby Itkowitz, 30 March 2017, The Washington Post
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Get Help, 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
Protection from the Evil Eye, Reina Gattuso, September 2025, Curationist, editorial feature
What Is A Hamsa?, My Jewish Learning, article

Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research