Part 12 of my sigil project, where I design emblems, sigils, seals, and runes for my favorite Marvel magic characters.
My focus, this time, is on prominent houngans, or Hatian Vodou practitioners. Jericho Drumm, aka Doctor Voodoo, and his late brother Daniel, are the most recognizable characters in this category. They share a mystical symbol-- a V-shaped forehead scar which Jericho inherited, along with his powers, after Daniel's death.
Andres Gastrade is a one-off character from Uncanny Avengers who was introduced as a retired superhero known as the Ghost Dancer. I wanted to include him because his presence deepens and expands the history of Vodou as an important magical force in the Marvel world. His symbol is also based on a forehead marking-- in this case, the ornate border of his skull mask.
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These name-sigils were inspired by vèvè-- pictorial seals which are used to name and summon individual Loa, similar to the Goetic seals I described in earlier posts. Vèvè designs have been closely linked to Nsibidi, a pictographic writing system from West Africa. I designed them using Ndebe, which is a modern syllabary based on Nsibidi, meant to help revive and decolonize the Ìgbò language. Ndebe allows names and modern words in a diverse range of dialects to be written in a non-white, non-Western alphabet, which I think is amazing!
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This is part 9 of my sigil project, where I design emblems, sigils, seals, and runes for my favorite Marvel magic characters. After doing the entire living Maximoff family, I thought it might be nice to design for their predecessors.
These designs were inspired by the dharmachakra, which has become a prominent cultural symbol of the Roma people, and is featured on the international Romani flag. I've also designed a pair of composite-letter name sigils using the Theban alphabet, which I'm using to distinguish "witch" characters from other types of magicians in the Marvel canon.
Speaking of witches, I also designed a similar sigil for Agatha Harkness, who was Natalya's peer and, later, a mentor to her daughter, Wanda. The emblem on the left is based on Agatha's brooch.
I recognize that Natalya is a polarizing character, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts, as a person of Roma descent, under the cut. I'll say up front that I, personally, get something out of bringing my perspective to imagery and narratives that are lacking in authenticity, but I respect that others may not feel the same way
Natalya Maximoff is depicted a Roma woman from a traveling community in the Balkan region. She died protecting her children from the High Evolutionary on Mount Wundagore, and the twins were subsequently adopted by Natalya's brother, Django, and his wife, Marya. While uncovering Natalya's past, Wanda learns that her mother practiced witchcraft as part of her family trade. Natalya was the Scarlet Witch of her time, and Django, who was a spiritual leader in his community, possessed mystical abilities as well. Wanda's magical aptitude is, therefore, hereditary, and we are meant to understand that the Scarlet Witch title is part of her cultural lineage.
This drew a lot of rightful criticism, particularly from Jewish and Roma readers. For one thing, the retcon removes the Maximoffs' Jewish ancestry, and distances them from representations of Romani Holocaust survivors. Natalya and Django are also played straight as mystical "gypsy" stereotypes, which are, unfortunately, more common in American media than any sort of accurate representation. That said, the circumstances of these characters' lives-- such as their lifestyles and the challenges they face-- are reflective of Romani history in that part of Europe. This is very similar to Doctor Doom's family-- under all of the fantasy and genre trappings, these stories demonstrate an awareness of class and race that is rarely afforded to Romani people in American media. Unfortunately, writers tend to overlook these details, which reduces the characters to racist tropes. Nevertheless, Saladin Ahmed's Quicksilver proved that these characters can be used for informative, meaningful representation-- you just have to do the research and be respectful.
The magic stuff is complicated, and I find that Roma tend to really differ on how it should be approached. No group is a monolith, least of all one so diverse and wide-spread. Here's what I know-- witchcraft is a part of Romani history. Divination, folk medicine, and even spellcasting are all trades that Roma families have historically practiced. Some of these skills, derived from ancestral knowledge, have been used for healing within communities, but they've also been used by entrepreneurial folks to make money and provide for their families. Roma have historically faced job and housing discrimination, so this just one way of the ways that they found to get by.
Now, the Marvel universe is a setting where magic is real and tangible, and witches have actual supernatural powers. It makes sense that real-world magical practices would be afforded the same type of power in the Marvel world-- families like the Maximoffs and von Dooms would, logically, exist in that setting. The problem, as always, is authenticity. If we're being honest, I think that Romani witch characters, like Wanda and Natalya, are going to persist in the media whether we like it or not. I'm more interested in creating an authentically Roma image of the heroic witch than I am in stamping that archetype out entirely.
Part 13 of my sigil project, where I design emblems, sigils, seals and runes for my favorite Marvel magic characters. I finally got around to the von Doom family!
Doctor Doom's late mother, Cynthia, was a witch who used her powers to protect her family and community. Cynthia kept all of her magical tools and texts in a chest, which Victor inherited after her death. Although Victor's magical expertise has far exceeded his mother's witchcraft, his origins as a sorcerer lie in that ancestral practice.
This design is based on two things: the Latverian flag under Doom's rulership, which mimics the shape of his mask; and a "w"-shaped emblem that has appeared on Cynthia's chest, and a number of Victor's other belongings, in various comics. It's a bit simple, but I like that it mirrors the "m" shape of the Maximoff crest.
As always, for witch characters, I created the name-sigils by compositing letters in the Theban alphabet. I'm particularly pleased with the swoopey line on Cynthia's :)
Part 7 of my project designing sigils, runes, and emblems for my favorite Marvel magic characters. You can check out the rest of my designs here.
The Faltine are described as "extra-dimensional energy beings" which originate from a distinct magical plane. Dormammu and his twin sister Umar were banished from their native realm and set about conquering the Dark Dimension, which Dormammu rules to this day. They're not demons, in the traditional sense, but the Dark Dimension has often been depicted as a Hell realm, so I thought it'd fun to design seals in the style of the Ars Goetia for them, similar to what I did with the Hellstrom siblings. Once again, the basis for each of these sigils is a kamea, or magic square, which is a mathematically-produced number grid that you can transpose letters onto in order to form an abstract shape.
[prev. post] Well,If we're looking specifically at sigils as occult or mystical devices, they are not meant to be representative images. They can be pictorial, as they may include recognizable symbols or even be designed in a representative shape, but they're not pictograms or illustrations. The body of the sigil is typically made up of text. You can think of them as written characters, rather than drawn pictures, which why I made a distinction between a proper sigil, and the Scarlet Witch symbol that was used in Trial.
Anyways, you got me thinking, so I designed a few different things, based on a few common types of sigils. The image on the left is a composite of the letters "W A N D A" in Theban script.* Think of this as Wanda's personal signature, which she might use to conclude a written spell, or close the loop on a magic circle. Letter composites like this are pretty common in modern-day mysticism, and were coincidentally popularized as a method of chaos magic. In the real world, "chaos magic" is very different from how Marvel comics describe it, but I digress.
The image on the right was designed as a seal to represent the title and station of the Scarlet Witch. Around the Middle Ages, and continuing through the Renaissance, magical seals, comprised of a sigil alongside other text and symbols within a circle or star, were used for a variety of occult purposes. Oftentimes, they represented the name of a supernatural entity which could be summoned or petitioned. I translated the phrase "scarlet witch"-- very roughly-- into a Romani dialect and plugged that into a kamea.** Unfortunately, the lines were mostly overlapped, which left me with a really simple shape, but I like my finished design. I did include the Scarlet Witch crest as a small symbol, and then I also added in the signature sigil to represent Wanda, specifically. If this were being used by a different character, like Billy or Natalya, I'd switch it out for their name instead.
Marvel actually uses a distinct rune cipher to write out spells and stuff in dialogue. It's based on Norse runes, specifically the elder futhark, but the letters are all switched around. I thought it would fun to make a sort of bindrune which reads "scarlet witch" in that cipher.
*Theban is just a cipher for the Latin alphabet that's used to encode magic writings. It's a few centuries old, but it doesn't have any inherent cultural significance.
**Kameas are number grids that you can use to plot the letters in a word or phrase as a series of lines. I think they're all supposed to follow the math principle of a "magic square" but I don't know if that's always the case. There are several different grids and several keys for converting letters to numbers.
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Part 3 of my little design project-- I've been making up emblems, sigils, bindrunes and such for Marvel magic characters. You can also use these as icons or phone backgrounds :)
The runes that I used on Loki and Leah's emblems are from War of the Realms-- they represent Jotunheim and Niflheim, respectively. Amora's emblem is taken directly from WoTR, as well, and Lorelei's is just a modification.
These bindrunes were made using the Marvel rune cipher.
You can check out the rest of my sigil project here
Part 8 of my project designing sigils, runes, and emblems for my favorite Marvel magic characters. You can check out the rest of my designs here.
These ones were really just for fun-- they're based on extremely minor characters from Doctor Strange (2016) and Scarlet Witch (2016). I just enjoy designing decorative masks :)
The skull design is based on the mask worn by Médico Místico, and the oval design is based on the mask worn by Professor Xu, who were both featured in Last Days of Magic.
The blue kitsune mask was inspired by Hiroshi Tanaka, the late Aoi Master from Scarlet Witch #10, who reincarnated as a fox after his untimely passing. The bian lian-inspired design on the bottom right is based on the August Wu, who appears Scarlet Witch #7. The current August Wu doesn't have a costume, but her predecessor is shown wearing what looks, to me, like an opera mask, so that's what I went with.
