#sigilry

My husband and I collaborated on this enchanted clay plaquette recently, and I'm quite pleased with it.

Tom Miller clearly planned these two novels stupendously, and I found myself wanting to put everything together in order so I could follow the timeline the way he intended. Hope someone else finds this helpful!

In which magic, history, flying sports, romance, science, heroism, and women’s rights combine in glorious fashion

The Philosopher’s Flight is a delightful, fantastical, and magical coming of age story.  In Miller’s version of the world, “empirical philosophy” is a practice dominated by women that is a mix between magic and science; these “philosophers,” or sigilrists, as they’re often called, use powders and drawn “sigils” to let them “hover” or fly, carve smoke, transport from place to place (like teleportation), freeze human motor functions to put people in “stasis,” and much more. Narrator Robert Weekes grew up the son of one of the best hoverers in Montana (and probably the country), and since he was a young boy, he had dreamed of following in his mother’s footsteps and becoming part of the U.S. Sigilry Corps’s Rescue and Evacuation team, where only the best and bravest philosophers have flown.  As a male, however, this is viewed as impossible; men just can’t perform empirical philosophy like women can.

But as in any patriarchal society, the philosophers are not without opposition.  The Trenchers, groups mainly of men who believe that empirical philosophy is against God’s word and should be made illegal—and that the woman’s place is in the home—are riled up and out for blood as our story begins, and it is because of a tragic event involving Trencher terrorists that Robert Weekes becomes a hometown hero and is given the chance to get a scholarship to Radcliffe, a women’s college and a premier school for sigilrists. Robert finds opposition everywhere he turns at Radcliffe, but he does not give up on his goal to become a part of Rescue and Evac.  To even earn the recognition that would get him an interview with R & E, though, he must find a way to compete in the inter-collegiate General’s Cup, an Olympics-style competition for philosophers.  And of course, what would a coming-of-age story be without a love interest?  Over the course of the school year, Robert falls for Danielle Hardin, war hero and transport sigilrist extraordinaire, but will their love survive the political turmoil surrounding Danielle and Robert’s impossible dreams?

I absolutely loved reading this books and learning about how history would be different if empirical philosophy were a real practice.  There are such great little details that you pick up—like women already having the vote in the 1800s, for example—that it’s impossible not to be absolutely floored by the insane amount of time and research it must have taken Miller to put this whole book together.  Robert is a darling narrator who is so easy to empathize with; I honestly don’t think the story would have worked half as well from any other character’s perspective or if it had been written in third person.  And the quotes from characters and excerpts from textbooks and articles created for the beginning of each chapter are ingenious.  Not only do they immerse you in Robert’s world, they let you see into what the future holds for Robert and empirical philosophy as a practice. Similarly, the inclusion of pages at the end f the novel taken from a “textbook” of sigils that Robert helps to write is incredibly fascinating, finally giving the reader visual representations of the symbols sigilrists use for their different tasks.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the novel was the thought put behind how gender dynamics would work in this alternate universe.  The dedication page is great—apparently one of Miller’s friends or colleagues had asked why his stories never feature women, and this novel, though told from a male perspective, is all about strong women and the struggles they face in early twentieth century society, which, despite the respect most people have for the philosophers, is still a world run by men, where women and their “witchcraft” are often feared.  Miller does an excellent job of thinking out the nuances of how a society where powerful women are given a chance to take charge would differ from our own.  It’s also a very interesting way to look at how, for most of Western history, women were seen as the inherently inferior sex; if you were a woman, you just couldn’t compete with men.  In Robert’s world, he is seen as naturally inferior because men just are naturally worse than women at empirical philosophy, and Miller hits the nail on the head of how, for example, women who fought and flew in the World Wars must have felt trying to break into these fields dominated by the opposite gender who saw them as naturally incapable.

However, Miller is also not blind to how these situations would obviously be different as well. Robert’s roommate, another male at Radcliffe, Unger, has a younger sister who wants to go to Harvard, and after he and Robert are targeted in the cafeteria on their first day at school, Unger shudders to think of the kind of treatment his sister would get being the first woman at male-dominated Harvard.  The threat of sexual violence and the way that people like the Trenchers use the Bible to remove women’s autonomy and classify them as the submissive sex are still very real for the women in the novel, and I appreciated Miller’s effort to show that while Robert can metaphorically stand in for the women who had to break into the public sphere in a patriarchal society, he enjoys privileges as a white male in a country that still holds the white male as the standard, making his transition into the female-dominated world of empirical philosophy much easier.  

As part of a specific rite we undertook for Hollantide/Hallowe'en, we created this Jack-O-Lantern, inscribed with a compound-sigil that was generated using the ideographic sigilry my husband developed.