Magic Words & Symbols Spotted in the Wild

Bell, Book, and Candle

The ever-charming Futility Closet notes that in the Wingdings font, characters 0×25, 0×26, and 0×27 depict a bell, a book, and a candle.

The phrase "bell, book, and candle" traces back to a 9th century excommunication ritual in which ringing a bell evokes a death toll, closing a religious text symbolizes separation from the church, and snuffing out a candle symbolizes the excommunicant's soul being extinguished.

The Spiritual Quest Has Been Lost and Forgotten

Camille Paglia on the danger of flippantly rejecting religion:

A responsible atheist needs to be informed about religion in order to reject it. But the shallow, smirky atheism that’s au courant is simply strengthening the power of the Right. Secular humanism is spiritually hollow right now because art is so weak. If you don’t have art as a replacement for the Bible, then you’ve got nothing that is culturally sustaining. If all you have is “Mad Men” and the Jon Stewart “Daily Show,” then religion is going to win, because people need something as a framework to understand life. Every great religion contains enormous truths about the universe. That’s why my ’60s generation followed the Beat movement toward Zen Buddhism and then opened up that avenue to Hinduism — which is why the Beatles went to India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Then it all disappeared, when people became disillusioned with gurus. But spiritual quest was one of the great themes of the ’60s that has been lost and forgotten — that reverent embrace of all the world religions. This is why our art has become so narrow and empty. People in the humanities have sunk into this shallow, snobby, liberal style of stereotyping religious believers as ignorant and medieval, which is total nonsense. And meanwhile, the entire professional class in Manhattan and Los Angeles is doping themselves on meds and trying to survive in their manic, anxiety-filled world. And what are they producing that is of the slightest interest? Nothing. Nothing is being produced in movies or the fine arts today (except in architecture) that is not derivative of something else.

Magic, Science, and Religion

"He began to think that even though magic, and science, and religion did not all mean the same thing, they all meant in the same way." —John Crowley, The Solitudes