# The occult symbols came from a character set

> Witch house iconography looks ancient and mostly isn't — triangles, crosses and ornaments pulled from Unicode because they were the strangest glyphs a keyboard could reach.

August 17, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/witch-house-occult-symbols

Thin white triangles, a few crosses, a row of moon phases, arranged symmetrically on black with a
lot of space around them.

It reads as occult. Most of it came from a font.

## Where did the symbols actually come from?

Typography, not grimoires.

The genre's visual language was assembled around 2010 from characters that happened to be
available: triangles, daggers, inverted crosses, ornamental dingbats, Unicode blocks that most
people had never had a reason to type. Band names were written with them deliberately to be
unsearchable.

That's a genuinely modern origin story wearing a very old costume, and knowing it makes the
aesthetic more interesting rather than less.

## Why does it work anyway?

Because symmetry and sparseness do the ritual work, not the symbols.

An arrangement that's perfectly mirrored, thinly drawn and surrounded by empty space reads as
deliberate and ceremonial regardless of what the marks mean. The eye interprets order plus
restraint as intent.

Which is why adding more symbols weakens it. Density reads as decoration; sparseness reads as
significance.

## What are the components?

Four, and three of them are about restraint.

- **Thin white line** — hairline weight, no fill, no shading.
- **Strict symmetry** about a vertical axis.
- **A great deal of empty ground**, more than feels comfortable.
- **A limited symbol set**: triangles, a cross, moon phases, one arc.

Colour is essentially absent. White or pale violet on black, and nothing else.

## Is there a risk of using symbols that mean something?

Yes, and it's worth taking seriously rather than waving away.

Some marks in this vocabulary are live religious or cultural symbols, and some are associated with
groups nobody wants to be mistaken for. Others are entirely typographic and mean nothing at all.

The safe and honest approach is the same as with script:
[know what it says](/stories/bilingual-text-on-a-shirt). If a symbol has a specific meaning
to a living tradition, either you know it and chose it, or you should use something else.

Invented sigils — a mark you constructed from lines rather than borrowed — avoid the question and
are more personal anyway.

## Can I use a band's symbol?

No. Several of these bands built their entire identity on a specific glyph arrangement, and those
function as marks.

The general vocabulary is free — triangles and moon phases belong to no one. What isn't free is a
particular arrangement associated with a particular act, which is exactly what the genre's naming
convention produced.

## Does this print well?

Technically it's the hardest register in this section, and the reason is line weight.

Hairline white on black is right at the boundary of what
[the weave can hold](/stories/bold-shapes-survive-fabric) — a line thinner than the yarn
breaks up into dashes. That's fatal here, because the whole effect depends on the lines being
clean and continuous.

The fix is counterintuitive: **make the lines heavier than looks correct on screen**. It'll still
read as thin at chest scale, and it'll actually be continuous.

## What subject can it carry?

Not much, and that's the constraint to design within.

This register can't render a creature, a scene or a face. It does one thing: arrange marks
symmetrically to imply significance. Anything that needs depiction belongs in another style.

Where it's strong is a personal sigil — a mark built from the lines that matter to somebody, which
looks like an occult symbol and is actually a private one. That's the version worth wearing.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the arrangement at [JustOG](/) — which marks, how sparse, and what the symmetry is about.
Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to
order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

It looks like it was dug up. It was typed.