Last night I got caught in a bit of a brainstorm about this weird pictogram that JK and I accidentally spotted recently. I was pondering the letters that had appeared to me in a dream that same night as a domain name which I’d purchased and built a website of some kind on. The site name was smlttr.com or something similar.

At first I didn’t there was any connection between the two, but after some careful mental wrangling, I came up with a very interesting (if highly speculative) one. This graphic ought to illustrate it adequately:

As you can see, the theory that I am toying with is that my subconscious mind somehow decoded a series of letters which had been hidden within the shapes in this pictogram. Admittedly, it’s a crazy theory, but it makes as much sense as anything I’ve heard so far. I’m not really sure I believe it, but I’m seeing where it takes me.

Where it takes me is the chaos magic technique of creating sigils out of words, as described by Grant Morrison in this Pop Magic essay (scroll down to where it says “sigils”). To give a generic overview to the whole thing, you create the sigil as a sort of seed around which to focus magical intention. You start with a phrase which encapsulates your desire, such as:

WIN LOTTERY

And then you remove vowels, spaces and repeated letters:

WNLTRY

From there, you abstract it even further, creating what Morrison refers to as “an appropriately witchy-looking glyph”, like this:

It’s a pretty open-ended thing to create a sigil, but you can see in that example how the letter-forms are all sort of mashed together. And the whole thing becomes rather similar to the pictogram we found on the rock the other night. Is it possible the symbol we saw was some kind of sigil or encoded communication and that my mind reverse-engineered it to the source? Who knows! But it’s a fun theory to explore.

What would the next steps of such a theory entail? Well, one might to try to add back in the vowels which had been removed. It’s difficult to do, because we don’t know where the spaces are supposed to fall if any. Plus there is the possibility that the letters are out of sequence and need to be put in their proper order. If we just play fast and loose, we could come up with a few different possibilities:

SAME LETTER
SMILE TATER
SIMULATOR
SIMILARITY

You’ll see that I dropped letters and moved things around in a couple of those. But you get the idea. From here, we could pick one and test the new results using a trusty anagram server, which will dish out a list of possible permutations using our new consonant-vowel combinations. Using the string “SAME LETTER” as our base, we come to a number of interesting possibilities:

SEATTLE MER

Jumped out at me of course, since we saw this pictogram in Seattle, close to the waterfront (”mer” is “sea” in French, I believe). Another fun one:

LAME STREET

We saw this symbol on a street full of hospitals, lame meaning disabled, unable to move around: sick. And another great one for the skeptics:

REALMS TETE

Another French word, “tete” means “head.” Realms of the head - it’s all in my head. A very real possibility which is not lost on me.

In any event, there are a number of other ways we could try to decode these strings. If we go back to our original SMLTTR, we could apply what’s called a substitution cipher to it. Ciphers are used in cryptography to create and break codes. There’s one called the Caesar substitution cipher which would render our letters as follows (using one of many possible starting points):

S=V, M=P, L=O, T=W, T=W, R=U - which leaves us with the string: VPOWWU

Now, our anagram server returns no results for that particular set of letters. More interesting though is that those letters give us what’s called a Google Whack - a single result in Google’s search. Weirdly enough, the single page containing this text is on NASA, on a page of seemingly meaningless data with the unusual title of “SIMPLE = T / FITS FILE: MLSO/ACOS BITPIX = 16 / 2-BYTE SIGNED“.

Also strange is that part of the URL for that file includes a folder titled “/synoptic/”. The term is most commonly used Biblically: “The Synoptic Problem concerns the literary relationship between the first three “synoptic” gospels of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, and Luke”, but there is also a meterological definition which seems more likely given NASA’s interests: “Of or relating to data obtained nearly simultaneously over a large area of the atmosphere.”

In any event, the point I’m trying to make here is that you could spin these results in any number of different directions. We could also substitute SMLTTR for their corresponding numerical positions in the alphabet: S=19, M=13, L=12, T=20, T=20, R=18, which strung together give us the digits: 191312202018 (no results on Google). Or we could add the number pairs for each letter: 1+9 = 10, 1+3=4, 1+2=3, 2+0=2, 1+8=9. The results we would get then by stringing those together would be: 1043229. This yields a few interesting results on Google, but nothing substantial. I was sort of secretly hoping that it would turn out to be somebody’s phone number. Although, if you reverse the string to 922-3401 and then Google it, you do get some numbers, the first of which is a wanted list from a sheriff’s office in Leon County, Florida.

So, to reiterate, my point is that you could spin these threads all day and all night, but without more to go on, without some kind of additional key to guide us interpreting this pictogram and text, we’ll never know what it means. If anything. In my opinion though, this type of thinking, the methodology that I have illustrated here is still extremely useful. The point is to get your mind juiced up on making connections and turning information over in a multitude of ways. If you’re good at it, you could easily begin to draw narrative threads out of all the information that you filter in this way. In my opinion, the important thing is not to necessarily believe in that narrative or the “facts” that you uncover, but simply to go through the process of uncovering them. Very likely the sheer act of doing it is more important than the interpretations you’ll come up with.

Or maybe I’m just lying to you because I cracked the code and figured it all out. You’ll never know unless you have a crack at it yourself, I guess…

ciphers, codes, cryptography, interpretations, meaning, numerology, puzzles, signs, symbols