“What’s Past Is Prologue”

“What’s past is prologue” – The Tempest, Act 2, Scene I

In Act 2, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, our shipwrecked noble conspirators discuss whether or not what has happened in the past — the prologue of their current circumstance — is a reasonable justification for committing a politically expedient murder. That may seem like a strange thing to make into a sigil, but as is often the case with the words of the Bard of Avon, the villains tend to get the best lines. The scheming Antonio is wrong about the whole killing thing, obviously, but he’s dead right about the past. It’s the choices we make in the here and now that matter. Everything that happened before this moment is simply backstory and context for the decisions that will define us in the days ahead.

We aren’t bound by the past. In a very real way, the past is just a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the present. If that past we’ve lived is traumatic, filled with regret, or simply just not a good reflection of the people we want to be, we can always chose to leave it behind. It becomes the prologue to a new story — perhaps a truly grand and epic one — that starts right here, and right now.

That’s the core concept that this sigil speaks to.