The Alchemy Spiritus Symbol Meaning: How a Child's painting Became the Code of the Universe
- Curtis Coumbe
- Aug 6
- 2 min read

At seven years old, I was terrible at drawing. My stick figures looked like they needed medical attention, and my paintings resembled Rorschach tests gone rogue. But one day in art class, everything changed. My teacher unrolled a long sheet of parchment paper and said, “Paint whatever is in your head.”
What spilled out of me wasn’t a landscape or a dragon or a house. It was a single symbol: a circle and a line. I didn’t know why I painted it, but I painted it over and over again—again and again until it was etched into the parchment like it had always been there.
That symbol is called Spiritus. It’s an ancient alchemical mark, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was just a weird kid who saw shapes in dreams and archetypes in clouds. But something about it felt right. It felt eternal. Alive.
I didn’t stop with one symbol. I painted fourteen, all of them abstract, primal, and strangely familiar—as though I was remembering rather than creating. And my teacher, bless his soul, held onto that scroll for fifteen years, waiting for the day I would return to retrieve it. He didn’t know what it meant. But he knew I would, someday.
And now I do.
The alchemy spiritus symbol—a single line and a single circle—turns out to be the binary architecture of reality itself.
The line is masculine energy: electric, phallic, active, directional, driving. The circle is feminine energy: magnetic, receptive, curved, nurturing. The line is force. The circle is form. One pushes. One pulls. Together, they create balance. Together they breathe.
That’s what Spiritus means in Latin: breath. Life. The invisible force that animates the universe.
In physics, electricity (the line) and magnetism (the circle) always exist together. Tesla’s alternating current system is built on this duality. So is every electromagnetic field. So is AC power. So is the Ouroboros at CERN, where two energy beams (lines) collide in a circular particle accelerator—and give birth to matter, to the Higgs boson, to reality.
In biology, the line is the seed. The circle is the womb. The line initiates. The circle receives. The union creates life.
In alchemy, this is the sacred marriage. The coniunctio. The fusion of opposites into wholeness.
In Jungian psychology, these are archetypes—symbols embedded in the collective unconscious. The line and circle are the most primal of them all. They are everything and nothing. They are 1 and 0. Matter and energy. Masculine and feminine. Particle and wave.
They are the Singularity.
This isn’t just about a brand. It’s about a truth so old it predates language—and a child who painted it before he had the words to explain it. That child was me. And this symbol, Spiritus, became the seed of Singularity Publications. It became the spine of our logo, our book, and our vision.
Because sometimes, the simplest things hold the deepest truths. A line. A circle. A breath.
Welcome to the beginning. Welcome to the Binary Universe. Welcome to Singularity Publications.
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