Unsanctioned Sigils

Unsanctioned Sigils are sigils applied, inscribed, or permitted to persist without a validating entry in the Register of Authorized Marks, and are catalogued throughout the Tower as a class of Conditional Sigil known chiefly by what they lack. The term is administrative rather than material: an unsanctioned sigil is often indistinguishable in cut, pigment, and comportment from its sanctioned counterpart, and in many recorded cases the two were struck from the same plate on the same afternoon. What distinguishes them is provenance of permission, not quality of workmanship. The Grand Taxonomy files them under Primary Index M-7, "Unsanctioned Actualizations," a heading whose wording has itself been contested in the Ninth Concordance and again, more bitterly, in the Eleventh.

Definition and scope

The Tower recognises two broad families. The first comprises sigils made without reference to the Register at all — struck in unlicensed scriptoria, copied from pattern-books of doubtful lineage, or improvised on the spot by persons who later described themselves as unaware that a form existed for the purpose. The second, and by most accounts the larger, comprises sigils that were properly authorized at the time of their cutting but whose entries have since lapsed through non-renewal, mis-filing, flood, or the loss of the floor on which the entry was kept. The distinction matters, because the Fourth Concordance holds that a sigil does not become unsanctioned through the failure of its paperwork, while the Seventh Concordance holds precisely the opposite and adds, in Annex 2, that "the mark that cannot be found in the Register is not a mark but a rumour."

Unsanctioned sigils are to be distinguished from Tactile Sigils, which are a category of practice defined by their mode of contact, and from Pressure-Gradient Sigils, which carry the scale for measuring carat-span in etched markings. An unsanctioned sigil may be tactile, pressure-gradient, or neither; the classification runs on a separate axis and does not exclude the others.

Classification and the Register

Under the Dewey-Sigil System, unsanctioned sigils are classified as Conditional Sigils, alongside Buttress Sigils and the pressure-gradient family. This placement is accepted in practice but has never been formally reconciled with Certification of Integrated Sigils, which presumes that any sigil submitted for integration already holds a Register entry. Clerks of the Registry Office have adopted the working habit of classifying first and certifying never, a sequence the Office defends as "efficient and, in the present state of the archive, unavoidable" (Registry Office, internal memorandum of 14 March, unsigned).

The Register's coverage is uneven by floor. Floors whose names are recorded in full tend to hold complete entries; floors numbered but unnamed frequently hold none, and the Registry has adopted the position that an unnamed floor cannot be said to have authorized anything. Sigils recovered from such floors are therefore unsanctioned by default, whatever their appearance. A survey conducted by the Skeptical Cartographers' Guild in the winter of the year 412 found that of 1,180 sigils examined on unnamed floors, 1,143 carried no entry, and the remaining 37 carried entries on other floors, which the Guild described as "worse."

Prevalence and practical handling

Most unsanctioned sigils are harmless and are left in place. The Tower's ordinary maintenance practice is to note them in the floor ledger and proceed; removal is reserved for sigils judged active, meaning those that continue to confirm a process after the process has ended. The distinction is difficult to draw and the resulting disputes are frequent. On Floor 908, in the winter of the year 419, a clerk named Ovrin Sable removed what he took to be an active unsanctioned sigil from a Buttress Juncture and was obliged to spend the following nine months restoring the junction by hand, the sigil having been a sanctioned Buttress Sigil whose ledger page had been mis-bound into the volume for Floor 906. Sable's account of the affair, submitted to the Librarians in triplicate, remains the standard citation on the danger of over-removal.

Where a sigil is found to be genuinely active and unsanctioned, the customary remedy is over-inscription: a sanctioned Operational Sigil is applied over the original to confirm its completion and hold that completion against reversal. This is not always successful. Over-inscription on a sigil of unknown origin may produce a composite mark that satisfies neither the Register nor the floor, and the resulting object is typically logged and left alone. No one is required to explain it. In the year 431 the Registry issued a general instruction that composite marks be photographed and filed without further inquiry, and this instruction has not been rescinded.

Disputes between the Concordances

The central disagreement concerns what an unsanctioned sigil actually does. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, treats unsanctioned marks as inert — "a shape without office, which confirms nothing and holds nothing" — and on this basis permits their indefinite persistence. The Fifth Concordance takes the opposite view, holding that a sigil works by its cutting and not by its permission, and that an unsanctioned sigil therefore operates fully and without supervision. The two positions have never been resolved, and the Registry has quietly adopted the Fifth's premise for purposes of caution while citing the Third in its correspondence.

"The mark is not made lawful by our looking at it, nor unlawful by our looking away. We record what we find. The finding is the whole of our authority."

— Fifth Concordance, Annex 1

This passage is quoted in nearly every Registry ruling on the subject and is, by the admission of the Registry itself, contradicted four pages later by the same document.

Disputes over classification

A secondary controversy concerns the boundary between unsanctioned sigils and the related heading of Spontaneous Reclamation, under which sigils that reappear after documented removal are treated as new marks requiring fresh authorization. The Heretical Cartographers have argued, in a series of unlicensed pamphlets circulated on Floors 300–312, that the distinction is meaningless: a mark that returns is the same mark, and the Register's insistence on treating it as new is a device for inflating the count of authorized marks. The Eleventh Concordance rejects this in terms that are unusually direct for a Concordance, calling the argument "a confusion of the object with the record of the object, which confusion the Tower does not permit."

In practice the dispute is settled by whoever is holding the ledger. The Registry's own guidance to field clerks is a single sentence, repeated in three successive editions of the handbook: "When in doubt, log the mark and move on."

Related holdings

Unsanctioned sigils are catalogued in proximity to the Heraldic Sigils of the Sigils of the Obsidian Guard, which are the most prominent example of that class and are, for that reason, frequently cited by clerks as the standard against which irregularity is measured. Readers pursuing the distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned marks are directed to Sigils, Delta (Δ) Sigil, and the records of the Candlemark Choir, whose members have on several occasions been found in possession of marks they could not account for. The Descents Practice maintains its own, separate register, which the Registry does not recognize and has never asked to see.