Last month, I was fiddling around with the glyphs I had come up with for my books from the Realm War Chronicles, and came up with an idea for a unified trilogy set of covers. I really liked them and so showed them to some family members. They liked them too, but more than one person pointed out that the symbol on the first book, Muspell’s Sons, looked really close to the Deathly Hallows symbol from Harry Potter.

I explained that the reason these two symbols were so similar was probably because they were both derived from the symbol used by real world alchemists to represent the Philosopher’s Stone. But since Harry Potter is such a titan, I promised to see if I could alter my symbol to look less like the Deathly Hallows.

I tried a variety of different alternatives, but the more I changed, the more I wished that I could just keep my original symbol. I didn’t just scribble it out of nowhere, and I wasn’t copying the Deathly Hallows. My pharmakon symbol is different enough, I think, and has plenty of in-world history of its own.

It combines the philosopher’s stone symbol (which was a theoretical substance that practitioners of alchemy thought would turn lead to gold) with the Greek letter phi, which in mathematics represents the Golden Ratio.

My idea was that the pharmakons of old decided that the Philosopher’s Stone was not a substance but a person, and instead of turning actual lead to gold, it was a person who could turn bad situations into better situations, via their actions and with the aid of their powers. Thus, the symbol for a pharmakon was born.

So even though it does kind of look like the Deathly Hallows symbol, I am not going to change it. It works for my world and I’m happy with it.

I’m not worried. As far as I know, nobody from hundreds of years ago patented the Philosopher’s Stone symbol, and mine is different enough from the Deathly Hallows. Besides, if we throw out every idea that resembles something made by someone else, we’d have no art left in the world.