The Freedom Sigil: The Living Fight to Become Who You Choose to Be

The symbol associated with Mathew Cage's Freedom EP is known as the Freedom Sigil.

At first glance, it is strange.

There is an eye at its center. Curving shapes surround it. There are teeth, a mouth, a tongue, and an expression that makes the entire thing appear less like an ordinary symbol and more like some strange little creature staring back at you.

That is intentional.

Because the Freedom Sigil isn't supposed to represent freedom as something passive.

It represents freedom as something alive.

And more importantly, it represents the idea that freedom is something we continuously have to discover, choose, create, defend, and sometimes fight for—even within ourselves.

Three Ideas Become One

The Freedom Sigil was created by combining concepts associated with three different forms of symbolism: Illusion, Divination, and Conjuration.

Within the philosophy of the sigil, those ideas take on slightly different meanings.

Illusion and Deception represent the things that distort our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Those deceptions can come from almost anywhere.

They can come from governments, institutions, advertising, culture, religion, communities, relationships, families, or people deliberately trying to manipulate us.

But deception doesn't always come from someone else.

Sometimes the most powerful lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Fear can lie to us.

Shame can lie to us.

Trauma can distort the way we see ourselves.

Guilt can convince us that we don't deserve happiness.

Isolation can make us believe nobody would understand us.

And sometimes we can spend years living according to an idea of who we are supposed to be without ever stopping long enough to ask whether that person is actually us.

That is where Divination enters the symbol.

Divination represents looking.

Questioning.

Learning.

Turning the eye inward as much as outward.

It represents the pursuit of truth even when finding that truth may be uncomfortable.

It asks:

What is actually real?

What do I actually believe?

Who am I when everyone else's expectations are removed?

What do I want my life to become?

And perhaps one of the hardest questions:

Am I willing to accept the answer if it changes everything?

Then comes Conjuration—or Manifestation.

Because recognizing the truth is not the same thing as living it.

Eventually, a choice has to become an action.

Manifestation represents taking what you have discovered, deciding what you are going to do with it, and making that choice real.

See.

Understand.

Choose.

Create.

That progression sits at the heart of the Freedom Sigil.

Why the Symbol Is Alive

Then I did something that wasn't part of any existing symbolic language.

I gave it a personality.

The Freedom Sigil has teeth.

It has a tongue.

It has a mouth.

Its eye doesn't simply sit at the center of an abstract design. The entire thing looks like it could suddenly move.

That is because freedom is a living fight.

Freedom is not a trophy that humanity wins once and places on a shelf.

It doesn't work that way for societies.

It doesn't work that way for relationships.

And it doesn't work that way for individuals.

Circumstances change.

People change.

We learn things.

We make mistakes.

We grow.

We encounter new pressures and new expectations.

Sometimes we even discover that something we once chose freely no longer represents who we are.

Freedom therefore requires the ability not only to choose, but also to change.

The Freedom Sigil is alive because freedom must be alive.

What Freedom Means to Me

This philosophy isn't abstract to me.

One of the clearest examples in my own life is the fact that I am transgender.

For a significant portion of my life, the person everyone saw and the person I was expected to be did not completely reflect the person I would eventually understand myself to be.

Transition required questioning.

It required looking inward.

It required separating what other people expected of me from what I actually felt.

It required confronting fear.

It required learning.

And eventually, it required making a choice.

That choice wasn't simply, “I am transgender.”

Realizing something about yourself is only the beginning.

There is another question afterward:

What am I going to do with that knowledge?

For me, transition became an act of manifestation.

Changing how I presented myself.

Changing how I lived.

Allowing myself to become more feminine.

Allowing the person inside of me to increasingly become the person that other people actually see.

Choosing the name Alissa.

Choosing how I wanted to express myself.

Choosing to pursue a life in which I could look in the mirror and increasingly recognize the person looking back at me.

None of that means the journey suddenly became easy.

That is exactly why I connect it with the Freedom Sigil.

Freedom didn't arrive one morning as a finished product.

I had to discover parts of myself.

I had to question things.

I had to make decisions.

I had to live with those decisions.

I had to change.

I am still changing.

And I am still becoming.

That, to me, is freedom.

Freedom Is Not the Absence of Responsibility

There is an important distinction here.

Freedom does not mean freedom from consequences.

It doesn't mean that every decision is automatically good because someone freely made it.

It doesn't mean that our choices cannot affect other people.

And it certainly doesn't mean that nobody should ever be challenged.

If anything, genuine freedom demands responsibility.

If I claim ownership over my life, then I also have to accept ownership of the decisions I make with it.

I have to be willing to question myself.

I have to recognize when I am wrong.

I have to learn.

I have to grow.

And sometimes I have to admit that the person deceiving me was me.

That is why Deception remains part of the Freedom Sigil.

Freedom isn't merely escaping someone else's lies.

Sometimes it is escaping our own.

The Cages Aren't Always Visible

That idea connects directly to Mathew Cage.

Mathew's music is built around internal battles.

His cages are not necessarily made from steel.

They can be fear.

Shame.

Guilt.

Trauma.

Anger.

Isolation.

Dependency.

Relationships.

Expectations.

The belief that you aren't good enough.

The belief that you deserve whatever is hurting you.

Or even the belief that asking someone else for help somehow makes you weaker.

Some cages are built around us.

Some cages are built for us.

And some cages are built by us.

That makes freedom much more complicated than simply breaking something and walking away.

Sometimes you have to realize that you're inside the cage first.

Sometimes you have to discover that the door was never locked.

Sometimes you have to find the key.

And sometimes you have to build the damn key yourself.

That journey is a major part of what Freedom represents within Mathew Cage's story.

It is not simply rebellion.

It is discovery.

The Freedom Sigil Does Not Tell You What to Believe

This may be the most important part of the entire symbol.

The Freedom Sigil does not tell you what conclusion you are required to reach.

If it did, it would contradict itself.

Its message is not:

Believe what I believe.

Its message is:

Look.

Question.

Learn.

Think.

Choose.

And then have the courage to live according to that choice.

Two people can sincerely go through that process and reach different conclusions.

That is part of free will.

The philosophy only asks that the choice genuinely belongs to you.

Not because somebody frightened you into it.

Not because somebody manipulated you into it.

Not because somebody told you that questioning them was forbidden.

Not because you were ashamed of the alternative.

And not because living as yourself would make somebody else uncomfortable.

Your life should ultimately be something you participate in creating.

Freedom Is the Right to Become

That may ultimately be what the Freedom Sigil means to me more than anything else.

Freedom is ownership of your life.

The freedom to see.

The freedom to question.

The freedom to choose.

The freedom to love.

The freedom to change.

And the freedom to become.

That last one matters.

We sometimes talk about identity as though every person is supposed to discover one final, perfectly finished version of themselves and remain that person forever.

But human beings don't work like that.

We're alive.

We change.

So freedom has to leave room for becoming.

The woman I am today exists because an earlier version of me was eventually willing to question who she had been told she was supposed to be.

The woman I become years from now may look back at me today and recognize that there was still so much more to discover.

That's okay.

That isn't a failure to know myself.

That is what being alive looks like.

And that is why the Freedom Sigil itself is alive.

The eye represents seeing beyond deception.

Divination represents seeking understanding.

Manifestation represents turning choice into reality.

And the creature created by those pieces represents something larger than all three:

Free will.

Not freedom without responsibility.

Not freedom from consequence.

Not a command to agree with me.

The freedom to examine the world.

The freedom to examine yourself.

The freedom to decide what you believe is right.

The freedom to change your mind when you discover something new.

And the freedom to take what you have discovered and make a life out of it.

The Freedom Sigil is not the symbol of a fight that eventually ends.

Because as long as there are people discovering who they are, questioning what they have been told, breaking out of cages, creating new lives, and protecting the ability of others to do the same—

the fight for freedom is alive.