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The Circle-A is almost certainly the best-known present-day symbol for anarchy. It is a monogram that consists of the capital letter "A" surrounded by the capital letter "O". The letter "A" is derived from the first letter of "anarchy" or "anarchism" in most European languages and is the same in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The "O" stands for order. Together they stand for "Anarchy is Order" the first part of a Proudhon quote.[1]
This character can be written as Unicode codepoint U+24B6. In addition, the "@" sign or "(A)" can be used to quickly represent the circle-A on a computer.
Pre-Anarchist usage
An early occasion when the encircled A was used was in Stephan Michelspacher book Spiegel der Kunst und Natur (The Mirror of Art and Nature) which was published in Augsburg 1615. This was an Alchemical work strongly influenced by Agrippa's view of the Kabbalah and magic. Adam McLean describes the centre panel as "two circular diagrams with the German GOTT (the name of God) around the outside, and also the Alpha and Omega @ and the monograph which may be the name of God, Agla.[1] This represents the beginning - alpha - within the end - omega (the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. This relates to the claim related in the Book of Revelation that Jesus was "the "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last" (22.13). Many Anarchists have been Freemasons, and rosicrucian imagery of this type was used by the Golden Dawn. The Anarchist (and police spy) Theodor Reuss was associated with William Wynn Westcott, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, before setting up the Ordo Templi Orientis. Two offshoots of this - Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis and Aleister Crowley's Thelema used the formulation "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", which many have taken up as an anarchist slogan.
History of Anarchist usage
The first recorded use of the A in a circle by anarchists was by the Federal Council of Spain of the International Workingmen's Association. This was set up by the freemason[2], Giuseppe Fanelli in 1868. It predates its adoption by anarchists as it was used as a symbol by freemasons amongst others.
It was later used in the Spanish Civil War,(1936–1939). There is a picture of an anarchist militia member with the circle-A painted clearly on the back of his helmet. It was adopted as a symbol of the Alliance Ouvrière Anarchiste (AOA) as its symbol at its 25 November 1956 founding in Brussels, and appears to have been independently reinvented in 1964 by the French group, Jeunesse Libertaire ("Libertarian Youth"). [3]
Obviously, the circle-A long predates the anarcho-punk movement, which was part of the punk rock movement of the late 1970s. However, the punk movement certainly spread the circle-A anarchy symbol more widely, even among non-anarchists.
