Dr. W. JOHN coletta, ph.d., semiotician, or, a “Real Symbologist”
“A symbol is something which has the power of reproducing itself, and that essentially, since it is constituted a symbol only by the interpretation. This interpretation involves a power of the symbol to cause a real fact. ”
Hey, CONTESTANTS: INT3RP THIS! 1. Where was the image below taken? 2. Explain the symbolism of the image, paying especial attention to color and placement of the colors! Log your answers in the comments section below. First best answers win! Winners will be announced monthly!
Egyptian Ankh
Yes, the Egyptian ankh cross is the ancient hieroglyph that stood for the concept “life.” It was originally, some think, an iconic sign of the thong of the sandal (an iconic sign being one that stands for its object on the basis of some resemblance; the ankh looks like a sandal-thong). Consider, of course, how essential an intact sandal-thong is to securing your foot to the sandal and thus to protecting your foot from damage and disease. Sandal-thong = life (the ankh) is thus a symbolic equation based on an actual cause-and-effect relationship, and so the ankh is an indexical sign as well (one that stands for its object in some real, causal manner). Of course, it is general in cultural evolution, as semioticians tell us, that icon indices become over time symbols, signs that stand for their objects in conventional ways–and so the underlying sandal-thong iconic index has been lost (it is a dead metaphor), but while the visual connection may be “dead,” the feeling of security and of linked (looped) connectedness that that original iconic and indexical sign produced is still alive. The loop of the ankh, the key element of the sandal thong, of course, represents in its closed-circuit form, like a wedding ring, wholeness and endlessness (and thus faithfulness and eternity). These of godly traits.
Not surprisingly, the ankh in ancient Egypt was symbolically linked to the gods, indeed, to all of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon, and so it became an inclusive symbol of religious ecumenicalism. Perhaps for this reason, scholars tell us, the ankh has been picked up by the (inclusive) “New Age” religious movement. Clearly, the ankh today also derives symbolic force from its resonance with (1) the Christian cross (while avoiding the allusion to violence that that symbol of torture, and love, of course, necessarily carries with it) and with (2) the symbol for Venus, for goddess worship and the divine feminine: more inclusivity!
To playfully reenact the history of the exponential takeoff of human written language and the origin of both arbitrariness and digitalization as human modes of relation and communication, just turn the letter “A” upside down and recover the ancient pictogram (an icon–a sign that stands for its object on the basis of resemblance) of a horned animal. Where once that pictogram stood for that animal (in, admittedly, a range of ways, from quarry to non-human person to deity), after that icon is inverted and thus severed (a predatory act of violence) from the object it resembles, the upside-down animal head (now our “A”) can be made to stand not for a tangible thing in a user’s environment (say that animal) but for a sound or a set of sounds, a set of arbitrary phonological objects not connected by resemblance or causality to the letter (no longer “A” [pun intended] pictogram) “A.” These sounds, mere ghosts of the original iconic animal head, may be combined with the sounds represented by other letters and assembled into words or parts of words, a literal reader’s digest(ion). Thus is it that the stiff pictogram with a narrow range of objects becomes the “infinitely flexible everything,” that is, everything from the grammatical indefinite article “a” to the cognitive marker “ah” to “applesauce.” And what we write is no longer obvious to the uninitiated, to those who didn’t turn everything (at least the animal head of language) upside down. In conclusion, “I A[not animal]M A[not animal] REA[not animal]L Robert LA[not animal]NGDON.
