Icons and the mystic art of Iconography
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Icons are symbols and representations of things and ideas.
What are they
Some are mundane, some holy, some holier than Thou, but all are mysterious. Status as facsimile representations imbues all icons with an arcane power.
The star of David, a golden statue of the budha, the pictographs that designate the men's and ladies' toilets, a skull and crossbones, swatikas, the words on this page or the plastic statuette of Saint Christopher dangling from your rear view mirror... are all Icons.
Where'd they come from
The first icon was probably a hand print. An accidental charcoal smear on the wall of a smokey, oxygen deprived cave. Perhaps at the end of the last ice age.
In that long winter, when no human or beast was able to survive for long outside its shelter, the delirium of hunger and boredom caused one human mind to mildly halucinate. The four fingers of the handprint began to look like the four legs of an animal, the palm print like the fat body of a tasty beast.
He thought he could smell it, taste it.. He visualised the hunt, the slaughter, the roasting meat...
Imagine his amazement, in the spring, finding a crowd of curious cows had been attracted to the mouth of the cave, and the tribe ate heartily there-of.
How do they work
What magic was at work here? Simply, the displacement of the olfactory sensibilities by a dementia we call imagination. The sense of smell, which would have led him to the herd eventually, had been usurped by imagination - a result of the smoke, cold, hunger and sensory deprivation in general. The beasts, without fire in their lairs, did not suffer this mutation, but felt (smelt) something new was going on and wandered over to see what 'men' were up to.
This is better than Fire
This new pictographical device developed into many forms. You may recognise voodoo dolls, charms, crucifixes, lucky lottery numbers... You may have wondered at, or actually experienced, the power of pentagrams, police badges or neon lighting. If we can make the image of a thing we can induce the power of the thing. We don't really know how they work but we know they do.
But how do they work
It seems that the mental energies created by our distressed sense of smell gives power to all talismans, touchstones, prayer beads, mojos, and corporate logos. Every one of the gods forbids the use of these golden calves, but in spite of divine prohibition we persue this perversion, this blasphemy, and call it progress. In the past century we developed photography and videography.
The word
Finally, and most significantly of course, the one icon that is so obvious it is not immediately recognisable, the one you will want to deny. You won't want to believe it's really just smoke and mirrors, because it is the infrastructure of our modern world - the written word.
The power of writ:
Writing and literacy are a powerful magic because they impact on the minds of other people. As recently as ..now, we still tend to believe a thing because it has been writ down. The Laws, the Edicts, the Cannons, the fabric of our culture, our economy, our philosophies are in the written word. The signs and symbols of language are just modern forms of that original charcoal smear. And the men who can smear most succesfully are made leaders, apostles, saints, kings, priests, lawyers, ad execs...
There is power in the human 'imagination'. Sadly it is merely a corruption, a mal-lined displacement of the olfactory senses. Imagination is a mutation and those who have it will eventually die off. Perhaps some of us will wake up once we clear our sinuses of consumerism and plastics.
Resistance is futile
Those who insist on man's superiority because of his ability to read, write, do maths or draw plans for skyscrapers and jet engines are just plain wrong. Put down your books. Burn them all. Take a deep breath, and smell. Smell the stench that is our modern world. No fresh meat in sight anywhere. But come out of the smokey cave and smell the roses and eventually we will return to the Garden and spark up the barbie.
