The nature of decoding language.
One of the search terms leading to this site was "illumanti symbols," and searching for "illumanti" (which I take to be a misspelling of "illuminati") leads the searcher to quite the discussion of secret conspiracies, religion, and, inevitably, "symbology" and The Da Vinci Code.
The characterization of "symbology" I outlined recently, which although it does reference Dan Brown's work The Da Vinci Code, does not make the point that the term originated with Brown nor that novel. What follows after the jump is, inevitably, a long, dry discussion of the nature of language from a semiotic standpoint, and I must stress that while the content that follows is based on my own academic studies in literary theory, as well as the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and the eminent deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, that is not to say these theories have not courted controversy. It is often hard to introduce "deconstructionism" into the terms of a discourse without immediately creating said controversy, but I stand by the discipline as an effective tool for isolating the mechanisms by which we create and communicate meaning through language.
My actual point is not that Dan Brown's atrocious The Da Vinci Code created or originated the term "symbology." My point is that it is not an academic discipline. While this will probably draw more flak, I am not denying that people have at some point very probably studied something they termed symbology. It is that there is no basis in academia for using the term. You do not study it in college, there are no journals to publish papers about "symbology," and to use that term in literary theory is to be misinformed as to the theoretical foundations of language.
As a study of symbols, the only proper academic field is semiotics (which you might also see written as semiology, but they are the same). Now, whereupon we derive the word semiotics is from the Greek, sema, "sign," and more completely, from semeioun, "to signal."
Semiology then is literally the study of signs. It is the study of systems of signs and the way in which language uses signs, and it is an important field of literary and linguistic theory. Semiotics has even contributed to psychology and the study of the mind (look for the works of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan and the study of psycholinguistics).
How do signs "mean"? How does a sign communicate meaning from one individual to another? This is the fundamental question of language: how does it work? And it is in answering this question that we dismantle the basis for a field of "symbology." A sign is the medium through which we transmit meaning. Following Lacan, we discern the sign is composed to two halves: the signifier, which is to say the strict symbol (in the case of writing the signifier is the specific word we use), and the signified, which is the concept we refer to (in this case, the idea we want to communicate).
Take the sign tree. It is composed of a signifier, the sequence of letters we write as “tree,” and it is also composed of the signified, which is the concept of a tree, the idea of a tall thing made of bark with leaves that derives nourishment from sunshine. The idea of the tree is a totally separate entity from the word “tree.” If all the English speakers in the world decided that “tree” no longer referred to the leafy, branchy thing, and instead we would refer to that idea by the word “gubble,” then it would be perfectly acceptable to do so. The glue that holds language together is mutual agreement, and nothing else.
The nature of language is arbitrary. We decode language by referring to the signs we’ve already learned, and extrapolating from there, as well as asking other speakers more adept in the language to define these unknown signs for us. But it is only because we agree on what the signs mean that those signs actually mean anything. There is nothing about the word “tree” that suggests it is uniquely suited, or even correct, to use it to refer to the idea of the tree. This is why other languages actually use separate vocabularies--not because they are wrong, but because the speakers of those languages agreed on different sets of sounds to refer to the same concept.
This is why symbology as an academic discipline is in fact nothing more special than an everyday act of interpretation. For symbology to exist as a separate field of study, for it to be worthy of an entire branch of activity, requires it to be different in a fundamental way from the interpretation of other signs. This is not the case. Symbols are nothing more than signs with more than one referent. That is to say, it is one simple signifier (for example a cross), with several signifieds attached to it: the concept of resurrection; the concept of crucifixion; the concept of suffering; the concept of the afterlife; the concept of a footnote (as the cross is often an indicator of a footnote in legal, financial, or academic texts). Does this multiplicity of signifieds somehow require they all share a single signifier? No. It is simply yet another matter of agreement that symbols exist.
Another requirement for symbology to work as a discipline is for symbols to exist with some sort of unchanging or mandatory meaning. That one of the primary principles of symbology is the en/decoding of past information or wisdom is an indicator that the reading of symbols is not fundamentally different from the act of reading. Similar to Michel Foucault's plurality of authorship and meaning, the symbol exists as it does primarily because of a dichotomy in the audience of the symbol: the mainstream audience, who according to theory sees only the superficial layers of the symbol, and what I will refer to as the "gnostic" audience, those with the "special knowledge" required to examine the symbol and see its "true" or "correct" meaning.
But the plurality of meaning and the plurality of signifieds does not precipitate a correct answer. The symbol changes depending on the cultural assumptions and position of the viewer of the symbol. The practice of actually "decoding" the symbol is really nothing more than historical learning, tied to the peculiar history of a particular sect. That Freemasons have a vocabulary of symbols is not surprising. That they assert their interpretation of the symbols as "correct" is. The triangle is not always the symbol used to communicate the "sacred feminine" or the "sacred masculine." The triangle is, in some circumstances, the only way to communicate the closure of space into a segment of plane using the simplest number of mathematical points.
That particular sects have encoded their histories into a symbolic format is not a surprise, either. This is the act of communication at its most basic form: to condense your experience or thoughts into something which others will understand, you must encode your emotions and stream of consciousness into language. You do this automatically, as once you have attained language there is never any return to a prelingual mental state. Encoding meaning symbolically, or really, using any kind of metaphor or figurative language, is simply grasping the unstable nature of any particular sign and using it to your advantage. The ability to communicate in metaphor is hardwired into the human brain; research into synaesthesia--a condition wherein the human mind confuses the nature of different stimuli that often results in people experiencing the tactile feedback of a color, or the smell of a particular surface feeling--is yielding intriguing results into how our brain similarly encodes electrical signals into meaningful conscious information.
I have rambled for entirely too long. But the point of the article, if you take nothing else away, is this: the study of symbols is not a privileged enterprise, and the belief that symbols somehow have a "correct" or "true" interpretation that persists throughout time is incorrect. It is true that there is a particular context for the usage of symbols, and that reading symbols in context is likely to produce a particular intended meaning, but there is nothing different between this act of reading a symbol in context and, for instance, reading the newspaper in your native tongue. The decoding takes no special skills, requires no apparatus with which to begin the communication; all it requires is a foreknowledge of context that can easily be gleaned from history. "Symbology" is, then, rightly classified as both not an academic discipline, and further, as an activity that requires no further training than the ability to process language.
This is also the reason that all languages have not filtered down to using the same signs to refer to the same concepts. Other languages are, in fact, different, precisely because of the arbitrary nature of all language. Latin is what it is because the speakers of Latin decided upon a system to alter and create sounds in such a way that others could understand. They then developed a series of sounds, and written words as well, to refer to these common ideas. These Latin words are different from English; they are not, however, wrong. It is inane to discuss wrong or incorrect words outside of the context of the mutual agreement that holds language together.
How does this refer to symbology? It’s a pretty simple connection, actually. For symbology to be an academic discipline, it would require that symbols communicate meaning in a continuous logical stream, that their meanings be somehow absolute. This requires a “correct” interpretation of a symbol, and for the meaning of the symbol to exist as itself, separate from language. It’s nonsensical on its face to attempt to define a symbol as external to language and yet as a communicating object. All that communicates is a sign. Symbols themselves are signs, and so are chained to being arbitrary representatives of concepts. Metaphor, synecdoche, all symbols—and all symbolic or figurative language--is necessarily language.
Actually, there are two things you should take away from this article. The first being that "symbology" is not a priveleged or even real discipline.
The second?
Please, please don't read The Da Vinci Code. It's really, really terrible.