I first became
interested in semiotics from the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible. Of course I had never heard of “semiotics” at
the time, and I am still not sure I understand everything meant by the term as
used by some of my more learned colleagues.
Looking at its Greek root, I take it to mean the study or theory of signs, the most numerous of which are
the words we use in our attempts at oral or written communication. But of course there are also pictorial
traffic signs, signs of good or bad weather, signs of life, signs of the times,
and many others. One of my favorite
characters in Chaucer, who has spent some hours with an itchy mouth, says
“that’s a sign of kissing, at the
very least”. Anyway, when Cain killed
his brother Abel, God set a “sign” upon the murderer (Genesis 4:15). That is the word used in the medieval Latin
Bible. In the Authorized English version
the word is mark, and over the
centuries there has been a good deal of inconclusive speculation as to what the
sign or mark of Cain was. It had a
puzzling ambiguity. Though it identified
a murderer, its purpose was to protect him from anyone who might set out to
kill him. Anyone who dared to effect
revenge for Abel would be “punished seven times worse”! But what
was the “mark of Cain?”
The old rabbis, later
followed by Christian exegetes, suggested various possibilities. One was that it was the image of a dog—a late
suggestion pretty obviously influenced by the accidental similarity of the
name “Cain” to the Greek (kuon) and Latin (canis) words for “dog”. More
common was the idea that the “mark” was merely a hideous facial expression,
accompanied by a palsied tremor, but this, too, was probably classically
induced by a “dog word”—meaning something like “dog-faced” or “smiling in a
dog-like manner”. Many commentators
agree that the mark, whatever it was, was on Cain’s forehead.
That may get us
somewhere. A scholarly essay I’m working
on just now reviews the ideas that led Francis of Assisi to adopt the tau (a Greek and Hebrew letter
equivalent to the Latin “T”) as his personal signature. It was in imitation of the mysterious figure
(Ezekiel 9:2), a “man…clothed with linen, with a writer’s inkhorn at his belt”. The function of this scribe is to walk
through Jerusalem and to “mark tau
upon the foreheads of the men that sigh, and mourn for all the abominations
that are committed in the midst thereof.”
Only this small band of penitents will be spared from general slaughter.
There is another
important appearance of the forehead-writer in the Apocalypse, but I must move
on to his secular traces, which are
numerous and surprising. One way of
crossing two squiggles made a T. Another
formed the Greek letter chi, the
initial of “Christ” in that language, and the parallel to Latin X. Since there are quite a few words relating to
Christ in Christianity, scribes were happy to use X as an abbreviation and save
a little time with things like the “Count of Monte Xo,” “Xofer Columbus”, and
even “Merry Xmas”—I speak of many years ago, before the regime of the PC
police. Already in ancient times several
of the minimalist letters had been used to mean any graphic mark or sign. That is, tau
was a letter, but as a word it meant
“mark” or “sign”. The Vulgate phrase
“the sign Thau” is an innocent pleonasm, like “the River Avon”—afon being the forgotten Celtic word for
“river”. When a Roman teenager put
together his 1:1000 scale model of a trireme or whatever, the instruction was
to “insert fold T into slot X” or “make sure the tri jot is correctly aligned with the reme tittle” or something like that.
So X—now no longer
necessarily thought of as the sign of a cross—became the sign or mark for
anything you wanted to sign or mark, beginning with the mathematical unknown
that you were supposed figure out with the help of Y. And of course X marks the spot where the body
was found. Our own particular, individual
signs are our signatures. But what about illiterates? During World War II one of my aunts worked
for some alphabetical New Deal outfit doing good among the primitive
mountaineers on the south bank of the White River in northern Arkansas. She used to speak of the “exers”—not a
generation of aging hippies, but people who signed
all legal papers with an “X”. I think it
was the immortal Irving Berlin who wrote: “My uncle out in Texas can’t
even spell his name; He signs his checks with X’s, but they cash them all the
same.” More recently a Country and
Western song entitled “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” was nominated for a
Grammy. This has absolutely nothing to
do with my subject, but it is a sobering reminder of just how few words rhyme
with Texas.
