#symbolon

As people have guessed the word "symbol" is Greek but it comes from an ancient practice, something that can be traced even in plays and myths? It was a sign of mutual recognition or a guarantee of identity between two people. And as always the most frequent use of it would have been some cheap and easy to find material such as knuckle bones.

In Euripides's "Medea" Jason confronts his previous wife and expresses his will to help her and then he says that he will provide a "symbol" for her:

ὡς ἕτοιμος ἀφθόνῳ δοῦναι χερὶ ξένοις τε πέμπειν σύμβολ᾽, οἳ δράσουσί σ᾽ εὖ. I am willing to give you a helping hand and also send tokens to people for hospitality, so that they will treat you well

(Translation by me)

The practice went as such; one knuckle bone or some other piece of pottery usually, would be cut in half and one half would be given to one person and the other to another so when the two people met and they joined the two halves, that would be proof of identity. In case of hospitality one person (in this case Jason) might as well wish to sent a friend or family member (in this case Medea) to someone they know and trust but that third person is not aware of who their friend or family is. So the benefactor would be cutting a token in half and offer one half to their friend and the other half to the intended host so that when the two would meet, they would have a mutual recognition

The word coming probably from the verb "συμβάλλω" which has many different ancient interpretations but in this case it would be "to compare" or "to show side by side"

The mutual recognition sign of course is not always physical but also sometimes it can be some signal or other. Who can convince me that the whole "wedding bed discussion" between Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey is not some form of "token" of recognition? Both sides require the other to give them what they got, something they can compare to each other.

The essence of tokens representing this union or relationship or even hospitality between two people I would expect is what gave the word "symbol" its meaning. Because it symbolizes (yeah pun totally intended) the bond or the two people joining in one or mutually recognizing each other. The practice was also probably used for mutual recognition of lovers which also led to the exchange of tokens of love between lovers such as pendants, rings, kerchiefs and others

Disclaimer: Of course it needs to be added that proofs of recognition were not something invented by the Greeks. Probably every single nation in the world practiced it with some essence of proof of identity, the carrying of seals or sealings and so on and so forth. I mentioned the specific practice because it has a certain intimate essence to it which I personally love to see not just the official recognition process through letters epistles etc but through the more intimate practice of two people that share some form of bond.

So the next time you share a friendship bracelet or a two halves heart pendant with someone else have in mind that you might be practicing an ancient Greek practice hahahaha

Gospel of John: An Analysis #3

John 6:66-71 is one of those rare crystalline points where theology, language, and ontology come together. Even the verse number 6:66 feels like a mirror of division, marking the threshold where the Word separates those who remain from those who cannot bear the mystery.

Just before this, Christ uttered the most scandalous of all sayings: “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life” (John 6:54). He is offering a symbolon, the Greek word σύμβολον meaning “a thing thrown together,” a token of union, a joining of two halves, two syzygies, that recognise each other. The symbolon is that which unites.

Then comes the rupture: “From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (6:66). Here is the separation. And, immediately after, Jesus says: “Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” or, in Greek, διάβολος (6:70). The diábolos is literally “the one who throws across,” the opposite of symbolon. The one who divides what should be joined.

More at The Mirror of Sienna.

But there are many other examples. Money, for example, is a symbol; it symbolises wine and horses and beautiful vesture and high houses, the great cities of the world and the quiet tent by the river. The miser is a madman, because he prefers money to all these things; because he prefers the symbol to the reality.

But books are also a symbol; they symbolise man's impression of existence, and it may at least be maintained that the man who has come to prefer books to life is a maniac after the same fashion as the miser. A book is assuredly a sacred object. In a book certainly the largest jewels are shut in the smallest casket. But that does not alter the fact that superstition begins when the casket is valued more than the jewels. This is the great sin of idolatry, against which religion has so constantly warned us […]

Idolatry exists wherever the thing which originally gave us happiness becomes at last more important than happiness itself. Drunkenness, for example, may be fairly described as an engrossing hobby. And drunkenness is, when really comprehended in its inward and psychological reality, a typical example of idolatry […]

Now in this sense bibliomania is capable of becoming a kind of drunkenness. There is a class of men who do actually prefer books to everything with which books are concerned, to lovely places, to heroic actions, to experiment, to adventure, to religion. They read of godlike statues, and are not ashamed of their own frowsy and lazy ugliness; they study the records of open and magnanimous deeds, and are not ashamed of their own secretive and self-indulged lives. They have become citizens of an unreal world, and, like the Indian in his Paradise, pursue with shadowy hounds a shadowy deer. And that way lies madness.

In the limbo of the misers and the drunkards, which is the limbo of idolators, many great scholars may be found. Here, as in almost all ethical problems, the difficulty arises far less from the presence of some vicious tendency than from the absence of some essential virtues. The possibilities of mental derangement which exist in literature are due not so much to a love of books as to an indifference to life and sentiment and everything that books record.

In an ideal state, gentlemen who were immersed in abstruse calculations and discoveries would be forced by Act of Parliament to talk for forty-five minutes to an ostler or a landlady, and to ride across Hampstead Heath on a donkey. They would be examined by the State, but not in Greek or old armour, which are their pleasures, and in which they may be trusted as safely as children at cross-touch. They would be examined in Cockney dialect, or in the colours of various omnibuses. They would be purged of all the tendencies which have sometimes brought lunacy out of learning; they would be taught to become men of the world, which is a step towards becoming men of the Universe.”

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