The Roman Mithras Cult by Olympia Panagiotidou Roger Beck

Author:Olympia Panagiotidou,Roger Beck [Beck, Olympia Panagiotidou with Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472567406
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

4.2 The initiate’s process of interpreting the tauroctony

The tauroctony was a ubiquitous element of the material environment of the mithraeum. It was not a mere physical object but an artefact that was intentionally designed and placed within the cave. The uniformity of the scene indicates that it was not a set of signs randomly collected and represented. Rather, it was the material instantiation of the mental representations shared by people who ordered the monuments and who designed them. In Dan Sperber’s terms (1996: 80–1), the tauroctony was a ‘public’ representation, which would have acquired meaning only through its association with the mental representations of its commissioners, designers and viewers.2

The representation of the tauroctony would have been, first and foremost, a means of communicating information and meanings among cult members. The extent to which the initiates would have been able to extract information and to attribute meanings to the scene would have depended on two factors: (a) on their own explicit mental representations and implicit memories established during their interaction with the world and (b) on the semantic or encyclopaedic knowledge that they would have acquired living in the Graeco-Roman world and being inducted into the Mithraic mysteries. The scene of the tauroctony would not have had inherent semantic properties immediately perceivable by its viewers. Instead, it would have comprised a complex semantic structure the perception and conception of which would have been the result of a process of interpretation.3

The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) explored the hierarchical gradation of the interpretative processes (1931–58) that mediate the attribution of conceptual meanings to mental and public representations of perceivable reality and the transmission of these meanings between people. According to his theory, every perceptible entity – including objects and artefacts, natural phenomena and cultural events, or even sensory stimuli and abstract concepts – can operate as a sign – a ‘representamen’ – of another entity if people who perceive it infer the relationship between the sign that signifies and the object which is signified.4 This association between the sign and the object is the result of the interpretative process which takes place in people’s minds and generates the meaning that connects the signifier and the signified, which is another sign, the interpretant.5 The interpretant is formed on the ground of the inferred relation between the sign-signifier and the object-signified and further comprises the result of signification, which entails that a sign is interpreted as something different from itself in the human mind (CP 1.553; Hoopes 1991: 11–12; Sinha 1996: 485). In this view, we can say that every interpretant sign comprises a mental blended space in which certain features of the perceivable objects are merged with each other generating new conceptual entities (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002, 2003).

Depending on the inferential processes that mediate the blend, Peirce distinguished three modes of sign-interpretations, which are based on the different associations inferred between the signifier and the signified. The first mode6 derives from the observable similarity between two entities that entails the interpretation of one as an icon of the other (CP 2.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.