Use of the pictorial language

With the progress of literal languages, the meanings of ideograms (symbols-thoughts) were forgotten and symbols became silent. All that was left was their exterior forms, whose meanings remained within the principles of initiatory science.
The advent of writing overcame oral transmission, until then used to convey the initiatory legacy; the contents of the latter were therefore enriched with links difficult to remember without a written support. Initiatory culture as well had some advantages from writing, which allowed to develop more and more complex languages.

Languages became as many as the faculties, arts and crafts of men; this caused many misunderstandings. Today we can say that the most suitable language to represent reality is called synthesis. It is still a caste jargon, but its advantages will soon make it indispensable. In synthesis we find as many mental colors as the possible interpretations of a unique reality. The chaos of languages disappears with synthesis. But what happened before?

In order to avoid different interpretations, the initiatory system used to address man’s imagination, by using representations and pictorial images easy to read. In this way, meanings which were otherwise unconceivable such as astronomical movements, were communicated through figurative languages: ‘wonderful and dramatic’ myths.

Many people, though, forgot that the meanings of metaphors (see literal meanings of holy texts) must be distinguished from reality. In other words, they ended up believing that the representation was reality rather than a means of expression. The task of the esotericist, for example, is today to recover the inner meanings of representations. It is to find the soul of the word, of the architectonic aspects and symbols. It consists of reconstructing the meanings that were originally left to numbers, sounds and colors.

It was written that ‘…the Soul of a Form is the Number and the Number is the materialization of a Sound, which is its spirit…’. I think this is the only way to rejoin our deepest roots; they will tell us that we really are a ‘living sound’.

by Athos A. Altomonte