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Dictionaries and Pantheons

   According to Herder, language is a register of the evolution of the human soul, and due to the fact that our first innerization of the world was theological, our dictionaries are pantheons.[1] Let’s put aside for the moment the theological part of the argument, for theological myths are later elaborations of myths of the anima mundi, whose main figure is not the god, but the ancestor, and translate the idea to the theory of morphisms.

1    1.   Our first exomorphisms were in the symbolic spheres of the ancestors, gods and the supernatural.

2    2.  Those exomorphisms were endomorphized, rendered familiar through the use of metaphors. With the example of the eye of Ra. The sun is exomorphic, belongs to the realm of literal representations of the god Ra, but is vitalized through the metaphor of the eye, and comes closer to our vital experience. Exomorphisms must have a minimal endomorphic connection in order to be referents at all.

3    3.  With the passage of time they become completely endomorphic and acritic concepts, id est, part of a dictionary.

   Our dictionaries are not strictly pantheons, neither geological strata of the process of mythologization, for languages have a shorter life span than the mythologization process (as we see in Christianism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism), but are simply a web of endomorphisms.


[1] See Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. Christian Friedrich Boss. Berlin . 1770. p.44.
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