If the fundamental identity of rites and symbols is more closely examined, it may be noted in the first place that a symbol, understood as a graphic figuration, as it is most commonly, is only as it were the fixation of a ritual gesture. (NA: These considerations relate directly to what we have called the “theory of gestures” which we have several times had occasion to allude to, but without its having been possible to treat of it up to the present.) In fact it often happens that the actual tracing of a symbol to be regular must be made under conditions that give it all the characteristics of a true rite; a very clear example of this in a low domain, that of magic (which is nonetheless a traditional science), is provided in the preparation of talismanic figures; and on the plane that more immediately concerns us the tracing of yantras in the Hindu tradition is no less striking an example. (NA: The “TRACING BOARD” of the lodge in ancient Masonry, which indeed formed a true yantra, may be likened to it. The rites concerned with the construction of monuments for traditional ends might also be cited as examples here, for monuments of this sort in themselves have necessarily a symbolical character.) Essays: Rites and Symbols
Among visual symbols themselves there is also an example of “instantaneity” which is fairly comparable to that of sound symbols. This is the case of symbols that are not traced permanently but only employed as signs in initiatory rites (notably the “signs of recognition”) (NA: Utterances that serve a similar purpose, passwords for example, fall naturally into the category of sound symbols.) and in more general religious rites (the “sign of the cross” is a typical example known to all); here the symbol is truly one with the ritual gesture itself. (NA: A sort of intermediary case is that of the symbolical figures that are traced at the beginning of a rite or preparatory to it, and effaced as soon as it is ended; such is the case of many yantras, and used once to be the same with the “TRACING BOARD” of the lodge in Masonry. The practice does not represent a mere precaution against profane curiosity, which as an explanation is always much too simple; it should be looked on first and foremost as an immediate consequence of the intimate bond uniting symbols and rites, in such a way that the former have no cause for visible subsistence apart from the latter.) In any case a “graphic” symbol is, we repeat, itself the fixation of a gesture or a movement (the actual movement or series of movements that has to be made to trace it), and in the case of sound symbols one also may say that the movement of the vocal organs that is necessary to produce them (whether it be a matter of uttering ordinary words or musical sounds) is as much a gesture as are all the other kinds of bodily movements, from which it can never be entirely isolated. (NA: Note especially in this connection the part played in rites by the gestures called in the Hindu tradition mudras, which form a veritable language of movements and attitudes; the “handclasps” used as “means of recognition” in initiatory organizations in the West as well as in the East are really only a particular case of mudras.) Essays: Rites and Symbols