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The Two Primary Schools of Semiotics
Core Terms What is semiotics? Simply put, it is the study of signs. A sign is anything that refers to something other than itself – physical objects, concepts, occurrences, words, etc. – and which has been interpreted, whether consciously or not, to infer some sense of what the sign “means”...
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Future Directions
While the blog will quite likely veer off this summary of anticipated directions from time to time, the following evolving and unordered list provides the opening for topics that will appear according to the fylgja’s unfolding guidance: Semiurgy and other aspects of semiotics, with an emphasis on their usefulness in...
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What is magic? Part I
The most productive action we can take when discussing magic is not to use the word ‘magic’ at all. But to reach that point, we must recognize that there is a growing body of scholarship that does attempt to rescue the term; we can use this as a springboard to...
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What is a sign?
In order to understand the subtleties, implications, and dangers of semiurgy – the manipulation of signs to affect the inner and outer worlds of the semiurgist – we must first establish a firm ground for the ontology of signs themselves. At its most basic level, a sign is that which...
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Quote from "Getting Things Done"
“The truth is, our energy as human beings seems to have a dualistic and teleological reality—we create and identify with things that aren’t real yet on all the levels we experience; and when we do, we recognize how to restructure our current world to morph it into the new one,...
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What is Semiurgy?
The term semiurgy was coined by Jean Baudrillard to refer to the creation, manipulation, or combination of signs. A sign – studied in the discipline of semiotics – is something that stands for, refers to, represents, or evokes something else. For example, a word refers to the thing we agree...
