alls them. The presence behind, or inside, of the material has been forgotten.
The apparent opposite to the literal use of language is figurative, in which words are used in ways that deviate from singular interpretations to represent more fully the reality they attempt to describe. Metaphors are one example of figurative language. The first definition of metaphor that pops up in an online search is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” This definition succinctly reflects the popular approach to language, in which metaphors are ideas that exist in the mind, to be analyzed and interpreted but never to be experienced. To allow metaphor to push us outside of thought and into perception would be to rehydrate its desiccated meaning.
For oral indigenous peoples (who had not yet been exposed to the written word) metaphor was not a concept. It was the culture’s living reality, woven in to their layered understanding of the nature of things. We will soon see that if the history of human consciousness is traced back far enough through language we reach a point where perception is completely figurative, and thought takes a back-seat to direct experience. This type of consciousness cannot perceive matter without also perceiving the immaterial reality which it contains. We have traded the sweetness of substance for the safety of assurance, and now the dark, hidden, mysterious and unknowable things are vanishing, like a bright flame squished between two fingers, one after another.
While linguistic analysts and academic abstractions may attempt to create a language that would make misunderstanding impossible and meaning singular by demythologizing and disinfecting language, they would certainly fail. Language, like consciousness, is a living organism which is dead once it is petrified.” The etymology of language reaches back to a time when words were used to describe physical processes; a time when gods and goddesses pervaded all natural phenomena; when the genus loci (the indwelling spirit or voice of things and places) was alive and well.
In early Sanskrit, Greek and Teutonic, words for “sky” were used also to mean “God.” This suggests that at one time the human mind could not conceive of these two phenomena as being separate. The twilight-torn horizon was not a metaphor for the heavenly realm, but was it. There was something in the felt presence of natural forces that inspired early humans to experience them as divine entities.
Somewhere along the way, the quality of sky became divorced from its divine ancestry, and the two entities became separate in the human mind with different names to mark their divergence. A similar fate haunted the classical gods and goddesses, which “faded so slowly into the thin air of abstract thought that the process was hardly perceived.” Chance was once a Roman deity (Sors) which developed into a purely abstract idea. The Roman goddesses called Fata (Fates) turned eventually into our idea of destiny.
Process words developed in a parallel fashion to describe internal states. The word “delirious” is derived from a Latin verb that originally meant “to go out of the furrow” or “to plow in crooked lines.” In modern English we instead move askew inwardly in what is now defined as “an acutely disturbed state of mind.” Words such as this (and there are nearly infinite examples) are evidence that “all knowledge which has been conveyed by means of speech to the reason has traveled in metaphors taken from man’s own activities and from the solid things which he handles.”
As those processes which birthed a need for words to define them transformed into different technologies (from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to industry, to advanced technology, etc.) the words once rooted in the soil of direct physical experience came to describe less concrete phenomena: states of mind, philosophies, concepts and emotions. It is as if the ground beneath us is disintegrating. The entire English language comes to acquire a weightlessness. An