Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Not presenting an image or portraiture: in Greek antiquity, applied to the rudest agalmata, or symbols of a divinity, consisting of a simple pillar or block without human attributes. See agalma.
Wiktionary
- adj. Of or pertaining to representations without human or animal form .
Etymologies
- an- + iconic, alternatively an- + icon + -ic (see aniconism). (Wiktionary)
Examples
“Additionally, monotheism was held to entail certain consequences, including universalism, anti-superstition and magic, ethical, aniconic.”
“Her holy aniconic image was carried to Rome by order of the Cumaean Sybil, a personification of the same cave-dwelling Goddess herself.”
“At Mecca the Goddess was Shaybah or Sheba, the Old Woman, worshipped as a black aniconic stone like the Godess of the Scythian Amazons.”
“The attempt to pare away the fetishistic icons and idols, the pantheons of petitionable divinities, to reduce all this superstitous baggage down to the abstract, ascetic, aniconic idea of YHVH, ultimately runs up against our stubborn inabilities and refusals to deal in abstraction.”
“Is the Sodom story, even, a necessary step in constructing an aniconic, ascetic, abstracted concept of the divine needed to get from an animistic understanding of nature to a mechanistic -- i.e. scientific -- understanding?”
“The God of the Decalogue is uniquely authoritative, cannot be fashioned after our own image (pace Feuerbach), and cannot be controlled: God is absolute, aniconic, and useless. 6 God does not exist for our use.”
“Who was it—Feuerbach, Hegel, or simply every German philosopher there has ever been—who accused the Jews of being aniconic to their soul, eschewing the concrete because they would not envision God other than abstractly?”
“Sir Arthur Evans describes as "the aniconic image of the god" a stone pillar on which crude pictures of a double axe have been scratched.”
“Sir Arthur Evans is of opinion "that in the case of the Cypriote cylinders the attendant monsters and, to a certain extent, the symbolic column itself, are taken from an Egyptian solar cycle, and the inference has been drawn that the aniconic pillars among the Mycenæans of Cyprus were identified with divinities having some points in common with the sun-gods Ra, or Horus, and Hathor, the Great Mother" (_op.cit. _, pp. 63 and 64).”
“The obelisk at Abusir was the aniconic representative of the sun-god Re, or rather, the support of the pyramidal apex, the gilded surface of which reflected the sun's rays and so made manifest the god's presence in the stone.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘aniconic’.
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Rare Words - A
Not just rare words, but thousands of RARE WORDS WITH DEFINITIONS.
If you want to see the definitions, too, go to
http://phrontistery.i...aba, abacinate, abactor, abaculus, abaft, abampere, abapical, abarticular, abasement, abasia, abask, abatis and 1214 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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phrontistery - a
from phrontistery.info
aba, abacinate, abactor, abaculus, abaft, abampere, abapical, abarticular, abasement, abasia, abask, abatis and 1214 more...
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Most Obscure Words
acatalectic, acosmism, acuate, acuminate, adscititious, adytum, akratisma, alieniloquy, allelomorph, allochiria, allodium, alnage and 620 more...
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patterns
ergodic, stochastic, stereopsis, echolocation, holocation, broker, map, intarsia, encipher, ocellus, muslin, mandelbrot set and 159 more...
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theory
ontic, maieutic, peripeteia, hermeneutic, entelechy, teleology, dionysian, simulacrum, apophantic, leitmotif, ressentiment, apollonian and 29 more...
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