Cipher

The ‘cipher’ is what marks the impossibility of each certainty and opens up to the further sense that is symbolic experience; like the symbol, the ‘cipher’ ‘breaks up’ the fixed meanings in favour of an as yet unknown dimension

Drawing on Jaspers via Aversa, this passage constitutes the most theoretically developed treatment in the corpus, positioning cipher as the threshold-concept that annuls fixed meaning and inaugurates genuinely symbolic experience.

Tozzi, Chiara, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017thesis

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it is now one of a number of co-ordinated forces, almost a cipher in a calculable set of determinants. It is its allotted cipher-value and not its original phenomenal quality that now matters.

Jonas argues that Gnostic astrology reduces celestial bodies from qualitative numinous presences to abstract cipher-values within a deterministic system, diagnosing this as a symptom of cosmic alienation.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958thesis

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It is his familiar everyday life that is transfigured in the experience of religious man; he finds a cipher everywhere. Even the most habitual gesture can signify a spiritual act.

Eliade presents cipher as the hermeneutic attitude of homo religiosus, for whom ordinary reality is perpetually legible as sacred disclosure.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis

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The Old Testament is a cipher. (691)

Pascal’s lapidary formulation treats the entire Hebrew scriptural corpus as a double-coded text, transparent only to those who approach it with a hermeneutic of faith.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 1670thesis

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Cipher with a double meaning, of which one is clear and says that the meaning is hidden. (677)

Pascal elaborates the cipher as a structure of double signification—one stratum announces its own concealment—applicable to prophetic figuration and typological reading.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 1670supporting

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All this, moreover, is ciphered in the cosmic rhythms; man need only decipher what the cosmos says in its many modes of being, and he will understand the mystery of life.

Eliade treats the cosmos itself as a ciphered text, the decoding of which constitutes religious understanding of life, death, and regeneration.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting

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As Schiller says, ‘man in the aesthetic condition is a cipher’ (p. 101).

Jung relays Schiller’s formulation to characterize a state of indeterminate openness in which the person has not yet been inscribed by particular function or determination.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921supporting

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the ‘apparent subject matter’ of his poems is ‘a kind of cipher or hieroglyph for meanings which reject or devaluate the very experiences which express them.’

Abrams reports a symptomatic critical strategy that treats the surface content of Romantic poetry as a cipher concealing repudiated meanings, which Abrams himself contests.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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that this universe originated in a cipher, and aimlessly rushes nowhere.

Wilson’s pre-recovery manuscript uses cipher colloquially to denote pure nullity or nothingness, contrasting with belief in a purposive cosmological order.

Schaberg, William H, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019aside

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