Obelisk

As an altar in our sense, as a place for burnt-offering, the obelisk could scarcely serve, but, when it stood on a grave-mound or on a basis, mound or basis would serve as altar while wreaths and stemmata as on the coins would be hung on the obelisk.

Harrison argues that the obelisk functioned not as a sacrificial altar in itself but as a vertical marker atop the tomb-mound, whose base performed the altar-role, collapsing the distinction between commemorative stele and sacred pillar.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis

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To the oldest forms of clocks belong the gnomon and sundial, both of which make use of the seeming rotation of the sun around the earth by measuring the shadow of a rod, column, or obelisk.

Von Franz situates the obelisk within the archaic technology of time-measurement, reading it as a solar instrument that externalizes the archetypal intuition of cyclical time into monumental stone.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

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they are visited by a smooth gray obelisk—perhaps the idea of culture or religion—which they explore with touch, in a reverential way.

Keltner reads Kubrick’s cinematic obelisk as an awe-inducing numinous object, functioning as a material condensation of culture and religion that reorganizes primate behavior into reverence and tool-use.

Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting

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Diminutive ὀβελίσκος [m.] ‘(little) spit, needle, obelisk, etc.’ (Att., Hell.)

Beekes traces ‘obelisk’ to its Greek etymological root in obelos (spit/skewer), establishing the monument’s linguistic and material origins in a pointed, thrusting implement — a derivation with implications for its phallic and axial symbolic freight.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting

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the omphalos was a cone surmounting a grave. We have further had abundant evidence that cones did surmount graves.

Harrison establishes the cone-form shared by omphalos and obelisk as a grave-marker, providing the structural context within which the obelisk’s sacred verticality is historically grounded.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting

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If we ask further for a symbolical art-form to express this idea, we have to look for it in the chief structures built by the Egyptians. Here we have before us a double architecture, one above ground, the other subterranean.

Derrida, citing Hegel on Egyptian funerary architecture, gestures toward the monumental vertical axis above ground as the symbolic expression of Egyptian beliefs about immortality — a context within which the obelisk implicitly figures.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside

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