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The Birth of Symbols

Charles Sanders Peirce, the renowned American philosopher and logician, was among the pioneers of semiotics, the study of signs. For him, signs fall into three modes: icon, index and symbol. These categories are not always watertight, since a single sign can participate in more than one mode of signification. 

An icon represents something because it resembles it. Consider the envelope in the Gmail logo, which resembles a paper envelope and thus evokes the idea of mail. An index, by contrast, has a direct connection to what it indicates. Smoke rising from a chimney, for instance, does not look like fire; its physical connection to fire lets us take it as a sign of fire. Likewise, the whistle of a pressure cooker can indicate that food is cooking inside.

Symbols are different again. They need neither resemblance nor a physical connection. Their link to what they represent is largely established through social convention and shared understanding, reinforced by repeated use. The Tricolour is the symbol of India, yet it’s just a piece of cloth with no resemblance to the country or any physical connection to it. However, as the national flag, it can evoke emotions far beyond the cloth itself.

Symbols surround us in remarkably diverse forms. Some are simple: a red light tells us to stop, while an arrow points us in the right direction. Others are complex and carry elaborate associations. A flag can evoke a nation and its history; a religious symbol may carry meanings accumulated over centuries. And then there are the symbols of our digital world — emojis, hashtags, memes and reaction buttons. Some are so familiar that we barely notice them; others invite us to pause and interpret. A symbol, then, need not be an ancient emblem or a carefully designed insignia. It can be as small as an emoji at the end of a sentence or as prominent as a national flag.

Symbols are born in many ways. A culture may deliberately invent them. The adoption of ‘₹’ as the symbol for the Indian rupee in 2010, following an open competition, is a recent example. Symbols may also emerge gradually through convention. Take black, traditionally associated with mourning in many cultures. In many Indian traditions, however, white carries the same meaning. The colours themselves have no inherent association with grief. It is convention that teaches us to read them that way. And sometimes, symbols stumble into existence almost by accident. The ampersand ‘&’ began as a scribal shortcut, when Roman writers fused the letters of et (“and”) into a single stroke. What began as a convenience of the hand, repeated over generations, eventually became a symbol in its own right.

A symbol is born, but it does not remain what it was at birth. Once it enters the world, the world begins to leave its mark on it. Meanings accumulate, associations gather, and gradually it may acquire many layers and nuances. In this sense, symbols, too, come of age.

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The Coming of Age of Symbols

A monochrome apple with a bite taken out of it on the right is one of the most familiar symbols in the digital world. In 1977, Apple introduced the bite mark during the redesign of its logo, specifically to avoid it being mistaken for a cherry or a tomato. Over the next 50 years, various meanings were attributed to the symbol. People interpreted the bite as a reference to the biblical tree of knowledge; others connected it to Alan Turing’s death, and some pointed out the playful pun between ‘bite’ and the digital ‘byte’ of data. The symbol thus became a site where meanings accumulated beyond what its designers had intended. Such is the strange journey of symbols.

Symbols evolve over time. How does this happen? Every time we use a symbol, we inherit its history while also bringing our own context to it. We encounter this process every day, often without noticing it.

Imagine, for a moment, your WhatsApp pings, and you see a message with a folded-hands symbol: 🙏 How would you read it? It is commonly understood as prayer, reverence, and supplication, but in text messages and on social media it can also express gratitude, apology, hope, respect, or a polite request. Each use draws on meanings established by previous users while sometimes adding a slight nuance of its own. After thousands or millions of such encounters, the symbol can communicate far more than the gesture that gave rise to it. A symbol, in this sense, is never quite finished.

As symbols travel through time, across space, and between cultures, they encounter new contexts. The symbol remains, but the world around it changes, and so can its readings. The same symbol may speak differently to different generations. Therefore, a symbol does not merely acquire a meaning; it acquires a history of meanings. Yet some interpretations become so widely shared through repeated use that they begin to seem almost intrinsic to the symbol itself. These shared symbols and meanings form some of the threads that hold a culture together.

Cultures continually create, preserve and reinterpret symbols. Perhaps this is why attempts to suppress established symbols rarely have the last word. The Byzantine iconoclasm, for instance, rejected sacred images, but their use was eventually restored. At times, suppressed symbols return in unexpected ways; Buddhism offers an intriguing twist. In early Buddhist art, the Buddha was often represented by symbols rather than in human form, yet images of the Buddha eventually became widespread. Today, the Buddha’s image is almost impossible to miss, from temples and T-shirts to cafés and home décor. A symbol that was once largely absent from Buddhist representation has enjoyed a remarkably busy afterlife.

Symbols also help cultures transmit messages among their members, store cultural memory, and reactivate it when needed. A familiar example from Indian life is how symbols come alive during festivals, be it Holi, Diwali, Durga Puja, Onam, or any other. Such occasions are crowded with symbols that evoke memories of a shared past among participants. Finally, symbols can also function as a mirror through which a society sees its own identity. Walking along the streets of Santiniketan, I saw many houses with panels depicting Bauls; some had statues of them in their gardens and on their walls. To me, they are never mere ornamentation; they seem like a society quietly reminding itself of its roots and of an identity shaped by mysticism and universalism. Writing new, subtle nuances into symbols can also be a way of reorganising society.

The coming of age of a symbol, however, does not mark the end of its story. Symbols can lose their cultural relevance as contexts change. Their meanings may weaken, their use may decline, and eventually they may disappear from everyday life. In this sense, symbols too can experience a form of death.

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The Death of Symbols

We organise much of our lives around symbols. They speak simultaneously to our minds, emotions, ideas and social relationships, allowing different aspects of experience to coalesce into a shared cultural understanding. Yet symbols, like living things or cultures, can flourish, decline and eventually pass away. We might think of this decline in terms of decay or decadence, which may ultimately lead to their death.

Decay occurs when the shared understanding of a symbol begins to fragment. A meaning once relatively stable gives way to competing and contradictory readings. The symbol may then lose some of its power to connect people and instead become a site of division. Decadence takes a different form. Sometimes a symbol becomes so embellished that attention shifts from the ideas or values it was meant to express to the symbol itself. In such cases, form begins to overshadow content. A national celebration may become a spectacle dominated by enormous flags, elaborate decorations, and displays, to the point that the symbol’s visual grandeur begins to overshadow the democratic values and unity it represents.

The death of a symbol, however, need not be a complete disappearance. It can take several forms, which we might call obsolescence, fossilisation and opacity. Sometimes a symbol simply becomes obsolete. It may remain perfectly intelligible, yet people stop using it. The Charkha, for instance, was once a prominent symbol during the freedom movement. After independence, the Ashoka Chakra took its place at the centre of the national flag, and the Charkha gradually faded from everyday national symbolism. Then there is the possibility of fossilisation. The symbol’s original material form or cultural practice may disappear, while its traces survive in idioms, literature, ritual or historical memory. The floppy disk icon 💾 offers a striking contemporary example. Most people no longer use floppy disks, yet the image of one still means “save” in specialised contexts, such as computers and digital devices. The object has vanished from ordinary technological life, but its symbolic function continues. This is a form of digital symbolic fossilisation. We can also think of a quieter form of symbolic death: opacity. A sign may remain visible and familiar while its original meaning or history is no longer widely understood. The ‘X’ in Xmas illustrates this process. The ‘X’ comes from the Greek letter chi (Χ), which has historically been used as an abbreviation for Christ. The sign remains familiar, but the cultural knowledge that once made its origin intelligible has become increasingly opaque.

Yet perhaps the label ‘death’ of a symbol is premature. How can we say a symbol is dead when, at times, it lives multiple lives across different cultures, taking on different guises? Or when a particular symbol that has seemingly vanished for a while suddenly makes a comeback?

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The Many Lives and Second Lives of Symbols

A symbol can have more than one life. The same symbol may take on different meanings across cultural settings and follow very different trajectories. The dragon, for instance, is a symbol central to Chinese culture, signifying auspiciousness and power, whereas in the Western world it has acquired a different symbolic life, often representing the monstrous and the threatening. A symbol may die in one cultural context and yet survive, or even thrive, in another. The swastika still thrives as an auspicious symbol in Hinduism, while a requiem has long since been sung for its life as a Nazi symbol.

It was March 1905; the team was in the midst of the winter digging session under the leadership of Friedrich Oscar Oertel, and they chanced upon something buried. A 7-foot-tall structure made of chunar sandstone. It was more than 2000 years old. Almost 45 years later, this old block was adopted as the national emblem of India, the famous Lion Capital of Ashoka from Sarnath. A symbol submerged in oblivion, reminiscing about its heyday in Mauryan times, was suddenly thrust into the limelight. It was the resurrection of a symbol. The fate many symbols share. 

A symbol may fade from everyday cultural life without disappearing altogether. It may lie dormant, preserved in stone, memory, text, or the remnants of a forgotten tradition, waiting for another historical moment to reawaken it. Death, therefore, need not be the final chapter in a symbol’s story. Even after vanishing from active cultural life, some symbols make remarkable returns to contemporary cultural life. They can be resurrected and begin second lives in contexts far removed from those in which they first flourished. Runes, the ancient Germanic script once largely displaced by the Latin alphabet, have returned in new guises: neopagan spirituality, popular culture, graphic design, and the contemporary tattoo scene. Khadi, once a potent symbol of the freedom movement and swaraj, has found a new life as a heritage textile in contemporary Indian fashion. Look closely, and you may find many such supposedly dead symbols living second lives all around us.