The Semiotics of Fear - J Lopes

The field of semiotics studies how a shape, a sound, or a gesture comes to carry meaning. Sometimes that meaning is socially engineered to instill fear and maintain control over a group of people. I just want to meander with a handful of examples, of when someone decided to signify things, quietly or by force, so that maybe by the end you’ve got the vocabulary to recognize it when it happens.

To find a boogeyman

A wax seal appears, stamped with the word Abraxas. The Knights Templar were not just a military order, they also acted as Europe’s first multinational bank. Sometimes their seals reused engraved gemstones1 that had been passed around for centuries, including Gnostic amulets with the word Abraxas. People had been engraving Abraxas onto charms since at least 200 C.E.2. Basilides, a Gnostic teacher, used the name for a supreme being that was mostly unknowable. The seven Greek letters in Abraxas add up to 365 in gematria, matching the number of days in a year. That’s about as much as anyone can say for sure about what it meant to those who wore it. It’s hard to tell if any Templar saw Abraxas as more than just a handy engraved stone, or if I simply couldn’t find more information. But the historical record I found tells an even stranger story: the accusation that brought down the Templar Order in 1307 used a name no one had ever worn .

The name was Baphomet. When the Templars were arrested, they confessed under torture to worshipping an idol called Baphomet3. Some described it as a bearded head, others as a cat, and some as a skull. Their stories did not match. The name itself had already been used in Europe for two hundred years. It was a garbled Old French rendering of “Mahomet”3, the period’s misspelling of Muhammad, and can be traced back to a crusader’s letter from 1098. Whether Philip IV’s prosecutors chose the name on purpose or just repeated old Crusades-era slang, the result was the same.

An idol that sounded close enough to the enemy’s prophet was easier to accuse of heresy than gemstones with a Greek word on them. This was the perfect crime, demonise the warrior bankers by creating an enemy that no one would be able to refute.

Symbols, signs, and more in semiotics

A sign is anything that stands for something else: it could be a word, a picture, a gesture, or a shape. Ferdinand de Saussure4 explained that every sign has two parts. The first part is the signifier , which is the actual mark or sound you can see or hear. The second part is the signified , the idea or concept it evokes. There’s no inherent link between the two except through mutual agreement. Saussure pointed out that the connection is arbitrary : nothing about a shape or sound forces it to mean a particular thing. This is why meanings can be changed, taken away, or given to something new. The signifier stays the same while the signified can shift underneath it.

Charles Sanders Peirce5 approached it in a different way. He sorted signs by how closely they connect to what they stand for. An icon looks like its object. An index is tied to its object by a direct fact, like a footprint showing a foot or smoke showing fire. A symbol , though, has no natural link. It only means something because people agree on it, like the word “cat,” which does not look or sound like a cat. Symbols are the most fragile type. You can check an icon by seeing if it matches what it represents, or an index by looking at the fact behind it. But a symbol is just a shared idea, so it is easier to interpret in different ways, and sometimes the first person to speak gets to decide what it means.

Roland Barthes focused on two main ideas. Denotation is the basic, literal meaning of a sign. Connotation is everything extra that a sign picks up through use. For example, a skull means death, but it can also suggest piracy, poison, or even a leather jacket, depending on the time period. Barthes used this difference to build his theory of advertising, calling the second layer of meaning a myth , an idea that appears to be a simple fact but is actually a choice made by someone.

Underneath all of it sits what Peirce called semiosis . Meaning is never assigned once and left alone. It keeps moving, each reading becoming the raw material for the next one, so a sign carries the sediment of every hand it’s passed through. A shape gets its meaning through shared agreement, and since that meaning is not permanent, someone with enough influence can change it. If we see a sign like ours, it feels like a badge. If we see the same sign as belonging to others, it can feel like a threat. Both meanings use the same symbol.

Fear is what narrows our view. When people are calm, a sign can have several meanings, and most do not worry about it. But when fear takes over, people quickly stop accepting different interpretations, and the sign starts to seem like it means either us or them, safe or dangerous, good or evil. Courts, tabloids, sermons, and...