The Semiotic Collapse of Aniconism: How the Prohibition of Idols Became the Negation of Non-Linguistic Agency

This paper offers a phenomenological description of a three-stage cognitivearchitecture embedded in Abrahamic monotheism. The original prohibition ofcult images (pesel, ) functioned as a semiotic command againstfabricating counterfeits of the divine—a specific injunction within thecompetitive religious politics of the ancient Near East. Through a process ofsemantic expansion spanning roughly a millennium, this prohibitiontransformed into an ontological principle: the negation of non-linguisticagency as such. The mechanism of this transformation is identified in theLogos doctrine—the theological claim that divine being is co-extensive withlinguistic articulation (John 1:1; the Islamic uncreated Quran; the Jewishmemra)—which installed as cognitive infrastructure the implicit axiom thatwhat cannot be linguistically articulated does not exist. Against this,cognitive science of religion demonstrates that distributed agency-attributionacross non-human entities is the maturationally natural default of humancognition: animism is not a primitive error but the baseline from whichmonotheistic cognition departs through active, institutionally sustainedsuppression. The paper further describes how the monopolization of divineagency in a single, linguistically complete being structurally necessitates adelegation system in which interpretive authority over divine languagefunctions as the primary source of human power. This architecture, takentogether, constitutes the cognitive infrastructure for what subsequentlymanifested as ecological disenchantment and colonial epistemicide. Nonormative claim is advanced. The paper is offered as phenomenologicaldescription of a cognitive system whose internal structure has consequencesthat can be traced.