You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The letters of our alphabet stand for human sounds, vowels and consonants. They are symbols. But their symbolism is religious and metaphysical, or psychological as well as phonetic. To understand our alphabet's psychological symbolism we must go back to those ancient times when the people lived, thought and worked who constructed our letters.
In Europe, it was the Greek people who first received the Semitic system of letter writing, perhaps around 1500 B.C. According to Greek mythology it was King Kadmos of Thebes who brought the art of writing from Phoenicia to Greece, and other sources point to Phoenicia too.
Now while some of the Sanai-Semitic letters of 1500 B.C. still looked like hieroglyphs, later versions such as the thirteenth-century letters of Byblos (an important town in ancient Phoenicia), still more so the Byblos alphabet of the tenth century as well as the very oldest Greek version of these alphabets, were composed of letters in today's sense of the word, i.e., constructed along a definite graphic principle.
This principle, the circle, is Egyptian; in Egypt, with its very old sun cult, the circle was a sun symbol. The Chinese, Hindus, Sumerians, Hittites and Phoenicians also knew the circle, but with radii, and perhaps it is from these sources that the Greeks, and later the Romans, have taken over circles with radii, together with a rich symbolism, to them both fundamental and universal, that later achieved its fullest bloom in the Christian church.
Evidently all the letters of the Greek alphabet are formed by means of circular, vertical and horizontal lines, and their variations.
An inquiry into the meaning of these symbols is important because we still use Greek letters in today's writing. Greek writing of the first century A.D., for instance,