In some traditions, the personifications of the ancestral models have been increasingly marginalised. Where once they were all around, they gradually became relocated to inaccessible regions, within or outside the universe. In some, also, the number of personifications has decreased. Where once they were many, some were first designated ‘false’ and later non-existent, leaving a single omnipotent personification. Concomitant with this has been a general depersonification of Nature: not only have the inanimate and the plant kingdom been depersonified, but also other animal species, denying them the status of social-semiotic beings. Where once all was ‘us’, now only human is ‘us’.
The valeur of a tradition changes as the semiotic-in-social system evolves, because what it contrasts with evolves. The ancestral lineages continue to function interpersonally — and for many, ideationally[1] — even though many of their interpersonal functions have been replaced by the Arts and Humanities, and many of their ideational functions have been replaced by the Sciences. They provide comfort and solidarity in times of grief, as well as motivation, hope, optimism, confidence and certainty.[2] But more importantly, the idealisation of human personhood as a universal creator raises the value of ‘human’ towards the divine: the semiotic creation is reversed such that the divine creates the human as an instantiation of itself that is embedded in a body and which is capable of surviving the death of the body that houses it to join with the eternal.
Footnotes:
[1] For fundamentalists, changes to the ideational truth of a tradition erodes the skeleton on which its values hang; and it is the values which unites/defines the community.
[2] Certainty received a boost when the traditions were recorded in writing. Writing down meaning made its expression a potentially permanent visible thing (“real”) in the world of things (“reality”), rather than a transient audible process. In this way, the durability of the expression mode reinforced the unchallengeability of meaning being expressed.