Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Not presenting an image or portraiture: in Greek antiquity, applied to the rudest agalmata, or symbols of a divinity, consisting of a simple pillar or block without human attributes. See
agalma .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Of or pertaining to representations without human or animal form .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Additionally, monotheism was held to entail certain consequences, including universalism, anti-superstition and magic, ethical, aniconic.
Early Jewish Monotheisms James F. McGrath 2009
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Her holy aniconic image was carried to Rome by order of the Cumaean Sybil, a personification of the same cave-dwelling Goddess herself.
Archive 2008-04-01 Jan 2008
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At Mecca the Goddess was Shaybah or Sheba, the Old Woman, worshipped as a black aniconic stone like the Godess of the Scythian Amazons.
Archive 2008-02-01 Jan 2008
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The attempt to pare away the fetishistic icons and idols, the pantheons of petitionable divinities, to reduce all this superstitous baggage down to the abstract, ascetic, aniconic idea of YHVH, ultimately runs up against our stubborn inabilities and refusals to deal in abstraction.
A Dark And Hidden God Hal Duncan 2006
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Is the Sodom story, even, a necessary step in constructing an aniconic, ascetic, abstracted concept of the divine needed to get from an animistic understanding of nature to a mechanistic -- i.e. scientific -- understanding?
Wisdom, Justice And Mercy Hal Duncan 2006
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At Mecca the Goddess was Shaybah or Sheba, the Old Woman, worshipped as a black aniconic stone like the Godess of the Scythian Amazons.
Archive 2008-03-01 Jan 2008
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The attempt to pare away the fetishistic icons and idols, the pantheons of petitionable divinities, to reduce all this superstitous baggage down to the abstract, ascetic, aniconic idea of YHVH, ultimately runs up against our stubborn inabilities and refusals to deal in abstraction.
Archive 2006-02-01 Hal Duncan 2006
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The God of the Decalogue is uniquely authoritative, cannot be fashioned after our own image (pace Feuerbach), and cannot be controlled: God is absolute, aniconic, and useless. 6 God does not exist for our use.
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Who was it—Feuerbach, Hegel, or simply every German philosopher there has ever been—who accused the Jews of being aniconic to their soul, eschewing the concrete because they would not envision God other than abstractly?
Kalooki Nights Howard Jacobson 2006
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Sir Arthur Evans describes as "the aniconic image of the god" a stone pillar on which crude pictures of a double axe have been scratched.
The Evolution of the Dragon G. Elliot Smith
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