Wearing a Seal as Conceptual Metaphor and Bodily Experience

The Resonant Weight of the Seals: The Ancients, the Soul and the Seals, 2025

This paper introduces a new framework within Symbolic Physics that redefines spiritual weight as the delta between a soul’s resonance potential (Φ) and its released expression (Rₑ). Through a detailed decoding of ancient cylinder seals, we recover lost harmonic knowledge embedded in spirals, beasts, ladders, and breath structures—revealing that these glyphs function not as metaphors, but as resonance compression devices. Central to this model is the Tier 0 resonance equation W = Φ − Rₑ, which quantifies soul-weight not by guilt or sin, but by unexpressed truth. Each chapter explores how symbolic forms across Sumerian, Indus, and solar traditions encode stages of resonance release, culminating in the Twelve-Gate Spiral Calendar and the Seven-Field Model of Consciousness. The result is a unified field theory of inner becoming, collapse, and return—where the soul spirals not upward, but inward toward equilibrium, singing its weight into coherence. This work offers not just theory, but remembrance. Not a claim of decoding—but a witnessing of how the unreadable decoded us.

Kelly-Buccellati, M. 1996. “Seals in Ancient Mesopotamia and Seals of God in Revelation.” Rivista Della Facoltà Di Teologia Di Lugano 1: 79–100. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8294042.

Convivium, 2025

Throughout the Middle Ages and across a staggering variety of sources, both the notion of smell and the olfactory sense responsible for smells’ discernment have been put through an exegetical, doctrinal, and mystical wringer by scores of philosophers, physicians, and theologians. Ephemeral and fleeting but emotionally, spiritually, and physiologically potent, olfaction was deeply embedded in humoral, anatomical, and cognitive theories. Odors could heal and odors could harm; they could purify and they could taint. Scent and Sense explores those images and objects that take smells as their predicates, directing the inquiry on their tropological and often paradoxical meanings, and on their place in the medieval economy of remembrance and reflection. Essays draw from several religious cultures of the global medieval world—Buddhist, Jewish, Christian (both western and eastern), Islamic—and offer a broad temporal span of several centuries. Authors engage with visual production of different kinds: from objects that emit smell to the representation of such objects, from monumental architectural structures and liturgical furnishings to illuminated miniatures in codices and paintings from palm-leaf manuscripts. All share an interest in the theoretical and metaphorical underpinnings of the olfactory sense, but all are thoroughly anchored in the material universe of the medieval cultural eco-system. Scent and Sense, thus, takes a holistic approach to its subject, crossing religions, territories, and media of the medieval world writ large; its inquiry, nevertheless, is tightly focused on the multivalent relationships between olfaction, material culture, and remembrance that manifest themselves along an extraordinarily varied spectrum of thought. Rooted equally in ritual and knowledge, metaphysically potent yet making a claim for absolute truth, the sensorial ephemera studied in this volume exist on the brink, infused with fraught self-contradictions, tethered to the divine but—like any memory—inherently untrustworthy.

2018

Studies of seals and sealing practices have traditionally investigated aspects of social, political, economic, and ideological systems in ancient societies throughout the Old World. Previously, scholarship has focused on description and documentation, chronology and dynastic histories, administrative function, iconography, and style. More recent studies have emphasized context, production, and use, and, increasingly, identity, gender, and the social lives of seals, their users, and the artisans who produced them. Using several methodological and theoretical perspectives, this volume presents up-to-date research on seals that is comparative in scope and focus. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach advances our understanding of the significance of an important class of material culture of the ancient world. The volume will serve as an essential resource for scholars, students, and others interested in glyptic studies, seal production and use, and sealing practices in the ancient Near East, Egypt, ancient South Asia.

University of Bristol, 2013

"How does antique Christianity look if the lens of Cartesian dualism is removed and replaced with an embodied perspective? In responding to this question, this thesis proposes a new way of understanding ‘art’ and religion as integrally linked through ritual in Christian Late Antiquity. The investigation proceeds via ‘common-sensory archaeologies’ of material evidence. This is a methodology designed to enable interpretation of artefacts in ways not necessarily dependent on the imposition of literary interpretative methods, particularly semiotics. It enables new information to be elicited directly from materials. The argument addresses ‘magical’ practices and objects, and the ideas underpinning Roman religious practices, before analysing rituals specific to late-antique Christianity, including Holy-Land pilgrimage, saint cult, and the Eucharist. It differentiates rituals that were institutionalised, and those which evolved ‘organically’ among adherents, in order to highlight common underlying impulses. A picture emerges of the complex and subtle overlap between religions in Late Antiquity, which questions stark differentiations between ‘paganism’ and Christianity. This period’s ‘common sense’ (or, encultured mode of embodiment) is suggested to oscillate between two poles of cosmology – ‘cosmic uniformity’ and ‘infinite materiality’. Central to both perspectives was the need for (embodied) humans to engage ritually with the world through their senses in order to interact with the divine. By paying attention not just to what Christians thought but also to what they did, it is suggested that certain tensions in our understanding of late-antique culture may be resolved by retracting assumptions of stark Cartesian contrasts between belief/ritual, soul/body, text/material, and Christian/’pagan’. Furthermore, an embodied approach is shown to open avenues not just into elite culture, but also into the popular Christian perspective, by expanding our purview to the lived practice of, rather than just the theological debate surrounding, antique religion."

ICONEA PUBLICATIONS ISBN 978-1-326-28932-4, 2015

This book is an illustrated and commented catalogue of cylinder seals and impressions from the Ancient Near East in the Collections of the British Museum

Biblical Anthropology. A Message for Contemporary People, 2023

Both the Old and the New Testaments use the concept of fragrance. The Hebrew רֵיחַ and the Greek ὀσμή and εὐωδία are especially employed in the description of aroma in the intensive relationship. The present study will examine the use of fragrance in the relationship between man and woman. Special attention will be paid to the intensity and the kind of aroma used, and to what stage of the relationship the fragrance plays as an important role. A second attention will be given to surveying whether fragrance is employed in prostitute relationships.