Symbol Two: The Circled Asterisk or Cartwheel

We've discovered that the circled cross is not really universal, just very common.  How about it's sister, the circled asterisk?  This is sometimes called a cartwheel or spoked wheel, also.  Among Egyptian hieroglyphs, there is one of these "spoked wheels," N15.  It has five "spokes."  It is not a wheel, though.  It's a star.  You see, the "spokes" also occur without the surrounding circle, in which case they are still a star.  With the surrounding circle, it's most often an ideograph for d(w)3t, "netherworld," originally the place of morning twilight.

The ancient Egyptians' neighbors in southern Iraq -- well, it wasn't Iraq yet -- had a symbol in proto-cuneiform that was a very nice circled asterisk.  This asterisk had eight points just like our modern one does.  The name of this proto-cuneiform symbol is |LAGAB~a x UB|.  The verticals in this case are a convention, indicating that one sign is inside the other.  Here, UB is inside LAGAB, variant "a."  LAGAB seems to have eventually come to mean "black, slab (of stone); trunk (of tree)."  The asterisk inside, UB, may be the tidbit that eventually meant "corner, angle," or it might be another one that ended up as a prefix.  My knowledge of these proto-cuneiform tidbits is pretty sparse.  Knowledgeable readers are welcome to fill me in.  My college education was longer on Egyptian than cuneiform, I'm afraid....

There is another proto-cuneiform sign that is mostly rectangular but bulges on one end as if it were going to become a diamond. It isn’t a diamond, though, because the other end looks like an ordinary rectangle. Inside this odd shape – half diamond, half rectangle – is an asterisk with eight points, or a cross with an ex on top (*). This whole symbol, container and asterisk inside, is AMA~a. According to my Sumerian dictionary, this ought to be the word for “mother.” This seems terribly odd since, at this early stage, these symbols are supposed to be pictographic according to the generally accepted theory. That means they should be drawings of objects. But this boxy gadget with an asterisk inside doesn’t look at all like my mother.

Moving on a bit further east, we come to ancient Iran where the Elamites once lived.  Proto-Elamite symbols are generally not round, so there is no circled asterisk per se.  But there is are several symbols that may be comparable to the rounded forms found in proto-cuneiform. It is as if the not-yet-Elamites wanted to copy the not-yet-Sumerians, but made all the roundish proto-cuneiform symbols in an angular style.  So, proto-Elamite symbol M302~b isn’t quite round, and it isn't quite a diamond shape, either. Its right and left ends are pointed like those of diamonds, but the middle is extended as if it were going to become a pair of diamonds but hadn't managed to split in two yet.

The proto-Elamite scribe must have wanted to draw an oval, a very wide oval, but he wanted to make it squared off and pointy – no curves allowed! Maybe he was inspired by his wife’s cross-stitch patterns or her bead work.  Or maybe it was her basket-weaving that made him so enamored of angles and points – some sort of craft where the nature of the material inhibits free curves. Looking at it this way, M302~b could be the Elamite square-minded equivalent of the Sumerian round-minded circled asterisk. There is some similarity to M305~b as well – a sister or cousin design of the square-minded folks' circled asterisk.

Continuing still farther east, there is an Old Chinese symbol resembling a circled asterisk.  Well, sort of.  In the older form of writing, it was a circle with an "X" in it, then elongated dots in the spaces between the arms of the "X."  This is supposed to be the character wei4, "the stomach which encloses the food" (Wieger 1965: 285).  Nowadays, it looks more like a square with an asterisk in it.  The "asterisk" is the character for grain, of course.  Another Chinese character, similar in the Old Seal writing, is kun4, a circle with a kind of curvy six-point asterisk inside.  This "asterisk," however, represents a tree.  The whole character represents camping under a tree, now written as a cross in a square (Wieger: 1965: 276).

In North America, the spoked circled appears in rock art fairly often.  It is found in Texas, as documented by Newcomb (1996: 189, 207, 214).  It also occurs in Nevada and California (Heizer and Baumhoff (1984: 161; 11 occurrences).In some of the occurrences, the spokes continue on outside the rim of the circle. In other cases, there is a circle inside the larger circle as well as spokes. Other examples are even more complex, with spokes inside, “V” shapes, and additional lines inside and outside the circle. The number of “spokes” varies as well, with some instances having few spokes, others having a multitude. However they are drawn, elaborate or simple, whatever these shapes represent, they are not really wheels, since these people did not have wheeled vehicles when they were creating these images.

The Chumash people of California, near Santa Barbara, made some elaborate designs that included circles with four or more spokes and often rays on the outside in addition.  These have been cited by some authors as examples of entoptic forms.  This is a reference to the "stars" and other bright shapes one sees when hit over the head, when about to faint, and when under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.  Now, supposedly, there are precisely 15 entoptic forms that are universal -- there's that word again -- as established by scientific research many years ago.  The little icons representing these 15 forms appear again and again in article after article, and the original research is cited again and again.  But who did this research and when and just how was it established that it was universal, meaning that everyone everwhere sees the same things?  As far as I can tell, a German scientist named Kluver did the original research about 100 years ago.  He did the research in Germany.  He tested about 1000 people.  But as far as I can tell, he tested Germans.  It leaves me wondering if Australians really see the same 15 forms.  Do natives in the Amazon see the same 15 forms?  Do shamans among the San in southern Africa see the same 15 forms?  Has anybody checked?  It doesn't look like it to me.  But maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, the 15 universal entoptic forms include (1) what I would term nested curves but what most writers term “catenary curves.” The standard drawing resembles the a parenthesis followed by another that is smaller and nestled within the first. This drawing is then repeated in reverse. When I have migraines, or I bonk my head on the edge of a cupboard, I sometimes see a large curve which tends to rise and another rises below it and then another rises below that one, and so on and so on. Sometimes these nauseating curves move from side to side instead of rising. I don't recall them sinking, but my memory may be faulty.

The second drawing in the list of universal entoptic forms (2) is a very small circle with large rays, rather like the conventional drawing of a sun. If this is meant to be the only entoptic version, I would tend to object. There are roundish things inside my eyeballs which grow spikes or spokes inside the roundy thing, then the spokes or spikes outgrow the circle, pierce the rim and keep on growing, in my experience. In other words, as far as entoptic forms are concerned, the circled cross and circled asterisk are essentially the same thing at different stages of growth. Other relatives in this trajectory include the circled dot, the circled circle, concentric circles (#6 in the list), and the rayed circle. There are also hybrids of these, a circle with a smaller circle inside, which also has a dot inside, and there are rays outside the outer circle. Since everything is moving all the time in these entoptic tidbits, growing, expanding, and changing, there are no hard and fast categories. And one cannot really count how many spokes or spikes or rays there are because even as one attempts to count, more spring up or disappear and one gets an awfully queasy feeling in one’s stomach if one tries to concentrate on those things too long.

Moving along, the third item in the list seems to be a set of wavy lines (3), although these are often described as zigzags. In practice, there is not a hard and fast distinction, since they too are often in motion, the upward points moving up and down and the downward points moving down and up. So at any given moment, the “line” may be more or less jagged and zigzag-like or it may be more wavy and undulating. Another sort of zigzag is created by an individual dot or bean-shaped bright spot moving in that back-and-forth path. That’s especially nauseating and makes the migraine particularly excrutiating. I definitely have to go lie down when that happens. The bright, little booger leaves a trail, too, which is not bright but rather like an after-image when you’ve stared at something very shiny.

I’ve seen lines (#4 on the entoptic list) but my entoptic lines are never as neat as tidy as the carefully arranged, parallel sets shown in the standard drawings. I resent this deeply and think my phosphene lines ought to shape up. Mine are loners, very straggly, and generally wrinkled. They never stand up straight like fence posts.  I want to lodge a complaint about that. I have a similar complaint about the dots (#7 on the entoptic list) which are also shown neatly arranged in rows and columns. Mine are spilled all over the place like Legos spread across the rug after the kids have been playing with them for several hours. There's certainly no semblance of order.  Besides that, they blink on and off like defective lightbulbs, wander hither and yon, and generally behave badly. They never line up in tidy groups like the drawings show. I want a phosphene housekeeper to tidy up forthwith!


Things don’t get much better as the list progresses. There is a grid (#12) which I suppose is the thing which I always thought of as a checkerboard that my migraine genie forgot to color in. I do recognize that gadget although I haven't actually seen it in awhile. And she suppose that the spiral (#10 on the list) is distantly related to the rarely glimpsed Ferris wheel I had the displeasure of getting caught in a few times in some of the worst migraines. It spun around me playing some very loud music, with some old friends from childhood -- some very animated old toys -- sitting in the seats during a couple of nighttime migraines.  That was quite an experience.  I even became paralyzed during those migraines. That was interesting.

And I'm guessing that the two little circles attached to curving lines (#15) described as "like cherries" are something like the dimly glimpsed circles and lines attached in various different ways that I've seen. I consider these lollies. There is the balloon – a single circle attached to a single wrinkly line; the barbells – two circles attached to each other by a short line that runs between them; the earphones – two circles attached to each other by a “U” shaped line that arcs over them; the skewered circle – a single circle with a line attached on either side. Then there are less regular forms that are harder to characterize.

But I'm at a loss to comprehend what is meant by the blobby shape of #9, how that differs from the pointy blob of #5, both described as irregular shapes.  Neither do I understand what is meant by “like digits” for the pointy blob of #14. These all seem ill-defined and might be better lumped together in a single miscellaneous “undefined” category. Other shapes are drawn clearly but never appear in my migraines.  For example, #8 appears to be a diamond; #11 appears to be a crossroads ex; #13 appears to be a triangle.  The interesting thing about these last three is that I never see them.  The only angular shapes I've seen are the grid and the zigzag.  Now, you might consider the diamond a piece out of the grid.  But still, I never see it as an individual piece.  And, interestingly, it doesn't appear as an individual item in the rock art collections of Texas or Nevada and California.  It occurs only in the Grid or in chains of "X" shapes.

So, that leaves me wondering if this universal set is really universal.  Now, if these are universal, perhaps an individual might not see every single one of them.  One person might only see a subset of the 15 possible forms. But if the 15 forms of a universal set, no individual should see entoptic forms that are not on the list. Or so it seems to me. That’s what “universal” means in linguistics. The IPA or International Phonetic Alphabet contains universal symbols. Any given language will use only a subset of the available symbols. But if a new society comes to light somewhere in the world, the available set of symbols is expected to be adequate to describe their language. It is a universal alphabet.

So, it does not concern me too much that I have not personally seen all 15 of the entoptic shapes in the list. It does seem a bit odd that several items on this list seem conspicuously absent from rock art and from hieroglyphs, etc., when certain other items are quite common.  If they're all equally universal, why aren't they equally common? 

But the oddest thing is this.  This “universal” set of entoptic shapes does not contain the particular shape that I see most often during my migraines. And that seems to be a serious defect in this list. It leads me to wonder just how universal the list really is. If the original research was done by testing only Germans, perhaps the list only applies to Germans. Perhaps, if Klüver had asked an Australian, he might have added a few other symbols to his list. What might he have learned if he had asked somebody from South America? Or from East Africa? Or from Alaska? We could go on and on. There are lots of places in this world and lots of people in this world who may have seen other entoptic forms. If everyone just takes Klüver at his word and copies his little chart, how are we to know?

Now, those who repeat these findings often apply them to the art of indigenous people and claim that certain images are representations of phosphenes or entoptic forms. I find many of these claims to be unconvincing, based on the entoptic forms that I see. Specifically, the Chumash Indians painted spoked circles that also has rays.  It seems to me that these are not entoptic forms, but a simple combination of two common forms, found so often in many places, that it makes no sense to call them entoptics.  They are simply symbols.  But rather than dispute the generally accepted wisdom of so many anthropologists, I would like to ask others to report the nature of the entoptic forms that they see, and to report the circumstances – whether these things are due to migraines, temporal lobe epilepsy, dreams, ingesting drugs, or getting bonked on the head.

Have you ever seen a circled cross, a spoked circle, or a rayed circle, dear reader?