WRITING SYSTEMS

There are writing systems that convey far more than others. Not all writing systems play in the same league: some compress a density of ideas into a single sign, while others merely line up sounds. Our Western alphabet is practical, fast, efficient — but it remains poor, on its own, at encoding layers of concepts, images, and relationships.

Let us take a classic example from sinography: the Chinese character 王 (wáng, meaning “king”). In a traditional reading, one sees — Heaven, Human, Earth — united by a central axis. It is not merely a word: it is a miniature diagram of the world, a visual thesis on the function of the “king” as a link. A single sign, several levels of information. These three planes can be named as follows: 天 — Heaven, 人 — the Human, 地 — Earth, and 王 (wáng) the king, indicates the unification of these planes through the axis.

To project this idea onto our field of research is to imagine an “exotic” writing system in which each motif encodes — like a logographic character — several layers of information: geometry, rhythm, orientation, location, context. This is exactly my hypothesis for certain crop circles: signs that superimpose levels — mathematical, astronomical, geodesic, and symbolic — in a single imprint readable from the sky.

In this perspective, reading a large motif is nothing instantaneous. It takes time, comparisons, cycles, sometimes decades. As with the character 王, which one believes to be “simple” until the day one perceives the pattern it carries, a crop circle reveals its logic only to those who agree to fit the levels together: the form, the place, the date, the solar angle, the echo with other figures.

It is not merely rural decoration nor land art: it is also a writing system. This writing system may even need asymmetry — the very same asymmetry that once allowed people to classify a motif far too quickly in the category “made with a plank.” Considering the years required to grasp a motif of unidentified origin, it gives pause for thought.

By contrast, tracking a message or “hidden” concepts in a hoaxer’s work requires, in my view, much less time. There is one thing hoaxers decidedly struggle to do: predict future events, far away… very, very far away.

To be continued...

Anne L.