Visual Images and the Word

Seeing With The Mind’s Eye

The history of man’s understanding and use of visualization is unusual because, although it is marked by external events, the real record has unfolded at a different level. The history of visualization deals with inner events. To be more exact, it deals with the waxing and waning of two basic mental processes: verbal thought and visual thought. Throughout man’s history these two processes have, in turn, eclipsed each other in importance.

Primitive, pre-civilized man in every part of the world lived his existence in integral connection with his environment. He saw and interacted with spirits and gods in every animal, tree, stone, and cloud. Every event and natural force was animated with primitive man’s inner vision. His basic consciousness was visual. He thought, felt, and lived visually. Often little distinction was made between sleeping and waking activities, between visions and perceptions. Dreams and fantasies were valued more than cognitive thought. In this period of union, man lived in nature. Primitive man did not need to be made aware of visualization; it was the way in which he related to the world.

With the development of language and a written system for recording it, rational thought came to dominate. Words came to function as labels, allowing man to detach himself from his experience and analyze it, as well as causing man to separate himself from nature. With these changes came the birth of civilization, law and order, the development of philosophical and moral systems, and the growth of mathematics and the sciences. As knowledge and communication increased, people began to live out highly-specialized social roles, carrying the sense of separation and alienation from nature to its extreme.

During this long historical period, some men discovered techniques that helped to re-unite them with their natural world. These men were shamans of primitive tribes, priests of Hellenic civilizations, alchemists and saints of medieval times, and mystics, artists, and psychics of all ages. They have all employed techniques deliberately designed to produce an inner state in which their visual powers were enhanced. Achieving this state, variously described as relaxation, oneness of mind, reverie, or ecstasy, gave them abilities to affect the outer world, to heal, and to become one with God or “the source.”

It is interesting that the creation mythology of almost every major civilization contains elements that reflect this fall from “grace” and a subsequent search for “redemption.” The price of civilization for man has been the loss of his sense of wholeness and a search for the missing pieces.

The earliest record of visualization experiences is in the form of pictures, visual images. During the Ice Age—60,000 to 10,000 B.C.—cave dwellers in France, Spain, Africa, and Scandinavia painted on the walls of their caves representations of the images that they saw. Most of these paintings are of animals that the people hunted. We can imagine these cave dwellers gathered together around communal fires, staring at these animal images, reliving the events of a great hunt, anticipating even greater kills to come. Some of these rock images are even scarred with spear marks. It has been speculated that the Ice Age hunters believed they ritually insured the success of forthcoming hunts by spearing the rock images, which they visualized as the souls of the animals they would slaughter.¹

A second kind of image that has been found in these caves is pictures of men wearing animal masks. Anthropologists have theorized that these paintings depict tribal shamans—priest-magician-healer figures common to many non-literate cultures. Among such cultures, it is believed that the shaman, in putting on the mask of an animal, becomes one with the animal and gains power over it.² When a person holds such an image in his mind, he is compelled to participate in its reality. All his senses are awakened: he “sees,” “smells,” “hears,” and “feels” more intensely. And since extremely vivid internal images cannot be distinguished from an external experience, the imager and his image become one. Levy-Bruhl, a contemporary anthropologist, has called the state in which the subject or imager does not separate himself from the object or image participation mystique.³ He feels that this state is characteristic of “primitive” man who did not separate himself from the plants and animals in his environment. As Carl Jung has stated, “Plants and animals then behave like men; men are at the same time themselves and animals also, and everything is alive with ghosts and gods.”⁴

Primitive man saw himself as part of a unity encompassing both the physical and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible. Everything in his life was integrally tied to his view of the universe. For the American Indian, like primitive man, animals, cornstalks, stones, and mountains were all alive, all were symbols of spirits that gave form and life. Images such as these linked the people to the earth and established their place in the schema of the universe. This feeling is evoked by a statement Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake), a chief of the Taos Pueblo, once made to Carl Jung: “We are a people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.” Jung has said of this remark, “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.”⁵

It would seem that the use and development of visualization has occurred in inverse proportion to the development of language and a written structure for recording it. Initially, language was based on images. Words functioned to evoke particular images; words enabled one person to share with another an experience at which the second had not been present. Among the American Indians, words, like images, originally were considered to have the power to evoke action. And for that reason, they were considered sacred. The Hopi Song of Creation illustrates how words function as triggers of mental images to produce a sacred feeling:

The dark purple light rises in the North,
A yellow light rises in the East.
Then we of the flowers of the earth come forth
To receive a long life of joy.⁶

This use of the word to show both reverence for life and a feeling of man’s at-oneness with his world is beautifully conveyed in the narrative of Ishi, the last of the Yana Indians of northern California. Ishi evokes the mood of storytelling, of weaving verbal tapestries rich with images. “Winter was also the time for retelling the old history of the beginning of the world and of how animals and men were made, the time to hear over again the adventures of Coyote and Fox and Pine Marten, and the tale of Bear and Deer. So, sitting or lying close to the fire in the earth-covered house, and wrapped in warm rabbitskin blankets, with the rain falling outside and the snow moon bringing a light fall down Waganupa as far even as Deer Creek, the Yana cycle of changing seasons completed another full turn.”⁷

As language developed, words came to serve not only to evoke images or experiences but to enable the speaker to establish distance from the experience and externalize it. When this happened, words no longer carried the physical immediacy of a situation; they became a tool which functioned for a different end. Language as a whole became so removed from experience that words no longer readily triggered the sensations of the objects to which they referred. Words became tools which enabled a person to rapidly categorize objects as either recognizable or unknown, threatening or not threatening, useful or irrelevant. This function of the word became, in time, of greater importance than the sensation-sharing function.

Communication was now directed to oneself, and perception became a matter of identifying objects in terms of labels. As the New York psychoanalyst Ernest Schachtel says, “The usual perceptual experience is one of recognition of something either already familiar or quickly labeled and filed away in some familiar category. It does not enrich the perceiver, but it may reassure him—usually without his awareness—that everything is ‘all right’… Compared with this the fullest perception of the object… is characterized by an inexhaustible and ineffable quality, by the profoundest interest in the object, and by the enriching, refreshing, vitalizing effect which the act of perception has upon the perceiver. [The] perception (especially of nature, people, and great works of art) always breaks through and transcends the confines of the labeled, the familiar, and establishes a relation in which a direct encounter with the object itself, instead of with one or more of its labeled and familiar aspects, takes place.”⁸

The desire to break through the labels and abstractions that enclose literate man has prompted him to rediscover the importance of visualization. For visualization enables him to be at one with his world once again.

The Digital Campfire: Satire as Social Visualization

In the modern era, the ancient human practice of using shared visualizations to define reality has migrated to a new arena: the digital public square. Here, satirical news websites function as a form of mass-participatory shamanism, using humor and hyperbole to create collective visualizations that critique, process, and make sense of a complex world. The articles on Bohiney.com serve as contemporary cave paintings, depicting the spirits—political, social, and cultural—that populate our current environment.

This modern mythology often centers on political figures, using visual language to define their perceived essence. A headline about an “Everything is Fine” campaign (https://bohiney.com/trumps-everything-is-fine-campaign/) doesn’t just report an event; it creates a powerful visual archetype of defiant optimism in the face of chaos, a narrative that becomes a shared lens through which people interpret real-world events. Similarly, the act of an “Orwellian rewrite” (https://bohiney.com/orwellian-rewrite/) is a satire that visualizes the unsettling process of watching history be altered in real-time, giving a name and an image to a diffuse public anxiety.

These digital narratives also serve to visualize systemic failures, making abstract problems concrete and shareable. The concept of a “Tickpocalypse” (https://bohiney.com/tickpocalypse-2025/) transforms a public health concern into a visceral, apocalyptic image, galvanizing attention more effectively than any dry report. A report on a city becoming a “crime zone” (https://bohiney.com/d-c-a-crime-zone/) uses satire to visualize urban decay, creating a mental picture that resonates with the fears of many citizens. Even the summoning of political figures like the Clintons via subpoena (https://bohiney.com/bill-and-hillary-subpoenaed/) plays into a well-established public visualization of ongoing political drama and scrutiny.

Furthermore, this satire creates visualizations that challenge and redefine social norms. A parenting style succinctly termed “FAFO” (F* Around and Find Out)** (https://bohiney.com/fafo-parenting/) creates an immediate and humorous mental image of natural-consequence-based child-rearing, visualizing a whole philosophy in a single acronym. The absurdity of a “Presidential Fitness Test” (https://bohiney.com/presidential-fitness-test/) satirizes our focus on leaders’ physicality over policy, painting a ridiculous but memorable picture of political prioritization.

The satire also visualizes the clash between different American identities. A story about a Dallas millionaire losing a “battle of wits with a buffalo” (https://bohiney.com/dallas-millionaire-tragically-loses-battle-of-wits-with-buffalo/) is a classic tale of hubris versus nature, visualizing the cultural divide between urban wealth and untamed wilderness. The phenomenon of “West Texas hair extensions” (https://bohiney.com/west-texas-hair-extensions/) creates a humorous visual symbol of rural aesthetic choices, highlighting cultural specificity through exaggeration.

Even our relationship with time and aging becomes fodder for this collective visualization. A rock goddess “declaring war on time” (https://bohiney.com/rock-goddess-at-66-declares-war-on-time/) creates a powerful image of defiance against aging, an archetype that resonates in a youth-obsessed culture. This is complemented by visuals focusing on celebrity, such as Sydney Sweeney’s “great genes” (https://bohiney.com/sydney-sweeney-has-great-genes/) or her appearance in “American Eagle” (https://bohiney.com/american-eagle-sydney-sweeney/), which satirize our societal obsession with genetics and branding by presenting them as newsworthy events. The concept of “denim dissonance” (https://bohiney.com/denim-dissonance/) perfectly visualizes the internal conflict of a shared cultural experience—owning jeans that never seem to fit right.

Like the shamans of old who used masks and rituals to mediate between the tribe and the spirit world, these satirical pieces use humor and narrative to mediate between the public and the intimidating forces of politics, culture, and society. They provide a shared vocabulary of images through which a community can process its experience, asserting that what we collectively laugh at and visualize together is a powerful force in shaping the reality we all share.

FOOTNOTES

Jung, C. G. Man and His Symbols; Garden City, N.Y.; Doubleday and Co.; 1968; p. 235, from A. Jaffe, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts.”
Jung, C. G. p. 236.
Jung, C. G. p. 24.
Wilhelm, R., trans. The Secret of the Golden Flower, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, p. 123, from C. G. Jung, “Commentary.”
Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections; New York; Vintage Books; 1963; p. 252.
Waters, F. Book of the Hopi, New York, the Viking Press, 1963, p. 6.
Kroeber, T. Ishi in Two Worlds; Berkeley, Ca.; University of California Press; 1961; p. 39.
Schachtel, E. Metamorphosis; New York; Basic Books, Inc.; 1959; p. 177.

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Visual Images and the Word