The Triangle

The Delta Glyph

The triangle, in the Greek alphabet is called the delta glyph. It has often been regarded as being symbolic of a doorway, but before the Greeks used it in their alphabet, it had been drawn on cave walls across many cultures and times. It is an entoptic shape, something generated by the brain and as such it belongs to human beings just as much as their arms and legs and stomachs. 

Amesbury Archer arrowhead from Stonehenge

Many of the early triangle representations do look very like arrowheads, so it is hard to decide whether they are drawings of things that would have been around all the time, or whether that is simply a coincidence. However, these basic early forms do occur right across the world.

The distribution of early symbols

The tri-angle is of course a representation of three lines coming together. It can be used to draw an arrowhead and the arrowhead in its turn has sometimes disengaged itself from the shaft of the arrow to become a stand alone directional symbol. 

Contemporary directional arrowheads

The triangle combined with three arrowheads is of course now used as a recycling symbol, which is a sort of multiplication of triangular effect. 

Recycling symbol

The triangle has been used by many cultures and faiths as well as different societies to symbolise a wide variety of ideas and concepts.

Triangles can be used to direct energy and power in the direction which they point. If however it is an equilateral triangle, a decision as to which line forms a base, will often depend on context. 

In alchemy, the triangle represents the three realms of human existence; the body, the mind and the spirit/soul. The triangle providing four symbolic representations of the basic alchemical elements. 

Fire – 🜂

Water – 🜄

Air – 🜁

Earth – 🜃

It can be rewarding to play around with numbers

In caves the world over the basic abstract forms that we have been looking at reoccur again and again. I have referred to them before as entoptic forms, but there are other explanations. 

The prehistorian Henri Breuil, decided that the abstract symbols were representations of traps and weapons, linking the shapes to the animals depicted next to them. The French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan read the lines and hook shapes he found as male symbols, and ovals and triangles as female symbols. 

Representation of the vulva?

However reading inverted triangles as representations of the vulva, could be the result of gender bias in interpretation. “It’s interesting that it was predominantly male archaeologists doing this work early on, and there were a whole lot of vulvas being identified everywhere. This could have been a product of the times, but then again, many cultures do place importance on fertility,” stated a more contemporary researcher, Genevieve von Petzinger. The general consensus in the books on symbolism is when pointing up, triangles represent stability and power, when pointing down they become unstable. The up-pointing triangle is often seen as a masculine shape, but when inverted it represents the feminine. Perhaps this juxtaposition needs amended though, it tends to suggest an association of masculine strength and female instability. It would have been more interesting if it was power v balance. The balancing of all that mass on a fine point being far more difficult than resting on a fat base. In spirituality, triangles represent the union of body, mind, and spirit, and in the Christian religion, God the father, God the son and God the Holy Ghost. Once again we have a great many uses for a simple shape. 

It was the South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams who proposed a neuropsychological interpretation for these symbols. It was argued that they were triggered in the darkness of caves during hallucinogenic experiences that were part of shamanic rituals. These  symbols being literal representations of hallucinations which were themselves visions of entoptic forms. As someone that gets severe migraines, I see linear and triangular forms drift across my field of vision when my migraines are at their worst, and the drawings I have made of them are not unlike those found on cave walls. Triangles can also be thought of as 'geons', simple 2D or 3D forms, (a cone is the 3D form of a triangle) that can be used to build up more complex forms. 

Number 1 could easily be a boy's head with a dunces cap on and number 2 could be an ice cream in a cone. 

With the advent of computer graphics geons are becoming more important. In computer aided design 3D shape representation is often made by approximating the shapes of object parts by a set of prescribed volumetric models called parametric geons. Something that is actually not that new, as I remember having students draw as many variations as possible of combinations of cubes, cylinders, cones and spheres, as a 3D design exercise when working on foundation back in the 1970s. In fact it takes me back to the time I was working as a draftsman at Round Oak Steel Works. Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) is a language of symbols and standards designed and used by engineers and manufacturers to describe a product and facilitate communication between groups of people and machines working together to produce something. GD&T statements are essential to this, and they make sure that in making drawings for manufacture that all dimensions must have a tolerance. Every feature on every manufactured part is subject to variation, therefore, the limits of allowable variation must be specified. However what geons reminded me of was that there are 14 GD&T symbols and they are very like the basic forms we have been looking at. The symbol for angularity is basically another arrowhead.

If you ever come across a feature control frame you will now know what it refers to. This is yet another example of those codes that have by necessity become fixed, such as the highway code. The white lines, yellow lines, dashed lines and arrows that are part of our highways' visual texture, are as fixed in their interpretation as the letter A (another arrowhead) in English standing for the sound 'ei'. 

The letters IPA set out in the International Phonetic Alphabet

The reason I know that the letter 'A' is pronounced 'ei' is because of another set of standards set out as a code. The International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA which of course has yet another set of guidelines, its own highway code.

Guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet

Typical map legend 

We see these code translations on inserts in every map we open, in some cases our arrow/triangle will now become a campsite, in others a survey marker. 

But it is also at the root of all our troubles, the triangular form that is in the centre of the larynx or the voice box is what makes us human, without it we would be something completely different.

Canova's tomb

The larynx image instigates an idea that the spoken word is perhaps the beginning of the end for human kind. When I hear contemporary political debate it feels as if oratory has lost all reason and that language is dying. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it became fashionable to view art galleries at night by torchlight. This meant that sculpture became subservient to the shadow, and Canova was an artist who was seduced by those shadows, smoothing out his marble surfaces until all life had been polished away. The language of sculpture at that time was dying too. 

There are times when I yearn for a set of standards whereby there could be no more than one interpretation for something I have drawn. So as my mind wanders off in another direction perhaps I'll leave you with a few images with titles (code translations) just as a test to see whether as images they are in any way anchored in their interpretation by text juxtapositions.

Fear of failure

Deep sleep

Incontinence 

See also:

The circle

Angles

Points, dots and spots

The zig zag

Dotted lines

Entoptic forms and how they can be mixed in with representational drawing 

Flowing line drawings

X

The square

The spiral

The hashtag

Maps