Semiotic’s reading of the Temple of Salomon and the consumption of the faith

Abstract

The Temple of Solomon, in the city of São Paulo, surprises for its giant size and pharaonic luxury. It is also surprising for the large number of believers it attracts to its rituals. This article aims to place this architectural sign, its temporality, its references, its discourses, and its symbols under the scrutiny of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics. This theory works here as a cognitive cartography capable of guiding the understanding of the complexity involved by the sign Temple of Solomon. The most important, however, is that the complexity of this sign derives from the hypercomplexity of its field of millenary historical references, a kind of field that semiotically functions as the object of the sign. To that extent, this article proceeds on a historic journey towards collecting the density of this field, namely, what, in semiotics, is called collateral experience with the object of the sign. As a result, this analysis aims to be able to guide the reader towards the understanding of the layers of meaning that overlap in the constitution of this complex sign Temple of Solomon.