Abstract
In discussing the power of cult images, Sylvia Schomburg-Scherff proposed an approach that asserts 'the identity of the represented with that which represents it'. In other words, the power of the spirit mask has power through the perception of the mask and the spirit itself: 'cognition fuses the prototype and image and invests the latter with the qualities of the former'. Without limiting the power of the image to iconic practices, she refers to Roland Barthes' essay on the image of the mother, where he 'speaks of the non-distinction of the photograph and its referent, the thing or person it represents". For Sylvia, it is important that the power of images is contained not only in the constructive power of metaphor, but also in the "constructive power of human perception and cognition to fuse the image with reality'.
It turns out that metaphor is not only an ornament, but a form of cognitive perception. Moreover, it can be divided into referential metaphor (something is like something) and nonreferential metaphor (something is something). The second type is not often spoken of. Olga Freidenberg developed the most coherent theory of such metaphor, or rather of "pre-metaphor". Studying ancient literature, she pointed out that the ancient metaphor is not free. While the modern metaphor can be created by transferring a feature from any phenomenon onto any other, such as "iron will," the ancient metaphor could say "iron will" only if "will" and "iron" were synonyms. 'Thus Homer could say "iron sky" "iron heart" because the sky, man, and man's heart were represented in myth as iron'. She saw the reason for this peculiarity of ancient metaphor in the fact that as heir to myth, she could not get out of the rut of mythological representation, which had no concepts, but only images. For thousands of years, human development was dominated by the perception, in which different objects did not mean each other but were each other. This "pre-metaphor" later became a "concept".
Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky suggested that even in the modern world man has retained a partial capacity for mythic perception of the world through asemiotic phenomena in which there is no division into signifier and signified. Although there is little room for such an approach in the paradigm of semiotics as a universal epistemological approach, the asemiotic approach can also be useful in the study of human culture.