Building, curse and marriage

Abstract

The curse inscribed on the tombstone, Onta chi ossa sposta, oversees the peace of the married couple's bones lying in the grave. It protects it through the horrifying atmosphere of the graveyard, the horror of the visual decoration of the tomstone motifs and, particularly, through the horror of symbols hidden in the sound makeup of the text itself. They comprise: the snake, alpha and omega, darkness and others. One of the most important of these sound symbols can be represented as a hexagram figure and its purpose is not to frighten but to draw attention to the entire life's work of the deceased - the owner of the tomb: to his marriage, home and legend. The hexagram represents a duality. The symbolic analysis of the objects that it refers to has isolated two series of elements: the first would be the Moon, the horizontal line of the palace, woman, while the other would be the Sun, the vertical line of the tower, man. These elements exist in a relation of absolute parallelism and interdependency, implicate one another and are mutually opposed. They are impressive because they are harmonic. More and more one of these symbolic pairs has imposed itself as the visual emblem of Silba, the island where all of this began in the 19th century: the Toreta and the palace, their vertical and horizontal lines. However, while the chances for them becoming the emblem of Silba are great, owing a great deal to the fact that this would accord with extant, structurally identical (belfry and church), similar attempts, it need be said that the public has not be in the know about the true meaning of the chosen motif. Nevertheless, the motif simply radiates its symbolic value, enriched with by layers of similar symbols stemming from the collective unconscious.