ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how introducing questions about the experiential, particularly sensory and embodied, aspects of the cross's ritual context can lead to a reinterpretation of the Byzantine Syrian understanding of it not as a referential symbol but as a divine presence. The cross is the ultimate symbol of Christianity, traditionally interpreted as a representation of Christ's sacrifice. In twenty-first century Western culture vision is commonly understood to be the most objective and accurate sense, and so it is privileged in material culture and our way of life, particularly in screen media and scientific instruments. In the context of a numinous 'common sense', the material practice of ritual is a means of experiencing divinity. Twentieth-century semiotics is an abstract system of referents that bypasses materiality altogether by reducing objects and things purely to concepts and ideas, and it is read into early Christian language of signs and symbols.
