ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to restore metonymy by showing how the structure of three historically durable and significant forms of experience divination, epiphany, and the ekphrasis that structures them all rely on metonymy, without which their magic as architecture would be unthinkable. Human thought and culture depend on the "occultation" of metonymy, without which any understanding of metaphor is impossible. Ekphrasis is thus both about framing and about the mute speech of materials. Divination preceded the idea of theistic powers with personalities, worshipped as specifically named wilful beings. Divination was a response to a world that was generally and generically daemonic: a daemon for every object and occasion so to speak. Epiphany, like divination, arises from a substrate of the abject, the accidental. It is the element of chance that connects with the artist-diviner's mind.
