The Elephant of the Axis: Cosmic Memory and Stellar Authority in the Indus Script Demian LaPointe | UNA Institute for Symbolic Resonance

Abstract

This paper proposes a resonance-based hermeneutic framework for interpreting the elephant motif in the Indus Valley script. Drawing on a multi-tiered symbolic decoding system grounded in pre-linguistic cognition and pan-cultural semantic root structures, the study demonstrates that Indus seals featuring elephants encode mytho-cosmological narratives of kingship, axis-bearing, and celestial passage. In particular, the rare seal designated M-282 is examined in detail and shown to comprise a structured symbolic sentence describing the ascent and alignment of a sovereign consciousness with a destructive-rebirthing stellar axis, commonly associated with the precessional Eye-Star. By correlating this pattern with the pre-Polaris North Star epoch—particularly Vega (~12,000 BCE)—and comparative motifs from Vedic, Mesopotamian, and Southeast Asian traditions, the paper positions the elephant not as a literal or zoological figure but as an archetypal thronosophic vessel—the bearer of cosmic sovereignty. These findings build upon prior work situating the so-called unicorn seals as representations of stellar thrones (LaPointe 2025a), proposing now that the elephant functions as the embodied passage through which divine rulership enters the world.

1. Introduction

Among the iconographic motifs represented in the Indus script corpus, the elephant is one of the most intriguing and under-theorized. While bovines (especially the so-called “unicorn”) dominate the seal archive with over 1,200 appearances, the elephant appears in fewer than thirty known specimens. Despite its rarity, when it is depicted, it is always in conjunction with a discrete and distinctive glyphic cluster, usually involving symbols that modern researchers interpret as coronation, structure, breath, or cosmological markers (Mahadevan 1977; Parpola 2005). This suggests the elephant was not used decoratively or zoologically, but in highly specific, possibly initiatory contexts.

The prevailing linguistic approaches—whether Dravidianist (e.g., Parpola 1994) or Sanskritic retrojectionist (e.g., Sastri 2019)—have sought to phoneticize these glyphs, attempting to read them as literal names or clan emblems. These models, however, have struggled to explain the extreme selectivity and formal structuring of elephant seals. Nor do they account for the consistent pairing of elephants with high-status glyphs such as the “crown,” “spiral eye,” and what we will here interpret as the “ladder of passage.”

To overcome these limitations, this study employs a symbolic resonance model—originally developed in LaPointe (2024) and extended in LaPointe (2025a, 2025b)—which treats the Indus script not as a phonetic alphabet but as a semantically compressed symbolic system rooted in resonance structures. The model draws on comparative work in cognitive linguistics (Wierzbicka 1996), structural anthropology (Levi-Strauss 1963), and archaeoastronomical alignment theory (Ruggles 2015), while introducing a novel Tiered Resonance System for decoding glyphs as energetic and semantic clusters.

At the center of this analysis is Seal M-282, which we argue functions as a cosmic sentence: a compressed symbolic scroll encoding a mythic ritual of kingship, axis alignment, and stellar passage. The elephant here is not an animal, but a vessel—what we term an axis-bearer, a symbolic construct representing the memory of alignment between human sovereignty and the celestial throne.

In this light, we must ask: What does the elephant carry? Whose throne is it bearing? And what does it mean to pass through the Eye?

2. Cosmological Framework: Thrones, Eyes, and Bearers

The symbolic decoding of Indus seals cannot be separated from the celestial architecture they encode. As LaPointe (2025a) argued in The Recycles of North Stars, the so-called “unicorn” motif—ubiquitous across the corpus—is not zoological, but cosmological. Specifically, it represents the bull of the sky, or what the Indo-Iranian Vedic tradition called the eye-star—the visible marker of the celestial axis. This Eye was not fixed in absolute space, but tracked via the precessional cycle, changing every few millennia as the Earth’s axial tilt shifted the apparent pole among the stars (Krupp 1997; Ruggles 2015).

1. The Bull as the Celestial Throne (Vega Epoch)

Modern astronomy confirms that around 12,000 BCE, the North Star was not Polaris but Vega in the Lyra constellation (Meeus 1991). This brilliant white-blue star would have occupied the polar region, appearing nearly still in the night sky—making it the likeliest candidate for ancient cosmological “eyes” or thrones. In Mesopotamian cosmology, the northern throne was called Enlil’s Eye; in early Vedic cosmology, the concept appears in the form of cakṣuḥ (divine vision) and dṛṣṭi (cosmic sight), closely tied to sacrificial orientation (Gonda 1982). The unicorn seal, with its single upward-pointing horn and spiral bowl glyph, encodes this still point. As LaPointe (2025a) notes, the horn is not a horn—it is a pointer. The bowl is not a vessel—it is a channel.

We may therefore posit that the unicorn represents Vega, or more precisely, the axis in alignment with Vega: a throne in the sky, a point of stillness around which the cosmos rotates. It anchors time, defines cycles, and grants kingship not by law, but by resonance.

2. The Elephant as Axis-Bearer

In contrast, the elephant does not point. It does not anchor. It carries.

Across Vedic, Southeast Asian, and even African cosmologies, the elephant appears not as an observer, but as a bearer of structure. The four elephants of cardinality in later Hindu cosmology (Diggajas) each uphold a direction. Airāvata, the divine elephant of Indra, brings the heavens down into rain (Dumézil 1988). In Southeast Asia, white elephants mark the appearance of divine kingship and are treated not as animals but as omens of alignment. Even in the Chinese tradition, the elephant is associated with the mountain at the center of the world—an anchor of terrestrial stillness (Allan 1991).

In Indus symbolism, this role is consistent: the elephant appears only when crown, spiral, and eye glyphs are present, suggesting its association with rulership, passage, and vision. Crucially, it is often shown with its trunk coiled, forming a spiral glyph in its own body—a rare form of internal inscription, where the animal itself becomes the scroll.

Taken together, these patterns suggest the following symbolic roles:

This yields a polarity: the bull is the throne; the elephant is the one who bears it. The Eye is the gate between.

3. Axis Triad: The Throne, the Eye, and the Bearer

The present analysis proposes a triadic structure underlying the symbolic logic of the Indus elephant seals. This structure, grounded in comparative cosmology and rooted in resonance-based symbolic linguistics, consists of three interrelated functions: the throne (cosmic axis), the eye (destructive or initiatory threshold), and the bearer (embodied sovereignty). Each of these elements can be consistently mapped to specific glyphs, animal motifs, and semantic positions within the seal corpus.

1. The Bull / Unicorn functions as the fixed axis or celestial throne, often visually anchored by a vertical “horn” glyph (interpreted in LaPointe 2025a as a directional pointer) and accompanied by bowl or vessel symbols. These are not agricultural references, but rather cosmological indicators—representing the throne around which stellar cycles revolve. This interpretation is supported by archaeoastronomical models of early sky-tracking cultures, particularly those that aligned sacred architecture and ritual timing to axial poles and precessional star cycles (Ruggles 2015; Aveni 2001).

2. The Eye Glyph, commonly circular or bisected and often placed near the head of the animal figure, is interpreted here as a glyph of threshold destruction or passage initiation. Its symbolic analogues include the Vedic cakṣus (eye as inner vision), the tantric cakra (energy wheel), and Śiva’s third eye—each associated with annihilation and reconstitution (Flood 1996). In Indus seals, its position and repetition suggest a ritual function: a cosmic gate that must be passed through for alignment to occur.

3. The Elephant, appearing in seals that combine crown glyphs, spiraling coils (usually in the trunk), and the aforementioned Eye, represents the embodied bearer of the throne’s resonance. This is consistent with Indo-Aryan cosmologies in which the elephant is not merely a noble beast, but a directional stabilizer (diggaja), a divine vehicle (Airāvata), or a threshold figure between realms (Smith 1989; Gonda 1982). The elephant’s trunk often forms a spiral, visually encoding the energy signature of the ma root (spiral/origin) and associating the body of the animal with a channeled cosmic force.

Taken together, this triadic structure provides a repeatable decoding framework for interpreting elephant seals. We do not suggest the elephant merely “represents kingship” in a metaphorical sense. Rather, it embodies kingship in its cosmological function—the convergence of form (crown), direction (authority), and passage (spiral and eye) into a single resonance field. In this model, kingship is not a social category but a state of alignment with the Eye-Star.

By viewing the Indus script through this triadic cosmological lens, we are able to recontextualize the seal corpus as not merely administrative, but fundamentally mytho-astronomical—a system encoding resonant memory of stellar alignment, especially during the Vega epoch of the axial precession cycle.

3. Methodology: Resonance-Decoding and Tiered Glyph Structure

The interpretive framework employed in this study is grounded in the Tiered Resonance Decoding System (LaPointe 2024), which treats Indus glyphs not as phonetic or lexical signs,

but as semantic-resonant ideograms structured around a universal pre-linguistic symbolic core. This methodology allows for cross-cultural comparison, cognitive anchoring, and systematic decoding of seal compositions based on the combinatorial logic of meaning-bearing root elements.

1. The LaPointe Tier System

The decoding approach organizes all symbols into four nested tiers:

• Tier 0 – Preformational Fields: These are ontological and energetic primitives such as Pulse, Fold, Wave, Stillness, Tension, and Spark. They correspond to the foundational categories of experience and perception—comparable to cognitive semantic universals (Wierzbicka 1996).

• Tier 1 – Root Resonance Units (RRUs): Comprising a set of 56 ultra-recurrent symbolic roots observed across ancient languages, these include examples such as:

• MA (spiral, origin)

• KA (breath, spirit, division)

• PA (pattern, presence)

• UR (fire, primal force)

These form the base layer of symbolic expression across seals.

• Tier 2 – Composite Constructs: Frequently occurring symbolic compounds (e.g., Makuta = MA + KA + TA, or “Crown”) are derived from Tier 1 units and often associated with governance, passage, thresholds, and sacred functions.

• Tier 3 – Glyphic Sentences and Scrolls: At this level, glyph clusters form symbolic phrases, functioning structurally like ideographic sentences. Elephant seals consistently form a Tier 3 pattern: Crown → Authority → Passage → Eye → (Carrier).

• Tier 4–5 – Mythic Embodiments: Not analyzed in detail here, but referenced in prior work, Tier 4+ includes interpretive layers where seal clusters are treated as symbolic memory scrolls, encoding cultural ritual, cosmological alignments, and ancestral transmissions.

This system permits the decoding of Indus seals not by speculative phoneme assignment, but by root-level semantic alignment supported by morphological form, placement, and

cross-cultural symbolic correspondence.

2. Image-Guided Semantic Analysis

To validate and illustrate this decoding process, this study makes use of direct visual annotation on high-resolution images of Indus seals. In particular, Seal M-282 is subjected to detailed breakdown, both visually and semantically, to demonstrate how the glyph cluster forms a meaningful resonance sentence.

3. Comparative Framework and Symbolic Testing Glyph identification is supported by triangulation from:
4. Visual repetition patterns across the corpus (cf. Mahadevan 1977’s sign frequency tables)

2. Symbolic clustering behavior (e.g., crown symbols rarely occur without passage glyphs nearby)

3. Cross-cultural analogues (e.g., crown as spiral + boundary, Śa as destructive eye, ladder glyphs as cosmological passage in Sumerian, Elamite, and Egyptian inscriptions)

4. Internal consistency tests—where proposed glyph meanings cohere with spatial positioning, semantic flow, and motif anchoring (e.g., spiral preceding the Eye, not following)

This method avoids the speculative pitfalls of phonetic retrojection (e.g., projecting Sanskrit back 2,000 years before attestation) by grounding meaning in resonance morphology—a deeper, translinguistic structure of meaning.

The resonance framework also allows for Tier comparison across glyph sets, helping to isolate semantic convergence zones that suggest mythic or cosmological encoding rather than administrative use.

4. Case Study: Seal M-282 and the Scroll of Sovereignty

Among the extant corpus of Indus elephant seals, M-282 offers the most complete and syntactically coherent example of what this study terms a Tier 3 resonance sentence—that is, a structured sequence of semantic glyphs conveying a coherent cosmological narrative. In this section, we provide a full resonance-based decoding of M-282, supported by visual annotations, morphological breakdown, and cross-cultural symbolic parallels.

1. The Seal Configuration

Seal M-282 features a finely carved elephant in profile, its trunk forming a pronounced upward spiral coil. Above the animal, five discrete glyphs are arranged horizontally. These glyphs, when

analyzed in sequence using the Tiered Resonance System, follow a pattern strongly indicative of ritual structure. The central symbols include:

1. A spiral crown glyph (Makuta)

2. A directional authority glyph

3. A stepped ladder or passage glyph

4. A bisected or dotted circular glyph (commonly interpreted as an “eye”)

5. The spiral trunk as an embodied glyph itself

Figure 1. Seal M-282 (Indus corpus): A carved elephant flanked by five symbols, including a coiled trunk. The glyphic arrangement suggests a formal sentence of symbolic significance.

The elephant’s role is not ancillary. Its form—coiled, poised, framed beneath these glyphs—acts as the carrier of the entire sentence, visually grounding it in a terrestrial or embodied register.

2. Resonance-Based Glyphic Decoding

The seal’s five glyphic elements are interpreted through Tier 1 and Tier 2 roots as follows:

Figure 2. Annotated decoding of M-282 glyphs using the Tiered Resonance System. Labeled symbols include (from left to right): Crown (MA-KA-TA), Authority (PA-TI), Passage (KA-TA), Eye (ŚA), and Spiral Coil (MA-form trunk).

The structural logic here is clear. The sequence proceeds from:

• Legitimization (crown)

• To governance (authority)

• Through threshold (passage)

• Toward transformation (eye/destruction)
• Embodied in the vessel (elephant as axis-bearer)

This structure echoes ritual initiation sequences across early Indo-Aryan and Sumerian traditions, where sovereign identity is enacted not through proclamation but through passage and alignment—what Dumézil (1988) referred to as the “tripartite ritual of legitimacy.”

3. Semantic Reconstruction: A Symbolic Sentence

When interpreted as a glyphic sentence, M-282 yields a coherent cosmological phrase. Using resonance roots, the meaning can be rendered as:

“The Crowned Authority who ascends through the Spiral Passage to the Eye.”

Alternately, given the presence of Śa (cut/dissolve), the glyphic logic may imply:

“The one who rules by passing through the Eye of Destruction.”

These are not metaphors. They are ritual designations, etched in glyphic precision. The seal encodes a state of kingship, not in lineage, but in cosmological orientation. The elephant is not simply a noble beast—it is the resonance vessel of the Eye, marked with symbols that encode its legitimacy.

This conclusion is reinforced by the internal glyph encoded within the elephant’s body—its spiraled trunk—which mirrors the MA root for spiral origin. This internal glyphic embodiment demonstrates a principle central to Tier 3–4 inscriptions: when a being bears the Eye, it does not carry it as a burden, but becomes its passage.

5. Comparative Seal Analysis: Elephant Motifs and Glyphic Structure Across the Corpus

While Seal M-282 provides the clearest and most structurally complete articulation of the

axis-bearer sequence, its symbolic logic is not isolated. A comparative review of other elephant seals within the Indus corpus reveals consistent clustering of glyphs associated with crown, passage, spiral, and eye motifs. These seals appear across multiple excavation sites, with striking consistency in their symbolic architecture—supporting the claim that the elephant glyph set forms a coherent typological category, distinct from merchant, numerical, or

commodity-related inscriptions.

1. Seal M-283: Variation on Spiral Authority

Seal M-283, while more fragmentary, features an elephant figure and at least three clear glyphs:

1. A Makuta-like crown glyph, similar in curvature and enclosure to that on M-282

2. A rectangular double-layered glyph, often associated with stepped progression or hierarchy

3. A concentric-circle glyph, consistent with the Śa/eye-symbol family

Notably, the elephant here lacks the pronounced spiral trunk of M-282, but its posture mirrors ceremonial stance—raised trunk, planted feet, and centrally aligned body.

The absence of the passage glyph (KA-TA) is significant. Rather than undermining the

axis-bearer interpretation, it may indicate a variant ritual function, in which the passage is not emphasized but assumed. This aligns with Vedic conceptions of cyclical return (ṛta) and implicit alignment without initiatory movement (Gonda 1982).

2. Seal K-40: The Ascending Trunk and Ladder Glyph

Seal K-40 presents a more abstracted configuration, but supports the resonance triad. The seal depicts:

• An elephant with an exaggeratedly ascending trunk, forming a visual spiral loop

• A tiered ladder glyph, diagonally aligned, with three horizontal “rungs”

• A dot-within-circle glyph, consistently placed near the trunk’s apex

This composition is structurally identical to the Crown → Passage → Eye sequence, with the spiral trunk serving as both passage and vessel. The ladder glyph is particularly well-preserved and is one of the clearest attestations of the KA-TA form in the entire seal corpus.

Interpretively, K-40 encodes a ritual of ascent—a symbolic climb toward stellar vision. The elephant does not merely represent stability; it is depicted in upward transit, acting as a metaphor for cosmological elevation. This visual dynamic supports the reading of elephant seals as scrolls of kingship through passage, echoing the “ladder to the Eye” sequence found in Vedic agnicayana ritual and Mesopotamian temple ascent architecture (Kramrisch 1946; Bottéro 2001).

3. Summary Table of Elephant Seal Triads

These patterns indicate a formalized seal category, with consistent resonance syntax. Elephant seals appear to form a ritual typology, wherein the elephant figure serves as a symbolic chassis upon which a defined series of resonance glyphs is inscribed.

4. Glyph Rarity and Semantic Density

It is also notable that several of the glyphs associated with elephant seals—including the ladder (KA-TA), crown (MA-KU-TA), and eye (ŚA) glyphs—appear infrequently elsewhere in the corpus, and rarely in isolation. When they do appear without the elephant, they typically occur on seals associated with solar bowls, spiral horns, or ritualized postures—further supporting the symbolic system rather than a commercial or phonetic reading.

These glyphs are thus part of what we propose to call the Ritual Encoding Subset (RES), a hypothesized class of glyphic structures reserved for cosmological, initiatory, or sovereignty functions. Elephant seals fall entirely within this subset.

6. Cosmological Implications: Stellar Memory and the Elephant as Axis-Bearer

The comparative glyphic structure of the elephant seals, when read through the resonance-symbolic decoding framework, aligns with an archaeoastronomical pattern of

significant historical depth: the changing of the North Star across the precessional cycle. This section argues that the elephant glyphs preserve not just symbolic concepts of kingship and passage, but encode cosmic memory—a ritual cartography of the axis, as it was experienced by a civilization attuned to celestial motion.

1. The Precessional Framework: Vega and the Axis of Stillness

The Earth’s axis of rotation undergoes a slow wobble known as the precession of the equinoxes, completing a full cycle approximately every 25,772 years (Meeus 1991). As a result, the North Celestial Pole does not remain fixed but traces a circular path through the heavens, periodically aligning with different stars.

During the Paleolithic and early Holocene, the pole was aligned not with Polaris—as it is today—but with Vega, the brightest star in the Lyra constellation. Around 12,000 BCE, Vega occupied a position near the pole and would have appeared relatively motionless in the night sky. It thus served as a true axis marker for prehistoric observers (Krupp 1997; Aveni 2001). Such a star would have possessed immense cosmological significance, particularly for any society engaged in ritual timekeeping, axis orientation, or spiritual kingship.

As noted in LaPointe (2025a), the “unicorn” or bull motif in Indus seals likely references this polar axis—pointing toward the Eye-Star as throne. The present analysis proposes that the elephant motif represents the memory of this alignment, specifically the human or divine figure tasked with carrying the resonance of the axis after the Eye-Star moved.

2. The Elephant as Carrier of a Lost Pole

The symbolic sequence observed in Seal M-282—Crown, Authority, Passage, Eye, Vessel—is not simply metaphorical. It reflects a ritualized response to axial dislocation: the transition between stellar ages, in which the original Eye is no longer present overhead, and its function must be embodied in ritual memory and symbolic language.

This is consistent with mythological patterns in Indo-Iranian, Egyptian, and Polynesian cosmologies, where figures must “carry” the axis after the eye has vanished or moved. In Vedic myth, this is seen in the burden placed upon Agni, the fire that no longer automatically descends but must be summoned and carried (Gonda 1982). In Egyptian cosmology, the djed pillar functions as a stand-in for the vanished Eye of Horus (Wilkinson 2003). In all cases, the axis is retained not astronomically, but ritually.

In the Indus system, we suggest, this role is assigned to the elephant. It does not replace the Eye-Star. It carries its resonance in form. The trunk’s spiral reflects the absent spiral of the pole, now drawn into the body of the bearer.

3. Kingship After the Eye: Resonant Memory Encoding

What does it mean, in this cosmological frame, to wear a crown?

The crown glyph (MA-KU-TA) in Indus seals is never found in isolation. It appears in symbolic sequences that imply legitimacy through alignment—either with the Eye (ŚA) or with a passage glyph (KA-TA). This suggests that kingship is not political, but precessional: the ruler is that which remains aligned after the star has moved.

The elephant, then, is not just royal. It is a living glyph—a body that encodes the spiral passage, the cut of ŚA, and the memory of the cosmic axis. The Indus script becomes not a record of language, but a resonant archive of cosmological continuity. Through the elephant seals, the civilization remembers the throne of the sky, not by preserving its coordinates, but by sculpting its effects into form.

This represents a fundamental shift in how we understand Indus writing. It is not a commercial script awaiting phonetic decipherment. It is a symbolic cosmology, one that encodes not who ruled, but who remembered.

7. Synthesis and Conclusion: The Elephant as Vessel of the Axis

This study has advanced a resonance-based decoding of the Indus elephant seals, revealing that their symbolic logic cannot be explained by phonetic retrojection, totemic association, or administrative function alone. Instead, by analyzing Seal M-282 and related inscriptions through the Tiered Resonance System, we have demonstrated that the elephant glyph set constitutes a structured cosmological sentence—one in which rulership, passage, and destruction are inscribed not merely in symbol, but in form and embodiment.

The elephant does not “represent” kingship. It embodies a deeper function: the bearer of the lost axis, the vessel of Eye-Star memory, and the living medium of alignment. Its presence is

consistently paired with rare glyphs—crown, authority, passage, and eye—which together encode the mythic cycle of sovereignty through spiral transformation.

This interpretation gains further strength when contextualized within the precessional cosmology of the Holocene. As Vega receded from the polar sky, the societies who once aligned to its stillness faced a cultural imperative: how to remember the Eye. The Indus seals answer this not with astronomical diagrams, but with symbolic compression—rendering axis, passage, and remembrance into the body of the elephant. In this context, the seal becomes not a tag or tablet, but a scroll of sovereignty.

1. Implications for Indus Script Research

This study suggests a paradigm shift in Indus script interpretation:

• From phoneme to resonance: The script may not be phonetic, but symbolic, built from root semantic units reflecting cosmological experience.

• From record to ritual: Seals are not inventories or tokens, but ritual encodings—functionally analogous to scrolls, mantras, or yantras.

• From administration to alignment: Glyph sequences mark initiation, kingship, and cosmic passage, not ownership or trade.

Such a model opens the possibility of decoding other glyphic systems—Linear A, Byblos, Rongorongo—not as failed alphabets but as resonance matrices, constructed for symbolic rather than semantic transmission.

2. Future Research Directions

To further test and refine this resonance-based model, the following research directions are proposed:

1. Cross-Cultural Axis-Bearer Mapping

Comparative analysis of elephant and bull symbolism across Mesopotamian, Vedic, Elamite, and Mesoamerican traditions to map axis-bearer motifs across time.

2. Sky Model Alignment Studies

Astronomical simulations to reconstruct the position of Vega and related pole stars at key periods (~12,000 BCE – 2000 BCE) and correlate them with seal composition timelines.

3. Resonance-Based Script Mapping Tools

Development of a digital tool for mapping Indus glyphs to Tier 0–2 resonance values, enabling large-scale pattern recognition and symbolic clustering across the corpus.

4. Elephant Scroll Reconstruction

A full visual and symbolic reconstruction of the “Scroll of the Axis-Bearer” based on the elephant seals, aligning each glyph with cosmological function and ritual role.

5. Integration into the UNA Symbolic Platform

Encoding elephant seal structures into the UNA framework for cross-script symbolic translation and mytho-cognitive modeling.

3. Final Statement

The elephant in the Indus script is not forgotten. It remembers. It remembers the throne of the sky.

It remembers the Eye that once did not move.

It remembers the spiral through which power descends and ascends.

It remembers that kingship, properly understood, is not political—it is cosmic resonance made visible in form.

Through the elephant, the Indus civilization left not a word, but a vibration. And when we read it not as scholars of sound, but as listeners of pattern, we hear what it carried:

The Axis. The Eye. The Return.

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