Taylor 1 Cassandra Taylor Living Religions of the World 12 December 2018 Making the Invisible Visible: Aniconism in Early Buddhist, Christian, and Islamic Art Humans rely the most on their sense of sight. We are visual people. Thus, it is no surprise that we surround ourselves with art and have since the time we lived in caves. Art assists us in making sense of the world around us—a trait shared with religion. Religious art became a way of understanding transcendent beliefs about our world. But how does one portray the invisible into the visible? Early religious traditions answered this question with the use of aniconism. Early Buddhist, Christian, and Islamic art utilize aniconism with similar and different justifications in order to connect the visual practitioner with the invisible deities in religious traditions. The term “aniconism” is uniquely religious in the world of art. Milette Gaifmanthe defines aniconism as the “demarcation of divine presence without a figural representation.” 1 Vidya Dehejia determines that “‘aniconism’ is defined as ‘worship or veneration of an object that represents a god without being an image of him.’” Gaifmanthe also examines Alfred Gell’s 2 terminology of “‘index of divine presence’” while discussing a “marker that indicates to the worshipper that a divine power is present at a particular site.” Gaifmanthe then develops the analogy of smoke to fire in order to explain the relationship of the marker and the divine. They propose that “when we see smoke, we assume fire … Similarly, upon seeing such a marker at a Gaifmanthe, Milette, “Aniconism: definitions, examples and comparative perspectives,” Religion, 47, no. 3 (2017) 1 335, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2017.1342987 Dehejia, Vidya, “Aniconism and the Multivalence of Emblems,” Ars Orientalis, 21 (1991): 45, https:// 2 www.jstor.org/stable/4629413