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Some years ago, while learning about computer code, I completed a task involving the creation of a tribute page to a figure of one’s choice. I chose Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as one of the fathers of modern computing, and whose work encompassed a range of disciplines all of which would once have been named philosophy but are now considered more commonly as independent fields of study.

One of the more interesting elements of his work was the study of the characteristica universalis which underpin modern character sets, the ‘emoji’ in particular, which was undertaken in collaboration with Baruch Spinoza.

Leibniz was born at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, but he appears to have been protected from its ravages and was free to travel and work in a manner not common in his age. From Leipzig, he worked in both Paris and London. His birth also coincided with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the same city.

It is not clear by what means exactly the knowledge of the Chinese pictogram character set was given to both Spinoza and Leibniz, who lived under the reign of Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand III, but the Roman Catholic church had already established open and formal relations with China at that point.

The work is of significance in that it illustrates that the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty had a close understanding of the significance of the issues of images and words, education and denial of education, that were the core of the unfolding theological struggle, and adopted a stance explicitly antagonistic to the propagandized image of the first Holy Roman Emperor, Louis I, a stance that imposed the existence of a ruling dynasty by any means necessary, which ruled by any means or ideology necessary.

My view of the contemporary emoji system is that it is the intended global language of a class of being defined as subervient, and that the intention with regard to the keyboard on your device has long been that it should contain only that set, while the keyboard of the ruling class would maintain access to the complete unicode set. This is entirely consistent with Roman Catholic praxis.

Another area of Leibniz’s work was Monadology, the search for the unifying particle that would enable a synthesis of the elements whose study represented the birth of philosophy both in the West and the East and remains central to chemistry and physics, in which domain it is now referred to as the ‘God particle’.

Today, I chanced upon the existence of the unicode character, U+059F, which is a(n) Hebrew punctuation mark, somewhat tricky to locate, copy and paste.

Karne parah (Hebrew: קַרְנֵי פָרָה, also spelled Qarnei Farah and other variant English spellings) is a cantillation mark found only once in the entire Torah (Book of Numbers Numbers] 35:5), and once in the Book of Esther, immediately following the identically unique Yerach ben yomo.

The symbol of the Karne para is that of the Telisha ketana and gedola together. The melody, likewise, is that of these two more common cantillation sounds put together.

The Hebrew words קַרְנֵי פָרָה translate into English as cow’s horns.

This, ֟ , would appear then to be the symbol or the mark of Cain as rendered by modern computers.

Whether to use “symbol” or “mark” to refer to it is another interesting question. The root of the latter word is claimed to be merg- in PIE, meaning a boundary or border, or more simply the symbol of a boundary, and the evolution of the sense of the word over history is very interesting.

While I wouldn’t dispute the use of either word, I think “creed” represents a plausible alternative, and one which may be preferable as it draws attention both to its existence in the form of a belief or meme, and the error underlying the philosophical Weltanschaung that stems from a mistaken attempt to materialise divine essence, and to do so in a manner by which it may also be used eternally to divide a ruling class from a subservient or slave class.

When I observe the actions of a contemporary political figure like Mark Carney, I do wonder to what extent and in what spirit or state of mind, he and his handlers have reflected on this issue.