Penny Hermeneutics

To escape the vengeful sky god Jove, the Penny God travels upon the earth in many guises—as a crippled wanderer, a mischievous child, a copper coin slipping from pocket to pocket. Just so he hides himself in scriptures and books, slipping in and out of the pages, rolling and spinning on his shimmering edge throughout both literature and history. He leaves his traces as puns, apparent typos, obscure witticisms, and, most of all, references to pennies, to luck or chance, or to “a sign” (Token) from heaven.

The recognition and veneration of Token, god of the lucky penny, is not (as detractors have charged) a modern invention. Although only a few fragments (namely, a genesis myth and an apocalyptic prophecy) survive of what must have once been an extensive corpus of sacred writings, traces of Token’s worship can be found throughout the major secular and sacred writings of western culture. To detect or deconstruct the cryptic and semi-suppressed allusions to our divinely disadvantaged god requires ingenuity, inebriation and the advanced techniques of contemporary literary theory.

The envious sky gods have seized for themselves the Logos, the overt meaning, forcing Token and his worshipers into the realm of shadowy connotations, equivocations, ambiguities, puns and apparent typos. Thus, a text signals the presence of a covert penny meaning by the presence of ambiguities, contrarieties, antinomies or punning word plays that force a dissociation of the dominant and privileged logocentric assumptions of signifier and signified (or token and betokened). This much is obvious. But traces of the suppressed god may also be detected by the absence of shadowy connotations, equivocations, ambiguities, puns or typos. Thus, when a text is too insistently rational, too suspiciously coherent, too logocentric, if you will, it is a sign (Token!) to delve deeper into its fossilized substructure, its suppressed or marginalized possibilities.

The presence of coin-like heads-or-tails dualities—day/night, black/white, exterior/interior, male/female, love/hate, strong/weak, foreground/background—alert the astute and determined reader to ignore the logocentric surface of the text and decipher the half-obliterated betokening of other meanings, other traditions.

The Penny God occupies not only contrarieties and antinomies but the space between them—balancing heads or tails, male or female, on the rim of the divine coin, the eternal circle of futilely referential meanings that coil back upon themselves like an ouroboros. References to twilight, thresholds, hermaphrodites or other sexual double or ambiguous figures, any figurative or literal gray areas, any middle space suspension or tension between warring extremes—these all betoken the Penny God (as does their absence).

Following these hermeneutic principles, we may find suppressed traces of the Penny God in virtually any text, simply by patiently detaching words from their meanings, like sticky little fingers clutching at a candy. If literal-minded anti-penny critics object to such interpretations as arbitrary, we may answer in the words of Sir Oliver Martext, the displaced and half-obliterated protagonist of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “Tis no matter; ne’er a knave of them shall flout me out of my fantastical calling.”


© 2006 Penny Priestess

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