August 2025, 11 Minutes

The Digital Middle Ages

How Meme Culture Mirrors Medieval Symbolism

Anyone who knows me knows I like memes.

I post enough of them on social media to start my own meme page. Way back in the before time, a solid quarter of the available space on my phone was dedicated to memes saved from all over the internet, saved from WhatsApp messages and groups, saved from obscurity and oblivion. Such compulsions are largely alien to me now, and I have a much more transient relationship with the medium (I hesitate to elevate it to “artform”, though on occasion it arguably can be so, though I would argue that in those instances, it remains firmly in the category of folk art).

Make them funny. Make them dumb. Make them whimsical. And, ideally, make them stick it to Power. If you can combine all the above, I may just repost.

I’m obviously not alone in this appreciation. Almost by definition, I cannot be alone. But are we just persisting into nothingness? Facing down the gaping maws of cheap chuckles and insignificant thoughts? Yeah, maybe. Maybe however, as so often is the case, something else is afoot.

In general, humans like memes because they compress complex emotions, ideas, and social cues into instantly familiar forms. In essence, memes seem to appeal to our evolved need for pattern recognition; they rely on established templates that reward us with a sense of understanding and belonging.

Sharing memes also satisfies a social drive that goes deep. When we laugh at or forward a meme, we signal alignment with others. We announce to them that we have something to share, a thing they will like, a good thing. In this way it’s a form of tribal bonding (or, if you prefer, low-effort grooming), where we build trust and appreciation through the act.

Memes also serve as emotional shorthands. They allow us to express despair, irony, absurdity, rage, or longing, in fast, playful, and often absurd ways. Life, even in the lighter moments, can always be counted on to be huge and complex, and in this brutal truth, memes offer a coping mechanism, a way to laugh through the chaos. I have in the past heard it referred to as “ironic armour”, and boy does that fit!

Typically, I hold to the well-travelled heuristic that there is nothing, or very little, new under the entropic sun. The Greek holy men who wrote that line into the Bible (Ecclesiastes 1.9) were foreshadowing what many a philosopher (“The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” - A.N. Whitehead ) and poet (“The ancient Greeks invented everything and we have done nothing but interpret and reinterpret their work” - Paul Valery; "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone... his significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists” - T.S. Eliot ) would later reiterate in their varied ways – the truth that, for as long as humans persist, our behaviours will mirror the past; as the ages of mankind spin up and down, we adapt, and we are changed, and yet something essential remains….

This era we find yourself firmly ensconced within is what I, but not I alone, propose as the Internet Age, a time as churning and consequential as the great metallic ones of Bronze and Iron. It’s high-speed, algorithmic, and ruled over by the infinite (doom) scroll. If caught intellectually lacking, one might think we’ve outrun the mythic. But, no. No, no, no – I invite you to look closer: I suggest that, just as in those times between Rome and the new Romes, we are surrounded by saints and sinners, ritual and relics, icons and heresies. The sacred hasn't disappeared. Rather, it has been remixed, deep-fried, layered in irony, and circulated across Discord servers, TikTok loops, and Facebook groups (The memelords of yore were in character probably quite different to the ones we lurk silently among us today [every mother, apparently, has a basement – who knew?!]).

Of course, due to the quickening pace of culture turning we find ourselves in as a feature of the Internet Age, the symbols of this age do not persist across the centuries or even millennia of the past iterations. Sometimes they can be done within a 24-hour cycle (I point you to the cheating Coldplay couple memes with swept the intent like a global tsunami for approximately that length of time before they began to enervate and become cringe, yesterday’s meme, literally), and a sort of Mandela effect can settle across the minds of those who consumed it, “did that really happen?...”.

I would say welcome to the Digital Middle Ages, but you’ve been here a while, we all have. This online cultural moment we find ourselves within looks, upon closer inspection, unexpectedly medieval - not, of course, in its technology, but in its symbolic logic.

…

Now, I can already hear the pushback, and it’s valid; it’s a criticism I have made in the past – cannot anything be read into anything? Cannot any specious connection be found or created? Schizophrenic threads stretched hither and tither? The great joining of everything and anything into a grey brain mush. Well, yes, but I hope I don’t come across as schizoid to my cherished readers – I hope I will be able to at least argue this once with some conviction. Of course, it will not be up to me to make that judgement, that burden rests with whomever reads this.

Before we cut into the meat, bear in mind that these are not necessarily aesthetic resemblances. The art itself is monumentally different, in design, craftsmanship and intent. These connections are symbolic, representing the same dichotomies across time.

Titanomachy

There is a war in Heaven. A great cosmic battle between all things light and all thing dark. A being of radiance, armour shining brighter than the light of all the suns, leads the charge for its creator. The Archangel Michael takes the Devil, holding itself in dragon form, and throws it from Heaven, casting it forever downwards to evermore look up and cry in hateful despair. So the story goes. And so the story was depicted over and over during the Middle Ages of Europe. Good versus evil, right versus wrong, the light versus the dark.

It’s moral and it’s binary and it’s hierarchical.

It’s Chad versus Virgin.

You’ve no doubt seen that one. It was more popular a few years previous, probably having its pomp between 2016 and 2023. It’s a meme format that contrasts two male “archetypes” – that of the "Virgin" and of the "Chad". The purpose of the meme is to highlight extreme differences in personality, appearance, and social behaviour. Typically, it takes the form of a side-by-side cartoon or diagram, with the contrasting figures either addressing or ignoring each other.

The Virgin character is usually depicted as awkward, hunched, insecure, timid, and socially anxious. He may be over-apologetic, neurotic, or excessively self-aware. Additionally, he is physically weak, unimposing, having a skinny or skinny-fat body.

Conversely, The Chad character is shown as confident, relaxed, hyper-masculine, attractive, and unapologetically himself. This can manifest as an obliviousness to criticism or social awkwardness, or a rejection of the conventions of others or mainstream society. Furthermore, in contrast to his “rival”, he is physically well-built, with a jutting chest and chin, venous arms, and a cinched waistline. Basically, this dude fucks.

The meme was originally drawn in a crude MS Paint style, before developing into the “classic” form which is today most recognisable. It traces back to 4chan’s /r9k/ board in the mid-2010s (an online space known for ironic self-deprecation and, what can only be considered “hostile” masculinity). It evolved from earlier "Chad" memes that depicted confident alpha males versus "incels" or socially awkward pimply young men.

From a symbolic perspective, the meme arguably operates like a modern morality play, echoing medieval visual traditions in which two exaggerated archetypes embody opposing virtues and vices. The Virgin, almost monk-like, is withdrawn, hyper-rational, chaste, and socially outcast, a figure restrained by neurosis and doubt. The Chad, in contrast, resembles a pagan demigod: physical, instinctual, impulsive, fearless, and adored by the crowd.

As with Michael slaying the Devil, the varying depictions and derivatives of Chad v Virgin are legion and versatile in their deployment. Used sincerely, it can mock one side of the binary or celebrate the other, becoming a tachygraph for aspirational behaviour or derision. Used ironically (irony cannot be ignored or understated. We do after all live in an ironic, and one may even argue post-ironic age, so our derivations of symbol will naturally reflect that) it pushes inherent or learned traits to absurd extremes, turning the meme into a playful caricature of judgment itself. It is, in effect, a digital fresco or woodcut.

So is the Chad virgin meme format a modern example of Michael v the Devil? Well, the Virgin would probably argue no, explain it away in typically midwit fashion, “well actuallying” to the point of mouth foam. On the other hand, the Chad would simply say “Yes”.

En Masse Effect

If one were to ask a casual on the street what their prejudicial conception of a mode medieval peasant would be, they would probably respond with something along the lines of superstitious, fearful, sickly, toiling, illiterate, deferential to the priest and the king. This may be harsh, it may also be true, if not the truth in its entirety.

Much art from the period depicts the peasant in this way. They exist in the backgrounds of pieces, milling about, gormless or shocked looks on their collective faces. They are unagented; the world impresses upon them but they are incapable of returning the favour. They are beings hollowed out by history and about them, life just…happens.

The NPC (Non-Player Character) meme, which depicts a blank, grey face lacking inner life or independent thought, eerily echoes these medieval portrayals of the peasantry, the aesthetic of which aligns with the symbolic function of the NPC today. It caricatures the individual as a vessel of conformity, incapable of original thought - just as medieval art often portrayed the peasant class as receivers of fate rather than actors within it.

The NPC meme, then, is not as new as it seems. It’s part of a recurring visual rhetoric that flattens people (in all their complex glory) into archetypes for narrative or ideological convenience. Whether on a Gothic altarpiece or a Twitter thread, the gawking blank stare of the crowd serves as both reflection and warning - this is what it means to be absorbed into the mass, to surrender will. This suggestion of soullessness is scary and taps into stereotypes of the unthinking “mob”, a grouping of humanity that left Gustave Le Bon awake in the middle of the night in a state of cold sweats, shuddering.

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If, in the admittedly unlikely scenario, you find yourself deep in the southern Sinai desert, at the base of the titular Mount Sinai, you may be surprised to come across a sandstone fortress rising confidently from the harsh, sun-blasted landscape.

Though fortified, it is not actually a fortress – not one with a military intention, anyways. Saint Catherine’s is a Christian monastery, the oldest continuously inhabited monastery on earth. Built by the Byzantines, it’s run by the Greek Orthodox church, contains one of the rarest library collections in existence, and claims to be built around the Burning Bush of the Old Testament.

To say you’re stepping back in time when stepping within the walls of the monastery (something I myself have never done) would be doing a disservice to understatement. The interior is austere with thick stone walls, arched ceilings, and flickering oil lamps. Of course, religious imagery abounds; centuries old, adorning the sanctuary, their gold leaf details catching the limited light. Incense would catch your nose and propel you to a different time; the quietness of the place would let you reflect while you are back there.

But this isn’t Grand Designs; I’m going to focus on a very specific and special piece of the interior design – an icon depicting monks scrambling up a ladder while demons tear and claw at them, attempting to wrench them down towards the eternal fires. The icon symbolises the struggle of the monastic existence; the constant scuffle and fight for heavenly deeds and virtues in the face of relentless material and spiritual temptations.

Here we have the concept of the ascent to enlightenment, often in the face of hardship or overwhelming earthy odds.

The “Galaxy Brain” or “Expanding Brain” meme is a visual progression of increasingly “enlightened” states of thought, often ironic or absurd. Beginning with a modest brain scan, the sequence culminates in a radiant, cosmic explosion (the “Galaxy Brain”) meant to signify either ultimate wisdom or, when used sardonically, total delusion.

Essentially, the meme plays around with the unsubstantial aesthetics of the same transcendence we see in ancient iconography. It exaggerates the idea of spiritual or intellectual ascent in a way that mirrors the afore mentioned Heavenly Ascent diagrams, where the soul climbs celestial spheres toward divine union. But here, the ascent is corrupted, inverted, or painfully self-aware; Gnosticism for the terminally online. The final state often represents the most irrational or contrarian take, poking fun at the idea that “higher” always means “better.”

To be clear, I get that all of this has a note of “explain the joke” energy to it. For that, I beg your pardon. But I’m not going to beg it too much; I am on a mission to understand, and, after love and art, that comes in the order of priorities.

But, having said that, I need some help here - I cannot do this alone.

The Help of Galaxy Brains

I’m going to break with writing convention here and begin the next section with a quote: “The Middle Ages were obsessed with the idea that everything in the world was a sign, a reflection of a higher truth.” — Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages.

In his work, Eco, a semiotician and medievalist, as well as an award-winning novelist, captures how medieval thought interpreted the world through layers of symbolic meaning. Nature, art, and scripture were never just things in themselves, they were mirrors of divine or spiritual realities.

For instance, a blooming flower could symbolise the Virgin Mary; a lion might stand for Christ or for Pride, depending on context.

In the times medieval, symbolism regularly outweighed realism: marginalia, written by candlelight, carried hidden jokes or moral lessons; cathedrals embodied mystical or heavenly diagrams; and scholastic theology built itself on elaborate systems of correspondence that crisscrossed the continent.

Modern meme culture functions in a strikingly similar way. Memes condense layered meanings such as jokes, references, or ideologies into a single, effortlessly recognisable image. Like medieval signs, they thrive on intertextuality, insider codes (or jokes), and shared literacy. Just as medieval audiences “read” the world for divine signs, digital audiences “read” the web for ironic, political, or subcultural signals. A meme is thus a semiotic unit, part of a broader symbolic system, where nothing is purely surface-level, and the chance of hidden meaning is everywhere.

For contemporary Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, rituals make life possible, a truth that becomes troubling in an age where, as he observes, ritual is disappearing.

In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han argues that modernity has eroded the symbolic and communal structures that once gave life rhythm, orientation, and meaning. “Rituals transform being-in-the-world into a dwelling,” he writes, stressing that they are not empty formalities but meaningful acts anchoring individuals in a shared world.

Unlike the fast-paced, performance-driven logic of neoliberal capitalism, rituals slow time down; they are repetitive rather than productive. Their decline signals a cultural shift toward hyper-individualism and digital immediacy, a sinister place where tradition gives way to novelty and atomised experiences.

Rituals - like Egyptian funerary rights, filling the bowels of pyramids to the brim with early good for the afterjourney, Greek mystery cults seeking enlightenment, even Christian latinised mass - once linked people to cosmic, religious, and communal orders, thus providing stabilising frameworks for identity and belonging. Without them, we are left with a vast emptiness where once there was shared meaning. For Han, reviving ritual means finding new ways to dwell meaningfully in time and togetherness. Transient trends, algorithmic feedback loops, and self-optimisation “wellbeing” practices have failed to fill the online void; enter memes, which can be seen as a kind of digital ritual. Their repetition, remixing, and circulation offer comfort and structure in an otherwise disenchanted, flattened media landscape.

In Sexual Personae Camille Paglia claimed that art is the beginning of civilisation, stating that, “Civilisation is the history of art. The first sign of civilisation is art.” I would actually quibble this claim, and am going to write on the very topic of prehistoric art in the near future, but if we replace the heavily burdened word “civilisation” here, we have the core of an idea that has a lot of workability.

Paglia states that art (particularly recurring visual archetypes) shapes cultural identity by encoding collective desires, fears, and ideals (social or moral). This was as true for medieval iconography as it is for internet memes. Saints and martyrs in medieval art became fixed symbols of virtue or suffering, rendered in collectively identifiable visual codes; likewise, meme figures like the Chad or the Galactic Brain function as flattened icons of modern pathos or aspiration.

Consequently, I argue that memes, like religious icons, are not merely vehicles for individual creativity or humour-rendering - they are communal artworks, vessels for shared experience, libido or anxiety. Yes, they exaggerate traits and strip away nuance, but in doing so they become legible cultural signs. In this way, memes belong to the same symbolic lineage as medieval frescoes or stained glass - artforms that privilege recognisability, emotional impact, and archetype.

It would be improper of me to discuss all things Internet Age and neglect to mention Marshall McLuhan; a man born on the vast Canadian prairie, who died before what we now know as the internet came into existence, and yet he had so much to say about it. Beyond predicting the internet as a medium of communication and exchange, McLuhan framed how media shapes consciousness itself. His famous quote, “We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backwards into the future,” encapsulates the paradox of technological change, that the new doesn’t replace the old so much as reconfigure it.

In The Medium is the Message, McLuhan argued that every major media shift alters not just how we communicate, but how we think, behave, and organise ourselves. Hence the fully digitised Internet Age has the power to “foster unification and involvement,” breaking down individualism and reawakening older forms of tribalism and symbolic communication. One could contend that the internet has had largely the opposite effect, encouraging hyper-individualism and toxic parasociality, but the possibility of an island always remains, for, as he noted, “The electric age fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media”.

Thus, unwittingly, McLuhan provides the backbone of my claim - that technological revolutions (like the internet) often lead to a return of pre-modern ways of thinking like tribalism, symbolism, ritualised behaviour. The Digital Middle Ages is therefore a media condition flowing both up and downstream from a cultural one.

Marginalia

So there it is, three examples from what could be millions. Obviously a terrifically small sample size, so trivial as to not even exist in statistical analyses, and far from any sort of proof. But maybe there’s enough there to get the reader thinking along certain lines.

Regardless of the veracity or otherwise of my theory, I’m still going to enjoy my memes, in the seemingly infinite variety they come in. I won’t be overthinking that enjoyment, - won’t be reading too deeply into a meme of a dolphin saying something snarky and postmodern about housing economics to Saul Goodman - but somewhere in the far back and away recesses of my mind, there may be an unconscious turning of membraned wheels, something unconscious looking for that symbolism, trying to make sense of what’s really going on.

Perhaps, in this quiet endeavour, I will have your company.

Photo by: Federico Orlandi