Cos meaning

Meaning

Number (Ratio)

Fleece

Cave, Prison

Etymology

From the Macedonian word for number or arithmetic.

From a contracted variant of κωας (koas), fleece.

From a contracted variant of κωος (koos), cave or den.

The name Cos — or Coos as older translations such as the KJV have it, or Kos as per the modern transliteration — belongs to an island to the north-west of the slender Peninsula of Cnidus, south-east of which sits Rhodes. The island is mentioned only once in the Bible, namely in Acts 21:1.

Throughout their history, the Koans (people from Kos) were fiercely independent, yet hospitable and cooperative. Their democratic government was remarkable enough to be noted by many, and remained largely unscathed even when the great empires came calling. Under the Ptolemies, Cos became a branch of the Alexandrian library and a noted center of learning.

Cos was considered the birth place of Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis (whose father was Zeus). Leto's father was a Titan named Coeus (Κοιος, Koios), whose name is the same as the Macedonian synonym for αριθμος (arithmos), number, and as such appears to have personified the numerical aspect of the rational mind (see below for a quick look at this). However, this name Coeus is also identical to a word in the Carian language (spoken in south-west Asia minor), namely the Carian synonym for προβατον (probaton), herd-animal (goat, sheep), which comes from the verb προβαινω (probaino), to make gradual progress with little steps at a time. This seems to demonstrate that arithmetic arose within the economic concerns of the shepherds of Kos, or so the mythological memory of Greece recalls.

Mythology also told that Zeus banned all Titans (except Oceanus) to Tartarus, and became the chief of the Olympians and the ruler of the thus established new world order. Imprisoned, Coeus succumbed to madness, which may have presaged the obsession of later Greek philosophers with number (see our article on Plato).

The Roman author Tacitus cited a legend that explained that Coeus was the first inhabitant of Cos, or was embodied in the Argives (men of Argos) who first settled it (Ann.12.61). His name was modified from Κοιος (Koios) to Κωιος (Koios), or so explains the Alexandrian poet Herodas in his mimiambics (Mimes 2 and 4 are set at Cos). That would suggest that our name Κως (Kos) means Number, in the sense of ratio or numerical reason.

But our name is also identical to the word κως (kos), which is a contraction of the more common κωας (koas), which means fleece (as in the Golden Fleece), which obviously connects both to learning and government (see our article on Jason, whose ship was called the Argos), as well as the afore-mentioned noun προβατον (probaton), sheep or goat, from which a fleece would commonly be lifted.

Also striking is the contraction into κως (kos) of the relatively rare noun κωος (koos), cave or den, which in Corinth became a slang term for prison: the hole, the cave (prisoners were indicated by the plural κωες, koes). This associates our name to Coeus' unfortunate incarceration in Tartarus, the holding pen for discarded deities, which was as far beneath Hades as the earth is beneath heaven (Il.8.17).

It's unclear where the name Cos originally came from, or even in which language it was conceived. But mythology held that it meant Number or Ratio, for which we need to remember that all unitless number is ratio. Six sheep divided into groups of two sheep gives a unitless 3 (6s/2s = 3). The discovery that ratios give numbers without unit, and that those numbers have qualities that hold true for every quantity, was as profound as the rise of language itself. An entity that described reality without it being attached to a physical item (which is what a number without a unit is), proved that beyond the realm of visible quantities, there exists an even more fundamental realm of truths that have no physical aspect: numbers and ratios are of the same order as spirits and angels and thus gods.

Our name also means Fleece or Prison, which to modern minds are widely dissimilar to the previous but which in the Greek mind were quite the same. Quantities are numbers attached to a unit: we cannot see the number itself but we can recognize it by looking at the quantity (because we can only see the physical aspect of the quantity, not the numerical aspect). Likewise, the invisible soul of a sheep sits within its visible fleece (in the Greek mind, every invisible soul sits within a visible body), which makes the soul the prisoner of the body (compare 2 Corinthians 5:1 to Acts 18:3).

We humans have emotions and we have ratio. The latter works on algorithms, which are rules that work always the same (words and numbers are algorithms too, which is why we can count on them). That means that our ratio is lawful (it works on rules), whereas our emotions are lawless (no rules, no predictions in the world of feelings). But that means that a perfect ratio runs perfectly on perfect rules, and is thus a machine. That means that the fleshy body of a sheep is its emotional part (even its conscious part, because via the senses an animal is conscious), whereas its wooly fleece is its rational and mechanical and lifeless part.

We humans have a consciousness that is very much an animal consciousness (read our article on σαρξ, sarx, flesh, that is one's consciousness), whereas our mechanical and lifeless ratio has grown from a brushy natural skin into colorful garb and tents, then houses and cities and presently a big steaming and heaving modern world full of machines. All those things are crystals of our ratio: our fleece, so to speak.

The PIE root "tek-" means to weave, and from it come our English words textile, text and technology. The name of the earthly profession of Jesus also comes from this root: τεκτων (tekton), meaning "assembler" (rather than carpenter).