Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
I could've been grifting them this whole time with badly made signs from the cheapest factory I can find?
If you write a European word or "faith" on a piece of wood, white people will maul each other like hyenas to buy it for $100 at a farmer's market. Nothing but teeth and blood.