Barbara G. Walker - The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects

S ymbolism is a slippery subject. Any one symbol may have hundreds of interpretations, according to the differing beliefs of people who have interpreted it. Any basic symbol of worldwide distributionsuch as the triangle, circle, cross, square, or starcan represent many disparate things in various times or places. Symbols now associated with orthodox religions originally evolved from very different contexts in the prepatriarchal past, like the crescent moon of intensely male-oriented Islam, which descended from the female-oriented worship of the Moon Mother in archaic Arabia.

An example of debased popular interpretation is shown by the swastika. During and after World War II, the swastika was seen as a symbol of totalitarianism and cruelty. Previously, however, the swastika was an ancient Oriental emblem of peace and creativity, related to the sun wheel, with such meanings as let it be or amen. It was even a sacred sign, probably representing rebirth, in Paleolithic times twelve thousand years ago.

Some symbols tap archetypal imagery deep within the mind. Human responses to symbols are artificially learned from the culture, yet also intensely subjective. Consider the way we respond to the purely arbitrary symbols of a written language. The alphabetical marks have no relationship whatever to the sounds they are supposed to represent. Yet, as we read, our minds hear those sounds instantly and accurately. The sounds, moreover, have no relationship whatever to the ideas they are supposed to indicate. Yet we grasp the ideas also, immediately. From printed letters to words to ideas is an enormously complex mental journey that we can make thousands of times a minute as we read a page of a book. Once we have learned to read, we identify alphabetical symbols with such ease and speed that we can even use reading as a form of relaxation. Our minds rest by going through this complicated process of sorting, remembering, identifying, and associating symbol systems!

So readily and intensely do human beings respond to symbols that it is hardly a surprise to find symbols deified and divinized in every human culture. People seem prone to attach feelings of awe to their own works, especially when the works bear esthetic significances, such as an orderly symmetry. People also revere external objects that strike their fancy for either esthetic or associative reasons. Whatever is perceived as somehow special in ones experience can become an object of worship. Thus we find human traditions littered with holy trees, holy stones, holy mountains, rivers, animals, and other elements of the natural environment, as well as every kind of personal or collective fetish. Reverence focuses attention on the object as a feedback mechanism arising from the initial focus of attention that generates the reverence in the first place.

Furthermore, it might be said that graphic symbols represent the essential preverbal language. Infants think in images before they learn to think in words. That preverbal language is the most vital of all, remaining throughout life as the language of dreams and unconscious perception. The infant can sense that its very life depends on establishing communication with the mother or other caretakers. Without the ability to sense, project, and respond to imagery, the human being lacks the very essence of humanness.

Since the primary function of the mind is to associate ideas, people naturally associate many things without regard to their real connectionsor lack of themin the external world. Often, the vaguest kind of resemblance will do to connect a picture with a real form. A stick figure can be readily seen as a man. The letter M can be two mountains or nurturing breasts of Mother Earth. A plain circle can be the moon, the sun, a wheel, time, the universe, or a cosmic principle of wholeness. The simpler the symbol, the more meanings it can accumulate as it is contemplated and discussed through generations.

Still, there are some related constellations of meanings that adhere to the same symbols again and again, so it becomes possible to say a symbol represents this or that with at least a degree of consistency. Sometimes, historical changes in interpretation may be recovered, so we can know both the archaic meanings of the symbol and the more recent oneswhich may even be mutually contradictory, especially in the case of religious symbols.