A Dictionary of Symbols (Dover Occult)

Humans, it is acknowledged, are symbolizing animals. At each level of civilization, humans have depended on symbolic expression, and advances in technological know-how and expertise have merely elevated our dependence on symbols. The language of symbols is taken into account a technology, and this informative quantity bargains an quintessential software within the research of symbology. it may be used as a reference or just browsed for excitement. a lot of its entries — these on structure, mandala, numbers, serpent, water, and zodiac, for instance — should be learn as self sustaining essays. The energy of symbology hasn't ever been larger: a necessary a part of the traditional arts of the Orient and of the Western medieval traditions, symbolism underwent a 20th-century revival with the learn of the subconscious, either without delay within the box of goals, visions, and psychoanalysis, and not directly in artwork and poetry. a large viewers awaits the help of this dictionary in elucidating the symbolic worlds encountered in either the humanities and the background of ideas.

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The move has been frequent as a photo brand, very mostly because of Christian effect yet both as a result of the fundamental value of the signal; for it truly is transparent that each one easy notions, whether or not they are principles or symptoms, have occur with no the prompting of any cultural effect. countless numbers of other shapes of crosses were summarized in works akin to Lehner’s Symbols, symptoms and Signets, and it's been chanced on attainable, by means of the examine of picture symbolism, to clarify the actual which means of every one. a lot of them take the shape of insignias of army orders, medals, and so forth. The swastika is a truly universal form of move (q. v. Swastika). The Egyptian, anserated move is especially fascinating in view of its antiquity. In Egyptian hieroglyphics it stands for all times or dwelling (Nem Ankh) and varieties a part of such phrases as ‘health’ and ‘happiness’. Its higher arm is a curve, occasionally virtually closed to shape a circle. Enel analyses this hieroglyphic as follows: ‘The phonetic importance of this signal is a mixture of the indicators for task and passivity and of a mix of the 2, and conforms with the symbolism of the move in most cases because the synthesis of the energetic and the passive precept. ’ The very form of the anserated go expresses a profound proposal: that of the circle of lifestyles spreading outwards from the foundation and falling upon the outside (that is, upon the passivity of life which it then animates) in addition to hovering up in the direction of the countless. it may well even be visible as a magic knot binding jointly a few specific blend of parts to shape one person, a view which might make sure its attribute life-symbolism. it might probably additionally characterize future. Judged from the macrocosmic viewpoint, that's of its analogy with the realm, the Ankh-cross might symbolize the sunlight, the sky and the earth (by connection with the circle, the upright and the horizontal lines). As a microcosmic signal, that's through analogy with guy, the circle may characterize the human head or cause (or the ‘sun’ which supplies him life), the horizontal arm his fingers, and the upright his physique (19). In sum, the main basic importance of the move is that 71 CROW of the conjunction of opposites: the confident (or the vertical) with the adverse (or horizontal), some of the best with the inferior, lifestyles with dying. the fundamental notion at the back of the symbolism of crucifixion is that of experiencing the essence of antagonism, an concept which lies on the root of lifestyles, expressing because it does life’s agonizing ache, its cross-roads of chances and impossibilities, of building and destruction. Evola means that the pass is a synthesis of the seven points of area and time, simply because its shape is such that it either keeps and destroys loose circulate; consequently, the go is the antithesis of the Ouroboros, the serpent or dragon denoting the primeval, anarchic dynamism which preceded the production of the cosmos and the emergence of order. there's, hence, a detailed courting among the go and the sword, given that either one of them are wielded opposed to the primordial monster (Plate V).

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