Symbolism, the Language of the Gods

Jung was first to recognize the universality and reproducibility of the language of symbolism. In Man and His Symbols, Jung shows us the same archetypes in the untutored dreams of contemporary children, in medieval alchemy, in Hindu mythology, and in Persian folk tales. Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts have continued and extended this study of a vast and strange inner world, little appreciated until quite recently. How does Jung account for the universality of symbolic themes? He sees it as evidence for the collective unconscious, which I have called "the waters of life," or "the ocean," a realm of consciousness which could be called the collective Soul of humanity. Where is this collective Soul? Everywhere. Nowhere. Soul and divinity are not in nature, and thus have no size or position. Nature is in Soul, rather than vice versa. This is the Unitary Worldview.

The study of symbolism led Jung naturally to an interest in divination techniques, which are methods of retrieving or selecting symbolic material. He was struck by the apparently meaningful pattern that arose from random events, because all systems of divination have this in common. They all begin with random events, such as shuffling cards or tossing coins. There is a deliberate attempt to remove any possibility of conscious control or foreknowledge from the selection.

Yet something apparently meaningful and significant arises. Jung began to find such patterns of "coincidence" in his own life and in the lives of his patients, and coined a new word for it, "synchronicity." If synchronicity and divination are real and not some kind of illusion, then we have a mystery, but one easily understood if nature is a thought in the Soul of divinity.

And in finding the same universal archetypes in the dreams of children, alchemy, and Persian folk tales, C.G. Jung has demonstrated the reproducibility of symbolic messages from the deep, i.e. the reproducibility of revelation and divination.

I shall treat this subject as I have mysticism, and give you my personal experiences only. I will tell you about The Revelations of the New Tarot, and Mandalas. This book is not a comprehensive introduction to metaphysics. I only tell what I know, because objective studies have yet to be done.

Metaphysics is more than knowledge; it is also a practice. Metaphysical practice is usually concerned with such things as divination, revelation and magick, all of which make metaphysics resemble religion. For all these practices, a knowledge of symbolism is essential. Indeed, symbolism is to Metaphysics what calculus is to Physics.

Symbolism is the ancient language of the deep, the language of the gods and magicians. It is the language of all that is sacred and holy, numinous, mysterious and elusive. It is the language of moonlight, of dreams, of waiting, as opposed to the sunlit languages of the workaday world. Every religion begins as a spiritual path which couches its highest secrets as symbolic parable and paradox. Only when it is old and decrepit does it degenerate into the literal "word" of the law, ritual and creed. For five hundred years we have neglected the inner path in the West, and pay for it with nightmarish mythologies like Nazism, or cults like that of Jim Jones or David Koresh. Those who choose the inner path must learn the language.

Only the ancient language of the deep can express the insights of mystics. Ordinary languages are tied to our senses and to practical everyday bodily concerns. Symbolism is the essential language for understanding revelation and divination, since every legitimate revelation and divination is couched almost entirely in symbolic terms. Yet this poses a problem.

After 500 years of the World-Machine, including 200 years of "Heroic Materialism," the simple ability to interpret a dream, a folk tale, a myth, a mandala, or a tarot spread is exceedingly rare. We marvel at the insights and abilities of Jung and Campbell, and wonder how we can emulate them. Jung and Campbell are silent on this point. There seems no way for them to pass on their ability, no way to teach it to later generations. All that they tell us is negative. We are told the popular dictionaries of symbolism are useless. It is easy to believe they are right, but where does that leave the beginner who wishes to learn the language of symbolism?

In order for empirical metaphysics to become a knowledge-discipline, symbolism must become a teachable language, with an alphabet and a grammar. The secret to accomplishing this is the recognition that universality lies not in the symbols but in the symbolic elements. Symbols are comparable to sentences, while symbolic elements are comparable to words. It is quite possible for an author to write a dozen books and never use the same sentence twice. Students of symbols may likewise never encounter the same symbol twice. That is why the student must learn The Alphabet of Symbolic Elements.

In the new tarot, in the Book of the Changer, there is a hooded and jessied Eagle sitting on the left shoulder of the Changer, drawing three drops of blood with his claws. I have never encountered that particular symbol in any other context. However, some of the elements are quite common, such as blood, being on the left side, the number three, and the Eagle, but not the hood and jessies (used to control falcons).

Symbolism is a language unlike any other. The ordinary languages of everyday speech, English, German, Chinese, etc. are all conventional and local. The meaning attached to marks or sounds is arbitrary. It is arbitrary that "dog," "chien," and "hund" all refer to the same species of animal. The symbolic meaning of dog, wolf, or eagle is not arbitrary. It cannot be defined or redefined. No act of free association provides the definition. The elements of symbolism have a universal meaning, at least for human beings living on earth. Because of this, anyone knowledgeable in symbolism can read the images, rituals or acts of any time or place in human history, and make sense of them.

For instance, we can read the symbolic meaning of Paleolithic burials that are at least 40,000 years old, just as if they were done yesterday.

In some of these burials, the dead were buried in a fetal position, with the head facing east. They sprinkled the body with red ochre (a kind of red clay powder which does not fade with time), and also put various flowering herbs with medicinal properties in the grave, along with the dead person's favorite trinkets and tools. This is an interesting test. Before reading the next paragraph, try to interpret the previous scene. The symbolic elements have not changed with time. What can be learned about Ice Age beliefs from this burial rite?

We know from this rite that at least some tribes of the old stone age knew about reincarnation, and were symbolically expressing their wish for the spirit to return in another body. The body is left in the fetal position, in which the individual will re-emerge from the womb, covered with blood (red ochre = blood). The east is the direction of the rising sun, emblematic of a new day, and each lifetime is much like one day, with the chilly dawn, the noonday heat, and the quiet dark of twilight. The flowering herbs symbolically "heal" the individual, so he will come back to life. The favorite toys, trinkets, and tools remind the dead of the pleasures of life, so he or she will want to return to it, and indeed, the flowering herbs also have that meaning. Why were only the flowering herbs used in the ritual and not the root herbs or the bark herbs as well? Because the flowers are beautiful as well as healing, and a reminder of the joys of earth. The whole rite is a plea to the dead individual to speedily reincarnate.

Symbolists can read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics...not as a conventional language, but as a pictorial language of symbolism. Let us take for instance the Ankh sign, which resembles a T with a handle on top. We know the loop on top is a handle, because we see figures holding them in that way. "T" looks like a very abstract sign to be a symbolic element. Yet we know it has a universal meaning because of the way it recurs in human history, for instance in the crucifix, or in the new tarot (which is also known as the Book of T).

Indeed, in one aspect, the crucifixion tells us what the T means, if we ignore the pseudo-historical legends of Christ's death. The meaning of T is that it is the shape made by a standing figure holding the arms straight out at the shoulders. The ankh comes even closer than the T to resembling that gesture. Gestures also have a universal meaning, or at least some do. Indeed, try making the T gesture to a loved one. What will happen? They will come and give you a hug! Or try making the T gesture to the rising sun from a lonely hilltop. The earliest Christians called this ceremony Orisen, and this is what they did instead of prayer. They also filled the marginalia of their earliest books with Ankhs and portrayed Yoshua making the T gesture in their earliest catacomb art. What is the feeling associated with making the T gesture, alone, at sunrise, on a high and windy hill? Welcoming the new day? Being glad of it? Welcoming, being glad of the hills, birds and wind?

One may even experience a kind of epiphany in which everything in life is seen to serve the divine purpose, and therefore welcome it, whether it be life or death, pain or pleasure, gain or loss.

Symbolic meaning lies in the feelings and memories that are associated with a thing. Remember, the symbol IS the hawk, threeness, leftness, blood, not the signs we use to refer to these things. An interpretation can never be a translation of the meaning. Symbolism, in the Jungian sense, cannot be translated into ordinary languages. An interpretation can only suggest, or be a reminder. Once the meaning of a symbol is felt, don't destroy its numinous emotional power with over-interpretation.

As one last example of the universality of symbolism, I claim that symbolists can interpret the meaning of Paleolithic cave art, such as that of Lascaux. The animal figures in the Paleolithic cave drawings are not symbolic; they are too realistically drawn. What is symbolic is what is strange and unusual about these paintings, and there are two such oddities. One is that human beings rarely appear, and when they do, only in sketchy and hieroglyphic form, as if to indicate "here is a human being." The other oddity is that the paintings appear deep in the inaccessible and remote parts of the caves, not in the usual dwelling areas. What are we to make of this? One association is "deep, dark holes in the ground" = "bowels of Mother Earth," from which comes all life, including the all important living animals that Cro-Magnon man hunted.

No doubt humans did not consider themselves to be "of the earth" in quite the same way. They "came from the sky," and that is why human figures are rare and incidental to the animal scenes.

Why did Cro-Magnons represent animals in their pre-existent, deep-in-the-bowels-of-Mother-Earth form? Remember, these are not casual doodles, but sensitive portrayals, that must have taken a lot of time and effort, at least in practice to achieve such skill. Two possibilities come to mind, and they may have been combined. Rituals were performed in these rooms, sometimes by the Shaman alone, other times accompanied by the hunters. They made contact with the spirit or root forms of the animals in order to "see" them in actuality. Such remote viewing or finding of herds is still a feature of some hunting tribes, in Siberia and in southeast Asia. It is a practical skill for hunters. Another kind of ritual encouraged the spirit forms of the animals to come forth from Mother Earth as actual animals. One can imagine a shaman dressing up in animal skins, and "coming to life" and rushing out of the cave, pursued by the hunters in mock combat.

The test of truth (reproducibility) suggests four general guides to correct interpretation of symbolic elements. These are rules of consistency: (1) Start with the unique facts about a thing. (2) Ask yourself what human experience or trait is suggested by that unique fact. Symbolism is a human language, a set of metaphors for terrestrial human experience, in this life, in-between lives, and in earlier lives. Symbolism derives from a level of collective and shared Self, but it is still human Self, having no meaning for a flying saucer alien from the Pleiades. (3) Make it consistent. Symbolic elements have the same meaning in all contexts. This is a powerful rule. If we have correctly understood the meaning of the symbolic element "blue" or "being a serpent," we can check this understanding against any symbolic material from any time or place. (4) Completeness is important. No detail can be left out of the interpretation. Indeed, it may be that last difficult-to-understand detail which may change the whole interpretation.

New Tarot Contents | 29. Divination