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The Symbolism of the Heron

Posted on November 8, 2025 by Symbol Reader

Ever since I watched The Boy and the Heron by Hayao Miyazaki – twice, drawn back by the questions it left me with – I’ve been captivated by the symbolism of these enigmatic birds. Herons appear frequently in Japanese art, particularly in woodblock prints, and I began to wonder whether the Japanese understanding of the heron differs from the ways other cultures have seen it. As Selena Takigawa Hoy explains,

“Unlike its cousin the crane, which symbolizes peace, luck, and longevity, the meaning in the heron’s appearance is more mysterious, tied to spirits, gods, death, and a link to another world” (1)

I often encounter herons from the train window; I see them rising out of mist and fog, their forms ethereal and almost unreal, much like the grey heron captured by a photographer in the valley of Engadin, perched among golden larches.

Mary Oliver’s poem Heron Risen from the Dark, Summer Pond expresses this same sense of surprise and transformation. The heron she describes is heavy, long-bodied and long-necked. It is rooted to the spot. And yet, when it rises from the dark, heavy water to open air, it becomes a metaphor for sudden change: what seems inert can move, what seems fixed can open. The poem also meditates on life, death, and renewal, portraying the heron’s flight as both an act of transcendence and a reflection on mortality. The pond, dark and still, stands for inertia: “though everything seems so inert, so nailed / back into itself.”

Throughout history, not herons alone but birds of every kind have provided fertile ground for symbolic imagination:

“Birds are able to move from the world of the senses to the world of inner vision. Forming a link between heaven and earth, conscious and unconscious, the bird is almost universally seen as a symbol for the soul or anima, as the breath of the world, or the world soul hidden in matter.” (2)

In Egyptian mythology, the Ba was one of the essential aspects of the soul, often depicted as a bird with a human head. It represented a person’s unique individuality that survived death. After death, the Ba was believed to travel freely between the realms of the living and the dead, returning to the body each night. Closely related to this idea of the soul’s flight was the myth of the Bennu bird, most likely a heron, which symbolized rebirth and renewal. The Bennu was said to have risen from the primordial waters of Nun and alighted on the benben stone in Heliopolis, becoming a solar emblem of resurrection and eternal return. This myth would later echo in the legend of the Phoenix.

Papyrus from the Book of the Dead of Nakht (detail), showing two Bennu

In ancient Greece, the word for bird, ornis or oionos, also meant omen, and birds were considered channels through which the gods revealed their will. Romans developed this into the system of augury, interpreting flight and song to divine the future. (3) As the Homeric Hymn to Hermes reads,

“Whosoever shall come guided by the call and flight of birds of sure omen, that man shall have advantage through my voice, and I will not deceive him. But whoso shall trust to idly-chattering birds and shall seek to invoke my prophetic art contrary to my will, and to understand more than the eternal gods, I declare that he shall come on an idle journey; yet his gifts I would take” (4)

In Homer’s Iliad Athena sends a heron as an auspicious omen to Odysseus:

“Pallas Athena sent a night heron; they did not see it with their eyes through the murk of night, but heard its ringing cry. And Odysseus rejoiced in the bird sign.” (translated by Caroline Alexander)

Miyazaki’s heron echoes these mythic traditions. In the film, the bird is a trickster and shapeshifter – half heron, half man, acting as a psychopomp who guides the hero to the underworld in search of his deceased mother. Through a web of illusions and deceptions, the heron leads the boy to deeper truths, reconnecting him with his ancestors. William Butler Yeats captures a similar sense of awakening in his poem “The Stolen Child”:

“Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats”

Water birds, including herons, have long been associated with goddesses and the liminal powers of nature. As Maria Gimbutas noted,

“Most bird goddess figurines combine the human female form with a specific species of bird: waterbirds (ducks, geese, cranes, herons); spring birds (cuckoos); or birds of prey (crows, owls, vultures). Waterbirds appear most often as figurines and vases. These birds inhabited both terrestrial rivers and lakes and the celestial environment, where rain originates. They provided a link between earthly life and beyond.” (5)

In Hindu tradition, the goddess Bagalamukhi, whose name may mean “she who has the face of a crane,” is strongly associated with supernatural or magical powers, reflecting the heron’s capacity for focus and acuity. She is one of the ten Mahavidyas (Sanskrit: mahā “great” + vidyā “wisdom” or “knowledge”) who are ten forms or aspects of the Divine Mother in Hinduism; manifestations of Śakti, the cosmic feminine energy (6). Bagalamukhi possesses the power to immobilize or attract others, and these uncanny abilities parallel the heron’s patient observation and sudden action. The crane, in its ability to stand absolutely still while hunting, symbolizes intense concentration; in this sense, Bagalamukhi embodies a spiritual and magical perfection of a yogi. She governs vital energy and the tongue, representing mastery over greed, speech, and taste. In this, Bagalamukhi, like the heron, represents the fusion of stillness and power, perception and action, the mastery of subtle forces, and the potential for transformation through discipline, insight and spiritual awareness. She is also able to bestow magical powers on her devotees.

Across cultures and centuries, the heron emerges as a liminal figure bridging worlds: water and air, life and death, consciousness and the unconscious.

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Notes:

(1) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/heron-japan-myth-folklore

(2) Ronnberg, Ami, ed. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS), 2010

(3) Mynott, Jeremy. Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words. Oxford University Press, 2020.

(4) https://sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/hymns.htm

(5) Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. University of California Press, 1999.

(6) Kinsley, David R. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahāvidyās. University of California Press, 1997.

Posted in Heron | Tagged Athena, augury, Bagalamukhi, Bennu, Birds, consciousness, Egypt, Gimbutas, goddess, Greece, Heron, Iliad, Japan, magic, Mahavidyas, Mary Oliver, Miyazaki, mythology, Odysseus, omens, ornis, phoenix, Shakti, shapeshifter, Soul, symbolism, symbols, trickster, unconscious, Yeats | 6 Comments

The Reality of Radical Evil

Posted on September 27, 2025 by Symbol Reader

“The sight of evil kindles evil in the soul—there is no getting away from this fact. The victim is not the only sufferer; everybody in the vicinity of the crime, including the murderer, suffers with him. Something of the abysmal darkness of the world has broken in on us, poisoning the very air we breathe and befouling the pure water with the stale, nauseating taste of blood. True, we are innocent, we are the victims, robbed, betrayed, outraged; and yet for all that, or precisely because of it, the flame of evil glowers in our moral indignation. It must be so, for it is necessary that someone should feel indignant, that someone should let himself be the sword of judgment wielded by fate. Evil calls for expiation, otherwise the wicked will destroy the world utterly, or the good suffocate in their rage which they cannot vent, and in either case no good will come of it.”

C. G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, Vol. 10, par. 410

The famous balloon-globe scene in The Great Dictator distills Charlie Chaplin’s satire of tyranny into a single, haunting image of narcissism. Adenoid Hynkel, i.e. “the Great Dictator”, treats the world as a toy, tossing and caressing it with childlike delight, as though global domination were no more than a game. His is an empire inflated by vanity, ready to collapse at the slightest touch. When it bursts, the dictator’s fantasy dissolves in an instant, exposing the absurdity and futility of his lust for power. The evil he embodies is both destructive and ridiculous.

This summer, I had the opportunity to visit the wonderful Chaplin’s World in Vevey, Switzerland. This was his last home, where he spent the final twenty-four years of his life. While watching this scene at the museum, I marvelled how it reminded me of the world today. The only comfort we have is that tyrannical evil is inherently unstable: the balloon collapses, the ring of Sauron is destroyed in the end.

In the above-featured book, published in 2003, the Jungian analyst Robert L. Moore talked about “the agency of evil” and its roots in the collective psyche. There are very perilous forces lurking in the depths of our souls, he insists. He speaks of ancient cultures, which saw evil as possession; a malicious entity that colonizes souls and “seduces individuals into states of enchantment that compromise their ability to liberate themselves or even realize the destructiveness of their behavior.” This force presents itself as “the centre of life,” yet in truth it swallows and annihilates “Being itself,” much like a black hole. It invades the human ego from the recesses of the collective unconscious, which Moore calls the “Great Self Within.” He writes,

“Part of a person’s psyche is hell-bent on destroying her and not allowing her to have any love, not allowing her to have any trust, not allowing her to have any successful transformation of her patterns of relatedness and her patterns of human interaction.”

The kind of evil he describes goes hand in hand with grandiosity. As Moore puts it,

“There is no one alive who does not have a grandiose, exhibitionistic self-organization, an actual psychological structure or entity that thinks it is God.”

The grandiose Self hates limitations above all else. We all carry the divine likeness within our souls but the secret is not to let it inflate the ego, for it will burst like Chaplin’s balloon. These Godlike energies of the collective psyche suffuse our lives with enchantment but they can also be destructive. Moore calls the dark aspect of the collective unconscious, the great dragon. This particular beast that seeks to take over our souls cannot be slain, he says,

“The only thing that can be slain, however, is an ego organization that has merged unconsciously with the great dragon. The great dragon cannot be killed. It must be related to in a conscious way…”

Moore emphasises that it is naive to believe that archetypal forces want nothing but good things for us. On the contrary, he asserts that “the archetypal Self, if you are not awake, will eat you alive.” Not a single human soul is free of this danger.

If we fail to own our inner dragon of grandiosity, we inevitably project it onto others. We then elevate destructive leaders, idolized by a spellbound crowd. They proclaim themselves the very centre of truth and life, while dismissing everyone beyond their circle as worthless. As Moore explains,

“When dragon energies are present unconsciously, we have little concern for even the most blatant inequities. Injustice is not high on our list of concerns. We look for ways to stay in denial, to rationalize our acceptance of poverty, disease, political oppression, and environmental despoilation.”

Moore’s book is perhaps my favourite work by a Jungian analyst. I find his work strikingly relevant for our day and age not just for our time, but for any era. I was shattered to find out about the tragic circumstances of his death. You do not poke the Great Dragon without the tragic consequences, it would seem.

William Blake, “The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun”

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged archetypes, C.G. Jung, Carl Jung, Chaplin, depth psychology, dragon, evil, grandiosity, Jung, narcissism, psychology, radical evil, Roger L. Moore, Self, symbolism, symbols, The Great Dictator | 10 Comments

Disasters and Their Symbolic Dimensions

Posted on July 13, 2025 by Symbol Reader

“In the beginning, there was nothing at all that anyone could have discerned – only a yawning gap that stretched in all directions – featureless, indefinite, without orientation.”

Sarah Iles Johnston, Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Reader

On May 28, 2025, disaster struck the Swiss village of Blatten in the Lötschental valley. Millions of cubic meters of rock and glacial ice broke off from the mountain and crashed into the valley below, obliterating the whole village. For the first time, a collapse like this – a new mix of rockfall, glacial ice, and avalanche – was captured on video in real time. We bore witness to the apocalypse, broadcast live, so to speak. As per Revelation 6:14, “…and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.” A Swiss historian said in an interview, for the first time we saw

“how this force of a mountain comes towards you, how this cloud full of rubble, rock and ice thunders into the depths.” (1)

In earlier centuries, disasters like this claimed hundreds of lives, with no warning systems and no understanding of what was coming. Today, even with technology, we were still powerless to stop it.

In the same interview, Mathieu refers to previous Alpine disasters, notably the 1618 Piuro landslide, which claimed around 1000 lives:

“The mountain collapsed at the very beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, when the religious conflicts in Europe reached a boiling point. The mountain lay exactly on a front line between Protestant and Catholic areas. The landslide was seen as a punishment from God. The Protestants said the Catholics had behaved sinfully, and vice versa.” (2)

After the Blatten disaster, it felt as if the landscape had swallowed the village whole and turned back the clock, returning to a state of primordial chaos. The valley had been evacuated or stripped of human presence, as if nature had reclaimed its wild, untouched form. This reminded me of Robert MacFarlane’s description of “‘old nature’ where silence stretches back to the Ice Age – an ancient stillness beyond time or human memory.” (3) The disaster brought the valley back to that raw, formless state, where the power of nature is overwhelming and human control disappears. This creates a profound metaphor for loss of memory, history, and identity. The land forgets what was once there.

Caspar David Friedrich, “The Sea of Ice”

In Derborence, a remote alpine valley in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, a massive rockfall occurred in 1714. Part of the Diablerets massif collapsed, sending millions of cubic meters of rock down into the valley. The devastation was so complete that for a time, the area looked like a barren rock desert. A second, smaller rockfall followed in 1749, which added to the mythology and fear surrounding the place. Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz’s novel Derborence (1934) is based on the 1714 landslide when “the mountain has fallen,” as one of the characters expressed it. One of the novel’s most evocative passages reads:

“That was all; he had fallen silent. And, at that moment, Séraphin was silent as well; they felt growing around them something completely inhuman and, over a long time, unbearable — the silence. The silence of the high mountains, the silence of the places uninhabited by men, where men are present only temporarily, provisionally; then, if ever so little one should be silent himself, he cocks an ear in vain, he hears only that he hears nothing. It was as if nothing existed anywhere, from us to the other end of the world, from us to the bottom of heaven. Nothing, nothingness, a void, the perfection of a void; a total cessation of being, as if the world had not yet been created, or was no more, as if one were before the beginning of the world or after the end of it. And the ache lodges itself in your breast where it’s like a hand that closes round the heart.”

From our finite human perspective, mountains seem immovable and eternal. However, geologically, they are actually “temporary structures” (4). As soon as they form, erosion begins to wear them down. If given enough time, even the tallest mountains will be reduced to plains. That is another example of how the alchemical dictum “Nature delights in nature, nature conquers nature, nature masters nature” manifests.

When disasters happen in our modern world, do we still feel the sense of such mythic dimensions? Since the Age of Enlightenment, we have been searching for rational explanations. Today, global warming is viewed as “a human-engineered calamity” (5). In her book, Huet examines the etymology of the words disaster and catastrophe. The word disaster comes from the Greek for “ill star”:

“The word is … directly related to … the destruction, despair and chaos resulting from the distant power of cosmic agencies.” (6)

“Catastrophe” originally meant the “turning downward.”

Instead of seeing punishment from the gods, we now assign blame: to failed infrastructure, to political negligence, or to humanity’s impact on the climate. Without denying the hard facts of the climate change, this rational framing helps us feel less powerless, and still the emotional core remains strikingly similar to the dread felt by past generations. Even our search for causes can be seen as a modern form of apotropaic mechanism: a way to push back the chaos, to reassert order and meaning in a world that feels suddenly unstable. Just as ancient societies used rituals to appease angry gods, we now use data and responsibility to ward off the intolerable idea that disaster might be random and uncontrollable.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu and Gilgamesh set out to climb a sacred mountain and kill Humbaba, its terrifying protector. Before they set off, Gilgamesh had a dream:

“Enkidu, my friend, I had a dream. The dream I had filled me with terror. I walked through a valley beneath a great mountain. The mountain fell down upon me. Under the mountain was I helpless and bereft of hope. And then did the Sun rise and cast its light over the mountain.”

The mountain he seeks to overcome, overcomes him. And yet after the inevitable disaster, a ray of hope emerges. This echoes the ancient Greek myth of Pandora, who unleashed all the calamities by opening a forbidden jar. As disease, suffering, and chaos escaped into the world, one thing remained at the bottom: hope. Macfarlane sees the same motif in the myth of Ragnarök:

“Even in the Norse myth of Ragnarök, hope prevails. Although the Earth has been burnt by the fire demon Surtr, although most of the gods are dead, it is not an end. Under Yggdrasil, the great ash that links all worlds together, there is light. The woman Lif and the man Liftrasir, whose names mean ‘life’ and ‘life of the body,’ emerge from some underground shelter, the only humans to survive. A new age begins, with new gods, and new worlds.” (7)

Myths like Ragnarök or the flood stories o speak not only to cosmic cataclysms but to the inner necessity of breakdown before rebirth. Carl Jung wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.” Outer disasters, whether personal crises or global upheavals, often reflect a deep psychic shift, a cracking of the old order to make way for something new. What collapses in the world also echoes a transformation within.

J.M.W Turner, “Goldau” (The Goldau landslide of 1806 was one of Switzerland’s deadliest natural disasters, burying several villages and killing over 450 people when a massive rockfall from Mount Rossberg collapsed into the valley below)

Notes:

(1) NZZ Folio. “Früher Gottes Strafe, heute die Rache der Natur: Katastrophen in den Bergen haben die Schweiz geprägt.” NZZ, 3. Juli 2025. https://www.nzz.ch/folio/frueher-gottes-strafe-heute-die-rache-der-natur-katastrophen-in-den-bergen-haben-die-schweiz-gepraegt-ld.1890626 (paywall)

(2) Ibid.

(3) Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (London: Penguin Books, 2007).

(4) Ibid.

(5) Marie‑Hélène Huet, The Culture of Disaster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

(6) Ibid.

(7) Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (London: Penguin Books, 2007).

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Posted in Disasters | Tagged alchemy, archetypes, Blatten, C.G. Jung, calamities, catastrophe, depth psychology, Derborence, disaster, Enkidu, enlightenment, Gilgamesh, hope, landslide, literature, mountain, nature, Pandora, Piuro, psyche, Ragnarok, Ramuz, Switzerland, unconscious | Leave a comment

The Rose as a Symbol

Posted on April 13, 2025 by Symbol Reader

Rose,
the unfading rose beyond my verse—
rose that’s full and fragrant,
rose of the black garden in the deep of night,
rose of any garden and any night,
rose that’s born again by the art of alchemy
out of tenuous ash,
rose of the Persians and Ariosto,
rose that’s always by itself,
rose that’s always the rose of roses,
the young Platonic flower,
the blind and burning rose beyond my verse,
unattainable rose.

“Rose” by J. L. Borges, transl. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni

the oldest living rose in the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand-year_Rose

Symbols convey both the language of the divine and the language of nature, bridging the realms of body and spirit. A rose, when observed, is simultaneously sensual and transcendent, both tangible and elusive. For Rilke, the rose embodied “a pure contradiction” – the exact phrase he chose for his epitaph.

The key that most often unlocks the door of symbolism for me is tracing of words back to their earliest meanings:

“The Greek word rhódon is connected phonetically with rheein, meaning ‘to flow’, linking the rose’s life cycle and scent to endless effluvious life, and thereby making it closely associated with the metamorphosis that is characteristic of humanity’s relationship to nature. In Latin, rosa sounds like ros – ‘dew’ – which is an especially ethereal natural phenomenon also closely associated with the realm of the gods. The words rhódon and rosa refer to the colour of light itself, and so the plant was deemed to originate in the world of the gods. In relation to sexual love, the word rosa sounds very close to the Greek Eros, the name of Aphrodite’s son, … These interconnections, reinforced by a purely visceral delight in the visual and olfactory beauty of the rose, meant it was understood to be both an earthly creation and a material sign of the world of the immortals.” (1)

Gustave Doré, Dante and Beatrice contemplating the City of the Blessed Souls

In Dante’s Paradiso, the City of the Blessed Souls takes the form of a white rose. Like the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals, this celestial rose is a mandala that draws the soul inward in contemplation of divinity. The rose in Dante’s Divine Comedy is connected to number eight, as are many rose windows in Gothic cathedrals. (2) In many cases, the imagery and symbolism surrounding the rose window reflect Mary’s role as the “Mystical Rose” in medieval Christianity. Mary was an intercessor between the human and the divine realm, as the rose is “the portal through which the divine love enters the human world.” (3) Her prayer beads are called the rosary.

Furthermore, the number eight is connected to the Venus cycle because of the way the planet Venus moves in relation to Earth. Every eight years, Venus returns to almost the exact same position in the sky, forming a regular and beautiful pattern. This perfect symmetry characteristic of the Venus cycle brings to mind Yeats’s poem “The Secret Rose” in which the “inviolate” rose stands for unattainable, secret beauty. The Persian word for the rose is gole, which is related to the word cosmos. In Persian Sufism, the rose is sometimes used as a metaphor for the soul’s journey toward enlightenment. The “gole” represents the heart that opens in spiritual awakening, much like the petals of a rose unfolding. The connection to the cosmos can be seen in the idea that the beauty of the rose mirrors the divine harmony and order of the universe. The rose, in this context, is not just a symbol of earthly beauty but also a reflection of the divine creation, echoing the larger cosmic order. Additionally, in Persian poetry, especially in the works of poets like Hafiz and Rumi, the rose is often depicted as a symbol of the eternal, transcendent beauty of the universe, conveying a spiritual connection to the infinite cosmos. The rose’s scent is likened to the divine fragrance that permeates the universe, offering a reminder of the divine presence in all things. (4)

John William Waterhouse, “The Soul of the Rose”

Alchemists frequently employed the rose in their symbolic repertoire. In The Rosary of the Philosophers, for example, the white rose symbolised albedo, while the red one stood for rubedo, i.e. the final stage of the opus:

“In the language of the alchemists, matter suffers until the nigredo disappears, when the ‘dawn’ {aurora) will be announced by the ‘peacock’s tail’ {cauda pavonis) and a new day will break, the leukosis or albedo. But in this state of ‘whiteness’ one does not live in the true sense of the word, it is a sort of abstract, ideal state. In order to make it come alive it must have ‘blood,’ it must have what the alchemists call the rubedo, the ‘redness’ of life. Only the total experience of being can transform this ideal state of the albedo into a fully human mode of existence. Blood alone can reanimate a glorious state of consciousness in which the last trace of blackness is dissolved, in which the devil no longer has an autonomous existence but rejoins the profound unity of the psyche. Then the opus magnum is finished: the human soul is completely integrated.” (5)

Image from The Rosary of the Philosophers, read more here https://symbolreader.net/2018/02/17/jung-on-alchemy-8-the-coniunctio-part-2-the-white-stone/

Eos, the goddess of dawn, was described as “rosy-fingered” by Homer. However, it was Aphrodite who was most consistently associated with the rose. In Botticelli’s famous The Birth of Venus, she is showered with white gallica roses, which, according to myth, were created from the sea foam that fell onto dry land. According to another myth, roses became red when Aphrodite pricked herself on a rose bush while rushing to her lover, Adonis. In yet another story, Eros, Aphrodite’s son, offers a rose to the god of silence, Harpocrates, so that his mother’s love affairs remain secret. This gave rise to the phrase sub rosa, meaning “under the rose” – in secret and in silence. (6) The Greeks also spoke of the rose’s cooling effect, saying it “cools the head not to blurt out secrets” while drinking. (7)

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “The Roses of Heliogabalus”

Another god associated with the rose was Dionysos, who discovered the first vine right next to a rose bush. In Greece, rose petals were often dropped into wine, enhancing the symbolism of the rose with themes of passion, intoxication, and losing oneself in the throes of desire.

In summary, for the ancients,

“The rose was closely equated with femininity, vivacity, fecundity, love, beauty, pleasure, desire, the delicious pain of passion, and also the waning of these things … with death.” (8)

Thus, the symbolic rose encompassed the entirety of the universe: the underworld, the human realm, and the divine world, all interconnected in a single, indivisible process. Roses marked significant life transitions and moments, “defining the borders of life’s stations.” (9) Moreover, the Roman holiday of Rosalia celebrated “the transformation of the dead into a rose.” (10)

The symbolism of the rose encompasses the full range of human experience, including not only sweetness and passion but also pain and suffering. In Little Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty), the female protagonist cannot escape life’s hardships. She pricks her finger on a spindle, and as a result, the entire kingdom is engulfed by a thick, enchanted briar rose hedge, isolating it from the outside world. Within this protective barrier, she remains suspended in limbo, avoiding both reality and pain. The rose’s symbolism also holds cruelty and bitterness, as Rilke wrote, “the roses’ red may grow fiery and menacing.” (11)

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Notes:

(1) Morley, Simon. By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose. London: Oneworld Publications, 2021.

(2) Di Scipio, Giuseppe C. The Symbolic Rose in Dante’s Paradiso. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1984.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Morley, Simon. By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose. London: Oneworld Publications, 2021.

(5) Jung, C. G. C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. Edited by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton University Press, 1998.

(6) Morley, Simon. By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose. London: Oneworld Publications, 2021.

(7) Géczi, János. The Rose and Its Symbols in Mediterranean Antiquity. Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2011.

(8) Morley, Simon. By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose. London: Oneworld Publications, 2021.

(9) Géczi, János. The Rose and Its Symbols in Mediterranean Antiquity. Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2011.

(10) Ibid.

(11) Rilke, Rainer Maria. “The Lunatics in the Garden” in: New Poems: A Revised Bilingual Edition. Translated by Edward Snow, North Point Press, 2001.

Posted in The Rose | Tagged albedo, alchemy, Aphrodite, archetypes, art, astrology, Briar Rose, C.G. Jung, Dante, death, depth psychology, Dionysos, Eros, etymology, goddess, love, Mary, Mystical Rose, pain, Paradiso, Rilke, Rosalia, rose, rose window, rubedo, Sleeping Beauty, Soul, suffering, symbolism, symbols, thorns, transition, Venus, Virgin Mary, wine, Yeats | 10 Comments

Mythical Lisbon

Posted on February 28, 2025 by Symbol Reader

Fountain of the Forty Spouts in Lisbon (notice sea horses and serpents); via https://aviewoncities.com/lisbon/ajuda-botanical-garden

This year, I traveled to Portugal for the first time, and throughout my journey, I felt as though I was encountering something deeply mysterious. The country struck me as a land of silence and secrecy, and I became captivated by various esoteric theories, such as the one which posits that the Knights Templar played a crucial role in the formation of Portugal. One of the most enchanting places I visited was Sintra, a town just outside Lisbon, renowned for its numerous palaces and palpable mystical atmosphere. Perhaps Sintra’s most captivating site is the Initiation Well at Quinta da Regaleira, where its spiraling staircase leads deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. The energy of the place was very intense, leaving a lasting impression. Portugal is also home to messianic ideas, particularly the belief in the Fifth Empire, which suggests that the country has a divine purpose to fulfill. While these ideas are fascinating, I remain somewhat skeptical, as many nations tend to view themselves as exceptional – a phenomenon that, as Jungian scholar Robert L. Moore wrote, reflects spiritual grandiosity. My focus in this essay will be on Lisbon, a city that embodies the very essence of the Portuguese myth and mystery.

Granted, all cities are mythical spaces, rich with meanings that extend beyond their mere physical presence. In this way, cities transform into texts to be deciphered, their structures layered with stories and messages awaiting interpretation. Historical truth, however, is a separate matter; in this article, I am not concerned with historical accuracy, but rather with the symbolic expression embodied in the city’s form and essence.

In Critias, Plato gives a description of “cosmic space, and of the space of the city as a reflection of the Cosmos.” (1) In this dialogue, the city of Atlantis is depicted as having a highly organized structure with concentric rings of land and water, creating a symbolic spatial organization. Ancient cities were perceived as an imago mundi – they represented the world. (2) Symbolically,

“Cities are the goals of pilgrimage, and embody our projections of possibility, reorientation and rebirth. … Sacred mandalas of which the centre is the focus are sometimes configured as cities, and the city is also an image of the alchemical lapis, signifying sanctuary, integrity, symmetry, balance, the marriage of heaven and earth or of Sol and Luna.” (3)

I was captivated by the beauty of Lisbon, and the first thing that caught my attention was the light. The light in Lisbon feels almost otherworldly, or at least, that’s how I imagined it. The Ancient Romans referred to this land as Lusitania, a name that some etymologists suggest is connected to the Indo-European root lus-, meaning “to shine” or “light.” I like to think this connection holds some truth. Adding to the city’s allure, there is a myth that the ancient city of Olisipo, the earliest known name for Lisbon, was founded by Odysseus himself. Christopher Kark (4) traces this myth back to the fifth book of The Odyssey, where the god Proteus describes Elysium, a place that resonates with the luminous and divine qualities attributed to Lisbon:

“Gods will carry you

off to the world’s end, to Elysium.

Those fields are ruled by tawny Rhadamanthus

and life is there the easiest for humans.

There is no snow, no heavy storms or rain,

but Ocean always sends up gentle breezes

of Zephyr to refresh the people there.” (translated by Emily Wilson)

As Kark explains further,

“Throughout classical antiquity, many geographers and historians believed that “the limits of the earth” to which Proteus refers lay somewhere on the western extremes of the Iberian Peninsula, beyond the Pillars of Hercules where Odysseus is thought to have ventured.”

The Greeks named the mouth of the Tagus, where Lisbon stands, Ophiussa – the land of serpents. This mythical power of serpents ties to Lisbon’s tragic fate and the symbolism of the West, representing death, transformation, and the boundary between life and the afterlife. The 1755 earthquake, which devastated Lisbon, mirrored this journey, as the West in ancient myths was seen as the realm of the dead. The city’s coat of arms reflects this existential threat through the story of Saint Vincent of Saragossa, whose body was protected by ravens after his martyrdom at the hands of the Romans. Fittingly, ravens are also psychopomps, acting as guides of souls between worlds.

Lisbon’s distinctive pavements, known as calçada portuguesa, are intricate mosaics made of black and white stones, often depicting geometric patterns or local motifs, reflecting the city’s rich cultural heritage and artistic craftsmanship.

The poignant ruins of the Carmo Convent, left standing after the 1755 earthquake

Lisbon is a city rich in legends, and the story of Saint Vincent is featured in one of the fourteen polychrome azulejos wall panels at Restauradores and Rossio stations. Designed by Lima de Freitas in 1976, these large ceramic panels modernize traditional Portuguese azulejos*, blending abstract and figurative elements to narrate Lisbon’s mythical past. One panel depicts Ulysses arriving in Lusitania to meet the queen of serpents in a cave of initiation.

via https://mariomarzagaoalfacinha.blogspot.com/2009/10/azulejos-de-lima-de-freitas-na-estacao.html where you can also view the other panels

In Lisbon, three key neighborhoods – Baixa, Alfama, and Belém (the latter featured in the photos below) – hold significant spiritual importance. Belém is linked to the Order of Christ, the direct successor of the Knights Templar in Portugal. After the Templars were disbanded in 1312, King Dinis I restructured the order in 1319, preserving their assets and many of their traditions. The Order of Christ continued the Templars’ legacy, including their distinctive symbols, and played a pivotal role in supporting Portugal’s Age of Exploration. I was struck by a sheer number of Masonic and Templar symbols in that area.

Baixa Pombalina, or simply Baixa, is the downtown area of Lisbon. It was rebuilt in the late 18th century after the 1755 earthquake under the direction of Marquis of Pombal, which is why it bears his name. In its totality, it is a prime example of sacred architecture. Adriao explains:

“Following hermetic tradition …, the Marquis of Pombal … planned 17 large avenues, … which is a key number for Portugal. … Three main avenues lead from … Rua Augusta (in the centre), Rua do Ouro [gold street] and Rua da Prata [silver street] (on either side). They symbolise caudeceus representing Mercury, which is composed of a central column around which two snakes, one black and one white, intertwine; one snake is solar (golden) and the other lunar (silver). These serpents (ofiussas) represent the arteries through which vital energy flows.” (5)

Baixa Pombalina rises in perfect symmetry, a rational masterpiece of urban planning where neoclassical facades and measured streets reflect the Enlightenment’s belief in order and progress. But just a few steps away Lisbon reveals another face. The oldest district called Alfama (its street pictured below on the left) was a labyrinth of irregularities. It was easy to get lost there while Baixa (the street on the right) was the easiest to navigate. In Alfama, the city’s soul is enveloped in saudade – a longing that drifts through the air. This is the birthplace of fado and home to the most wonderful museum I visited during my trip – the Museum of Fado. The word “fado” comes from the Latin fatum, meaning “fate” and in many ways, it captures the soulful essence of Alfama itself. Unlike the sunlit grandeur of Baixa, Alfama is lunar, introspective, soaked in shadows and melancholic melodies.

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Notes:

(1) Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991, p. 14.
(2) Ibid., p. 244.
(3) Ronnberg, Ami, ed. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS), 2010, p. 614.
(4) Kark, Christopher. (2014). Portugal as Nostos Interrupted. Journal of Lusophone Studies. 12. 10.21471/jls.v12i0.67.
(5) Adrião, Vitor Manuel. Secret Lisbon. Jonglez Publishing, 2017, p. 50.

* azulejos – decorative ceramic tiles; from the Arab word meaning “small polished stone”

Posted in Lisbon | Tagged Alfama, archetypes, azulejos, Baixa, Baixa Pombalina, Belem, caduceus, cities, Critias, fado, hermeticism, initation well, Jeronimos, Knights Templar, light, Lima de Freitas, Lisbon, Lusitiania, Masonry, Odysseus, Odyssey, Ophiussa, pavement, Plato, Portugal, Quinta de Regaleira, ravens, saint Vincent, saudade, serpents, Sintra, Soul, symbolism, symbols | 8 Comments

Kafka’s Book of Images – Part 2

Posted on January 25, 2025 by Symbol Reader

SATURN’S SHADOW

Reiner Stach published the second volume of Kafka’s biography in 2013 under the title Kafka: The Decisive Years. The volume covers the years 1910 (Kafka’s 27th birthday) till 1915. This period, spanning Kafka’s late twenties to early thirties, aligns with what astrologers call the Saturn Return, a time when life’s deeper questions seem to demand answers, often through upheaval and self-reckoning. For Kafka, these were years of intense inner conflict and creative fervour – navigating the suffocating expectations of his family, the severe restrictions of his job at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, and his own relentless self-doubt. This was also the time when his most iconic works were written – The Judgement, The Trial, The Metamorphosis, and last but not least, the Letter to His Father.

I have recently read a wonderful essay on Kafka by Deborah Eisenberg. (1) She describes the experience of looking at Kafka’s photos as akin to seeing “images of a lone witness about to be engulfed in darkness.” This observation made me reflect on how even baby photos can carry a certain shadow, as though Saturn lays its claim far earlier than the fateful age of thirty. Eisenberg also references Philip Roth’s striking description of Kafka’s face: the “intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure—enormous fears, enormous control.” Without overanalyzing, the gaze of baby Kafka feels haunting, almost like peering into the abyss.

Saturnian themes permeate Kafka’s work, shaping its tone and weight. Notably, Kafka reserved the word “work” exclusively for his writing, relegating his office job to a mere functional label: “the office.” Reiner Stach attempts to pinpoint the essence of the “Kafkaesque” by identifying several key elements: “the father figure who is both overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero.” These qualities evoke a world where every attempt at meaning or progress is met with insurmountable resistance.

In the Letter to His Father, Kafka wrote, “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.” This moment of self-reflection reveals how the oppressive presence of his father – whom Kafka continued to live with into his thirties – deeply shaped his life and art. In his webinar Saturn in Myth and Psyche, astrologer Jason Holley discussed Saturnian themes of suppression, comparing the devouring Father/Cronos figure to a force that diminishes or stifles children, viewing them as “less than ideal.”

Although he was well accomplished and respected in his profession, Kafka experienced similar forms of oppression in his work life, feeling trapped by the demands of his office job. Yet, paradoxically, emphasizes Stach, it was this very job that fueled his creativity as a writer. Holley suggests that Saturn’s ultimate gift is the solitude that comes with deep reflection and constant striving – an experience Kafka found both burdensome and creatively essential.

The Kindlifresserbrunnen (Child-Eater Fountain) in Bern, Switzerland

THE COMPLETE OPENING

The suppression of Saturn did not cease for Kafka on the significant night of September 22 to 23, 1912, but it was undeniably a defining moment when his genius briefly soared to the stars, and the darkness receded, if only for a fleeting, radiant moment. This is how he described the night he wrote The Judgment:

“This story, ‘The Judgment,’ I wrote during the night of the 22nd, from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M., in one sitting.

I could hardly pull my legs out from under the desk; they had become stiff from sitting. The frightful exertion and pleasure of experiencing how the story developed right in front of me, as though I were moving forward through a stretch of water. Several times during this night I lugged my own weight on my back. How everything can be hazarded, how for everything, even for the strangest idea, a great fire is ready in which it expires and rises up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A car drove by. Two men walked across the bridge. At 2 A.M. I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid came through the front room in the morning, I was writing the last sentence. Turning off the lamp, the light of day. The slight pains in my chest. The exhaustion that faded away in the middle of the night. The tremulous entry into my sisters’ room. Reading aloud. Before that, stretching in front of the maid and saying, ‘I have been writing all night.’ The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been carried in. My belief confirmed that with my novel I am in the disgraceful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only in a context like this, with a complete opening of body and soul.”

There is not a single, unnecessary sentence in that short story. The language of Kafka may be sparse and controlled but, as Stach beautifully puts it, it is “like a glowing scalpel that cuts through stone.” In symbolism, stone and Saturn share an affinity around the themes of endurance, permanence and unyielding force.

THE ABYSS OF NIGHT AND DREAMING

Because of the demands of his daytime job, Kafka was forced to work on his writing during the nights. He also developed a habit of strolling through very dark and empty streets of Prague at night. He was acutely aware of the duality of his existence spanned between the office, which he described as being “on the surface of life,” and his nighttime writing which had “its centre of gravity in depth.”

The night and his “dreamlike inner life” exerted an irresistible pull on Kafka, to the point where his waking life began to “atrophy,” as he himself put it. The monstrous vermin he created in Metamorphosis held a more dreadful reality for him than the figures he encountered in his waking life. From a Jungian perspective, this reflects a transformation of libido – life energy that withdraws from conscious life and is redirected toward the unconscious. Yet, as Jung writes, “flight from life does not exempt us from the law of age and death.” (3) This law, governed by the inexorable force of Saturn, reminds us of life’s inevitable constraints.

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If you enjoy my writing, please consider donating to support my work. Thank you very much in advance.

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Notes:

(1) Eisenberg, Deborah. “Urgent Messages from Eternity: Franz Kafka.” The New York Review of Books, February 13, 2025. Accessed January 25, 2025. (paywall) https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/02/13/urgent-messages-from-eternity-franz-kafka/.

(2) https://www.astrologyuniversity.com/shop/search-by-astrologer/jason-holley/saturn-myth-psyche/

(3) Jung, C. G. (1967). Symbols of transformation: An analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press, par. 617

Posted in Franz Kafka | Tagged archetypes, astrology, biography, C.G. Jung, death, devouring, father, Franz Kafka, Judgement, Kafka, Kafkaesque, libido, literature, metamorphosis, Reiner Stach, Saturn return, symbolism, symbols, transformation | 4 Comments

House as a Symbol

Posted on December 29, 2024 by Symbol Reader

Snails and hermit crabs both carry their homes, but in distinctly different ways. A snail’s shell grows with it, a steadfast and secure refuge crafted by nature. In contrast, the hermit crab embodies adaptability, seeking shelter in the discarded shells of other sea creatures. As it grows, it must continually search for a new, unfamiliar home. This symbolism of home extends into astrology, where the sign Cancer, represented by the crab, is closely associated with the concept of home.

Home is a universal and potent symbol, adaptable to countless entities: a country, a planet, a family, a person, a belief system, or even the human psyche – both conscious and unconscious. The body itself is often seen as a temporary home for the soul. In Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo’s cathedral was described as his “egg, nest, house, country, and universe.” (1) On a larger scale, the recent reopening of the rebuilt Notre Dame in Paris marked a profound spiritual moment, restoring a cherished sanctuary for many.

Some of the most beautiful reflections on the spiritual meaning of a house can be found in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where he writes, “the house shelters daydreaming.” Bachelard observes that even the humblest dwellings possess their own unique beauty. Certain homes seem to bring the soul of their inhabitant to the surface, like a hidden pearl made visible. Although most of us keep moving house in the manner of the hermit crab, we carry our stories with us, for as Bachelard writes, “an entire past comes to dwell in a new house.”

This evocative line came to mind as I was reading Safekeep, an extraordinary debut novel by Yael van der Wouden. Published in 2024, it was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. If you plan to read it, skip this paragraph, as it contains significant spoilers.

The novel is set in 1961 in a quiet, rural area of eastern Holland. The setting feels steeped in the lingering shadows of the past, even though there are no visible traces of the war. At the heart of the story is a large country house, home to the main character, Isabel, who lives there alone. She deeply cherishes the house and its garden, devoting her days to meticulously maintaining it – inventorying every item, polishing the tableware and cutlery. Her attachment to the house borders on obsession:

“She went around the house and closed everything, locked everything – the shutters and the curtains and everything that could be pulled over herself like a cloak. For a moment, for a brief and raging moment, she thought: Let him. Let him try to drag me out of here. She saw herself clawing into the walls, taking root.”

The house once belonged to Isabel’s late mother. The family had moved there in 1944, when Isabel was a young girl. She has only vague memories of the house being filled with objects and furniture, as though it had already been lived in. At some point, this realization hits her with full clarity:

“An odd angle of a thought that hadn’t struck her before – they’d moved into a finished house, a full house. Nearly everything laid out: the sheets, the pots, the vases in the windowsills.”

Gustav Klimt, “Country House by the Attersee”

Isabel’s solitude is disrupted when her brother Louis, the rightful owner of the house, arrives with his new girlfriend, Eva. Louis is soon called away, leaving Eva behind with Isabel. Eva finds it hard to tolerate Isabel’s presence – her loudness, her constant touching of everything in the house Isabel holds dear. However, over time, the two women grow closer, gradually united by an unconscious, shared love for the house:

“Isabel was wiping gently over the ear of a milk jug.

Eva said, “You do that with such care.” It came out quietly.

Isabel held the jug in the dip of her palm. The night had made the space between them odd, hushed. Isabel met Eva’s gaze and said, ‘A house is a precious thing.’”

Johannes Vermeer, “Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace”

Now for the biggest plot twist – and a major spoiler: Eva is Jewish, and the house once belonged to her family. They lost it when her father was taken to a concentration camp, which led to his inability to pay the mortgage, allowing the Dutch government to seize the property. Eva recalls:

“I was born in this room, and these walls were witnesses, and this desk, and these windows too. The house wants me here, even if no one else does.”

What I found most compelling in the novel is its haunting atmosphere, where the house symbolizes the childhood and past of both women, and how the unconscious mysteries of the past continue to shape their present. The way they are both so deeply attuned to the house makes it feel like a character in its own right. The novel also explores how Europe is still grappling with its Nazi past. The most powerful moment occurs when Isabel sees a Hebrew scripture quote in a synagogue:

”The Hebrew scripture was inlaid in what once must have been a gold-painted stone but was now graying, dull. She stepped closer. In Roman letters, the quote announced itself: Isaiah, 56:7. Isabel drove back home. Her Bible she kept in her room, on her shelf. … Isabel found the quote. ‘For my house will be called’, she read, finger next to the number seven, ‘a house of devotion for all.’ She sat on the edge of her bed. She touched the page, and it was thin, and the letters so black against the grain of the paper. She touched the word house. She touched the word devotion.”

Isabel was as if frozen in the house, trapped by trauma she had not caused directly but in which she had unconsciously participated. Eva, in contrast, brought life and movement into the house. She became the key to resolving their shared trauma – Isabel’s latent guilt and Eva’s victimhood.

In a well-known psychological experiment, children are asked to draw a house. Bachelard explains how traumatized children depict their houses:

“If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears traces of his distress. In this connection, I recall that Francoise Minkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time there was an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houses long after those evil times were over. These are what Mme. Minkowska calls ‘motionless’ houses, houses that have become motionless in their rigidity. ‘This rigidity and motionlessness are present in the smoke as well as in the window curtains. The surrounding trees are quite straight and give the impression of standing guard over the house’.”

It is no surprise that, in depth psychology, the house symbolizes various layers of the psyche. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung shares one of his most significant early dreams:

“I was in a house I did not know, which had two storeys. It was ‘my house’. I found myself in the upper storey, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in Rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious, old paintings. I wondered that this should be my house and thought, ‘Not bad’. But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older. I realised that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The furnishings were medieval, the floors were of red brick. Everywhere it was rather dark. I went from one room to another, thinking, ‘Now I really must explore the whole house.’ I came upon a heavy door and opened it. Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway that led down into a cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this, I knew that the walls dated from Roman times. My interest by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down to the depths. These, too, I descended and entered a low cave cut into rock. Thick dust lay on the floor and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old, and half disintegrated. Then I awoke.”

The house thus symbolizes both the personal and collective unconscious, and in its symbolism, it is as vast as the psyche itself. The earliest home for us all was the womb, a concept revealed through children’s games:

“… like the animals who instinctively make the homes in nests, burrows in the earth, the hollows of trees, caves and clefts, many of the first homes of our devising were intimate, encompassing womblike structures.” (2)

We long for home, a place where we feel familiar, accepted, and at peace. This longing is deeply tied to the Greek concept of nostos – a homecoming, like Odysseus’s return to Ithaka after a long and treacherous journey. (3) Nostos also meant “return to light and life.” (4) The home, then, becomes a beacon, a lighthouse, a safe haven to which we return to find solace after straying from our path, much like Odysseus. The word nostalgia is etymologically connected to nostos, combining the Greek word algea (pain) with nostos (homecoming). This connection reflects the emotional ache of longing for a place that feels like home.

In the context of refugees and the homeless, this yearning for home takes on a more urgent and painful dimension. For those displaced or without shelter, the concept of home transcends a physical space – it becomes an almost existential need for belonging and security. The house, much like the hearth it used to contain, represents “the living centre,” (5) where the soul seeks nourishment and protection, a place to heal from the trauma of loss and displacement.

Notes:

(1) Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Beacon Press, 1994.

(2) Ronnberg, Ami, ed. 2010. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. New York: Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS).

(3) Nagy, Gregory. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ronnberg, Ami, ed. 2010. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. New York: Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS).

Posted in house | Tagged archetypes, astrology, Booker Prize, C.G. Jung, Cancer, depth psychology, dreams, holocaust, Home, homeless, house, house drawing, psyche, psychology, Quasimodo, refugees, Safekeep, shelter, symbolism, symbols, the Netherlands, trauma, War, Yael van der Wouden | 10 Comments

Symbolreader on the Black Madonna Speaks Podcast

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Symbol Reader

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Stephanie Georgieff on her podcast The Black Madonna Speaks. We discussed the inspiration behind my blog, Symbolreader, and my pilgrimages to various Black Madonna sites in Switzerland and Spain. Stephanie brings a profound depth of knowledge on the Black Madonna and the history of Christianity, including esoteric Christianity. Although it was my first ever podcast experience, her warm and welcoming approach made me feel at ease.

https://lnns.co/oYx9MebAmGX

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Black Madonna, interview, podcast, Stephanie Georgieff, symbolreader, The Black Madonna Speaks | 2 Comments

Symbolism of Mermaids: The Beauty and Danger of Unconscious Depths

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Symbol Reader

“Her hair was as a wet fleece of gold, and each separate hair as a thread of fine gold in a cup of glass. Her body was as white ivory, and her tail was of silver and pearl. Silver and pearl was her tail, and the green weeds of the sea coiled round it; and like sea-shells were her ears, and her lips were like sea-coral.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Fisherman and His Soul”

In 1948, Pablo Picasso visited post-war Communist Warsaw and was invited to view an apartment in an unfinished building. Spontaneously, he sketched a large mermaid on the wall, referencing the coat of arms of the Polish capital. Picasso’s mermaid held a hammer instead of the traditional sword. However, five years later, the apartment’s owners had the mural painted over, unable to bear the constant flow of visitors eager for a glimpse of the artwork. (1)

Picasso’s mermaid, much like her mythical counterpart, revealed herself only fleetingly before vanishing once more into the waters of the collective unconscious. Mermaids hold such a prominent place in symbolism due to their shimmering and elusive nature. Like the play of light on water’s surface, they cannot be captured or solidified. Ever in motion, they slip away from any fixed definition, embodying a mercurial quality that makes them as elusive as the unconscious itself. They embody Rudolf Otto’s concept of Mysterium tremendum et fascinans” (fearful and fascinating mystery).

The mermaid is a liminal and hybrid being, able to cross the threshold between the conscious and unconscious realms. There is a yearning for connection on both sides: she bears gifts of the depths to offer, yet she also longs for something which can only be found on the human side – our individual souls. Dane Rudhyar expresses this beautifully:

“The mermaid personifies a stage of awareness still partially enveloped by the ever-moving and ever-elusive ocean of the collective Unconscious, yet already half formulated by the conscious mind.” (2)

Giving birth to ideas from the unconscious is often a painful process. (3) In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the protagonist sacrifices her divine voice for human legs, and every step she takes feels like walking on sharp knives. The mermaid archetype embodies an aspect that resists being shaped into form, refusing to be domesticated. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about the Wild Woman, emphasizing that periodic renewal is essential for the wild soul within every woman. In the tale of the Selkie, who lives as a seal in the water but can shed her skin to become human, Estes highlights this need for renewal. In the myth, Selkies, whose “skin shimmered with little silver dots like those on the salmon in springtime,” gather to dance together. (4) Various myths highlight the mermaid’s “ability to cross the threshold into the world of humans and ‘pass’ there as human while never fully belonging.” (5) In Western myths and stories, there is often an element of control over the creature emerging from the watery depths:

“These tales speak to the discrepancy between men’s longing for a woman unfettered by social mores and their attempt to control her by domesticating her. The mermaid is beautiful, and men yearn to possess her, but it must be on their terms and not the mermaid’s.” (6)

For C. G. Jung, mermaids were one of the many personifications of the anima, who can be a negative or a positive expression of the unconscious:

“The unknown woman, therefore, has an exceedingly contradictory character and cannot be related to any normal woman. She represents some fabulous being, a kind of fairy; and indeed fairies have the most varied characters. There are wicked fairies and good fairies; they too can change themselves into animals, they can become invisible, they are of uncertain age, now young, now old, elfin in nature, with part-souls, alluring, dangerous, and possessed of superior knowledge. We shall hardly be wrong in assuming that this motif is identical with the parallel ideas to be found in mythology, where we come across this elfin creature in a variety of forms —nymph, oread, sylph, undine, nixie, hamadryad, succubus, lamia, vampire, witch, and what not. Indeed the whole world of myth and fable is an outgrowth of unconscious fantasy just like the dream. Frequently this motif replaces the water-motif. Just as water denotes the unconscious in general, so the figure of the unknown woman is a personification of the unconscious, which I have called the anima.” (7)

Collectively, we remain enchanted by the medieval mermaid, which shapes our common perception of her. Depictions of mermaids began to emerge in Romanesque churches around the eighth century, likely influenced by Atargatis, the fish-tailed goddess of the Aramaeans in Syria. Atargatis was a deity associated with fertility, water, and protection, embodying both nurturing and fearsome qualities. According to legend, she transformed into a mermaid as an act of penance after falling in love with a shepherd. Overcome with grief, she cast herself into a lake, taking on the form of a fish to dwell in the water. Since ancient times, mermaid tales have centered around themes of heartbreak and tragedy.

The worship of the Greek goddess Aphrodite has its roots in the veneration of Atargatis. Born of the sea, and venerated as the goddess of the sea, Aphrodite was accompanied by Tritons and is associated with the myth of the two fish (Pisces). This connection stems from a Greek myth involving Aphrodite and her son, Eros, as they fled from the monster Typhon. According to the tale, Typhon—a massive serpent-like creature—threatened the mother and son. To escape him, Aphrodite and Eros transformed into fish and leaped into the Euphrates River, where they swam to safety. Pisces symbolizes the duality of the unconscious and the boundary-crossing nature of Aphrodite, Atargatis, and mermaids in general. Medieval mermaids inherited the symbolism of mirrors and pearls from their ancient counterparts.(8) Cirlot writes this on the nature of the unconscious and the mermaid as its emanation in his Dictionary of Symbols:

“Given that the sea is the lower abyss and an image of the unconscious, then the twin fish-tail, pertaining to the sea, must express a duality (or conflict) within the watery deeps.”

Medieval Mermaid with a mirror (another symbol of duality), via https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sirena-con-specchio-e-pettine-Bestiarium-Biblioteca-Reale-di-Copenhagen-ms-GKS-1633_fig2_328603298

Romanesque mermaid from St Mary’s Church, Adderbury

Before the High Middle Ages (12th to 13th century), mermaids were primarily depicted as seductive figures, representing a heathen counterpart to the chaste Virgin Mary and symbolizing unrestrained sexuality. According to Scribner, early medieval churchmen appropriated an ancient (likely Etruscan) image of a water deity with two tails. Sculptors depicted these mermaids as “spreading” their tails apart, revealing their reproductive area—or vesica piscis (Latin for “vessel of the fish”)—in graphic detail. (9) In doing so, church leaders aimed to evoke shock and disgust, alerting the faithful to the ensnaring and treacherous nature of the feminine form. Ironically, however, they created an iconic mermaid whose allure endures to this day. The mermaid in the Starbucks logo, for example, was based on an image of a medieval mermaid that the logo’s creator found in Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols. The current design focuses on her face, concealing her sexual features. (10)

The original Starbucks Mermaid, via https://www.gotmedieval.com/2010/08/the-other-starbucks-mermaid-cover-up.html

After consulting both Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols and The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, I was surprised to find that both sources remain rooted in the medieval, reductive notion that mermaids symbolize the danger of death through their unchecked sexuality. Cirlot wrote:

“It seems that they are largely symbols of the ‘temptations’ scattered along the path of life (or of symbolic navigation) impeding the evolution of the spirit by bewitchment, beguiling it into remaining on the magic island; or, in other words, causing its premature death.”

Similarly, Chevalier, the author of The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, issues an even sterner warning:

“They symbolize the self-destructive power of desire, to which the depraved imagination offers only a senseless dream instead of objective reality and a viable action. Like Odysseus, one must lash oneself to the mainmast, the spirit’s vital axis, if one is to escape the delusions of passion.”

John William Waterhouse, Odysseus and the Sirens

Crucially, the sirens in The Odyssey were not depicted with fish tails but as airy, winged creatures. Moreover, their song was not one of seduction but of timeless wisdom. Homer’s Sirens sing, “Approach! thy soul shall into raptures rise! Approach! and learn new wisdom from the wise!” Clearly, there is more to sirens and mermaids than mere physical allure:

“Homer’s Sirens sing a song that promises knowledge—a wisdom that bridges worlds—instead of pleasure. While their appearance differs from that of the mermaids with whom they are later conflated, the Sirens’ music is still a portal that draws humans into a different dimension.” (11)

Every epoch has its mermaids, even the Enlightenment – the least magical and metaphysical of eras. The mermaids of the Age of Reason were described as “ugly creatures for ugly times.” (12) To my mind, this reflects the prevailing cultural attitude toward the unconscious during each era. While antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and Romanticism were all ages of wonder, the Enlightenment sought to sever the vital connection between consciousness and the collective unconscious.

A mermaid, with a measuring scale. Colour mezzotint by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier D’Agoty, 1757. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

On the other hand, Gautier’s mermaid/merperson looks surprisingly modern and refreshing. Words like monster and ugly carry negative and highly subjective connotations. With their hybrid, fluid nature, mermaids have become an icon of the queer culture. Mermaids and other “monsters” are never “ugly,” but they inspire both fear and awe, embodying the etymology of the Latin monstrum—”that which reveals,” “that which warns.” (13) Mermaids, as messengers from the depths, convey symbols from the unconscious to the individual soul through their haunting, alluring siren song. Abyssus Abyssum Invocat (14)—”deep calls to deep,” as Psalm 42 reads in the King James Bible—evokes the mermaid’s yearning for a soul and the human desire for the unconscious depths, sometimes at the cost of an individual life. Here, as Rudhyar observed, lies a mutual pull—a shared, magnetic attraction that draws the human and the mythical into a profound and timeless connection.

Notes:

(1) A. Müller, C. Halls, and B. Williamson, Mermaids: Art, Symbolism and Mythology (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2022)

(2) D. Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala: The Cycle of Transformations and Its 360 Symbolic Phases (Vintage Books, 1974)

(3) Ronnberg, Ami, ed., The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. (New York: Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, 2010)

(4) Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992)

(5) C. Bacchilega and M. A. Brown, eds, The Penguin Book of Mermaids (New York: Penguin Books, 2019)

(6) Ibid.

(7) C.G. Jung, CW 16, para 17

(8) A. Müller, C. Halls, and B. Williamson, Mermaids: Art, Symbolism and Mythology (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2022)

(9) V. Scribner, Merpeople: A Human History (London: Reaktion Books, 2020)

(10) Ibid.

(11) C. Bacchilega and M. A. Brown, editors, The Penguin Book of Mermaids (New York: Penguin Books, 2019)

(12) V. Scribner, Merpeople: A Human History (London: Reaktion Books, 2020)

(13) C. Bacchilega and M. A. Brown, editors, The Penguin Book of Mermaids (New York: Penguin Books, 2019)

(14) Ibid.

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Posted in Mermaids | Tagged alchemy, anima, archetypes, art, Atargatis, C.G. Jung, church, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, consciousness, depth psychology, enlightenment, Eros, fantasy, gender fluidity, goddess, hybrid, incarnation, liminal, Little Mermaid, Melusine, mermaid, Mermaids, merpeople, merperson, monster, morality, mythology, Odysseus, Odyssey, passion, Picasso, Pisces, psyche, queer, seduction, selkie, sexuality, sirens, Soul, Starbucks, symbolism, symbols, the unconscious, Typhon, Warsaw, Wild Woman | 9 Comments

Kafka’s Book of Images – Part 1

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Symbol Reader

Each volume of Reiner Stach’s Kafka biography is a gem in its own right. The Early Years, which, due to legal issues, was published last in the trilogy, offers a treasure trove of insights into Kafka’s childhood and formative years. This past June, I had the privilege of hearing Stach speak briefly about Kafka at a concert held at the Tonhalle in Zurich. The event featured passages from Kafka’s America, set against a backdrop of Czech classical music, in honor of the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death.

What left a lasting impression on me during Stach’s speech was his infectious energy, a kind of jovial exuberance that seemed to radiate from him. It was the kind of joy that comes from walking one’s true path in life, from having found a personal guru or guiding spirit. Stach’s enthusiasm for Kafka and his work was palpable and infectious.

One sentence from the first volume of the biography struck me as utterly true and perfectly encapsulating the essence of Kafka’s genius:

“His writing was magical in a sense that was utterly unlike the alleged magic of Prague, because every one of his lines passed through the filter of a daunting, often ice-cold intellectual alertness and an unyielding reflexivity saturated with imagery.”

This first post is a brief journey through Kafka’s imaginarium, focusing on his early years and drawing from Stach’s biography. Images, I believe, are central to understanding Kafka’s writing, and his own face has become an iconic image in itself. There’s a hypnotic quality to it – a cross between the human and the non-human, familiar yet strangely alien, much like his work.

I. JACKDAW

Pastel drawing by Mikhail Vedernikov https://www.artfinder.com/product/original-pastel-drawing-jackdaw/

The family name Kafka (kavka) means “a jackdaw” in Czech. Jackdaws are small birds related to crows. They are known to be intelligent, elusive, and somewhat mysterious birds. Similarly, Kafka’s life was marked by a sense of alienation and an inward retreat. Much of his existence was spent in quiet observation, working as a clerk by day, writing in solitude by night. Like a jackdaw, he seemed to hover on the edges of society, never fully integrating, yet watching everything keenly. As Stach puts it:

“The feeling that he was standing outside of life and had to find his way in was one of the fundamental, formative experiences that shaped his identity, a focal point of his self-image.”

II. PRAGUE

When Kafka was nineteen, he conceded in a letter to a friend that “Prague does not let go. … This little mother has claws.” The whole of Kafka’s writing is saturated with the spirit of Prague. Though he rarely named the city directly, the essence of Prague – its labyrinthine streets, Gothic architecture, and its historical tensions – permeates his work. In Kafka’s stories, there is often a fluid, dreamlike quality to space and time, where places shift, change, and become unfamiliar, bringing to mind the experience of navigating the winding, ancient streets of Prague. In essence, Kafka’s writing captures the unique, surreal, and oppressive energy of Prague with its sense of alienation and belonging, Kafka knew so well as a German speaking Jew living in a Czech city.

Throughout his life, Kafka longed for foreign travel, dreaming of distant lands and exotic cultures. Yet, each trip had to be carefully planned and kept brief, always cut short by the obligation to return to his office duties.

III. WRITING

A passage from Kafka’s letter to Oskar Pollak has long been my favourite:

“If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, why are we reading it? So it makes us happy, as you write? My God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if need be. What we do need are the books that affect us like a calamity that causes us great pain, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide, a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

These are the reflections of young Kafka: not yet a writer, but already an avid reader. He has not yet accessed his “dark depths grabbing hold of the treasures, and bringing them up to the light while keeping them intact”, says Stach. But these very words spelled his writer’s credo.

Limited by his family and professional obligations, Kafka struggled to pursue his writing as freely as he desired. He voiced his doubts during a meeting with Rudolf Steiner, from whom he sought advice:

“Apart from my family situation, I could not live by literature, if only, to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character; moreover, I am prevented also by my health and my character from devoting myself to what is, in the most favorable case, an uncertain life. This is why I became an official in a social insurance institute. Now these two professions can never get along and allow a common fortune. The smallest good fortune in one becomes a great misfortune in the other. If I’ve written something good one evening, I’m afire the next day in the office and can’t finish anything. This back and forth is getting worse and worse. In the office, I fulfill my duties satisfactorily, at least outwardly, but not my inner duties, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a misfortune that never budges.”

Kafka’s dilemma, ultimately, remained unresolved, and his disappointment with Steiner was evident. He never attended another theosophy lecture. His longing for inner depths and its irreconcilability with the external demands of social obligations is something his readers frequently identified with. C. G. Jung’s distinction into the spirit of our time and the spirit of the depths springs to mind.

IV. SUN AND WATER

Although on land Kafka was full of fear and “social prickliness,” water was a natural element for him. He spent hours swimming and sunbathing; hence his permanently tanned striking face. Shortly before his death he remembered fondly the Lugano sun and wished he could feel it on his face again. It was a memory of a trip to Switzerland he had taken with his friend, Max Brod.

Just as he moved through water with fluid ease, his imagination flowed freely in his stories, drawing from the vast, mysterious depths of his inner world.

He looks frail in photos, yet he loved the physical activity and the outdoors. He could hike for hours, played tennis, rode a bike and even took horseback lessons.

The longing for freedom without external limitations sees to have haunted him all his life. Here’s a memorable passage from his short story “The Wish to be a Red Indian”:

“If only one were an Indian, ready at once and on the running horse, askew in the air, quivering briefly again and again over the quaking ground, until one let go of the spurs, for there were no spurs, until one threw away the reins, for there were no reins, barely aware of the land ahead as a smoothly mowed turf, the horse’s neck and the horse’s head already gone.”

What is crucial to understand about Kafka is that, while he has often been embraced as a figurehead by frail intellectuals, he was far from a desiccated scholar lost in abstract thought. Kafka had a deep and genuine love for popular culture, engaging with it in ways that showed his vibrant curiosity about life. He may have been selective, even snobbish, when it came to literature, but beyond that, his interests were broad and unpretentious.

There was a childlike quality to Kafka—a purity and openness to experience that was most apparent in moments like when he watched the simple, unpolished performances of Yitzhak Löwy’s Jewish theatre. It was this blend of intellectual depth and an almost innocent fascination with the world around him that made Kafka a figure of complex humanity.