SCHOLAR ISLAND

DIA-BOLLEIN=to tear apart

SYM-BOLLEIN=to throw together

"The symbol is living and ever expanding."

J.C. Cooper

"It is a peculiar fact that every major advance in thinking, every epoch-making new insight, springs from a new type of symbolic transformation."

-Suzanne K. Langer

Philosophy in a new Key

"A symbol has a life of its own. An escaped metaphor-escaped from the control of the total poem or philosophy in which it belongs-may be a poisonous thing."

C.S. Lewis

"Symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words."

C.S. Lewis

"The recovery of symbolism is the chance to rescue man from his cultural provincialism and, above all, from his historical and existentialist relativism."

Mircea Eliad

"I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking."

-C.G. Jung

"The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol-a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post card."

G.K. Chesterton

The Defendant, 1901

"A symbol has character which is super-personal, binding and for its own part informative. It is an object of tacit understanding; anyone seeing the image knows what its meaning is. It expresses something real yet precedent to commonplace reality, something from the prehistoric past, a fragment of essential divinity. Inaudibly it says to us something which becomes reality; it is communication antecedent to intellect and logic, it seizes on the peculiar and extraordinary. Where that occurs, the phenomenon has become myth.

Robert Beer Rudiger

Unicorn: Myth and Reality

"A sign is easy to read and forget. Part of the very nature of a true symbol is its subtlety, it cannot be encompassed in a glance. It calls upon more than eyesight for appropriation. It demands a measure of insight. It is too deep to be easy. To be found it must be entered into, and when found it keeps demanding participation from the beholder.....its seeming weakness is precisely its great strength...

Man can never capture the whole meaning of what he symbolizes in outward form. True symbols are therefore never exhaustive but suggestive, leaving room for the deep levels of mystery inherent in all truth."

-Pietro Belluschi

"religious symbols are not tales about exterior happenings but rather imaginative modes of talking about the human condition. A living participation in these symbols tends to unify a fragmented existence and opens into creative relationships with others and the world. The criteria for adequacy or worth of these symbols in their ability to move men toward the transformation of themselves and their society in life-giving directions."

E. Bianchi

The Religious Experience of Revolutionaries (New York, 1972) p.6

"Everything is worthy of notice, for everything can be interpreted."

Hermann Hesse

The Glass Bead Game

"The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform."

-Charles Baudelaire (1821-67)

"It is through symbol that man finds his way out of his particular situation and opens himself to the general and universal."

-Mircea Eliade

"In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, come and double significance....In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched."

-Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Sartor Resartus

"In everything there is an unexplored element because we are prone by habit to use our eyes only in combination with the memory of what others before us have thought about the thing we are looking at. The most insignificant thing contains some little unknown element. We must find it."

Maupassant

"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond what you see beyond when you know."

Ernest Hemingway

"Seest thou how God citeth a symbol: "A good word is as good as a good tree, its root set firm and its branches in heaven, giving its fruit at every season by the leave of its Lord."? God citeth symbols for men that they may remember."

Qur an 14:24-25

I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, of half-consciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist."

Yeats

   "Sometimes the symbols take effect by being dis-proportionately impressive, haunting and fascinating in their own right. Of this kind are the rites and pomp's of religion. These "beauties of holiness" will strength faith where it already exists and where there is no faith, contribute to conversion. Appealing, as they do, not only to the aesthetic sense, they guarantee neither the truth nor the ethical value of the doctrines with which they have been, quite arbitrarily, associated. As a matter of plain historical fact, the beauties of holiness have often been matched and indeed surpassed by the beauties of un-holiness. Under Hitler , for example, the yearly Nuremberg rallies were masterpieces of ritual and theatrical art. 'I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war in the best days of the Old Russian ballet," writes Sir Nevile Hnderson, the British ambassador to Hitler's Germany, "but for grandiose beauty I have never seen any ballet to compare with the Nuremberg rally, " One thinks of Keats-" beauty is truth, truth beauty." alas, the identity exists only on some ultimate, supramundane level. On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with nonsense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a government or a priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult. Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad metaphysics. Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it is actually taking place? That is the question."

-Aldous Huxley

Brave New World Revisited

Book: "Sacred Symbols" by Clare Gibson

Book: "Symbols of the Sacred" by Louis Dupre

Book: "The Migration of Symbols" by Count Goblet d' Alviella

Book: "1,000 Symbols: What Shapes Mean in Art and Myth" by Rowena Shepherd & Rupert Shepherd

Book: "Hidden Symbols In Art" by Sarah Carr-Gomm

Book: "The Symbolism of Color" by Faber Birren

Book: "The Banned Book Of Mary: How Her Story Was Suppressed by the church and Hidden in Art for Centuries" by Ronald F. Hock

Book: "Cracking The Symbol Code: Revealing the Secret Heretical Messages within church and Renaissance Art" by Tim Wallace-Murphy