On the Power of Symbols
By Leonard Wibberley
An Excerpt from Something to Read
3/1/2020
There is on the Rock of Cashel in the Plain of Tipperary a lovely toy cathedral which was built by Cormac MacArt sometime in the twelfth century which would make it about eight hundred years old. It is designed in the style known as Irish Gothic, of which there are not many examples in the world and that in itself makes the cathedral of Cormac MacArt a rarity. Indeed, shortly after this cathedral was built the Normans invaded Ireland and although they never really conquered the land as they conquered Saxon England, they had enough authority for their ways to be copied. Subsequent cathedrals built in Ireland were in Norman Gothic style so that the cathedral on that strange rock called Cashel in the middle of the Plain of Tipperary is perhaps the last major building in Irish Gothic ever erected.
Some years ago I visited it on one of those bright hot Irish summer days when the skylarks seem to be singing extra loudly and the jade green grasshoppers are buzzing away with special industry in the lush grasses. I climbed up the pathway leading to the top of the rock and ignoring the larger Norman structure made my way to MacArt’s jewel of a cathedral and came upon a door in, I think, the southern side. There was something odd about the door which brought me to a halt before it. It was a little while before I had discovered that the door was not symmetrical. The top of the door was a semicircle, so there was a semicircular archway of carved limestone over it. But the center of the semicircle of the door was not the center of the semicircle of the archway so that it seemed that the archway was lopsided leaning to the east or left. Odd, I thought. Surely they were better builders than that? And then a guide, seeing me standing there puzzled, explained.
“It’s a symbol,” he said.
“A symbol of what?” I asked.
“The Crucifixion,” he replied. “The door leans to the left for Christ on the cross leaned to the left to comfort his mother who stood below him.”
I began to wonder about that symbol and speculate how many millions of people seeing that door had understood the significance of its being lopsided. I hadn’t. Had others also missed this tender significance through its eight hundred years of silent statement, so that the subtle design of the architecture was lost?
I decided after some inquiry that they hadn’t. A little reading about architecture and horticulture and ceremony and other diverse subjects showed me that man until very recent times could converse deeply and fluently with symbols which overcame the language barriers between peoples—far more deeply and more fluently than he can now that he has very largely dropped symbols for a pragmatism which is remarkable for its lack of depth. I don’t know quite when symbols went out of common usage—perhaps when free and compulsory education made writing a universal skill. But before that time, communication by symbols was widespread and eminently satisfactory. Symbols constitute a neglected language and what is worse, a language which we, stumbling upon it by accident, are liable to misinterpret grossly.
Let us take a look at some of the early symbols, undeterred by the fact that the greater number of them (though not all) were of religious significance; something about which I will say a few words later.
A fish, carved in stone, drawn in the dust, scraped in the bark of a tree, symbolized Christ. The derivation is this. The Greek word for a fish (Ancient Greek) is Ichtus. These same letters, in their Greek combination, are the first letters of what was, in essence, the Christian creed of the years immediately following the death of Christ—Iesous Christos, Theou U ios, Soter, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. The important thing here is to distinguish between the use of the drawing of a fish as a sign, and use of the same drawing as a symbol. The sign would merely convey the information that the person who drew the fish was a Christian.
The symbol however stood for God and all the magnificence of God, for all the miracles and the wonders and the testaments and everything that is in any degree associated with God—which for a believer means every single thing in the world and beyond into the universe. See how powerful, then, the symbol is, how awe inspiring. If we came upon it, recognized its symbolism and believed in these things, we would surely start back, or perhaps drop to the ground and cover our heads. We don’t but only because we have lost or allowed to become paralyzed that part of us to which the symbol speaks. In return, I suppose, we got science, a mere part of the whole which we rejected. But we didn’t quite lose symbolism. Instead of the fish think now of a drawing, however crude, of a mushroom-headed cloud. Yes, indeed, it is a symbol. And it is also a sign. It is a sign that there is such a thing as a nuclear bomb. It is a symbol that all mankind may one day be destroyed.
The difference between a sign and a symbol, I suppose, is that a sign speaks to the senses and in finite terms. But a symbol speaks to the spirit and its terms are infinite. There is no containing all the things a symbol says and hints at. Depth is piled on depth, aspect crowds in upon aspect and the more we ponder the message of a symbol, the more we realize that it cannot be contained in words. The concept we have in mind can be expressed only by symbolism.
No writer, though he wrote all the years of his life and had a talent to rival that of Shakespeare’s, could put into words what is conveyed directly, deeply and immediately by a glimpse of the Stars and Stripes. The flag is the United States of America and the history of the United States of America. It is the future of the country, its present, its past, its ordeals, its triumphs, its aspiration, its peoples, its crops, its industries, its highways, and besides these it is the innermost hopes and loyalties of every person who is a citizen of the United States of America and every person who hopes to be a citizen. And it is also surely the emotional reactions of all the people who are not citizens and who wish the worst to the United States of America. This, of course, merely scratches the surface. It is also the history of all the great men of America and of all the little men of America and of every American invention and every attempt at an invention that failed. And then we can go into American painting and writing and so on. But we will never come to an end in words of what the flag, flying on some city flagstaff says silently to us as we pass by.
Shakespeare, in fact, did try to put into words something of the sort though he dealt with England. He tried to express England in words rather than in the symbol of her flag or her sovereign, and wrote, as you will recall, in Richard the Second:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred Islae
This earth of Majesty, this seat of Marsk
This other Eden, demi-paradise
This Fortresse built by Nature for herselfe,
Against infection, and the hand of warre:…
But his words are themselves but symbols, using thrones and sceptres and seats and fortresses and Eden to describe the land and its essence. The Union Jack, like the Stars and Stripes, does all of this and more. So much in so little is surely one of our greatest marvels but only on special occasions do we see the flag as a symbol. More often we see it merely as a sign—an American office, an American ship, and so on.
It is a characteristic of symbols that they are simple, as all great things are simple. Complicate them in the slightest and they lose their effect. Complicate them further and they die which is to say, they become meaningless except to a few who are in the know.
Benjamin Franklin was one of the greatest of the nation’s thinkers, but he had one serious failing. He was incapable of thinking in terms of symbols, as, indeed, were the greater number of his contemporaries. Franklin lived at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and perhaps there is a clue here to the decline of use of the language of symbols. People became what is called practical. They wanted to reason things out and make them conform to reason. Symbols won’t. They transcend the mental processes and have a meaning which is far deeper than a mere logical conclusion.
Anyway, Franklin was asked to draw up a design for the Great Seal of the United States—a design which would symbolize the spirit of the new nation. The design he produced, after many years, is that which is used on the dollar bill. It means practically nothing to anybody—a pyramid with an eye on the top and some Latin running around it. The Latin is an explanation of what the symbol stands for and it is an immediate confession of failure. For no words are ever needed to explain the significance of a true symbol, and all the words in the world won’t make a false symbol into a real one.
The eighteenth century suffered from an inability to understand symbols. They made them complicated and tried to put too much exact meaning into them. Their political cartoons are so elaborate because the cartoonists couldn’t think in symbols. And when they did, they didn’t believe the symbol was effective and explained everything with balloons of talk coming from the mouths of the characters in the cartoon. Thomas Jefferson got hold of one symbol only all his life and he used it over and over again. The symbol was that of the ship of state, representing the nation and the national destiny, being steered through stormy waters by the President or the Congress or whomever he had in mind. It is a symbol still regularly used today and it is one of the oldest in the western world. It was used within a few years of the death of Christ, when the ship represented the Christian Church which would safely carry those in it through the sea of life.
Almost all symbols are visual which explains why cartoonists are perhaps the most active symbolists still left among us. They find that the symbol says a score of things that cannot otherwise be conveyed in a simple drawing. The dove is Peace and the elephant, Republican, and the eagle, American.
But not all symbols are man-made forms. The evergreens that abound in our cemeteries are symbols which date from pre-Christian times when the evergreen, flourishing even in winter, promised a life after death. The Christmas fun which mistletoe provides stems from the lost or perhaps I mean twisted symbolism of mistletoe. The European variety grows in a kind of bush on trees—mostly apple trees and very rarely oak. To the ancients, among them the Druids, a tree whose roots were not even in a ground; a tree which grew in midair free of earth was sacred. It asserted an independence of the soil and all the nourishment of the soil and hinted at a similar state for man when he, too, different but the same, would be free of the earth and all his physical needs. It promised them continuance of life beyond death, both by the fact that it was not rooted in the ground and the fact that it put out its leaves in midwinter. And it promised fertility—an abundance of children even for the childless. Our modern kiss under the mistletoe derives from the fertility belief. But perhaps there is no need for concern for very little of our mistletoe these days grows on the oak, and apple-grown mistletoe is without potency.
When the language of symbols was common, then some words took on a symbolism which far outstripped their literal meaning. These days being of a pragmatic disposition (we even try to induce visions chemically with drugs) we have lost the symbolic meaning of words, retained only their literal meaning, and so much of our religion and of our prayer, handed down through the centuries is downright nonsense to us. Take for example the expression “the throne of God.” “What?” we ask ourselves. “Do you really expect me to believe that God sits on an elaborately carved chair in outer space and that he sits there all day and all night and through all eternity? Throne of God indeed! Rubbish!” And taken with the shallow perception and understanding of our fact-oriented minds, it is of course, rubbish.
But that is not what is meant by the Throne of God at all. Let us consider for a moment what a throne is. It’s a chair or a seat certainly—but it is a special kind of chair. It is the chair or seat of authority, of law and of rule and perhaps of life and of death. Certainly to our forefathers the throne of their sovereigns was the place from which they could expect mercy, punishment, benevolence, imprisonment, favor or banishment. Much more then than a chair on which the king sat. The throne was actually the symbol of all the immense power of the sovereign and when, in the course of prayer, we come on the phrase “the throne of God” that is what is meant—the power and the presence and the authority of God. Not just a decorated chair in outer space.
It is not right to scoff at our ancestors and say that their reverence for thrones then came from the fact that they were ruled by despots, and free men would have no such reverence. That kind of viewpoint is the result of impression rather than of thinking—of a conclusion accepted before any mental work has been done. Do not we ourselves, free men that we are, on visiting the Congress hesitate for a moment before the Speaker’s chair, conscious of the authority it represents? We wouldn’t call it a throne, but the name does not matter. It is the seat of authority; a symbol of our free submission to democratic rule and one which rightly fills us with respect. We don’t bow before it. But we don’t sit in it either or permit others to sit in it. It is a symbol as well as a piece of furniture and so we revere it.
The same is true when we consider such phrases as “the right hand of God.” Again the shallow mind will exclaim: “Oh, so God has two hands—a right and a left, just like us. And the right hand is the best one to sit by, it would seem.” No. God does not have two hands. But men do. And the right hand of a man is the hand of his power. It is his weapon hand, his strongest hand, the hand with which he reaches to strike or to caress and again we are talking symbolically and the right hand of God means the strength of God and the place of honor in the presence of God.
I mentioned earlier the importance of symbols in religion and it is when the meaning of the symbols of religion start to fade that religion itself starts to fade. I suppose that what happens is that man becomes more “practical” and less “mystical” and even his teachers follow the trend until after a few generations the meanings of the symbols is either lost or distorted. Then we come to the position where we say, “God (who had two hands and sat on a throne in outer space) is dead” but we never knew God in the first place because we were brought up to test his reality on “practical” rather than on “spiritual” terms. Why didn’t He stop the slaughter in Dachau and the other horror camps of Germany? Because he just didn’t exist in the first place? No. Well, because he wasn’t interested? No. Because he gave us free will. And we can’t have free will on the one hand and have our affairs constantly taken over when they turn for the worse on the other. Though I stray a little from the subject in hand, man himself had the power to end the slaughter of the concentration camps. But men did nothing about it because they were too worried about their own skins. God is not to be blamed because man refuses, out of fear, to use the power he has.
Superstition is really symbolism gone sour, and symbolism being the inner language of religion, superstition is also religion gone sour; Friday is an unlucky day not for religious but for superstitious or decayed religious reasons. Friday is the day of the Crucifixion which makes it a day of special solemnity for Christians. But it doesn’t make it unlucky. Only superstition, the decay of religion, makes it unlucky. Thirteen is an unlucky number because Judas Iscariot was reckoned the thirteenth at the Last Supper and thirteen guests at a table is still held an unlucky arrangement. But there is no religious feeling behind this—only a distortion of religion. When our higher buildings leave out the thirteenth floor, as is the case with many office and hotel buildings, the architects are promulgating a superstition and a very horrid one, suggesting that the passion of Christ was controlled by a number and perhaps had there been but twelve at the table then He would not have been betrayed.
Thirteen is certainly held among numbers to be the symbol of bad luck, but I do not know of any number that is held to be the symbol of good luck. Among letters, however, there is one which is the symbol of hope—the letter V which the British propaganda experts in World War II turned into the symbol for Victory. Let those who doubt the power of symbols reflect on how much longer World War II might have lasted if we had not had the V for Victory symbol whether displayed in the upturned fingers of Churchill or beaten out in the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
One symbol rallied the underground of Europe, made occupation duty a nightmare of terror for the Germans and stirred men to put their lives on the line in the cause of liberty.
New Release Alert:
After years of being out of print, Leonard’s collection of short stories and columns—Something to Read—is finally available on Kindle! Click here to find on Amazon.
DESCRIPTION:
Having had occasion to look around for “something to read,” with long and short pieces that would not prove too deeply engaging, Leonard Wibberley—author of The Mouse that Roared as well as over 100 other novels—curated a personal selection of such choices from his writings. They are both published and unpublished works by this thoughtful and humorous man. ★★★★★ “The stories here remind me of Mark Twain. They are that wonderful.”—Amazon Review
★★★★★ “A good read, 40 years ago. A great read now.”—Amazon Review
-----
Sign up for Leonard's newsletter at:
http://bit.ly/LeonardNews and never miss one of his columns.
To read older columns, click here.
