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Most of the great spiritual truths are exposed to view at all times, but are not recognized because of their concealment in symbol and allegory. When the human race learns to read the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from the eyes of men.
Manly P. Hall, Melchizedek and the Mystery of Fire
Symbols provide the raw material for reflective thought – they give rise to thought. They are donations of meaning, embodying the fullness of language, things that are signs which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind. They are tools for cognition. All traditional symbols participate in universal principles and participate in the reality they represent. They always have a multiplicity of meanings that express a whole set of correspondences linking different orders of reality. Reducing profound metaphors to simple "fictions" flattens the multidimensionality of their intended potential in the psyche. A symbol is a truth in itself, a necessary mode of expression for realities that transcend language. We must move past a literalism-versus-metaphor dichotomy and see symbols as the very language of consciousness. But they often come from toolkits we’re unfamiliar with. ▼
▲ Augustine. (1996). De Doctrina Christiana (R. P. H. Green, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
A central fear about symbolism is that it opens the door to endless subjective interpretation, allowing a text to mean whatever a reader wants it to mean. But the Bible defines its own symbols – as in Revelation 17 when an angel explicitly tells John, "The waters that you saw... are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages." Other symbols are defined through patterns established throughout the scripture, with later authors deepening the dimensions of the images they've inherited. The symbol of the "Lamb" is not arbitrarily assigned to Christ, its meaning is rooted in the entire Old Testament sacrificial system, from the Passover lamb in Exodus to the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. When John the Baptist declares Jesus to be the "Lamb of God" he isn't inventing a new symbol, he's revealing the fulfillment of its meaning that had already been defined for millenia.
TIP: Examples of the most recognizable biblical images are quickly gathered from Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs & Ecclesiastes: they are known as the "Poetic Books."
Interpreting biblical symbols is not an easy task, and it's complicated further because the symbol's function changes depending on biblical genre. Do we find it in a legal code, a narrative, a wisdom saying, or a prophetic oracle? The Bible has all of these, and they matter in interpreting what we’re reading. When we venture into the symbolic world, we’re entering foreign territory.
Ancient peoples perceived the world with fundamentally different categories than ours. They had an enchanted worldview, one that predominated all the way down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution. They knew rocks, trees, rivers and clouds to be imbued with divine activity, and themselves intimately connected to the meanings of the patterns that emerged around them. Their lives were direct participations in a sacred drama, guided by gods and spirits and forces beyond their control, and fewer within their control. They had a consciousness of "original participation" within an environment they were relationally identified with. It was a kind of existential wholeness that has long since passed from the scene. We as subjects feel distanced from the objects we observe in a way that they didn’t.▼
▲ The person credited with developing the concept of "original participation" is the British philosopher and scholar Owen Barfield. He elaborated this idea in his works, particularly in his book Saving the Appearances, where he describes original participation as a primal consciousness that has been eclipsed by modern scientific objectivity but was fundamental to the worldview of early humans and traditional cultures. Barfield emphasized that original participation was a more open, participatory mode of consciousness deeply interconnected with nature and spiritual experience.
This kind of superstitious wonder could be scoffed at, but then again, its existential stance may have afforded a greater receptivity to spiritual insight than many of us have access to. It derived from a world perceived as made up of a vast assemblage of correspondences. Lodestones attracted iron, oil repelled water, dogs repelled cats. Things mingled in an endless chain of natural and intuitive relationships that were analogized with human life: the rocks of the earth were understood as the earth's bones, the rivers its veins, the forests its hair and the cicadas its dandruff. The world was constantly reflecting itself in endless networks of similarity and dissimilarity. This ancient worldview has become recognized in a term called the "doctrine of signatures" – markings of God's signature everywhere in the world.
the "doctrine of signatures" in modern meme
Such correspondences led to beliefs that walnuts prevented head ailments because the meat of the nut resembled the brain. The Greeks thought orchids treated impotence because they looked like testicles. The Chinese believed ginseng was a panacea because its forked root looked vaguely like a human body. Medieval monks saw lungwort's similarity to ulcerated lung tissue as reason to treat respiratory ailments with it. For the same reasons, faces and hands were seen to be reflections of the soul – still a staple of palmistry to this day – as were eyes the windows of the soul. The eyebright plant, whose flower looks like bright blue eyes, was still being used to treat eye diseases in the 18th century. In fact, the idea that "like cures like" still lies at the heart of modern homeopathy. In all of these correspondences you begin to see the origin of thinking photographs can steal your soul and throwing darts at your boss's portrait steers life toward a bright future.
Our modern distinctions between inner and outer – psychic and physical – didn't exist. If you wanted love: eat pigeons! If you wanted courage, eat a lions' heart. This participatory worldview recognized no sharp distinctions between mental and material events. In such a context, there was no such thing as "symbolism" because everything was a symbol. That is, all material events and processes had psychic equivalents and representations. Their rules were those of resemblances and mystical affinities.
This is how the people of the ancient Near-East imagined their universe. They believed that by participating in the divine relationships all around them, they could they become more fully human. Earthly life was fragile and mortal, but if you imitated the actions of the gods they would share their power and effectiveness with you. It was understood that the gods had shown humans how to build their cities and temples – copies of their own celestial homes.
This sacred world was not just an ideal to imitate but the prototype of all human existence, whether you wanted to imitate it or not: it was the original pattern on which earthly life was modelled. This is why cities across the world aligned their important monuments with the stars and situated their churches and temples in the middle of their villages. On earth we enacted the plan given from above. This worldview is reflected in our scriptures when, in Exodus 25:9 and 25:40, God shows Moses the divine blueprint of the tabernacle in heaven while on Mount Sinai. Moses is commanded to construct the earthly tabernacle exactly following this heavenly pattern. This is also why, in Jesus's instruction for prayer, we ask that God's kingdom be manifested "on earth as it is in heaven." ▼
▲ on earth as it is in heaven: This is presupposed in Genesis, and part of recognizing what God is like. The fact that God desires is a repeated theme throughout the scriptures: God desires to live with people. Even after the Fall that doesn't change. God clothes Adam and Eve to relieve shame, protects the first murderer from the first retributive cycle of violence, "tabernacles" with us in the Chaos desert, embodies in Jesus and sustains us with Spirit. Language describing humans as "children of God" or “adopted” into God’s family isn't accidental or artistic. It reflects the original vision of Genesis. Eden was created "as in heaven, so on earth." There's even a place for humans in that strange "divine council" referenced in Gen 1:26 and 3:22. An important theme to recognize throughout the scriptures is that although we separate from God in Eden God is in continual pursuit of us, with a Way to shape us into family.
When I use the word [myth] I mean this: the addition of theological significance to a fact which in itself, as an historical, psychological or human fact, has no such obvious significance. Its role is therefore to make a fact "meaningful," to show it up as bearing the revelation of God, whereas in its materiality it is neither meaningful nor of the nature of revelation. This is how myth operates. It does not destroy the historical reality of the event, but on the contrary gives it its full dimensions.
Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City ▼
▲ Ellul, J. (1970). The Meaning Of The City. Eerdmans.
Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, sociologist, and Protestant theologian who rejected both liberal theology and orthodox fundamentalism, emphasizing the radical freedom of God and humanity and urging Christians to resist societal conformity and technological domination. Ellul is famous for his critique of modern technology and its impact on society, especially in his book The Technological Society (1954). He describes "technique" as the totality of methods aimed at absolute efficiency in every human activity, warning that such a focus could marginalize spiritual and ethical values. Beyond theology, he was actively involved in political resistance during World War II and ecological movements afterward.
Ancient people relied on this highly visual language and logic of analogy and correspondence to order their lives in conformity with divine patterns. It was a world swimming in meaningful connections to be recognized and participated with. What was above was below: the way of the stars and human fate; humanity's life and an individual's life, colors and sounds and numbers and bodies. Each is different, but each was understood in the same way. This perception informed the myths, rituals and social organisation of most of the cultures of antiquity. This is mostly foreign to modern minds seeking to verify truth with mechanical causes-and-effects. But explaining such analogies and correspondences with mechanical causality would strike our ancestors as hardly relevant at all. It would matter less how something works on a granular level than how best to correspond and conform to the functioning of its participation in higher meaning.
When our ancestors perceived the butterfly to be an expression of the nature of the soul it was not a matter of a comparison. The butterfly wasn't an insect: it was a divine manifestation – the soul appeared in the being of the butterfly. The radiance of the stars is the signpost that leads in the dark; the ladder is the striving upwards; the lily is the earthly appearance of light; the two-headed eagle is superhuman power. Symbols were living; they had bodies; they had visceral, immediate vitality in what they expressed. This is one way to understand being an "image of God." The words that indicate symbols are codes to track their divine associations. The Jews understood their written Torah ("Law"/"Instruction") to be the translation of cosmic law into written expression. The scriptures weren't understood as fables, they were known to be supernal doors to the divine, brought alive by the chanting rabbi's breath of life, enunciating clues to the kingdom and categories for comprehending what life is all about. The symbols are flashing neon signs saying "Pay attention to this! Perceive this in your life!" As symbols they reflect facts or things or events only to the extent that they influence "Earth" and "Heaven," with you as the mediator of realities – the adamah humanity in the Garden, walking with God.
When Moses stretched out his hand and divided the waters of the Red Sea it was seen as a miniature separation of the primordial waters of Chaos by God in the beginning of Genesis. Just as God had made the sea into dry land, Moses's answer to Empire was the way out ("Exodus" means "the way out") on the dry land of divine Order carved out of a sea of Chaos. Miracles are represented as miniature versions of God’s powers in creation. It's a general principle, when reading scripture, that events like these can often (not always) be interpreted as re-presentations of divine principles on human scales.
Facts and values, epistemologies and ethics are identical in this world. The questions "What do I know?" and "How should I live?" are the same questions. To fully understand this we have to rediscover archaic symbolic vocabulary. This starts with seeing their symbols as empirical facts that embody higher meanings, understood within a universe composed of embedded microcosms.
Describing the universe in terms of microcosms means that each part of the universe can reflect a miniature version of the whole. This analogy wasn't interpreted as a metaphor: it was how the world related to itself. It was why wars in heaven were thought to effect war on earth. A story that describes empirical events on one scale can be interpreted as pointing to events on other scales as well. This ability to simultaneously express universal truths at different levels is the main reason why biblical narratives transcend the distinction between literal and symbolic interpretations. The symbols don't endlessly point somewhere else: they participate in what they signify because their symbols mediate between "Heaven" and "Earth."
Symbolism is humanity’s oldest and most universal language because it's based on generalization – identifying the universal in the particular – and specialization – seeing particulars as instances of the universal. Spiritual and physical realities are united in symbols. The principle pattern involves the union of abstract principles, the concrete examples that compose it, and the synonymous equivalence of those varied examples. These patterns are crucial for interpreting the Bible, even though our modern need for precise and differentiating definitions make it difficult to see these patterns. By adopting ancient cosmological perspectives, the meanings of these symbols become clearer and can help decipher myths and laws from many ancient traditions, not just the Bible.
The best way to understand the roles of "Heaven" and "Earth" in this cosmology is through an analogy with written language. Just like you order groups of letters into meaningful words, this cosmology organizes groups of facts into meaningful symbols, like this:
The abstract principle of a "vehicle" can be represented variously by concrete examples like "boats" and "chariots," with both acting as interchangeable expressions of both the abstract principle and each other. It's understandably illogical for modern readers to interpret a boat as a chariot, but understanding this function-based equivalence is often the key to understanding what the biblical authors are trying to say. Tangible objects express the intangible idea. Concrete examples define abstract notions, and abstract principles give meaning to concrete objects. This structure is essential for understanding ancient symbols and how one seemingly unrelated image can relate to another.
These symbols are facts (eg. items, places, events) expressing spiritual identities, analogous to how letters form words. This functional relation will help explain why Paul identifies Jesus as the "second Adam," how Egypt, Babylon and Rome are all the same evil Empire, why biblical leprosy isn't just a skin condition, how fish can sometimes be snakes and why barren Rachel traded her husband Jacob to her sister Leah for a night in exchange for mandrakes! Survey says… fertility correspondence.
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