The Book of Symbol 11...

Olive Tree

Able to root, grow, bear fruit and sustain itself in the dry, rocky soil of the Mediterranean landscape to which it is native, the olive tree evokes the resilience, regeneration and fertility that establish, and succeed, whole civilizations. Van Gogh's painting expresses the spirit of the olive tree, the gnarled trunks that exist for centuries, even a thousand years or more, and their branches that over time are buffered and twisted by the wind until they resemble waves on hillsides above bustling societies and ancient ruins. 

Olive trees perpetually renew themselves from their roots (Psilakis, 209). They resurrect after fire by sprouting new shoots and are able to grow back even if their tops and trunks decay. Cultivated olive strains cannot grow by themselves from seed by must be grafted onto wild olive trees. Saint Paul employed the image in reverse as a metaphor, reminding the Gentile Christians that they were shoots of the wild olive tree, which, contrary to nature, had been grafted on the cultivated olive tree of Jewish Christian believers, whose roots and branches were Israel (Romans 11:13-24). The olive was the Tree of Life for the ancient peoples of Greece and Rome, the Biblical Hebrews and the Muslims. Its fruit, processed with lye or salt, its rich, delectable oil and its wood provided food, light, medicine, fuel and building materials. Evergreen olive branches, their shapely leaves green on one side and silvery gray on the other so that they shimmered in the sun, crowned brides, war heroes and athletic victors who embodied the immortals. Olive oil anointed kings, holy objects for ritual and sacred spaces, and lighted the lamps of home and temple for centuries. Those who approached the Asclepian sanctuary of healing at Epidaurus came "crowned with the wreath of the pure olive," signifying transcendence of destructive forces and rebirth. Before going to Crete to slay the Minotaur, the legendary Theseus dedicated to Apollo an offering with branches form the holy olive tree on the Acropolis (Psilakis, 164ff). Olive garlands and branches were common in the worship of the god Zeus and at the Panathenaea, the games honoring Zeus' daughter Athena, warrior-goddess of the city-state. 

Gnarled, swirling, silvery, Van Gogh's olive trees

seemingly draw together earth and sky in timeless

witness to successions of human endeavor. Landscape

with Olive Trees, oil on canvas, 1889, France.

So essential to the religious, practical and economic life of Greece was the olive that in the sixth century B.C.E., the ruler Solon introduced strict laws for its protection (ibid.)/. Mythically, however, it was Athena who face the olive as a gift to the Greeks, who were cultivating it in Crete as long as 3500 B.C.E. or earlier (Enc.Brit. 8:917). Athena and Poseidon, the divine lord of the seas, held a contest to determine  who would rule Attica. Poseidon struck the rock of the Acropolis with his trident, causing a saltwater spring to burst forth. Athena planted an olive tree beside the rock and her gift was deemed of the greater value; she won Attica and Athens was named in her honor.

Athena's militant aspect primarily served the defense of Athens and its perpetuation as the thriving center of Greek culture. The olive tree's association with life made it the emblem not only of Athena but also of the Roman goddess Pax, or Peace. Messengers seeking truce or asylum would carry an olive branch wrapped in wool (Biedermann, 245). In the biblical story of Genesis, it was an olive branch that the dove brought back to Noah, signifying the recession of the floodwaters and the restoration of harmony between human and divine. That is the olive- symbol of the quintessence that survives the dissolution of the old forms and renews itself from the roots up. 

Biedermann, Hans. Dictionary of Symbolism.

NY, 1994.

Psilakis, Nikos. The Olive Wreath: The Wreaths 

of the Olympic Winners, Symbolic and Moral Background.

 Heraklion [Crete], 2003.

~Bella

The Book Of Symbols 10...

Darkness

Out from the darkness back into the darkness- affairs of the cat. Issa

Throughout our lives- in the daily circadian rhythms of sleep of sleep and waking, the creative process of play and invention, the thought waiting for emergence out of the depths of the unconscious; during periods of introversion when the allure of the outer world is stilled and the transpersonal encountered at the horizon of consciousness- we, like the cat, repeatedly come out of the darkness and go back into darkness. Darkness is our first reality, the looming riddle of our becoming. Like the macrocosmic galaxy hypothetically plunged in a globe of "dark matter" and permeated with mysterious "dark energy," so our own microcosmic being, quickening in the womb, is enveloped by the dark matter and dark energy of our ancestral inheritance.

Darkness is defined most simply as the absence of light, and out experience of the one may initially take shape as the observe of our experience of the other. We think of light, for instance, as clarifying and delineating. The world comes into being at daybreak. Darkness, on the other hand, as Rilke reminds us, absorbs and merges the many into one: 

But the darkness pulls in everything: 

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

 how easily it gathers them!-

While light is quick, propulsive, transparent, darkness is still and waiting and opaque. Light beams, transmits, radiates; darkness extinguishes, eclipses, swallows. Darkness is tunnel, abyss, maw, the city in the blackout, the locked closet, the roach scurrying over the countertop before the kitchen light goes on. It is the veiled face and cloaked body. It is the massive iceberg concealed beneath the pitchy surface of the sea, the miasmic land of the dead, the "nighttime nothingness" of the shadowed edge of the moon. 

Inscrutably, darkness presides over the brooding latency

and ghostly luminescence of sea and sky. North

Pacific Ocean, Stinson Beach, by Hiroshi Sugimoto,

gelatin silver print, 1994.

As absence, darkness attracts human projections of moral or mental deficiency, often translated in terms of sin or evil: the Koran's chapter Light, dor example, describes the deeds of the disbeliever as "darkness on a vast abysmal sea... layer upon layer of darkness." A "heart of darkness" in Joseph Conrad's imagination is one governed by abhorrent passions and base instincts that tempt the "unlawful soul" beyond the defining boundaries of humanity. For Sylvia Plath, darkness is intimate and impending: 

I am terrified by this dark thing

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, 

its malignity.

Darkness often evokes the teeming formlessness of the beginning: "Darkness there was" the Rig Veda declares, "at first concealed in darkness this A; was discriminated chaos." Or it may suggest an impoverishment of spirit or substance. Hinduism's Kali Yuga or "dark age," for instance, lacking the ordering force of dharma, the holy law, is rife with hubris, greed, and war. Alchemy associates the imagery of darkness with nigredo- the stage in which the ego is confronted not only with the weight of its earthliness and unlived possibilities but also with its capacity for evil. 

Yet what appears to be only absence, emptiness and obscurity may actually point to a luminosity, presence, and fullness of being peculiar to darkness' domain. Is it not, after all, alive and stirring? 

I'm getting the spirit in the dark

I'm getting the spirit in the dark

People movin, aw, ain't we groovin?

Just getting the spirit in the dark.

Aretha Franklin, Spirit in the Dark

According to the fourth-century Christian writer Gregory of Nyssa, it is only after one has quenched the brilliant light of the reasoning mind that one may enter most immediately into the presence and knowledge of god: "Moses' vision of God began with light, afterward God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw god in the darkness." 

The "Black Sun" of the alchemical stage of the

nigredo signifies an eclipse of the ego's standpoint due

to an incursion of the unconscious. Though depicted

as an encounter with death, the presence of the angels

testifies to the necessity of this provisional darkening in

order to achieve the opus. Viridarium chymicum, 

1624, Germany. 

Preeminently, darkness is the precinct of initiation. In the enchanted forest, the shamanic cave, the black pool or the well, the darkness theater, the alcheringa time, the Asclepian temple one comes face to face with the agony and the muted rapture fo death and (re) birth. The experience of initiatory darkness, as evoked by T.S. Eliot, is, to be sure, one of paradox and ambiguity:

O dark dark dark...

I said to my soul, be still,

and let the dark come upon you...

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;

wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing;...

Wait without thought,

for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light,

and the stillness the dancing. 

But if one consciously enters into the darkness and endures its enshroudment; if catlike, one learns to see and to hear acutely in its recesses, te darkness will gradually reveal the treasures concealed there. In the process, darkness will become the mysterious and familiar source of transformation and inspiration, growth and healing to which, repeatedly, we gratefully return:

You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world...

Rainer Maria Rilke, You, Darkness 

of Nyssa, St.Gregory, Jean Daniélou and Herbert 

Musurillo. From Glory to Glory: Texts from 

Gregory of Nyssa's Mystical Writings.

Crestwood, NY, 1979. 

~Bella

The Book Of Symbol 12...

IRIS

A low bridge zigzags through a stand of blue irises with fresh green stalks. On a golden Japanese screen, the irises are are perpetually alive, a vivid reminder of both springtime's renewal and absent love. In the painting, the artist alludes to an episode in the tenth-century litterary classics, the Tales of Ise. After a failed love affair, the story's hero, accompanied by a group of friends, leaves the capital for the east in order to start life anew. At a bridge that passes through blooming irises, they compose a poem about nostalgia, love and loss (ARAS, 1:367).

Irises and Zigzag Bridges, by Ogata Korin, painted 

screen, ca. 18th century, Japan.

The iris is a genus of about 300 species of flowering plants that for millennia have been prized for their daxxling colors. The number of the iris' stunning natural varieties has been augmented by the extensive use of selective breeding. The flower ranges in color from near black to blue and violet through vermilion, orange, yellow and white, and is often variegated with strongly contrasting hues (Westrich,17). It is this multicolor display of the iris that is responsible for its appellation. Iris, meaning "reainbow" in classical Greek, was the messenger of the Olympian gods. Her emblem was the rainbow of many colors, the bridge by which she traveled between heaven and earth with her divine messages. Analogously, the "iris" is what gives the eye its color.

Lusty mysterious, this iris reflects the deep 

reproductive patterns underlying romance and life.

Black Iris, by Georgia O'Keeffe, oil on canvas, 1926.

United States.

Striking not only for its colors, however, but also for its sensual nature, the iris has phallic, sword-shaped leaves surrounding distinctive blossoms consisting of three erect petals and three larger outer petallike sepals. The latter suggest, as in Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Iris, the form and enticement of the feminine genitalia, even if the artist denied that she had such imagery in mind (Wright, 65). While the flower of the iris is not noted for its scent, "essence of violet" perfume is made from orrisroot, derived from the varieties of iris that grow, not from a bulb, but a rhizome, a creeping underground stem (Enc.Brit. 6:384).

Medicinal properties accompany the sensual pleasures of iris. On an Egyptian hieroglyph of an iris carved in stone 3,500 years ago was a list of medicinal plants. The ancient Greeks documented the flower's internal and external uses (Westrich, 9, 12). Traditionally, Japancelebrates an Iris Festival in May, when the flower is publicly displayed and men and women wear bulbs and take baths in which irises have been floating, in order to insure good health and virility (ARAS, 1:367). The iris is also believed to protect against disease and evil spirits (Baird, 85).

The goddess Iris was a messenger of the gods, and 

traveled on a rainbow between Olympus and the earth.

Iris was honored by the planting of her flower on the 

gravees of women, since it was she who led their souls to 

the Elysian Fields (Lehner, 64). The Niobides Painter,

5th century B.C.E., Greece.

The diverse, exquisite hues of "iris," reflected in flower, rainbow and eye, correspond, in the alchemical fantasy, to the "peacock's tail," the brilliant omnes colores that represent the integration of all qualities in the Stone. Just as Iris heralded the approach of the gods, so, psychologically, the show of "many colors" heralds the transcendent self in which the many facets of the personality, once opposing each other, are brought into a unity (CW 14:388ff).

Baird, Merrily C. Symbols of Japan. NY, 2001.

Lehner, Ernst and Johanna Lehner. Folklore and 

Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees. NY, 1960.

Westrich, Josh and Ben R. Hager. The Iris:

The Rainbow Flower. NY, 1989.

Wright, Susan. Georgia O'Keeffe: An Eternal Spirit.

NY, 2009.

~Bella

The Book of Symbols 8...

Star

It does not prevent me from having a terrible need of, shall I say the word- of religion- then I go outside in the night to paint the stars... Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo, Arles, September 1888.

Twinkling in the more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe, the sheer numbers of stars are almost unimaginable. The stars of deep space that we see through telescopes on a clear, dark night are so ancient and so far away that their light has taken millions, even billions of years to travel to us. There are no people in the world who have not projected into the starry heavens the preeminent forces and myths of their cosmos. The great goddess- Inanna, Ishtar, Aphrodite- was everywhere the radiant evening- and- morning star, the arc of the mysteries of sleep, dream, death, and regeneration. We watch and wish on stars, pray to stars and see in them the phosphors of our psychic firmament. For thousands of years, stars have oriented the wanderer, sailor, and pilgrim just as consciousness navigating its unknown darkness takes its bearings from the scintillations of psyche's imaginal forms. Stars tell us of the infinite, the visionary, of something in ourselves that is starlike, star stuff. In the loss, we look up and find in the beckoning incandescence of a single star the longed- for soul of the departed.

Starry Night, Arsles, by Vincent van Gogh,

oil on canvas, 1888, France.

Out of galactic clouds of gas and dust, a star forms over millions of years into an immense ball, self-luminous with radiation from trillions of nuclear reactions at its core, and is held intact and bound to other stars and planets within its galaxy by the gravitational pull of dark matter (Greene, 295). Though Plato described it as " the moving likeness of eternity,"  a star eventually implodes under its own weight when its nuclear fuel is exhausted. If it is a massive star, its death can create a supernova, a series of explosions that blow off the star's outer layers in a radioactive cloud that causes a brilliance equal to a billion suns and finally ends as a black hole where the gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape it. 

Long before we knew the phenomenal nature of a star, it suggested a nuclear, enigmatic "point" or " monad" whose source of gravity was mysterious and abysmal. Egyptian Nut, the lovely goddess of the night sky, was depicted as giving birth to the stars and talking them up against her dark belly (Clark, 50), the way unconscious gives birth to consciousness and darkly encompasses the luster of its individual spark. In the Pyramid Texts, the deceased was directed to become an "imperishable star" and so live forever (Quirke,50). Alchemy adopted the theme in its goal of bringing the conflicting "many" of the self into a luminous and unified "one." Evocative of the magnetic "center" and its capacity to order and synthesize, the pole star, in Egypt known as "that place" or "the great city," was perceived as the node of the universe, the center of its regulation and the seat of the high god who presides over the cosmic circuit of stars (Clark, 58). In unmoving solitude in the midst of the heavens as at the center of a mandala, the pole star appeared to the Chinese as the stillness of an emperor surrounded by his glittering court, and alchemy described it as the fiery heart of its spirit Mercurius.

Five-pointed stars as emblem of gods and immortal souls.

Painting from the tomb of Iry-nufer, 1305-1200 B.C.E.

Theban Necropolis, Egypt.

Stars are also felt as ambivalent; we speak of our good stars and evil stars. The ancients discovered in the "wheel of the stars" a divinatory map, or zodiac, based on the orbits of the sun, moon, and planets in relation to the fixed star constellations. Astrology brought the outer heavens into correspondence with the inner by calculating the position of the heavenly bodies at the moment of an individual's birth. The "writing in the heavens" could seem fated, however. Heimarmene, the " compulsion of the stars," referred to unconscious patterns of behavior that felt unalterable and determinative; it was a goal of religious rites and of healing process even in their oldest forms to bring these patterns under a conscious agency, thereby breaking their compulsive power.

Stars continue to stir us at the deepest levels. the black hole has been compared to alchemy's "black blacker than black" of psychic fragmentation and absolute despair. M.L. von Franz thought of it as an image of the soul outside the "event horizon" of space and time- existing beyond death in a state of unextended intensity, or "specifications" (p.139). Alchemists called the imagination a celestial or super-celestial star because of its ability to shed light on, transform and transcend the fetters of existence ( CW 12:394). Paracelsus used the term for the numinous "light of nature," which he believed was innate uniquely in each individual and also in animals an inborn spirit. Only self-knowledge, he believed, can teach us of this "quintessence," and the learning is unconventional, engaging intuition, feeling, fantasy and dreams: "As the light of nature cannot speak, it buildeth shapes in sleep" (CW 8:90-391). These, too, are like stars, reflections of eternity in the dark pool of our being.

~Bella

The Book of Symbols 7...

Scarab

Through "scarab" applies to a whole family of stout-bodied beetles, it is the scarabeus sacer, the bung beetle of the Western Desert that has so captured the mythopoetic imagination. This "sacred scarab" embodied the Egyptian god Khepri who propels the sun out of the darkness of the underworld and across the sky in its diurnal journey (Quirke, 35-6). Here, in an illustration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Khepri encompasses the sun rising out of the night sea. Shu, the god of air, supports the solar barque, while Nut, the goddess of the sky, receives the brilliant orb to which she gives birth each day.

The dung beetle has the remarkable instinct of rolling balls of animal dung along the ground to its underground cache where the dung will be stored for food. Unlike the images of the scarab, however, it is not its front legs but its feathery-looking hind legs with which the beetle rolls the balls of dung. The ball is sometimes so large that the beetle is forced into an almost vertical position; yet, persistent and resolute, the scarab manages to negotiate obstacles in the way. 

Changing "heads" as the day progresses, the solar

deity is Khepri in the morning, while the noonday sun

at the zenith manifests as the falcon-headed Ra and the

sun of the evening as the ram-headed Khnum. Wall

painting form the tomb of Nefertari, 19th dynasty (ca. 

1270 B.C.E.), Valley of the Queens, Egypt. 

African cultures featured the dung beetle in myths of the beginning, as the creature able to bring up a piece of primordial earth from the watery abyss. But the scarab's pushing of its dung ball resonated especially in the imagination of the ancient Egyptians. Khepri, associated in particular with the sun of the morning, was depicted in lifelike forma as the black dung beetle, sometimes with its wings spread, or as the figure of a man with a scarab beetle head. Kheper, from which Khepri gets his name means "to take shape" or "to come into being," evoking the sun and solar consciousness taking visible shape with day. But Khepri's blackness also suggests that it is an invisible force that upholds solar energies, and unconscious that propels consciousness into its awakenings and discriminated forms, creativity and perpetual motion. 

The scarab's relation to the rising of the sun made it an emblem of rebirth. This symbolism was reinforced by the fact that besides the bung ball it rolls for food, the scarab fashions from sheep dung a pear-shaped ball in which to lay its eggs and feed its larvae. Pupae resembling tiny mummies, their wings and legs encased, rise out of the earth in which the dung ball containing the beetle's eggs was embedded, giving all the appearance of spontaneous self-creation. 

Transcending the boundaries of darkness and

underworld, the scarab god Khepri emerges with the 

rising sun. Illustration from The Book of the Dead of 

Anhai, 20th dynasty (ca. 1100 B.C.E.), Egypt.

So much did the scarab evoke the qualities of immortality, sublimation and transcendence that its dwelling, a subterranean, vertical shaft leading to a horizontal passage, may have been imitated in the architecture of Egyptian tombs (Andrews, 51). Hundreds of thousands of scarab amulets were crafted in Egypt out of precious and semiprecious stone, metal and glass. Their flat undersides were inscribed with images of animals, gods, kings and other designs, and they drew power to the living in the form of seals or jewelry (Andrews, 50), or were placed with the dead in the tomb as symbols of new life (Lurker, 105). Funerary texts illuminate the notion that at death the heart, seen as the center of life, feeling, action and memory, would be weighed against a feather of Maat, the goddess of order and proportion. If the heart failed to balance, it would be devoured by a monster, prohibiting entry into the afterworld. Heart scarabs were a magical means of preventing such an outcome, even, presumably, if the life lacked virtue (Andrews, 56). Attached or sewn to the mummy bindings over the chest, their purpose was "to bind the heart to silence during the weighing" (ibid.). Many were inscribed with pleas to the heart not to betray its owner: "Do not contradict me with the judges... do not make my name stink to the gods" (Wilkinson, 77). Here, the image of the scarab may be said to signify, on the one hand, a well-concealed defense against authenticity; and on the other, the balance and essence required for a "coming into being" as a linking of finite and infinite dimensions of self.

The Book of Symbols 6...

Flower

The ancient Greek counterpart to Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, was named Chloris, meaning "green." Zephyr, the gentle west wind, enamored of Chloris, pursued her, and as he overtook the maiden, flowers spilled from the lips, and they were subsequently married.

Mayan whistle depicting most probably Xochiquetzal

or "Flower Feather," goddess of love, erotic pleasure

and spiritual transformation. Ceramic, ca. 550-850,

Jaina Island, Campeche, Mexico.

Flowers are the hallmark of springs. There is no surer sign of renewal in the world, of awakening and rebirth. The young, budding shoots of violets, snowdrops and crocuses push up even through the impacted earth and late snows of winter's end. Delicate, fragrant cherry and apple blossoms signal anticipated fruits; other flowers are themselves vegetation's radiant, culminating bloom. Their ephemeral blossoms have associated flowers with all the brilliant forms that quickly fade. The transitory soul, for example. Or Kore, the divine maiden who, picking flowers, was herself plucked by Hades and carried to the underworld to become its queen. Or the lovely, short-lived mythic youths of antiquity: Narcissus, who wasted away, spellbound by his own reflection; Hyacinthus, felled by Apollo's misguided arrow; Adonis, for whom the briefly petalled anemone memorializes the blood of his mortal wound from a boar. Yet flowers are, in truth, remarkably resilient. Their aggressive roots invade rough, inauspicious soil. They assert their bright growth on the rocky banks of highways and out of asphalt cracks. Wildflowers gloriously latch onto walls and railings and fill jungles, deserts, and woods. Rare species of orchid thrive in swamps.

Possibly a figure of one of the Graces, Thalia (bloom)

evokes springs; virginal, feminine beauty and all that is

 lovely and fleeting. Primavera, painting from a 

bedroom of Villa Arianna, 89 B.C.E.-79 C.E., Stabiae (near

Pompeii),Italy.

All of nature is enticed into the flower's proliferation. The stamen forms golden pollen grains that produce male gametes. These sperms are transferred to the stigma or tip of the pistil and burrow down through the pistil to ovules at its swollen base. In the fusion of sperm cell and ovule a seed is formed. Most flowering plants are hermaphroditic, but some have either a stamen or a pistil. Cross-pollination of flowers is provided by bees, wasps, butterflies and moths, birds, bats and other mammals, water, and the fructifying wind: "There's April in the west wind and daffodils," said the poet John Masefield. Color, fragrance and sweet, golden nectar in the cup of the flower invite and guide the many pollen carriers.

Is anything more sensual than the flowers? Its green sepals forming the calyx, its shy buds unfurling to reveal a corolla of velvety petals, its heady perfumes, the edible and cosmetic essences of rose, jasmine, lily, freesia? In Pampore, India, the lavender-blue crocus sativus that flowers for just two weeks in October is plucked at dawn and the stigmas carefully removed to make saffron, that costliest spice with which the Hindu deities Krishna and Radha were traditionally anointed (Bharadwaj, 36-7). Flowers are incorporated into ritual and sacrament the world over, as emblems of eros, beauty, perfection, purity, fertility, joy, and resurrection. The simplest form of the flower with a radial shape is a natural mandala linking the flower symbolically with the wheel and eternal, cosmic movement around a mystic and orienting center. The flower's hermaphroditic qualities suggest the joining of opposites in self-becoming. Visible above yet rooted in the invisible below, the flower symbolically bridges the manifest and unseen worlds, realms of latency and potentiality and those of active generation. The poppy, for example, associated with the grain goddess Demeter, combines bright, many-hued blooms with narcotic properties inducing painlessness, slumber or death. The four-petalled "blue flower" of alchemy signifies both the darkness of the prima materia, as the shadowy, unknown self and the quadratic, unifying totality of the lapis.

Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers. Primavera,

detail, by Sandro Botticelli, tempera on panel, ca. 1482,

Italy.

We flourish in concert with the flower. It is an emblem of the hidden "seeding-place" within ourselves, supported by multiple, participating energies. The Holy Spirit makes itself known in the secret redolence of flowers. The lush rose intimates the presence of Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary. In Buddhism, the lotus signifies enlightenment and the "golden flower" of Chinese alchemy the achievement of the "diamond body" through the interior circulation of light. A European alchemical text describes the synthesis of the four elements, the hoped for unity in multiplicity of nature and psyche as the goal of the opus: It is " as if it were a meadow decked with colours and sweet- smelling flowers of divers kinds, which were conceived in the earth by the dew of heaven" (CW 14:389).  

~Bella

The Book of Symbols 5...

Kiss

Over the doorjamb of the womb-chamber of the Konārak temple in Southern India, and among the images in niches on its facade, are small, erotic sculptures of ardent couples, or mithuni. Their flowing bodies melt together in a passionate embrace, evoking the sexual play of both gods and mortals, and, paradoxically, the release from it in the union of the self and Supreme Self within a single being. Rapturously, the figures kiss. And here, under the arched brows and interlocked noses of two who are one, the lips merge in a state of bliss that knows nothing of a within or without, and in which there is no longer separation, desire or grief (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad IV:3:21; ARAS, 7Ao.044). 

A kiss of passionate longing may be shunned on the 

chaste movie screens of contemporary India, but it is

openly depicted in the sacred temple sculpture of the 

13th century. Sandstone, Surya Temple, Konārak, 

Orissa, India. 

Behind sealed lips, we protect one of the most personal spaces of the body; we part our lips to draw in the breath of inspiration or to speak intimate feelings into the beloved's ear, finally surrendering the private self in the loving convergence of one's own lips with the lips of the other. Even when not romantic, the kiss implies affection, blessing, recognition and reconciliation. Thus the psalmist intones, "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other" (Psalm 85:10). The comparable climax of the Muslim hajj to the Grand Mosque in Mecca is the pilgrim's kiss upon the Black Stone of the Kaaba, an act of reverence first performed by Muhammad. In these religious traditions, kissing is a ceremonial act, a sign of the bond between kin, or respect to holy relics, prayer shawls or altars or homage to one's ruler (kissing his feet) or to one's conqueror (licking the dust beneath his feet). With the bridal kiss, Western culture bridged the sacred and the romantic, although such European fairy tales as "Sleeping Beauty" or "Snow White" mark the approach of true love by a kiss that awakens the soul, rather than kindles sexual libido. 

Through the identity and meaning of many of the 

characters in Bronzino's mannerist allegory are still

debated, this detail is unequivocally of Venus and her 

adolescent son Cupid engaged in an amorous, 

incestuous kiss. Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time, detail, 

oil on panel, 1544-5, Italy.

However, the sensuous, unseemly kiss between Bronzino's Cupid and Venus, his mother-  slipping the tip of the tongue into her son's lips- portrays a sly, incestuous carnality. To some cultures, the public display of kissing is considered scandalous, for its signals the opening act of coitus, and casual, devouring tongue-kissing has even suggested cannibalism. Jung, in fact, disagreeing with Freud that all libido was sexual, noted the pleasure infants take in sucking and observed that "kissing derives much more from nutrition than from sexuality" (CW 5:652). The empty "air-kisses" of celebrities or the shallow "spit-swapping" of teenagers can seem to cancel out any encounter between two halves of a single soul that we can still feel in the secular sculpture of Rodin's The Kiss. The songbirds whose crossed wings surrounded Aengus, the Celtic god of love, deteriorated into the banal "x's" that close sentimental love letters. Modern Valentines- whose puckering smooches even use kisses to veil hostility- anticipate the chilling intentions of such phrases as "kiss off" (to dismiss a stale lover), "kiss up" (to display shameless obsequiousness) and "kiss and tell" (to betray matters shared in confidence). More stunning is the submissive "kiss of shame" upon the devil's anus (or that of his masked proxy). Here, the disciple kisses the "nether-lips" at the opposite end of the body than the mouth, a practice of medieval Satanists at their black Sabbaths, which often inverted conventional ritual. Similarly, the "kiss of death," such as Judas kissing Jesus, reverses, in the perfidious intimacy of betrayal, all that is signified by the kiss of love. The kiss can also convey a different kind of reversal. Francis of Assisi placed squarely on the lips of a fearsome leper the "kiss of peace," communicating a spiritual love that drew the most reviled being of the age into the saint's most personal interior. 

~Bella

The Book of Symbols 4...

Shell

From time immemorial, we have held conch shells to our ears to hear the surflike sound - the eternal tides of life that engrave their markings upon us. The human ear resembles a shell, gathering vibrations of air in its outer cavity called the "conch," and directing them through the winding passages of its shell-like inner ear as sound, symbolically evoking an interior listening. "He who has ears to hear let him hear," said Jesus of the hidden meaning of his parables. Images of the Buddha with elongated ears suggest that listening with the inner ear includes keeping silent, meditating on what has been said and opening ourselves to the resonance of the source. 

Shell-shaped and oversized, the ear of the Grand

Buddha suggests wise listening. Detail from a carved

cliff face, 713 C.E., Leshan, China

We have also raised the conch shell to our lips, trumpeting as gods of the sea might have, for the sound of the conch was said to lull the tumultuous waves of the sea.That the conch comes from the deep associates it with the underworld. The Mayan deity Quetzalcoatl mythically descends to Mictlan, the abode of the skeletons, as a dead conch that has fallen silent, so that worms may bore into him in order that he come to life again inside (Moctezuma, 138-9).

Figure, perhaps a deity, emerging from a shell,

showing whorls a growth. Effigy vase, painted

terra-cotta, Mayan, 600-800 C.E.

Shells are mysterious sea treasure, in beautiful shapes, sometimes symmetrical, often ridged and whorled, reflecting stages of growth. The recesses of a shell are reminiscent of the sacred spiral, labyrinth, and center. The intimation of marine life is also an allusion to the hidden life of our interior world, sometimes surfacing, leaving its evidence in consciousness, sometimes not. A shell is an exoskeleton serving to protect the vulnerable creature that dwells within. But shells are also delicate, easily broken, not the tough carapace of defensiveness. We speak of coming out of, or going into, one's "shell," suggesting a gradual, tenuous exposure to the world, or of retreat from it, in privacy, refuge or withdrawal.

As if incised by the waters of eternity- a stone conch 

shell. Aztec, ca. 1486-1502, Temple Mayor, Mexico.

The shape and depth of some shells, the lush pink of their coloring, brings to mind the female vulva, associating the shell with the allure and mystery of the feminine, and with incarnation and fertility. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love (to the Roman Venus), materializing out of the ocean's foam, is borne ashore on a seashell. In his celebrated painting, Odilon Redon depicts the open, vulva-shaped shell, its soft opalescence infusing the sky and the goddess lying, yet standing, asleep and yet waking, as in a vision. We adorn ourselves with shells, remembering the goddess and her beauty, her seductions. The shell and its evocation of the uterine salt-sea, the moon, tidal ebb, and flow imparts a sense of birth and rebirth; early Christian art made the empty shell an image of the soul's departure to immortality. 

The Birth of Venus, by Odilon Redon, oil on canvas,

ca. 1912, France. 

~Bella

Little note: I won't be able to post on Friday so I'm going to post tomorrow instead. Sorry about that, but you'll still get a post :) 

The Book of Symbols 3...

Pomegranate

Pomegranate Seed, by Elizabeth J. Milleker, 

gouache and sumi-ink painting, 2003, United States

A maiden kneeling on half a pomegranate holds her cloak in a gesture that signifies epiphany. The presence of winged Eros at her shoulder denotes that the one who discloses herself is divine- here, the goddess Persephone (Kerényi, 144). The smooth, hard, rosy shell of the pome granate, or "seedy apple," crowned by a golden aureole, opens up to reveal blood-red fruit and numerous seeds, the basis for the pomegranate's mythic dynamism throughout the ancient Mediterranean. According to a Phrygian myth, a fertilized stone phallus engendered a hermaphroditic being, Agditis, who, castrated by the gods, became the goddess Cybele (Daniélou 90); from the blood of the castration sprang the first pomegranate tree. The priests of Attis, a castrated son-lover of the earth goddess carried pomegranates in their hands or wore them on their heads in wreaths (Kerényi, 136). Along with the fig and apple, the pomegranate is associated with the underworld and the mysteries of the death, conception and rebirth of vegetation, personified by divine young men or maidens. The pomegranate's seeds and blood-colored flesh were emblematic of this eternal renewal of the life of the world in which the human initiate might also participate. The pomegranate was sacred to Hades, who seized Persephone, the daughter of the grain goddess Demeter, into the land of the dead. When Demeter in grief withheld the grain from the earth, Zeus agreed to have Persephone returned to her mother. But Hades gave the maiden "a single sweet pomegranate seed," which meant that she must spend a third of the year with him as his spouse and the Queen of the Dead (ibid, 133). The pomegranate played a part in the Eleusinian Mysteries, honoring the two goddess as the feminine source and continuity of life, and also in the phallic, Dionysian Holoa festival and the Thesmophoria. In some rites, the initiate was allowed to eat nothing except this seeds of the pomegranate; in others, the eating of this fruit was forbidden. As a votive offering to the subterranean aspect of the Great Goddess in particular, the pomegranate suggests, in the psychological sense, the bitter depths and majestic forces of the unconscious encountered in the taking of the fertile, dreadful seeds of the self. 

A girl with Eros kneeling on a half-pomegranate, 

terra-cotta, ca. 400-323 B.C.E., Greece.

~Bella

The Book of Symbols 2...

Fog

This monumental Japanese painting- it is 260 feet long- invites us into the world of fog. Studying it from right to left, in the tradition of Japanese scroll viewing, we move from forbidding blackness through a somber middle ground to delicate tracery and translucency to what finally appears to be hazy light. The symbolism of fog is just as variable.

The darkest images arose in Scandinavia, where Niflheim, a mythical wasteland of freezing mist and fog populated by monsters, also included the realm of the dead (Orchard, 118). "[F]og in my throat" was Robert Browning's metaphor for approaching death (in Prospice). Fog may arise from the work of demonic beings in fairy tales or surround Shakespear's witches, who comment on the "fog and filthy air" (Macbeth 1.1.16). In Asian legend, it may represent strange moods in which spirits appear (Biedermann, 139). Widely, through, fog is taken to represent confusion, uncertainty, indefiniteness, a state between the real and the unreal. Here it is opposed to the brilliant light of certainty.


While fog seems vaporous, we feel it, because it is formed by the condensation of very small water droplets around microscopic dust particles in the air. Fog limits horizontal vision. Less dense, it is called haze or mist. Unlike clouds, its base is on or near the ground and its symbolism is associated not with the sky, but with the earth realm. Sometimes the fog is seen as unfolding, blanketing. T.S.Eliot imagined fog as a yellow cat that "rubs its back upon the window pane" and finally "curled once about the house and fell asleep" (Eliot, 4 ). Contemporary poet Nan Hunt refers to fog as, "The mummy wrap of soft white/ that hints of a resurrection."

Fog is not favorable to direct action. Ships, planes, and fast-moving humans are delayed or stopped. A slower, more cautious awareness arises. Symbolically, the world of clear rational thought gives way to dreaminess, ambiguity, a kind of knowing that is more nuanced, less absolute. This knowing is perhaps more valued in the East than in the West. Zen sage Keizan Zenji puts it :

Though clear waters range to the vast

blue autumn sky. How can they compare with 

the hazy moon on a spring night!

Most people want to have pure clarity,

But sweep as you will, you cannot empty 

the mind.

Maezumi, iii

Fog is the medium in which the elements of a classic Japanese nature study are obscured, and materialize. Forest, Senju Hiroshi, fusuma (sling door) painting. 2001. 

~Bella