Symbolic and mythic thinking: nature as source and bridge between science and art
Symbol: from the Greek sym, meaning: together, with, in common; bolon, meaning: to throw together, a throw with a casting-net, a net, the thing caught.
A symbol can’t be reduced to a sign and often carries irreconcilable, paradoxical images. A symbol can take many forms. It can be a dream, a work of art, a thought, a visual image or even some everyday object that has been invested with special meaning. The importance of a symbol is not in the object itself; the symbol points beyond itself to some ineffable meaning or experience that can’t be wholly translated into words or even into images. Symbols, like art, work on a multiplicity of conscious and unconscious of levels to engage the emotional, psychic and spiritual sides of our nature as well as the rational and intellectual sides. A symbol expresses a reality that is true and real for the person experiencing it yet can’t be told in so many words and may well be meaningless to the next person.
A myth is a story or legend that generally has to do with the origin or emergence of life on Earth and the various customs, climates, geography, colors, sounds, habits, rituals and so on that govern and influence life both here on Earth and throughout the universe. A myth may contain many symbolic elements and will often give meaning to, or offer an explanation for, the way things are and how they came to be that way.
Myths may be local and specific to a particular tribe or group or they may be worldwide in their diffusion and influence. The myth of the male creator god, who fashioned both the Earth and Heavens, is common to many peoples and religions. Myths also serve, in the local context, to provide a structuring, socially adhesive function in placing the individual, family and society in harmonious relationship.
An archetype is an elementary idea or structuring force that provides the form, but not the content, of the psychic images and associations that are common to all members of the human species. For example, a witch, a female possessed of supernatural powers and able to work magic, is an archetype. Such a figure is common to all cultures yet each individual will have a local, culturally conditioned image of what a witch looks like and what magic she can work. These images can’t be proven to be genetically inherited yet they are so common as to be almost universally present in human society.
“People are corn” is a Hopi metaphor expressing the Hopi’s identification with corn and their reverence for both corn and life. Also, the different colors of the corn are symbolic of the four directions and the four winds. By growing and caring for the corn, the Hopi derive not only physical nourishment but also spiritual nourishment because growing corn expresses their reverence for all life and for the powers of nature.
Consider the symbolic import the Hopi give to their interaction with nature, especially as cultivators of the soil, corn growers. Consider the influence of universal forms, like spirals, meanders, curved paths and on to fractals.
How do our perceptions of the natural world create abstract “systems of concepts” which in turn influence our creation of art and science; in short, our worldview? Specifically, how have images from our visual experiences of nature, in particular those of the serpent, pig, bull, horse and birds, influenced, and been a vehicle for, mythic and symbolic thought in the course of human development.
In the modern world we live surrounded by symbols whose meaning can’t be grasped without reference to mankind’s first attempts to understand the visual impacts of nature and the unique responses these stimuli brought forth. Responses that, in a larger sense, have fashioned cultures the world over.
“And the Lord God said unto the serpent, because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle and above every beast in the field, upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life; and I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
Who is not familiar with this story from Genesis? Why should the serpent be cursed above all beasts for bestowing the boon of the knowledge of good and evil?
The same serpents, two entwining, also form the caduceus, symbol of the physician’s healing power. Entwined serpents also form the staff of Hermes and of Mercury, divine messengers of the gods. Indeed. in some cultures the serpent is given pride of place. The Buddha was shielded by the hood of a cobra while the storms of maya lashed about him as he meditated beneath the bodhi tree. Does not Vishnu sleep on the coils Ananta, the serpent of infinity, as he dreams the universe into being?
The kundalini is the serpent power that lies coiled at the base of the spine and, uncoiling through the practice of yoga, ascends the chakras (centers of consciousness) along the spine until,reaching the crown chakra, enlightenment is achieved.
It seems clear that the serpent was a symbol of the divinity long before the bible cast him into the dust. The clay tablets of ancient Sumer record the divine serpent in the earliest examples of mythic thinking extant. In Greek mythology Okeanos is the the great serpent, Ocean, biting his tail, who surrounds the world.
Can all this be simply because a snake sheds its skin? And simple man thinks it means something? Why, otherwise, would anyone choose a snake to represent the secrets of life and death, gods and men, immortality? A snake sheds its skin and the world of metaphysics is unlocked.
It is, in fact, the triumph of the Judaeo-Christian father god over earlier religions of the mother goddess, that cast into the dust the formerly divine serpent. Dust is, of course, mother earth. Just as Gaiea and Okeanos were overthrown by Zeus. Our focus here, however, is not the rise and fall of mythologies but the very forms of nature that have the power to evoke the life regenerating powers of myth.
Let’s look at the pig. An unlikely candidate for the symbol of the mysteries of the universe and the knowledge that illuminates life and death. Even so, the pig, or boar, has a place hardly less ancient and no less honored than that of the snake.
In the famous abduction of Persephone by Hades, Lord of the Underworld, it is recounted that Demeter, hearing her daughter’s cry, sought her but found that her footprints had been obliterated by those of a pig. For it chanced that at the time of the abduction a herd of pigs was rooting nearby. The name of the swineherd was Eubuleus. “the giver of good council.” In Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell quotes from Fraser’s Golden Bough, “Originally. we may conjecture, that the footprints of the pig were the footprints of Persephone and of Demeter herself.”
The sacrificed pig, or hunted boar, are figures prominent in mythology from the mysteries of Eleusis to modern day Melanesia where the pig has only recently wholly replaced human sacrifice. The boar’s tusk also evokes the crescent Moon. So, the pig is sacrificed, in part, because his curling tusk’s resemble the crescent moon. The waxing and waning Moon pulls the tides and influences the menstrual cycle and is symbolic of the rising and falling waters of life, the ever changing, ever the same, cycle of the Moon, the seasons, life and death. Thus the pig is not an ordinary animal but a spiritual animal.
The bull, with his great curved horns was also a paramount spiritual being in ancient Sumeria, Crete, Egypt and throughout the Mediterranean. The ever dying, ever living lunar bull, who is slain by a solar shaft only to be reborn again. The matador slays the bull and the lion-bird gnaws at the back of the Moon-Bull (as depicted on a clay tablet, Sumer about 2500 BCE) who, none-the-less, continues to smile blissfully.
Horses were linked with the Sun. Surya, the god of the Sun, was a principal Vedic deity. The Aryans or Indo-Europeans, those remote ancestors of all Latin, Greek and Sanskrit speaking peoples, swept down out of the north on their horses and overcame the Moon and serpent worshiping religions of the south. In Greek mythology, the Sun travels across the sky each day in a horse drawn chariot. The horse is associated with military and political power, manly action and war-like deeds. As the people of the horse gained ascendancy, so did their solar deities.
Birds are also amongst the most extensive symbolic images known to history. In a paleolithic site at Mal’ta in the Lake Baikal region of Russia, the earliest known swastika is carved on the underside of the wings of an ivory bird in flight. Birds, from the “Solar Eagle” of Sumerian mythology to the shaman flight of Native Americans, have always been symbols of the spiritual. Angels, putti, cherubs, winged griffons, winged lions, winged horses, are all symbols of, or messengers from, the higher realm. In Christian mythology it is recounted that, upon Christ being baptized, “Immediately he saw the heavens opened and the spirit descending upon him like a dove.” (Mark)
Birds are associated with the spirit world because they fly through the air and the visual image of their flight has lent wings to human imagination. Is it no more than imagination? Are birds not the actual messengers of the gods, or our higher selves, as you prefer? Their appearance full of meaning for those who can see.
How or when the correspondences between nature and the world of humankind’s higher spiritual aspirations came to be, is beyond our knowledge but it is enough to know that they do exist, and must have existed, long before even the clay tablets of Mesopotamia were inscribed. Who can say when these images first impressed themselves on our senses, or why. The cave paintings of Lascaux are 20,000 years old.
The swastika found at Mal’ta was one of a number designs found there. Others were: a stippled design showing a spiral of seven turns with 3 spiraling S forms enclosing it (“The earliest spirals known to the history of art” notes Prof. Campbell), a labyrinth and wavy lines. Were these man’s responses to what he saw in nature, a ritual motif created by some shaman, both, or neither?
All we can say for certain is that the world of nature is the source and inspiration for art and the observation of nature the beginning of what we call science. If we are separated from nature will we loose touch with those unique responses that only nature seems to call forth? Is this what John Muir meant when he said, “In wilderness is the salvation of the world.”