CHAPTER XIII

LIGHT FROM AN OLD LAMP

One of the achievements of this age, for which it may come to be marked in later historical view, is the restoration of symbolism to a significant role in the mechanism of culture. We have seen that the superconscious seldom delivers its messages of approval or warning to the lower mind in the known language of common speech. It speaks in the language of symbols and pictorial representations. The discovery of this fact signalizes a great and really momentous advance in technique for the deeper cultivation of the human spirit.

It is worth what Dr. Hinkle has to say as to the desuetude of symbolism before its present re-discovery (The Recreating of the Individual, p. 137):

"Until now, however, it has been chiefly a subject of academic interest belonging to a past phase of human culture and with no vital meaning for the present. Through psychoanalysis we have come to realize that this ancient process has a present value; and the mode of interpreting and utilizing the symbol, the way in which we understand it in relation to the individual, are intimately connected with his future well-being and development."

Symbols were an integral part of ancient expression because they were the one universally known, or available, and only true language of meaning transfer. Symbols were known to be the one standard means of communication of truth, because the ancients were still in possession of an important item of usable knowledge, the great fact that the seen world is the mirror of the reality of the unseen world. Understanding went into eclipse when this plank in the platform of a primal formulation of knowledge was taken

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out. Now it is being restored, and it is found that symbols are the substantial stepping-stones by means of which the mind can cross the gap between the objective world and the realities of higher ones. The sages of antiquity knew that if they ventured to construct the pictures of metaphysical reality over the pattern of the objects and phenomena of the known world they would never widely miss the truth.

We are face to face here with a re-discovery as important as that of the unconscious. And it is one that is a necessary supplement of the other, if the full harvest of benefit is to be reaped from knowledge of the unconscious. We shall never be able to read the communications of the inner lord of life to his outer protégé, the conscious human, without the help of this symbolism. Just as the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was essential to our regaining Egypt's lost wisdom, so our ability to translate the language of symbolism is necessary to understand the strange vernacular in which the Ancient of Days speaks down to us from his seat in the plane of consciousness just over our heads. He speaks in the language of meaning-forms and not in that of words. An object or a process from the world of nature conveys a graph of meaning that often could not be elaborated in less than a thousand words. The snake, beetle, locust, hawk and bee, the cloud, rainbow and lightning announce the principles of cosmic law with a definiteness that no words can match. Words can misrepresent the truth; nature symbols can not. They discourse upon the straight truth. They can not lead the mind into sophistry. So reliable and certain is their testimony to verify that whenever the mind wishes to confirm its insights into truth it cites the harmony of its deductions with natural fact. If a structure of exposition can be paralleled with a phenomenon in nature, it is considered to be certified. Poetry is in large part the sensing and limning of this perceived correspondence. To show that an inner construction sustains analogical identity with something in outer creation, proves that it is already accredited, being found extant in the world of real being.

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A vivid line from one of Goethe's poems strikes ringing recognition of this truth of symbolism:

"To the capable the world is never dumb!"

And Schiller, while seemingly turned around to a wrong orientation to the theme, nevertheless gives out a phrase of sententious truth when he says:

"I was not yet capable of comprehending nature at first hand; I had but learned to admire her image reflected in the understanding, and put in order by rules." (Italics Dr. Hinkle's in quotation.)

Any one who has learned to admire nature's image reflected in the understanding has already become, as Emerson puts it, a priest interpreting the epiphany of creation. This is not an elementary step preparatory to comprehending nature at first hand, as Schiller says. It is indeed first-hand comprehension itself. For it is the interpretation of nature through translation of her forms as alphabet into ultimate meaning. This is to understand nature, for she is then seen not as sheer object, but as forms of meaning. The mind so qualified is able to look not merely at nature, but through nature to discern the archetypal forms in the divine mind. This is to read God's thoughts after him.

Misguided superficial dialectic might rise here to expostulate that since, as declared, the entire drive of religious aspiration is to transcend the natural man and the world that ensnares him, and to catch and hold the diviner superhuman, it is going against philosophy and evolution alike to ask the mind to tie itself in ever closer relation to the natural world. That, says pietistic faith, is the world to be shunned and escaped. But this is a mistake. To recommend the use of nature as an alphabet for the reading of higher truth is in no way to involve the mind in subjection to nature's own play of mindless forces. It is in no sense to enmire intelligence in her own ground of partial nescience. It is but to use her forms as

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mnemonics and hieroglyphics of exalted sense or as the lens of a more penetrating and magnifying insight.

Another statement from Dr. Hinkle falls in here with much pertinence (p. 441):

"The whole process of psychic development is seen to follow a kind of spiral movement in which there is a recurrent return to former states having the closest analogy to the actual physical conditions experienced. Thus in all psychic development there is a close relationship with the physical processes, but not an identity."

It is well to observe, with this reminder, that analogy works through likeness, but does not claim identity.

"Through man's capacity for psychic creation he has attained a power for individual development which in its becoming follows like a shadow the actual physical processes lived through, but which possesses a reality of its own as important for human life as the actual physical processes are for all organic life. It is this reality so frequently expressing itself in the language of organic reality which must be recognized for an understanding of human needs. The light that psychoanalysis has provided has revealed a new meaning to many of the great intuitions of the past, and has shown unmistakably that they possess a validity and reality in relation to the individual life wholly unrealized by thought, but entirely realizable in the human being."

This is to say that a meaning, perhaps an actual message from the man's oversoul to his outer intelligence, comes to him in the form of an analogue with some phase of his actual experience. The supermind must speak to him in the terms of what has already had meaning for him. As already set forth, it is impossible that an abstract idea can be presented to a mind without reference to a previously known physical object or process. Even an idea must accrete whatever form, structure or organic outline it is to have from something once known. It has often been said that the mind can form no picture of a something the likeness of which it has never seen. It can formulate new pictures, but only out of a new configuration or combination of elements already imprinted in

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memory. The very categories of thought, as extensions, quantity, number, dimension, cause, effect, quality, etc., are abstractions derived from experience with the concrete physical, which plant these concepts in the intellect. The only pathway open to the mind is through the physical, whose forms become symbols of the metaphysical.

Symbols, then, are the currency in the ideal realm. It is not too strong an assertion to say that symbols are not only the language of conception and impartation in the metaphysical realm, but that they are therefore the instruments of the soul's highest culture. It has been claimed that the mathematical symbols, pi, x and the horizontal 8 for infinity and others, have virtually made higher abstract mathematics possible. Culture hinges on grasp and communication of ideas and symbols make the interchange a near-divine art. It has been questioned whether the act of thinking could be achieved without symbols. An idea would be left formless if it could not be given suggestive shape over the pattern of fixed representation. Description could not be achieved if some known object bearing likeness to the unknown to be described could not be pointed to.

There is evidence of surprising cogency pointing to the realization that the attainment or the degree of culture in mankind bears a significant relation to the interest in symbolism. A cursory canvass of history seems to reveal a distinct and decided parallel between cultural rise and fall and the vogue and lapse of symbolic methodology. This is indeed challenging. The ancient period, during which there was extant a culture sufficiently lofty to inspire the writing of the only books that have held universal veneration throughout the centuries, obviously was steeped in symbolic practique. No more valid attestation of this is needed than the observation that these books themselves purvey symbolism as their chief method of intellectual expression, as they fairly teem with symbolism. Culture rose or prevailed hand in hand with symbolism in that era. The great upsurge of Greek culture was based on and widely

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utilized symbols, such as Plato's cave allegory, the myth of Er, King Minos' labyrinth, and others. The mighty wisdom of old Egypt verily reeked with symbols. The best in Hindu thought relied largely on symbolic portrayal. The Gospel character of Jesus for the most part taught in parables.

Up to the third century in Christianity, while there prevailed a strong trend to Gnosticism and Greek philosophy in the schools and doctrines of the Church, symbolism and allegorism held a very high place in exegesis, pre-eminently so in the work of the two most illuminated of the Patristics, Clement of Alexandria and his pupil, Origen. Particularly "Origen's allegories" became later a bone of contention between partisans in the Church and as a result fell under the fierce denunciation of the orthodox parties and finally were "excommunicated" by the decrees of Councils about the sixth century. Origen steadfastly maintained that beneath the letter of scriptural text, to be discerned by a more cultivated spiritual intuition, lay a deeper stratum of meaning, which was the true and vital message, supplanting the more obvious literal sense. The scriptures carried a profounder esoteric implication, concealed "under glyph and symbol," which the untutored would miss and the initiated would grasp. The milk for babes was the simple exoteric surface meaning; the meat for hardier digestion was this more deeply buried occult rendering. Philo laid great emphasis on this esoteric symbolic methodology. It is indeed a general characteristic of the body of ancient literature.

But symbolic usage largely disappeared after the fatal third century in countries under the Christian banner. For nigh unto eleven centuries little is heard of symbolism, and this period is precisely that covered by the "Dark Ages" in Occidental civilization.

Then, to put an end to the dismal night, came the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A perusal of John Addington Symond's comprehensive volumes on the Renaissance in Italy brings to light the astonishing fact that with this great burst of enlightenment there swept in a great tide of symbolic poetization.

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The intellectual instinct for symbolization indeed formed one of the chief currents of the revival itself. Says Symonds (p. 95):

"Poetry is instruction conveyed through allegory and fiction. Theology itself, he [Boccaccio] reasons, is a form of poetry; even the Holy Spirit may be called a Poet, inasmuch as he used the vehicle of symbol in the visions of the prophets and the Revelation of St. John."

Symonds speaks of Boccaccio's work as containing "a full exposition of the allegorical theories with which humanism started." Another curious passage from Symonds may well be interpolated here, since it weighs in with a surprisingly pertinent reference to present postures in culture. He goes on (p. 96):

"The poet, according to this medieval philosophy of literature, was a sage and teacher, wrapping up his august meanings in delightful fictions. Though the common herd despised him as a liar and a falsehood-fabricator, he was, in truth, a prophet uttering his dark speech in parables. How foolish, therefore, reasons the apologist, are the enemies of poetry,--sophistical dialecticians and avaricious jurists, who have never trodden the Phoebean hill, and who scorn the springs of Helicon because they do not flow with gold! Far worse is the condition of those monks and hypocrites who accuse the divine art of immortality and grossness, instead of reading between the lines and seeking the sense conveyed to the understanding under veils of allegory."

This outcry of Boccaccio against the stolidity and unresponsiveness to the finer poetic aspects of literary culture of the fourteenth century well dramatizes the general protest of delicacy of sensibilities against crassness in all ages. It is one of the noblest yet plaintively pitiful bleatings of refinement against gross dullness. The point to be remarked here is that it came from one who performed pioneer labor in the restoration of intellectual light to a benighted Europe, and that the light which had been kindled for him and which he beamed further abroad to his age, was largely generated and carried by the torch of symbolism. The enlightenment of the Renaissance superinduced, if it was not in great measure superinduced by, the revived science of symbology.

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But the Renaissance ran its course, lighting up the intellectual horizon of some generations with a mellow glow of great refinement, to be lost eventually in the sweep of the Reformation, the assertive reaction of the human spirit from centuries of stultifying blind faith, and the extraversion of interest created by the trend to modern physical science. The fine discernments and appreciations of cultured intellect requisite to capture the exalted values in symbolic usage were extinguished and disappeared. Humanitarian culture fell again to a low status, although the Renaissance had given too sweet a taste of it ever to be completely smothered out again. At any rate symbolism was once more submerged in desuetude, except in so far as it lingered in general poetry and polite literature. Even that continuation owed nearly all its inspiration to the vigorous breath that fired the Renaissance flame.

Now, once again, there is the dawning of the sun of symbolic apperception. What it heralds for humanity this time is conjectural and precarious. It all depends on the cultural capabilities of the age. The world has possessed the forms and norms of culture and lost them. With coarse, crude realism stalking the land, in music, art, drama, literature and social life, there seems little chance that a revival of symbolism can take hold and live. The requisite refinements of intellectual perceptions, the delicate nuances of human sentiment, the quietude and habits of reflection needed to catch the subtle but powerful force of natural analogies are lacking or perilously inadequate. The set of the modern mind is too aggressively extravert to open the way for symbolism to register its values and show its light. Yet, as always before, the true culture of the world hinges upon that accomplishment. In this connection nothing is more illuminating than a fairly lengthy passage from Symonds' work. Speaking of the obstructions in the path of the fourteenth century revival, he writes (p. 67):

"The meagreness of medieval learning was, however, a less serious obstacle to culture than the habit of mind, partly engendered by Christianity, and partly idiosyncratic to the new races, which prevented stu-

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dents from appreciating the true spirit of the classics. While mysticism . . . reigned supreme, the clearly defined humanity of the Greeks and Romans could not fail to be misapprehended."

That is, the nice discernments of symbolic meanings could not be gained against or amid the thick atmosphere of heavy pietism and ecclesiastical postures of all sorts.

"Poems like Virgil's Fourth Eclogue were prized for what the author had not meant when he was writing them; while his real interests were utterly neglected. Against this mental misconception, this original obliquity of vision, this radical lie in the intellect, the restorers of learning had to fight at least as energetically as against brute ignorance and dulness. It was not enough to multiply books and to discover codices; they had to teach men how to read them, to explain their inspiration, to defend them against prejudice, to protect them from false methods of interpretation. To purge the mind of fancy and fable, [when of course literalized] to prove that poetry apart from its supposed prophetic meaning was delightful for its own sake, and that the history of the antique nations . . . could be used for profit and instruction, was the first step to be taken by these pioneers of modern culture. They had, in short, to create a new mental sensibility by establishing the truth that pure literature directly contributes to the dignity and happiness of human beings. The achievement of this revolution in thought was the great performance of the Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."

It requires no access of perfervid unction or over-serious thinking to be aware that this passage describes a situation the replica of which confronts humanity at this present hour with issues grave and fateful. It might indeed be said truly that the fate of our civilization hinges on the fineness or the bluntness of our susceptibility to the profound intimations of symbolism. The age has given no sign that it has cultivated the requisite sensitivity to the subtle impingement of the high values delineated by symbology. There seems little hope that it can rise to the measure of a successful accomplishment in this field.

Henry Drummond offered to its view the generic type of such an achievement in his The Natural Law in the Spiritual World.

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The book was widely read, a fact which makes its eventual drop into desuetude and neglect all the more dispiriting. Had the Christian theologians possessed the open mind to evaluate the great hint of his book in due and significant measure, the postulates of religion today would be resting more firmly, not merely, as Gladstone thought, on the impregnable rock of the Holy Scriptures--esoterically interpreted,--but on that still more impregnable rock of natural analogy, than they have ever rested on sheer faith. Will the age fail once again to hold the benignant light of symbolic truth when psychoanalysis kindles the lamp anew? It is a momentous question. More centuries of war and woe will follow if the response is feeble.

There has existed for centuries an inveterate obduracy against allegorism, symbolism and dramatization of truth, as particularly found in the sacred scriptures. The sage authors of those scriptures presented majestic truth in no less majestic allegory, myth, drama and symbol; and the best that even the modern mind can do in the face of it is to snarl and sneer and snort. To continue the alliteration, to that mind it has all been a snare. There was no soundness nor health in it. It was perforce accepted and palliated as the infantile habit of "primitive" peoples. It could be tolerated in condescension. But this "certain condescension" worked to a catastrophic end in the total failure of its possessors to grasp the meaning buried in those superb relics of cryptic wisdom under allegory and symbol. The creation story, the ark and deluge saga, the going down into "Egypt," the drying up of the Red Sea (now properly translated the Reed Sea!) and the exodus of forty years' wandering, the Jonah idyll and a good thousand other major and minor items of that Bible claimed to be the highest expression of the moral and ethical grandeur of a civilization boasting its clear-seeing powers above those of all other times and peoples in history,--all these items of cardinal meaning in its own holy volume are yet a totally sealed mystery, not a syllable of their true esoteric meaning properly read or understood. It should carry some measure of rebuke to modern pride and vaunting of all-time superiority in intelligence, as well

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as some degree of humiliation, from the discernment that the Bible it still extolls is quite incapable of interpretation without resorting to the keys supplied--and only recently discovered--from the allegedly primitive Egyptians.

There is a modern tide of concern with so-called prophecy. The forecasts of the future made by Nostradamus, Mother Shipton and others have been brought out and given great vogue. To give any plausible conciseness to their predictions, a deal of help must be supplied by the reader's imagination. They run much on the order of ancient oracles, whose messages were vague and flexible enough to cover several possible alternatives. But there is one such utterance that challenges the attention of the most incredulous. It was that given by Count Leo Tolstoy in 1910 and published in advance of the events it predicted. It foretold the Balkan War in 1912, the first World War in 1914 starting in the Balkans, the course of developments thereafter, and contained in its penetrating vision of the near future the remarkable statement that a new religion would arise based on symbolism. It is most impressively set forth.

Likewise the savant who was regarded as the world's outstanding authority on Orphism, Prof. Vittorio D. Macchioro, of the University of Naples, in a work entitled From Orpheus to Paul, declared in positive terms that if religion is to survive and exercise a beneficent sway over general intelligence, it must return from dogmatic theology to symbolism. This is sound insight, since the highest metaphysical values in religion can be adequately expressed only through the language of symbols. Psychoanalysis has added its corroboration to this conclusion. The divine soul must use symbols to adumbrate its realities.

It is pretty well established that among groups or schools that in ancient days labored at the great task of spiritual culture, the Essenes in the Trans-Jordan region were the most eminent custodians of true primeval wisdom. The article on them in the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains the remarkable statement that "they preserved in their libraries the books of the ancients, and read them not with-

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out an allegorical interpretation." The Christian historian-apologist Eusebius makes the statement, which is surely a vital challenge to all Christian claims, that the Gospels of the New Testament were old books preserved by the Essenes from remote antiquity.

Psychoanalysis now opens the door to the renaissance of symbolism. This may mean as great an advance for mental science in the domain of self-mastery for the individual as the introduction of symbols meant for abstract mathematics. It will equip effort at control of individual action with a technique of known scientific procedure. And now follows a denouement in this process of investigation that comes with startling impact upon common realization. Symbolism, the newest feature of psychoanalytic discovery, is all at once found to stand in the relation of a new intimacy with an older aspect, indeed one that presided at the very birth of psychoanalysis itself,--sex. We have said that nature and her phenomena stand as the outer language speaking the truth of cosmic creation, that nature is truth manifested in the form of concrete structures. The shape and nature of created things reveal the archetypal mind that engendered them.

A link that helps join the two aspects of the theme being developed here may be found in Dr. Hinkle's discerning pattern of relationship between symbol and reality in her volume already freely quoted. She writes (p. 240):

"One can gain value from experience only when it is grasped in its double aspect as symbol and as reality; not when it is possessed merely as a symbol, and the subjective content, expressed through the idea of fantasy, is the only reality. Actually there are two realities, the concrete external fact, and the inner subjective psychological factor; adaptation and assimilation must take place with both."

This is extremely well said and timely. Every object is at once both thing in itself and symbol of another thing less objective. And the true "being" or "reality" of a thing is not seen until this double refraction of meaning is discerned. As Wordsworth has brought out so pointedly in his Peter Bell poem,

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"A primrose by the river's brink

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more."

Beside standing there in the meadow it carried to Peter nothing in the line of the majesty, meaning and wonder of the universal life in which it was a humble participant. But it does seem as if Dr. Hinkle has here transposed her rating of values and acclaimed by the form of her language the lesser status of the view of the thing as symbol of deeper import. She seems to imply that people ordinarily miss its value as objective reality in the implied more common grasp of its meaning as symbol. This reverses the general status of the case, for hardly any mind misses the validity of the thing as object, while very few go beyond this to the reality of the thing as symbol of subjective experience. Our whole essay is the attempt to do just that with sex, to take it far beyond its known quality as an object of sensual experience in the concrete world, and to invest it with its grander reality as symbol. There is little evidence that this task has been attempted or achieved before.

Dr. Hinkle herself stands in position to be accorded credit for taking several notable steps in that very direction. She has caught some glimpses into the long vista of truth that is opening out through the analogical approaches, tentative and timorous as they are, of psychoanalysis to the science of sex as symbol. On page 49 of her work she writes that by the technique provided by psychoanalysis

"the sexual impulse is raised to the realm of the symbol and, for humanity in whom creativeness is the never ending goal, it is a symbol of the highest significance and value."

And she continues:

"One is forced by analytic work to a realization that the representations of sexual activity are themselves used as symbols by the human mind to indicate the new goal--the creative urge toward the fulfilment of a necessary psychic development and attainment, which all the physi-

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cal gratification in the world can not satisfy. Just as men use their sexual powers and achievements as a measure and symbol of their masculine strength and power on the physical plane, so the unconscious uses the sexual symbols as the language in which to express capacities and potentialities on the psychic plane." (Italics ours.)

The last sentence comes close to being a statement of the theme and thesis of this work. Sex is a great--a very great--objective reality in and of itself. And there the common mind of humanity has stopped in dealing with it. It has seemed so substantial and realistic a value in itself that there was not felt a need to use it as a mental stepping-stone or stairway to something of more intrinsic value lying ahead in subjective realms. Now the task is to transcend its value as object and sensual experience and to delineate its still higher value as a symbolic language of the most exalted descriptive character.

What Dr. Hinkle has brought out here is true and vital. The time is destined to arrive, and before too long, when the principles of analogy and the human mental capacity for analogical insight, developed to quick apperceptions in periods when symbolism was pursued and cultivated, but left to atrophy in all other periods, will be developed to an acute stage again and function like a new genius. The mind will be able to look at objects in nature's realm and see both of the realities pertaining to them, to cull both their objective and their subjective influences. It will see them as the things they are, standing there as objects of experience palpable to sense. But at the same time it will be able to see them as the Egyptians saw them, the living language of another world of reality, the world of truth, laws, ideas. It is the aim here to perform this service for the objective reality known as sex in human life. Another work will aim to do the like service for a thousand particular phenomena in the world of nature.