SYMBOL

Symbols are the product of the psyche-of the imagination of man, of that part of him which lays closest hold on the things called eternal. In the analysis of symbols, therefore, it is important that these images should be given neither less nor more than their true valuation. To the older theology, as to the newer psychology, these symbols had to do with the psyche and the states or moods of the psyche alone, that is to say, with the reactions of the soul to the external world. Anciently, they signified the course of the soul in its descent into material life from the heights of bliss, or the imaged records of adventures in its existence in the bonds of material, as contradistinct from ideal, or supernal things. To those theologians of an older age, or to some of them at least, the pattern of the stars was essentially that of a mind-of the Great Mind-"the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming of things to come". In their opinion, a human being's birth had a relation to the whole universe conditioned by the moment of time at which it took place. Its tendencies, mental and physical, came into being and were even to be read in the position and relation of the signs and planets of the heavens. Such a belief lay at the root of much of the ancient theology, and whatever later qualifications were made, such was the basis of an opinion on the gods in the myths of the older theologians.

The study and analysis of dream has shown the primary significance of this faculty of symbolisation in determining the thought behind the conscious mind, or in analysing the activity of the unseen world of imagination. Let it, however, be granted that some glimpse of this understanding was present in the outlook of the first recorders of myth, or of that genius who carried it forward into artistic completeness. In unhurried contemplation, it may have been found by empirical observation, even though in darkling ways, that there existed some relation between the movement of the moods in the mind as capable of expression and reproduction by a symbol, which was also made to relate to a position of sun and stars in the heavens.

What reason or purpose induced the designers of the figures of strange and even monstrous forms to establish them as they were, and have been with little change for age-long generations of men? The summation of symbols is established there: actually the whole mind's book of symbols is given compactly in the stars, and nearly all seemingly different, or new, symbols may be brought back to this original system as simple variants. That they first originated in the mind is hardly in question- so far as they are seen in the skies Man set them there, Although man's purpose, his mind's relation to these signs, and their interrelation in his mind, one must seek- and how hardly find! But it is necessary to establish that the phantasmal and the symbolical are in essence different, for of phantasms there are many, but of symbols, deeply established in the mind and consciousness, but few. A little of the way to an ultimate rationale of the astrological theories at the root of much ancient myth and theology may be cleared by making definite the real difference between phantasm and symbol.

Whether the older speculation on the mystical meaning of the signs set in the heavens may or may not finally correspond with the result of an examination of astrology from a psychological standpoint, it is one of the few feasible methods for bringing into order the divergent systems that elucidate by sun myth or by vegetation god the strangely arbitrary figures of myth and symbol, all of which, so far, have steadfastly declined to give up their secret hold on the minds and imaginations of men, deftly eluding the loose-woven nets of the exponents of comparative religion. At least it is necessary to assume for its appreciation that the thinkers of ancient times were of a mentality equal to ours and not appreciably more superstitious than we are to-day.

The object, then, of this present study, is the resolution of the psychological meaning of the Dragon with its kindred and associated symbols, viewed in the manner of the last generation of mystical writers with which we are yet in close touch, that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At that time the study of the mysteries of the mind was carried out enthusiastically by the most able and profound thinkers and writers of their day-a day which, in powers of poetical and imaginative expression in literature, has had no equal, or at least no superior, in our history.

The foundations of our literature were laid in that period by a generation of dreamers who sought deep things in myth and religion, while the humanists read by Kabbala and Astrology great and strange rumours in the Universal Mind, the Soul of the World. Whether they erred in their search, or whether they laid hold on immutable truths is debatable: it is sufficient to the present purpose to know clearly what they thought of that which they conceived as the "secret influences" that work behind the "shows" of life. In this present age the hidden power is given such titles as "libido", "sex attraction", "élan vital"! But then the Kabbalist saw in the union of man and woman the image and symbol of Divine Love, and the ultimate force of the universe: just as to the devout the Church is yet the Spouse of Christ: for more than 2,000 years the supreme revelation has been the divine marriage, the transcendental union of the lover and the beloved-of the fundamental pair. There was in Paradise, however, a third-a separator, the serpent or the Dragon. However far we go back in tradition there was always this complementary conception of the dark power that lay in wait, and brought about the primary seperation, and accounted for the fallen state of man.

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