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Figuratively
Speaking: Allegory & Individual Insight Hunter MacKenzie Allegory and symbolism are factors which add greater depth perception to our life experience. They allow us to see connections between things which are not always obvious. And they can be found nearly everywhere: books, dreams, conversations--even the seemingly ordinary events of the day... if you know how to look for it. Even for those who have been trained to some extent to look beyond appearance, to not be content with simply accepting things at face value, it's easy to miss the full range of symbolism. There are, of course, people who are willfully blind to the possibility of something having a greater significance what they see right away. There is always more than meets the eye. How deep are you willing to dig?They are like I was in my first film class in college: "Can't we just watch the movie? It's distracting when every little thing has to mean something else too!" This reflects a certain amount of mental laziness--an attitude of "I've been doing just fine without thinking before, so why should I start working at it now?" Many years later I realize that if you do try to look deeper, you get much more meaning out of things. You learn more about yourself and everything else too. And it perpetuates a sense of curiosity which keeps your mind fresh and challenges you to learn more than you already know--however much or little that may be. "All is illusion," many of our Eastern philosophies state. "Nothing is true," according to the Assassin sect of Persian myth-history. One could take these as hints--that nothing is only what it appears to be, that we must dig deeper if we want to get at the truth. The book is not the cover alone. I believe that in some sense, passages of the Christian Bible are "divinely inspired." I also believe the "Book of the Law" presented by Aleister Crowley is divinely inspired. But I do not believe either of them were originally intended to be taken entirely literally; both contain far more symbolism than I expect to ever comprehend. I mention these two because I am very familiar with both, but the same could be said for other books as well. There are countless works which have truly "inspired" passages and which could be analyzed ad infinitum in attempts to thoroughly interpret their symbols. Anything from the Arthurian legends to Dragonball Z to a disc from Nine Inch Nails could hold something worth delving into. But what if Sir Thomas Malory didn't know that swords are phallic and represent regenerative powers as well as having tarot associations with air and thought? Does it matter? What if Trent Reznor didn't know (or care) that in "Reptile" he connects the subject of his lyrics with the serpent in the biblical garden of Eden as well as linking it with the snake which was considered symbolic of knowledge and initiation in many cultures before the advent of Christianity and legends of St. Patrick? (Not to mention the ever-popular recurring phallic theme...) What if the writer never intended the meaning we are able to extract from the symbol? Is it still a valid meaning? Of course it is. For one thing, many writers and artists often freely admit that they don't have any idea what the piece they just wrote means; it's not until much contemplation and afterthought that they come to understand their own train of thought or where it came from. For another thing, if you get some meaning out of a line of writing and it works or is seen to hold true, then it doesn't matter whether or not it was there to start with. We must, however, keep in mind that symbol analysis and "decoding" can be extremely personal and that even if you get something out of Psalms 23 which consistently works and is true for you, it's not necessarily going to mean the same thing to me. And it may not have any meaning or value at all to yet another person. (It has often been the intolerance of such variations in opinion that has begun holy wars and caused general dissension and conflict among the various branches of religion.) This diversity of interpretation, in fact, is what causes such disparate opinions on such things as the tarot and dreams. One can check seven different interpretative books on the tarot and find seven different meanings noted for the Two of Pentacles; they may all be true by taking a sort of assimilated synthesis, or parts of each may be true, or one may fit one person's situation while another works best for the next person. The same sort of interpretational dilemma is frequently encountered regarding dream analysis. That rabbit from last night's dream is explained three different ways in as many books, but for some reason the brilliant red flag that figured so prominently in the dream from the night before is nowhere to be found in any of the same books (not even the one that boasts interpretations for 20,000 dream symbols)! This does not mean that your dreams are "abnormal"--it simply indicates that rather than using universal symbols which tend to have roughly similar meanings to nearly everyone, your unconscious mind is communicating with your conscious mind in a more personal way. For instance, if you've believed firmly all your life that goats are symbolic of Satan and his "evil influence," then your dream about goats in a library is going to have an entirely different meaning than my dream about goats in the library, when my associations with goats have more to do with Capricornian wisdom and virility. The key is to figure out what the symbol means to you, because it is your unconscious mind which is throwing out the symbol to your conscious mind for analysis. If you run across a symbol with which you have no associations whatever, then it's a good idea to research and see what ideas you can come up with; some interpretations will seem to fit better than others, and then you've added another "word" to your language of symbols. Remember, the only "false" interpretations are those which do not enlighten you and leave you feeling that you've reached a dead end--but any interpretation is valid if it works for you and leads you to greater insight. © Copyright 1998, 2003, 2004 by Hunter MacKenzie [This article previously appeared in SKOPOS Vol. I No. 1, and is archived here by permission of the author.] |