Symbols

The teaching

As the craft of reading a sign by its form, its setting and its history teaches it.

The token broken in two

The Greek word symbolon first meant a token broken in two. Two friends, or the two parties to a bargain, each kept one half, and when the halves were brought together again and fitted, each knew the other for who they were. A symbol in that first sense is half of a thing, and it is made whole only when it meets its other half.

So it is with every sign this art studies. The mark is one half; the other half is the knowledge of the people who made it, and the mark speaks fully only to those who carry that knowledge. A serpent on a staff meant healing to a Greek at the shrine of Asclepius; a serpent with its tail in its mouth is, in the Greek books of alchemy, the one matter from which all things come; a serpent in a garden is the tempter to a reader of Genesis. Each reader is right within their own world, and to read a sign is first to find out whose half it is.

Sign, symbol, emblem and the rest

Readers of signs keep a few words apart. A sign in the narrow sense points to one thing by plain agreement, as a letter stands for a sound, or the ankh in Egyptian writing for the word life. A symbol gathers many meanings at once and opens onto more than it can say, as the ring of the serpent opens onto the year, time and a world that renews itself. A monogram joins letters into one figure, as the chi-rho joins the first two letters of Christ in Greek. An attribute is the object by which a figure in art is known: the keys of Peter, the herald's wand of Hermes, the single-snaked staff of Asclepius.

An emblem stands for a person, a people, an office or a teaching. In the emblem books of the Renaissance, which gave the word its sense, an emblem has three parts, a motto, a picture and a short verse that unfolds them, and it is read as a riddle is solved. A seal is a mark of authority or ownership, pressed in wax or cut in a ring, as the Great Seal of a state or the legendary signet of Solomon. An amulet is a thing worn or hung in the belief that it turns harm aside, as the hamsa is hung by a door, and a talisman a thing made in the belief that it draws some good to its owner, as the pentacles of the old books of ritual were cut on metal or parchment. The words overlap, and one sign can be several of these in turn, but they help to ask the first question of any mark: what was it for?

The first figures

Beneath the famous signs lie a few plain figures, and each carries readings that recur in many lands. The point is the centre and the source: in a Hindu yantra the dot at the heart, the bindu, is the deity before it takes form, and astrologers and alchemists set a point within a circle for the sun and for gold. The circle, with no beginning and no end, is the whole and the unending, and it has long stood for heaven, as the square, steady on its four equal sides, has stood for earth; Chinese teaching speaks of a round heaven and a square earth.

The cross is the meeting of two ways. It is read as the four quarters of the horizon and, in many systems, the four elements; for Christians it is the cross of Christ, its long foot making the Latin form and its four equal arms the Greek. The triangle is three: in Christian art the Trinity, framing the eye of Providence; in the alchemists' books fire when it points up and water when it points down, with air and earth drawn as the same two triangles crossed by a bar. Stars are counted by their points, five for the pentagram and six for the hexagram, and the reading of any star begins with the count.

Form, direction and doubling

Readers of signs look closely, because a small change of form makes a different sign. One snake on a rough staff is the rod of Asclepius, the healer; two snakes on a winged wand are the caduceus of Hermes, the herald. A serpent lifted on a pole is the serpent of brass that Moses set up; a serpent bent into a ring with its tail in its mouth is the ouroboros. A cross with a loop above is the ankh, two Greek letters laid one over the other make the chi-rho, and a cross whose arms are bent is the swastika.

Direction is read too, though each rule has its own maker. Lévi taught that a pentagram with one point up is spirit ruling the elements and with two points up the goat, and the rule is his; Hindu teachers read the right-turning swastika by the sun's course across the sky and give the left-turning form to the night. Doubling is read as union or balance: the two triangles of the hexagram, the two snakes brought to accord about one rod, the dark and the bright of yin and yang, each holding a seed of the other. A single figure returning into itself, as the ouroboros does, is read as a whole that needs nothing outside it.

A sign read part by part

Many of the great signs are built to be read like a sentence, part by part, and their makers left the reading. The poet of Sir Gawain stops his story to explain the five points of the star on his hero's shield. Lévi explains every part of his Baphomet, from the torch between its horns to the words written on its two arms. Charles Thomson explained the reverse of the Great Seal to Congress: the unfinished pyramid, the eye, the mottoes and the date. The Jain emblem, read from the foot upward, gives the whole teaching of that faith, from the round of births through the path to release.

Where its makers left such a reading, it comes first, before any later reader's. A reader who explains a sign without asking what its own makers said of it is writing a new meaning, which may be worth having, but should be called new.

One form in many houses

A form travels between peoples, and each fills it anew. The six-pointed star stands on synagogues as the Star of David, in Hindu diagrams as the shatkona of Shiva and Shakti, and on rings in the old books of ritual as the Seal of Solomon: one figure, three histories, and the setting tells which is meant. The ankh passed from the hands of Egypt's gods into the Coptic church as the cross with a handle, and its meaning moved with it, from the life the gods give to the life to come.

A form can also be seized. The swastika is a sign of well-being in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain use to this day, and in modern times it was taken as the badge of the Nazi party. The second history does not erase the first, and the reader holds both, each in its own setting. A sign that a living faith holds sacred is read first in that faith's own words.

Reminder, charm and evidence

Most sacred signs, in the words of the faiths that use them, are reminders. The eye of Providence reminds the faithful of a care that watches over them; the square and compasses remind the mason to square his actions and keep within due bounds; the scallop shell marks the pilgrim of Santiago and the road behind them. The traditions of the amulet and the talisman go further and hold that a sign worn or drawn turns harm aside or draws good, and the art teaches that belief as the belief of the people who hold it, alongside their sign.

A sign is also evidence, of a narrow kind. It shows who drew it, where and when, and what they wished to say, and it shows nothing more. An eye on a seal shows that its designers knew a common church sign of Providence; it does not show who rules. The charges built on signs, from the idol the Templars were said to adore to the hoax that the lodges worship Baphomet, fall away when each sign is traced back to its makers.

How a student begins

The first practice is looking, with a pencil in hand. The student chooses one sign and finds it in as many places as possible, in a museum, a church, a temple, an old book, on a coin, a gravestone or a banknote, and draws each example small on the page with its place and date beneath. Copying a sign teaches its form as nothing else does: how many points or strokes, which way it turns, what is joined to it and what frames it.

Then of each example the student asks three questions: when was it made, who made it, and what did such a mark mean to those people then. The answers go down in order of date, each with whose reading it was, and whatever cannot be traced is marked as unknown rather than filled in. Done for a handful of signs, the habit soon sorts the old from the recent at a glance, and an old figure stops being frightening.

The branches, and how they stand

The branches of this art are single signs, each traced through all its houses. Three are figures drawn in lines: the pentagram, the six-pointed star, and the crosses with the ankh, from Egypt's sign for life to the chi-rho. Two are serpents: the ouroboros, with yin and yang beside it, and the two staffs of Hermes and of Asclepius. One is the eye, in its Egyptian, Mediterranean and Christian forms. Two are lessons in what can be done to a sign: the swastika, an old blessing taken for a party's badge, and Baphomet, a name from a charge made under torture and a drawing made long afterwards.

The pentagram is the best place to start, since it is the simplest figure with the longest line of readers. The six-pointed star follows, for the lesson that one figure can carry three histories, and then the serpents and the crosses. The eye, the swastika and Baphomet come last, once the habit of tracing a sign to its makers is firm.