The Ancient Code of Symbols
Look around. Your world is stitched together with symbols — most so familiar, so ever-present, that you no longer see them. Road signs, brand logos, glowing icons on your devices: modern glyphs vying silently for your attention, whispering instructions, permissions, warnings.
A simple picture becomes a message. The golden arches promise fast indulgence. A heart carved into bark becomes a vow. A wolf in sheep’s clothing? A fable encoded in form. This is symbolism: the art of capturing complex ideas in compact, visual form.
But beyond the convenience of logos and shortcuts lies a far older language. A language that predates writing. An archaic inheritance etched in stone, woven into myth, painted on cave walls, and emblazoned on royal seals. These were not mere decorations. These were signals. Codes. Maps of memory and meaning.
To study these is to enter the realm of symbology — the decoding of visual language in historical and cultural context. It is not enough to see the shape; one must ask: Who first drew it? Why? When? What did it mean then, and what does it mean now?
Symbols migrate. They evolve. A motif once sacred in one culture is absorbed, reinterpreted, sometimes weaponized by another. The same image, repeated across continents, may signify kingship in one land, divinity in another. This is no coincidence. This is cultural transmission across millennia, often carried invisibly through trade, conquest, and story.
Consider the Double Eagle – a regal emblem with wings unfurled and heads turned both East and West. It once adorned imperial standards, signifying dominion over yesterday and tomorrow. Yet long before this symbol crowned Czars and Kaisers, the Egyptians placed twin lions at the horizon — one facing the past, the other the future. Same idea, different form. The image endured because the idea did.
Many symbols trace back to the heavens. Our ancestors, eyes fixed on the stars, recorded the cycles of sun and moon with notched bones, painted spirals, and solar glyphs. Day and night. Summer and winter. Death and rebirth. Time itself, abstracted into shape.
Today, these ancient markings may seem inert, museum curiosities, or mystical wallpaper. But for those who learn to read them, they are alive. They connect us to a time when the boundary between myth and science was porous, and the sky was not a void but a calendar, a compass, a cathedral.
Symbology invites us to remember what we have forgotten: that long before the alphabet marched across parchment, there were symbols — silent, powerful, enduring.
And they are still speaking.
