communication, calling human beings homo symbolicus. Su-
sanne Langer extended the argument further, viewing sym-
bolization as one of the most basic and primitive functions
of mind. Symbols appear not only in rational, discursive
thought and behavior but also in the arts, which Langer at-
tempts to define as varieties of “virtual” behavior. Theorizing
of the symbolic process, therefore, typically involves theoriz-
ing of the structure of the psyche itself in order to explain
how meaning is created and handed down as humans repro-
duce. The British linguistic analysts and those of the Vienna
Circle also contributed to symbolic theory: they were con-
cerned with discovering the invariable patterns by which
meaning enters into human communication and with dis-
posing of the distorted patterns by which meaning is turned
into nonsense. Moreover, Freud’s point of departure in the
neurotic symptom and Jung’s search for archaic, archetypal
patterns both represent attempts to describe the universal
structure of mind in terms of symbol-making processes.
THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS. The problem of
symbolic meaning introduces a consideration of hermeneu-
tics and of semiotic logic. To the extent that they invoke a
hermeneutics, religious symbols ask the scholar to consider
what qualities—subjective, objective, or both—define a sym-
bol as religious. Next, the researcher must determine whether
a possible religious symbol is actually functioning as a living
symbol or should instead be classified as some other form of
communication. What works as a symbol in one age may,
even within a given tradition, cease to be relevant in the next
age. Naturally, the same precept applies to differences among
various cultural settings, and even among individuals. Prob-
lems like these underlie the distinction between a synchronic
study of symbols, which seeks to locate a symbol within a
certain living context or fund of symbols, and a diachronic
approach, which looks for invariable patterns in religious
symbolism. While many anthropologists take the synchronic
approach, Lévi-Strauss represents the diachronic approach.
His work on patterns of binary opposition has tried to brack-
et the question of the concrete meaning of symbols in order
to concentrate on the deep structure of the symbol-making
mind. Most students of the religious symbol part from him
on this point. Many, in fact, would say that Lévi-Strauss
himself subsequently departed from this position by arguing
that one cannot clarify the process of signification without
beginning with the concrete meaning of concrete symbols.
Turning to semiotics, religious symbols raise equally
fundamental questions. Early in the twentieth century, the
Swiss linguistic theoretician Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–
1913) set the tone for much of general symbolic theory. He
had three objectives: to identify the signifier, to determine
just what it is signifying, and to describe the mechanism by
which the signifying process takes place. Yet another aspect,
one that Saussure purposefully neglected in his own work,
has proved to be essential to many of the most creative mod-
ern studies of religious symbolism: namely, the nature and
extent of the relationship between signifier and signified,
apart from the actual mechanism by which it is established.
Mircea Eliade made one of the boldest attempts to de-
scribe this relationship in terms appropriate to religious sym-
bolism. Echoing the Symbolists and Romantics, Eliade con-
tended that the symbol reveals certain dimensions of reality
that would otherwise elude understanding. For him, these
deeper dimensions are disclosed not only through the reflec-
tion of the interpreter of the symbols, but also in the “inter-
nal logic” of the symbols. This idea, however, depends on
the premise that there is something contained “in” the sym-
bol that is being disclosed. He and Rudolf Otto, call this em-
bedded something “the sacred,” a reality of an order distinct
from the natural and possessed of a power beyond humans’
comprehension and control. This shift away from the know-
ing subject does not deny the opening assertion that symbols
are constituted as such subjectively, nor that they are basical-
ly cultural phenomena. Rather, it moves away from the an-
thropological approach to one that seeks to remove the arbi-
trariness from the symbol, through an assertion that the
symbol reveals something else, something outside the closed
system of human cultural production. This attitude opens
a path to understanding “natural symbols” that goes beyond
investigations into the natural capacity of mind, and estab-
lishes symbolic conventions in order to capture invariable
patterns of meaning that those conventions communicate.
Jung’s research into “natural symbols” gradually deflect-
ed his mature work away from models of the psyche and
questions of physiology toward a search for “archetypal” pat-
terns of meaning by which symbols could be classified and
interrelated. Although his early work with Freud had con-
vinced him of the need to see the symbolic process at work
in the psychic appropriation of physiological processes, Jung
eventually placed greater emphasis on the religious and spiri-
tual significance of universal patterns that appear in the indi-
vidual experience of symbols.
Opinions vary widely regarding the general nature, clas-
sification of forms, and function of symbolism in culture and
psyche, and the problems multiply when considering the ac-
tual interpretation of particular symbols. The topic is com-
monly divided into two areas: a general hermeneutics, or
rules for interpreting symbols, and actual exegesis within a
given hermeneutics. Many scholars have attempted to pro-
duce universally applicable lexicons of symbols purporting
to decode the secrets of dreams, religious imagery, esoteric
traditions, and the like. A philosophical approach to herme-
neutics that is more congenial to scholarly endeavors and
closer to the goal of the Romantics is Ricoeur’s restatement
of one of the symbol’s oldest characteristics: that a symbol
both reveals and conceals—that it possesses both a symptom-
hiding and a truth-proclaiming dimension. In this view,
meaning and the interpretation of meaning are essential and
complementary moments in the general phenomenology of
the symbol: interpretation involves refining the symbol and
looking to the interpreter to reveal everything condensed in
the symbol. The symptomatic dimension of the symbol, for
Ricoeur, finds its clearest exponent in Freud, who attemptedSYMBOL AND SYMBOLISM 8913