to reduce all symbols to some repression of desire. (Ricoeur
found Jung too obscure and difficult to follow.) To Freud’s
“hermeneutic of suspicion,” which is basically a process of
“demystification,” Ricoeur adds a hermeneutic standpoint
long preserved in the West through Christian interpreters of
the words of the scriptures: opening oneself up to the inex-
haustible “kerygmatic” (teaching) capacity of the symbol.
THE ENDURANCE OF SYMBOLS. The idea of the symbolic has
proved compelling across the centuries and over many dispa-
rate cultures. This may have as much to do with what the
symbol hides as with what it puts on display. Among the dif-
ferent types of figuration of which humans have conceived,
symbols most consistently promise revelation—but they earn
this capacity through an equal and opposite tendency to
mystify. From the early passwords of the mystery religions,
to the secret hermeneutics of Pseudo-Dionysius, to the Ro-
mantics’ vehicles toward the transcendent, to Eliade’s prom-
ise of divine disclosure, the symbol is a repository for the pe-
rennial desire of humans to see their gods. Since direct
revelation lies out of reach, one settles for an image, a repre-
sentation that is usually called a symbol. At the same time,
the more this mode of figuration promises, the more it takes
away. Clouds of mystery thicken around the signified to the
precise degree that the signifier comes more clearly into view.
At last, face-to-face always turns out to be not yet.
Although symbols are a human creation, they seem to
have a life of their own, describing a dimension of human
experience that stubbornly resists humans’ control. Conse-
quently, they have become especially relevant in a world that
has developed increasingly elaborate conceptions of its own
utter self-containment. Technological advances and expan-
sion of knowledge—dizzying over the mere forty lifetimes
that separate us from the classical Greeks—stand as impedi-
ments to even entertaining the idea of human limitation. But
the symbol endures, ready to reassert, via a rich language of
human imagination and through a process that operates at
the root level of human experience, the infinite expanse
against which humans’ most magnificent achievements must
always, in the end, be measured.
SEE ALSO Cassirer, Ernst; Eliade, Mircea; Iconography; Im-
ages, article on Images, Icons, and Idols; Jung, C. G.; Lang-
er, Susanne; Myth, overview article.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Among the most extensive and readily accessible bibliographies on
symbolism are those included in Juan Eduardo Circlot, A
Dictionary of Symbolism, translated by Jack Sage (1962; 2d
ed., New York, 1971), and Raymond Firth, Symbols: Public
and Private (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973). Circlot’s lengthy introduc-
tory essay offers a helpful overview of symbolic theory, par-
ticularly as it pertains to the interpretation of esoteric materi-
al. The first six chapters of Firth’s masterful work constitute
the perhaps most comprehensive treatment available of the
rise and development of anthropological work on symbols;
in addition, he covers the range of opinion regarding the rela-
tionship between symbol and myth. Other helpful sources
are the introduction of C. M. Bowra in A Heritage of Symbol-
ism (1943; reprint, New York, 1961), which contains a brief
but authoritative account of the French Symbolists; and
Otto Gruppe, Geschichte der klassischen Mythologie und Reli-
gionsgeschichte während des Mittelalters im Abendland and
während der Neuzeit (Leipzig, 1921) and Jean Pépin, Mythe
et allégorie: Les origenes grecques et les contestations judéo-
chrétiennes (Paris, 1976), which contains detailed informa-
tion on numerous thinkers in Western history who came to
symbolic theory by way of classical mythology. For more in-
formation on the classical background, see Peter T. Struck,
Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of their Texts
(Princeton, N.J., 2004).
An important study of the religious-symbolic qualities attributed
to the written word is Alfred Bertholet’s Die Macht der
Schrift in Glauben und Aberglauben (Berlin, 1949). Harold
Bayley’s The Lost Language of Symbolism, 2 vols. in 1 (1912;
reprint, London, 1974), despite its age, remains a classic
study of the origin of symbolic folklore surrounding the em-
blem, including much material of directly religious interest.
Myth, Symbol, and Reality, edited by Alan M. Olson (Notre
Dame, Ind., 1980), presents a good overview of the range of
current symbolic theory; Jacques Waardenburg’s notes pro-
vide a good deal of useful bibliographical material. A study
by John Skorupski, Symbol and Theory: A Philosophical Study
of Theories of Religion in Social Anthropology (Cambridge,
U.K., 1976), draws careful attention to the contribution that
recent British philosophy has made to clarifying the conflicts
in anthropological opinion. Philip Pettit, The Concept of
Structuralism (Berkeley, Calif., 1975) and Peter Munz, When
the Golden Bough Breaks: Structuralism or Typology? (London,
1973) are both short but extremely helpful guides to the de-
bate surrounding the work of Lévi-Strauss and its relation-
ship to linguistic theory. In the latter half of his book, Munz
does a particularly noteworthy job of isolating the principal
theoretical problems faced by psychology, metaphysics, and
mythology in trying to explain the symbolic process. In a
provocative little book, Rethinking Symbolism, translated by
Alice L. Morton (Cambridge, U.K., 1975), Dan Sperber ar-
gues forcefully against the underlying assumption of much
current theory about symbols’ meaning—in particular the
ideas of Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Turner—on the grounds
that they work without meaning at all.
The opening chapter of Mircea Eliade’s Images and Symbols:
Studies in Religious Symbolism (New York, 1961) is a helpful
introduction to the basic philosophical position he has main-
tained rather consistently throughout his work; also see
Eliade’s “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious
Symbolism” in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodolo-
gy, ed. Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago,
1959). In Freud and Philosophy (New Haven, Conn., 1970),
Paul Ricoeur lays out in detail his own theory of symbolism,
in contrast not only to Freud’s psychoanalysis but also to
other philosophical schools. A straightforward history of
modern hermeneutics that aids in connecting symbolism
with contemporary Christian theology and exegesis work has
been done by Richard E. Palmer in Hermeneutics: Interpreta-
tion Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Ga-
damer (Evanston, Ill., 1969). For a concise account of Paul
Tillich’s position and its major objections to psychological,
sociological, and philosophical approaches to the symbol, see8914 SYMBOL AND SYMBOLISM