HOME - The Symbolic World

Rediscovering the symbolic patterns that inform the cosmos

Register today and receive a free gift View Membership details

SUBSCRIBER GIFTS & HIGHLIGHTS

Exclusive content offered to new subscribers, as a welcome to the community

PODCASTS

Podcasts, interviews, and commentaries from the Symbolic World

View all

LATEST NEWS

Snow White and the Widow Queen Kickstarter

Snow White and The Widow Queen marks a re-awakening of the traditional fairy tale.



June 6, 2023

June 2, 2023

learn more

Additional News

No other news yet...

LATEST CONTENT

ARTICLES

Articles on diverse subjects related to symbolism in our world today.

On the Preliminary Symbolic Meaning of Perfume

Articles

On the Preliminary Symbolic Meaning of Perfume

Olfactory experiences, like all symbolic experiences, mediate between the life of the person and the hierarchy of the kosmos by using a high level of metonymical, analogical, and metaphorical expression. This should be clear to us due to the immediate physiological and psychological link found in scent. The link can be easily understood by the way in which smell is processed....

The Artistry of the Machine in the Empire of Desire

“Art imitates nature.” Many take this concept, which goes at least as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics, to mean that artists represent what they find in the natural world like a landscape painter might replicate a scenic view or a musician might copy the sound of birds. Yet Aristotle actually meant something far more basic (and to contemporary sensibilities, disruptive)...

‘Cosmos’: A Poetic Reflection on the Medieval Model

Beginning June 6th, a group of us here at The Symbolic World will be reading and discussing C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy. Beginning with Out of the Silent Planet, we will pay close attention to Lewis’s fictional exploration of cosmological models. In his treatise on medieval literature The Discarded Image, Lewis expressed his “hope to persuade the reader not only that this Model of the Universe is a supreme medieval work of art but that it is in a sense the central work...