Articles
Axes Mundi: The Columns of Constantinople, Part One
Preamble For ancient civilisations, the erection of monuments—whether they were obelisks or honorific columns—implied, from a symbolic point of view, a correspondence or intersection between the horizontal or earthly/terrestrial and the vertical or heavenly/celestial...
Facing Up to the City of God: Transposing Augustine’s Political Theology for Modern Christians
The question of politics has been the point of contention in much of public discourse. Whether on social media or at the dining table for a holiday dinner, we find ourselves in varying degrees of disagreement on any number of issues. However, as the common thread of...
Technology and the Return of the Old Gods
At the close of the Millennium, David Noble published a book with Penguin titled, The Religion of Technology, in which he explored the spiritual underpinnings behind the modern technological vision. In the book’s introduction, Noble commented on the strange fusion of...
Peter & John, Martha & Mary — The Symbolism of the Active and the Contemplative
The following is a translated and transcribed version of a french podcast recorded in July 2021 by Jonathan Pageau and Jean-Philippe Marceau. JP: Welcome everyone to this new episode of The Symbolic Life with Jonathan Pageau and JP Marceau, after a few weeks of...
The Black Phone: Salvation With Fear and Trembling
Scott Derrickson left a lucrative gig directing Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to make The Black Phone, moving from popular but superficial to niche but genuine treatment of good resisting evil. A devout Christian, Derrickson delivers the moral conflict...
As Above, So Below: Palatial Symbolism in Late Antique and Medieval Constantinople
It is a truism that for ancient persons, the natural world revealed the sacred. Thus, when the dissociation between human beings and nature occurred with the beginning of agriculture and the rise of the first towns and cities (from c. 5000 BC onwards), this...
A Liminal State: Canadian Symbolism and Identity
Canada has always symbolically occupied a space between worlds, peoples, and empires. We are a frontier society—between the old world and the new, European and Indigenous, English and French, Canadian and American. Plenty of regions and peoples have been in-between...
Of Saints and Gorgons: Multivalent Aquatic Symbolism in Late Antique Constantinople
Water has been perceived symbolically since ancient times. In other words, from the activity of water in certain circumstances can be inferred certain phenomena. These can be sustaining and life-endowing, as is the case when we drink water or when rain and irrigation...
Story as the Key to the Cosmos: An Exploration of the Symbolic Design of Narrative
This article investigates storytelling through a symbolic lens.
The Symbolic World vs Egregores, Part 2
Is our terminology around higher beings really sufficient? Does the ‘materialist’ trend in how people have seen and begun to use the word ‘egregore’ approach some truth that has not been accounted for in the Christian cosmology we have previously described?