Savitri

  VIII

'Symbols'

We come at long last to a consideration of 'symbols'. The word 'symbol' like many other words ('love' for example), has suffered from promiscuous use. There are symbols, and symbols, and symbols. There are algebraic symbols, which seem to be mere abstractions; but they too are pointers towards the real. There are election symbols, a hut for one party, a pair of yoked bullocks for another, the hammer and scythe for a third, and so on. Colours, singly or in combination or in lines and patterns, have a symbolic value too, as in national flags. And words, language itself, can be symbolic. Bernard Stambler describes a symbol as, "a tool, a device for expressing a difficult, complex, or even ineffable concept in concrete and even pictorial terms."³⁵ For example, T.S. Eliot has made use of the symbol of the 'Waste Land' to convey with over-powering effect the sense of the bleakness, ugliness and sterility of contemporary urban civilisation. Likewise, Albert Camus has exploited the symbol of the plague to expose the political and other evils that raged in German-occupied France, though the immediate situation of the plague-infested city is not lost sight of either.

      The essential thing to remember, however, is that the symbol is not just an arbitrary equation; there must be something of a natural relation, an inevitability, in the equation between the symbol and the thing it is meant to symbolise. As Jolande Jacobi says,

A symbol is never entirely abstract, but always in some way

'incarnated'. For this reason even the most abstract relationships,

situations, or ideas of archetypal nature are visualised by the psyche

as specific forms, figures, images, objects, etc...It was this image-

making power of the human psyche which, for example, cast the

archetype of the 'conflict between light and darkness, or good

and evil' into the forms of the hero's fight with the dragon...or

translated the 'idea of death and rebirth' into representable episodes

in the life of a hero, or into the symbol of the labyrinth.. .³⁶

There are, of course, two terms to every symbol, and these are equated; on the one side there is the visible image or sign (the Sun, the Hound of Heaven, the Cross, the Swastika, the quincunx), and on the other side the idea or force that the image or sign is meant to signify. "The condition for the valid use of symbolic language is", writes W. T. Stace, "that both terms should be in some sense present to the mind...It is not necessary that the meaning of the symbolic language, or symbolizandum, should be clearly before the mind. It may be only dimly and faintly apprehended in the borderlands of consciousness, or perhaps in the sub-conscious.. .But clearly or dimly,

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the symbolizandum must be apprehended for the language to have any meaning."³⁷ If it is immediately and perfectly understandable, the symbol is superfluous; if it cannot be understood at all, or if an arbitrary meaning has to be imposed on it, the symbol fails to achieve its purpose. In a legitimate efficacious symbol, "there is concealment and yet revelation: hence, therefore, by silence and speech acting together, comes a double significance."³⁸ It is simply the process of groping one's way from the twilight to the dusky regions, from the more known to the less known. And the process can almost be endless. When the passage from Ignorance to Truth is symbolised as the passage from Darkness to Light, it is not merely that such a similitude just occurred to some people in the past and found general currency; it means also, and more basically, that such a way of putting things is natural, it is inherent in the very nature of things, and indeed there is no other way in which the right distinctions can be made and fixed in the consciousness, to be a part of it forever.³⁹

      The symbol, it would appear then, is a natural starting-point of a journey of discovery and realisation; the starting point, the face set towards the goal, the ardour of the journey (or the chase), all are somehow implied in the symbol. To quote Jacobi again, "symbols present an objective, visible meaning behind which an invisible, profounder meaning is hidden"; the invisible is crystallised into the visible symbol, which as it were 'contains' the invisible infinite; or, in Goethe's words (as quoted by Jacobi), "symbolism transforms the phenomenon into idea and the idea into image; in the image the idea remains infinitely effective and unattainable and even when expressed in all languages remains inexpressible."⁴⁰

      As in the best poetry, more is meant than meets the ear, as with the best paintings, more is meant than meets the eye, it is as though one is looking into a deep pool or the tranquil blue sky. A mystic symbol like 'AUM', a dramatic symbol like the Lord himself driving Arjuna's chariot through the embattled hosts on the field of Kurukshetra, a religious symbol like the Cross, a hunting symbol like the Hound

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of Heaven pursuing the frightened sinner, a dialectical symbol like Savitri vanquishing Yama, are all vivid and vague at once, vivid and therefore fixed in the mind, vague and therefore intriguing and hence compelling a drawing on or tapping of "a stored experience and a vestigial wisdom."⁴¹

      Traditional symbolism, although with its roots in antiquity, is never rigid; had it been so, it should have gone atrophied or died long ago. There is a dynamism in all living symbols, they always (though in each age, perhaps, a little differently) take the mind from the narrow to the more wide regions, from the surface play to the deeper reality, and hence Gai Eaton is right in affirming that, "traditional symbolism is never a closed system, for its terms are fluid and susceptible of different applications, but it is always precise."⁴²

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