Symbolism over Literalism

The Greek verb symballein — to throw together, to bring two things into conjunction — gives us our word "symbol," and this etymology is philosophically revealing. A symbol, in the deep sense that the esoteric traditions intend, is not an arbitrary conventional sign pointing to something else — a red light meaning "stop," or the letter A meaning the phoneme /æ/. A symbol is a bringing-together of two realities: the visible, tangible, audible form and the invisible reality for which it serves as the point of access. The symbol participates in what it symbolises; it is not merely a pointer but a partial presence of the reality it indicates. To encounter the symbol with genuine attention is not merely to think about what it represents but to be drawn into the reality it makes present. This is why the esoteric traditions treat symbols with a reverence that is entirely disproportionate to their surface appearance: the fish drawn in the dust, the pentagram inscribed in the air, the Hebrew letter aleph — these are not decorations but thresholds.

Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254 CE), the most philosophically sophisticated exegete of the early Christian tradition, developed a systematic theory of Scriptural interpretation that would shape Western hermeneutics for more than a millennium. Drawing on Platonic and Stoic precedents, Origen distinguished three levels of meaning in the sacred text, corresponding to the three constituents of the human being: the literal or somatic sense (accessible to all readers, concerned with the plain narrative), the moral or psychic sense (the ethical instruction concealed in the narrative), and the spiritual or pneumatic sense (the deepest meaning, accessible only to those who have developed the spiritual capacity to receive it). The same text thus speaks differently to different readers — not because the text is ambiguous or vague, but because it is structured to deliver, to each reader, exactly what they are capable of receiving. This dynamic hermeneutic — in which the text grows with the reader, always having more to offer to those who have grown — is characteristic of the esoteric approach to sacred literature across traditions.

The Neoplatonic theory of theurgy and symbol, developed by Iamblichus of Chalcis in the late third century CE, offers the most philosophically rigorous account of how symbols can be not merely representations of divine realities but actual participations in them. For Iamblichus, the theurgic symbols (symbola and synthemata) used in ritual practice are not conventional signs — not semeia, arbitrary markers pointing to absent referents — but genuine expressions of the divine realities they invoke, placed in the material world by the gods themselves for the purpose of enabling human ascent. The fire on the altar is not merely a reminder of the divine fire; it is a participation in the divine fire, a fragment of the sacred flame through which the divine fire can act in the material world and the human soul can be drawn toward the divine source. This ontological participation theory of symbols is perhaps the most important single contribution of Neoplatonism to the esoteric hermeneutic: it grounds the symbolic approach not in literary convention or psychological projection but in the actual metaphysical structure of reality.

The Kabbalistic system of PaRDeS — an acronym formed from the initial letters of the four levels of Scriptural interpretation — represents the most elaborate and influential Jewish development of the symbolic hermeneutic. Peshat is the plain or literal meaning of the text; Remez is the allegorical or allusive meaning, in which the narrative points toward metaphysical and cosmological truths; Derash is the homiletical meaning, developed through creative exegesis for moral and devotional purposes; Sod is the secret or mystical meaning, accessible only to the Kabbalist who has penetrated to the innermost level of the text. The word PaRDeS itself means "orchard" or "garden" — it is the same word used in the famous Talmudic story of the four sages who "entered the Pardes" and had four different outcomes, only Rabbi Akiva entering in peace and leaving in peace. The story encodes the hermeneutical point: the deepest levels of textual meaning, like the deepest levels of mystical experience, are accessible only to those who have prepared themselves sufficiently to navigate them without being destroyed.

Dante Alighieri's Letter to Can Grande (c. 1317), in which he describes the interpretive method appropriate to his Commedia, represents a remarkable secular deployment of the same four-level hermeneutic developed by the Kabbalists for sacred Scripture. Dante explicitly identifies four senses of his poem — literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical (the last concerned with the soul's ascent toward God) — and insists that the full meaning of the poem requires all four levels simultaneously. The Commedia is not merely a narrative about a man's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; it is simultaneously an allegory of the soul's journey toward God, a moral instruction in the dangers of sin and the rewards of virtue, and an anagogical vision of the soul's ultimate transformation. Dante's appropriation of the sacred hermeneutic for secular poetry is a landmark moment in Western literary and esoteric history: it declares that the symbolic depth previously reserved for Scripture belongs to all genuine poetry, and that the art of reading at depth is not a specialist theological skill but a general capacity of the cultivated mind.

Carl Jung's psychological hermeneutic — his systematic reading of myth, dream, fairy tale, religious imagery, and alchemical symbolism as expressions of the archetypal dynamics of the unconscious psyche — represents the most influential twentieth-century development of the esoteric principle of symbolism over literalism. For Jung, the symbols of mythology are not primitive attempts at scientific explanation (the reductive rationalist reading), nor are they merely charming stories (the aestheticist reading), but genuine expressions of deep psychological truth — functional images arising from the collective unconscious that carry real transformative potential when engaged with properly. A myth of descent to the underworld is not a failed cosmology but a precise symbolic description of what the psyche undergoes in depression, grief, or any other experience of being "brought low" by forces greater than the ego's capacity to manage. Reading the myth symbolically is not a retreat from truth but an engagement with a deeper order of truth than the literal narrative can convey.

The cosmos itself, in the Hermetic tradition, is not a mere physical mechanism but a vast text of symbols — a Book of Nature in which every creature, every phenomenon, every configuration of matter and force carries a meaning that the initiated reader can decipher. Paracelsus's famous doctrine of signatures — the conviction that plants display in their physical form an indication of their healing virtues, that yellow plants heal jaundice, that walnut meat shaped like a brain addresses brain conditions — is often cited as a crude pseudoscience, but it rests on a genuine and coherent metaphysical assumption: that the visible world is a system of symbols pointing toward invisible realities, and that careful observation of the visible will, for the prepared eye, reveal the invisible. The universe, for the Hermeticist, is not mute: it speaks a symbolic language to those who have learned its grammar, and the practitioner who can read this language has access to a kind of practical wisdom about the relationships between things that cannot be obtained by any merely empirical method.

The crucial Romantic-era distinction between symbol and allegory — articulated most influentially by Goethe and taken up by Coleridge, Schelling, and the German Idealists — has important implications for the esoteric hermeneutic. For Goethe, allegory is the conventional mapping of an abstract idea onto a concrete image: the image is subordinated to the idea and could in principle be replaced by any other image that illustrated the same idea. Symbol, by contrast, is the living presence of an idea in a form that cannot be separated from it: the form and the meaning are inseparable, because the meaning exists nowhere else but in this particular form. The distinction matters for the esoteric traditions because it identifies what is at stake in the preference for the symbolic: the esotericist is not claiming that sacred texts are sophisticated allegories, where the surface narrative stands for something else that could just as well be stated directly. The claim is more radical: the symbols are the meaning, and the meaning cannot be extracted from them without loss. The fish does not merely point to Christ; the fish participates in Christ, and to handle the fish symbol with genuine attention is to handle something of the reality it embodies.