When I was young, the idea that a red rose meant true love — while a pink rose meant appreciation and a yellow rose meant friendship — charmed me. I wanted to find more symbols that related to customs (like the giving of flowers) in meaningful ways. But I didn’t find them. In Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell offers one explanation for this dearth of symbols in American culture: we happen to be living in a time when our secular social order doesn’t share a set of public religious symbols. We don’t live in a world where everyone knows that three intertwined fish indicate the Trinity, or that a samurai warrior is symbolized by the cherry, or that the axis mundi is marked by a cosmic tree. In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell urges us to find our own private symbols, but he doesn’t explain how to do so — though he adds that it’s the artist’s job to find modern symbols for our symbol-poor culture.
Early in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, the teenaged main character and his mother tour a museum exhibit called “Portraiture and Nature Morte.” The mother explains how painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer often subtly placed a “speak of rot” into their paintings of flowers and fruit. The item wouldn’t jump to the eye, especially amidst “all the beauty and bloom,” but it was there all the same. The rot was symbolic of death, as the mother explains:
“Well, the Dutch invented the microscope,” she said. “They were jewelers, grinders of lenses. They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life — a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple — the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last — it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes.”
I don’t know if this symbology is still used today, but I’m going to keep an eye out for it. Either way, I’m grateful to Tartt for bringing these symbols for “death in life” into the modern age via her novel.
One of my favorite dramas, HBO’s Enlightened, uses the sea turtle as a symbol of enlightenment. Amy, the protagonist, first sees a sea turtle while swimming at a holistic treatment facility in Hawaii (where she’s recovering from a work-related meltdown). Amy’s memory of this moment — the sea turtle slowly paddling its two huge front paws through the blue-green water — appears on the show multiple times. In the show’s pilot, Amy sees it as she takes the elevator up to her old office, and it serves as a reminder to hold onto her spiritual awakening as she returns to work. Later in the series, her description of the sea turtle helps her ex-husband, Levi, make it through his drug-related stay at the same facility in Hawaii; her symbol becomes his symbol.
To remember the turtle, Amy brought a big, green, whorled shell back from Hawaii, and the show’s final episode, “Agent of Change,” begins as Amy wakes, looks at the shell, and muses:
Am I my highest self? Or am I stuck in the mud? Am I an agent of change? Or a creator of chaos? Am I the fool? The goat? The witch? Or am I enlightened?
Until writing this post, I didn’t know that the sea turtle is a Buddhist symbol. Buddha uses the sea turtle to tell a story about how lucky we are to be born human, and therefore what a duty we have to follow “the path of practice leading to the cessation of suffering” — which is what Amy tries to do throughout the show.
Since writing this post, I’ve noticed more symbols, though not contemporary ones. On the coziest show on TV, The Great British Bake Off, one contestant recently made an ornate, saffron-tinted, crown-shaped Spanish cake meant to celebrate God — so a cake can be a symbol of the divine. And in yoga class I saw a huge tattoo on a fellow yogi’s back of what looked like a cosmic tree. Though these symbols only partially resonate with me, it’s reassuring to see them, and gives me hope that I’ll find my own private symbols.
As a student of Joseph Campbell’s explains:
Joseph taught me to see beyond the symbols to the riches they represent. Those who cannot see beyond the symbol, he remarked, are “like diners going into a restaurant and eating the menu,” rather than the meal it describes. There is a good deal of menu eating in the world, and the result is a feeling of emptiness and an impoverishment of the spirit.