Returning to the Source, 10

Chapter 9 closed on the patient weaving of myth, chant, and rite: those fragile nets the first sages tied, without knowing it, so that a formless experience might cross time without tearing apart. Chapter 10 traces this weaving back to its source, to where symbol still precedes word; it shows how a circle, a mountain, or a serpent can be recognized before they are understood, and why what touches the body before the intellect travels, intact, across languages and centuries.

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Chapter 10. Symbols Before Concepts

Before knowing what an experience means, people knew that it mattered. Long before writing, long before words arranged themselves into systems of thought, certain symbolic forms already reappeared from one people to another, with no one having consulted anyone else: a circle, a spiral, a cross, a tree, a mountain, a serpent, an eye. These forms explained nothing. They needed no explanation. They were recognized before they were understood.

This is the whole difference between a symbol and a concept. A concept defines itself. It cuts reality up, isolates a property, encloses it within limits that can be stated and debated. A symbol, on the other hand, cannot be defined: it is recognized. One does not ask what a sunrise means to someone who has just come through an entire night of anguish; one sees it on their face.

A symbol touches before it is understood, and it often goes on touching long after every explanation has been forgotten.

Take the circle again. It belongs to no particular culture, and yet it turns up almost everywhere: in the ring of people dancing around a fire, in the solar disc, in the wheel, in the mandala, in the halo of saints, in the ring exchanged between two people, in Zen, in the Tao.

No one ever needed to teach people that a circle could evoke wholeness, the beginning-and-endless, return. It was enough to see it drawn for something in the one looking at it to recognize it. Where does this recognition come from?

It probably comes from the fact that the symbol invents nothing: it gathers, into a simple form, something the body and the senses already knew. The circle of the sun rising and setting. The circle of the seasons returning without ever quite repeating themselves. The circle of the womb that carries life. The circle formed by a group around a fire at night. The circle of wholeness. The circle of the cycle.

All these experiences existed before any drawing came to trace them onto a wall or a piece of pottery. The symbol only gave visible form to an experience already lived by everyone. This is why the symbol precedes the concept, and not the other way around. People drew a spiral long before they could put into words a thought about the movement of life, which seems to repeat itself without ever quite repeating.

People drew a snake shedding its skin before they had words to speak of death as something they hoped was only a passage. Abstract thought would often arrive much later, trying to put into sentences what the hand had already known how to trace.

This precedence of gesture over idea is not a lesser status. On the contrary, it is what gives the symbol a strength the concept will never have: its ability to speak to someone who shares neither its language, nor its era, nor its doctrine.

A concept needs to be translated to travel from one culture to another, and it often wears thin in translation. A symbol travels almost intact, because it does not address itself first to reasoning intelligence, but to something older in a person, a layer of recognition that words cover over without ever quite erasing it.

Take the example of the mountain again. In traditions that never had the slightest contact with one another, the mountain became the place where one meets the sky, the sacred. People climb it to pray, to receive a law, to meet a god, to withdraw from the world, to die in peace.

No one ever needed to explain why. It is enough to have once climbed a long enough slope to feel the noise of the world thin out as the air grows rarer, to feel the horizon widen as one rises, to understand, without a word, why height has become, almost everywhere, an image of what surpasses the ordinary.

The symbol, then, does not invent an arbitrary meaning that must afterward be learned by heart, the way one learns a code. It rests on a bodily, sensory experience that almost any person, anywhere, can find again within themselves.

This is what explains why peoples separated by oceans, who never met, could choose similar images to express similar, ontological, things.

But the symbol, like the myth and the rite discussed in the previous chapter, carries within it the same danger as any form meant to endure: it can outlive what it once carried.

A circle drawn on a wall can become a mere decorative motif, repeated out of habit, with no one left feeling what it once pointed to. A symbolic gesture can be passed down for centuries, precisely codified, meticulously observed, while the door it once opened has long since closed in the awareness of those who repeat it.

This is when a symbol becomes a sign: a convention that is learned, rather than an evidence that is recognized. The difference matters greatly. A sign is read. A symbol is lived. One can know perfectly well what a dove represents in a given tradition without anything, in oneself, ever having resembled a peace that is more than the absence of war.

One can state the meaning of a mandala without ever having experienced the inner gathering it was meant to reflect, or even to bring about. Knowledge has then replaced recognition, and it is precisely this shift, an imperceptible one, that prepares the ground for the concept.

For the concept is often born this way: someone, one day, no longer having access to the experience the symbol recalled, sought to explain its meaning to others who, like them, no longer felt it. Words had to be put onto what the symbol had long done without words for. The concept then appeared like a bridge thrown toward an ever more distant bank; useful, sometimes necessary, but already a generation further from the source. The further the bank recedes, the longer the bridge grows, never quite managing to reach it.

This movement is neither a fall nor a betrayal. It is, most likely, simply inevitable. An experience passed down over centuries, across ever more numerous peoples, cannot forever remain entrusted to the silent recognition of a symbol alone. At some point, someone has to explain, discuss, clarify, systematize.

This is how theologies, philosophies, and doctrines are born: not as enemies of the symbol, but as its heirs, tasked with carrying further, with the tools of reason, what the symbol had carried with the tools of the body and the senses.

But an heir is not always faithful to what they inherit. And this is where the question that will run through the coming chapters begins to take shape: when a tradition explains a symbol, does it truly recover its meaning, or does it build, on the ruins of a forgotten experience, an edifice that has nothing left of the symbol but its facade?

For instance, did the three wise monkeys originally mean what they are made to mean today? What was the seal of Harappa really saying? There is no single answer to this question, and this book will be careful not to offer one for every tradition at once.

But there is a way to keep the question alive: every time a symbol, a myth, or a concept presents itself to us in the pages that follow, we will need to ask not only what it means, but what it may once have stirred in the mind of the one who created it. It is this question, more than any other, that will let us make our way back up the rivers and banks of doctrines to their common source.

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