> [!orbit] Helen Luke in *The Way of Woman* > Symbol: The meeting point of conscious and unconscious meanings which awaken in us an awareness of something that cannot be expressed in rational terms. (glossary) > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *The Red Book* > If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know. (p. 311) > [!Orbit] Jill Mellick in *The Art of Dreaming* > The more an object or entity stands for itself in a particular time and place, the less it is a metaphor. The more it stands for something else, the more it takes on the function of metaphor. When it stands for something else consistently over a period of time, it becomes a symbol. > The snake that appears once is an image with possible metaphoric and symbolic overtones; the snake that appears twice is beginning to stand for something in the soul; the snake that appears again and again takes on the authority of a personal symbol in our private mythology. (p. 164) > [!orbit] Marie-Louise von Franz in *Alchemy: An introduction to the symbolism and the psychology* > …a knowledge of symbolism is a net, so to speak, in which one can at least catch the unspeakable mystery of an immediate experience of the unconscious > [!Orbit] [[Mary Oliver]] in *A Poetry Handbook* > We all share a universal fund of perceptions. Within this fund are perceptions so ancient, dramatic, and constant that they have been, over the centuries, mythologized. They have been inexorably bound up in each of us with certain reliable responses. I am speaking of such archetypal concepts as the ocean as mother, the sun as a symbol of health and hope, and the return of spring as resurrection, the bird as a symbol of the spirit, the lion as an emblem of courage, the rose as an example of ephemeral beauty — concepts that link some object or action of the natural world on the one hand, and our all but preordained response to it on the other. (pp. 105-106)