Symbols

What is the meaning of a symbol?

Why are certain natural elements represented with symbols..

gafr wrote:

What is the meaning of a symbol?

Why are certain natural elements represented with symbols..

You means symbols, like letters, put in a sequence we call words?

Symbol is a representation of a pattern, interpreted as an abstraction.
Symbol refers to the abstractions, which is a representation, a simplification/generalization of a phenomenon.
Symbol = the externalization of a neurological abstraction - a noumenon (idea) given shape and form that can be shared.

Noumenon = abstraction of phenomenon.
Abstraction = simplification/generalization - reduction of the phenomenon's spatial dimensions (possibility).
Two types of noumena =
1- a product of a direct interpretation, of phenomena, using the sense organ, or the nervous system. The abstractions are stored in memory as neurological configurations. If given a symbol they are codified - converted to code.
Experiences, either first or second hand, are stored memories.
Genes and memes, are stored experiences.
2- Abstractions, stored in memory combined into forms that have nothing to do with the phenomena they interpreted, or contradict the experienced.
Suck combinations have no external reference, and so are pure noetic constructs created in the mind.

Phenomenon = appearance, presence.
Appearance = interpretations of an interactive pattern, and/or congruence of patterns.

Pattern = ordering - repeating, consistent, rhythm - dynamic oscillation/vibration.
Congruence = two, or more patterns perceived at the moment, in space/time, of their interacting.
Unity = a congruence that has achieved balance, due to their interactive dynamics
Interaction = repulsion/attraction between two, or more, patterns.

I was referring more specifically to ancient pagan symbols, but technically it would apply to the written letter symbols.

So the creation of pagan symbols were to communicate with each other, or communicate the self with reality.

I guess a better question to ask would be how were those symbols used?

Like for example, I see buildings constructed with pagan symbols carved into them, some very sophisticated requiring a lot of work..I wondered, since it's clearly done out of seriousness, why would they choose to put symbols into buildings...Just decoration?

Same way all symbols are still used.
Symbols communicate abstractions.

An abstraction - noumenon - can be a combination of patterns.
The symbol facilitates the representation of multiple patterns with one representation - simplification/generalization.
Pagans used them to represent a multiplicity of natural processes they experienced in nature.

Their gods were symbols of the same.

Symbols are also ways of communicating complex concepts to the average, mediocre, laymen - reducing the symbolized to a singular thing, the average mind can comprehend and relate to.
For example, Zeus was a symbol of the electromagnetic forces, given a form a simpleton can grasp and comprehend in the only way he could.
Thor was a symbol of electromagnetism and gravity.
A symbol can also communicate, through time/space.

The Christians carve crosses everywhere...but most Christians have no clue as to what it represents, other than on a superficial level.
The sacrifice of their corporeality, their reason, in order to be saved, from their own nature (primordial sin), and be deserving of eternity, even if they are simpletons and are born mortals, is intuitively understood - it is felt, and given the word "faith".


Symbols reduce/generalize, so that the lowest man can comprehend it on a superficial level, and surrender to its insinuated meaning.

How does the concept of worship differ between the pagan tradition and Christian tradition, i'm aware that one is connected to reality and the other isn't, more specifically why is there a concept of worshiping natural elements?

Paganism worships but does not surrender - it does not idolize.
Pagan gods were fallible, they could be tricked.
Man struggled along side them.

Natural forces are also ephemeral.
electromagnetism, for example, will split into magnetism and electric force.

The four forces of nature were once two.
Increasing entropy is this splintering....they will become eight, then sixteen...and so on.
Forces of nature are rules governing order, not randomness, not chaos.
The gods were anthropomorphic representations of natural order - of natural forces, laws.

Perhaps the Titans had a bit of the chaotic about them....the gods had to defeat.

Christians do not believe in anything of this world. they believe in its antithesis - its nullification.
Their noetic constructs contradict experience.
Their god is a singularity, an absolute, with no reference to anything outside the mind.

The noumenon is inverted, and cast as a covering over the phenomenal world we experience.
They believe in a more 'real' reality - a world to substitute this 'fake' one they must endure.

Pagan gods were more powerful than humans, but not omnipotent, not omniscient, not ONE.
Their gods were real, in that they could experience their god's energies within world.
They could witness their deities in nature, because they were representations of nature, not negations of it, like the one Abrahamic God.

What pagan symbols are important that are no longer in use or there being no modern alternative in any other form of the symbol?

The pantheon, for one.
Symbols referring to natural, observable, experienced forces.

Pagan gods were more than abstractions to be given to the masses to placate their anxieties.
More than myth and mystical.
They were symbols of natural order, or of ancestries.

The most important thing about symbols is not which ones, but in what manner they are used.
It does not matter what language you use, or it does not matter as much, as how you use your symbols.
If the pantheon is not used appropriately, it results in clouding, and not lucidity, just as the wrong usage of any language produces confusion rather than clarity.

The pagan pantheon, if used as Abrahamics use their own anti-life, anti-world God, will lead to the same degeneration - see how Christianity did just that, replacing the gods with saints, and detaching their gods from world they reattach them words, triggering emotions.
Symbols must be used properly, otherwise they can be converted to symbols that contradict the original meaning.
Consider the application of pagan deities, heroes, demigods by changing their names and converting them to the reverse, as the Christians did.
The hijacking of symbols to then make them into a contrary to the original is easy and duplicitous. Christianity adopted pagan symbols and rituals, changed them, to hide their plagiarism, and then reinterpreted the symbols to refer to abstractions that were contrary to paganism's natural references.
This is common.
Jesus was corrupted to become a symbol of pharisees and a institutionalized monotheism.
Nietzsche is corrupted to be made a icon of Judeo-Christian metaphysics, and a new-age Christianity.
Christianity is corrupted to be converted to Marxism - keeping the basic principles but changing the symbols, the words associated with them.
Marx is corrupted to be made into post-modern humanism.

Symbols are tools...or more precisely they are the nervous system's representations, connecting mind/body to world/reality.
Taken literally, makes them magical, in the modern sense of the word. They replace the world they are supposed to represent, and connect to, with their symbolism.
They becomes a world on their own.
They cocoon the mind in a self-referential loop.

Take math.
If it is taken as symbols, representing in abstract form, processes man observes in the world they are useful.
They can then be used to project outward man's understanding.
If taken as representing the mind of God, or an absolute, they become symbols of self-deceit, degradation, mystification.
There is no ONE, and no NIL but only in the human mind...just as there are no things, no absolutes, only processes, only patterns and non-patterned Energy (vibration)

All anyone can do to witness the process of memetic corruption and inversion, is study how Christianity was born from the contact of Judaism with a threatening, antithetical, Hellenism.
Oil and water do not mix.
Opposites cannot synthesize.
They still celebrate their victory over the Greeks. It was the closest they, their memetic virus, came to extinction.
On the eastern Roman border, Byzantium, paganism was appropriated and converted into Abrahamism.
It took pagan spirituality, rituals, symbols, and renamed them, making them symbols of an opposite meme, an antithetical memetic virus.

Are they not doing the same with Nietzsche?
In time he will be the icon of post-modernity, and a new Christianity, incorporating his challenge to make the new variant more resistant.  

They took pagan rituals, and converted them to Christian ones.
They took pagan metaphors, gods and heroes, and converted them to Christian saints, and martyrs.
They took pagan healthy symbols referring to world, nature, reality, and converted them to occult mystical symbols referring to nothing but only to human frailty, human cowardice, human need, human fantasies.

This is how symbols can be detached from their original references and turned back into the mind, called esoteric to hide how solipsistic and self-referential and narcissistic it is....how emotional.
Then the Christians declares themselves the worthy for eternal life - the saved.
Height of hubris. Arrogance of humility, of self-humiliation.

The Jews made themselves mentally ill to escape the harshness of a world they felt they could not compete within, and then declared themselves the chosen, the truly healthy.
They inverted the world, converting shame to pride, and weakness to strength, and disease to health.
Christians and Muslims simply took it out of their elitism and offered it to all the desperate, feeble, slaves of the world.
Slaves of the world UNITE, under Christ, under Muhammad, and be liberated in me.
Sick of the world UNITE, under my symbols, and be healthy in me.
Lost of the world UNITE, under my symbols, and be found in me.

A multitude of gods indicate variation, which is important to placing humans outside of the focal point, but at the same time assimilate them into world, a better way of saying would be to self-realize as a creature living in a dynamic nature.

The object of worship would be awareness to safeguard ones existence in an overpowering realm. One god takes the creature out of the dynamic world and turns it's awareness inwards, which makes it vulnerable to the unknown.

Am i on the right path?

A one-God implies a perfect, complete, absolute... a singularity.
This contradicts our experience of reality, which is multiplicity, absence of absolutes, imperfect organisms struggling to survive, with no immutable, whole in sight.

The only place an absolute, a singularity, exists, is in the mind....as an abstraction (noumenon, idea/ideal) constructed in vagueness, and by taking the observable and inverting it.
In essence negating the real with a mental fabrication.
So, yes, a monotheistic God forces the mind to turn inward, where mind can fabricate whatever it wishes unaffected by an indifferent world.
The only way it can survive, if it dares to live in accordance with its own principles, is when it is sheltered from the indifferent world by some external force - institution, parent etc.
Then one must wonder what the motive is for this external entity to offer such a service.

In the case of a parent, we can hypothesize a positive, but what of an institution, or an ideology lead by a guru?

In the first case over-protectiveness stunts the child and the parent's sheltering has to gradually let go for the real world to confront the child.
But what about the state?
Is it not in its interest to maintain its population in a perpetual state of adolescence, or infancy?
This inward looking, is navel-gazing....narcissism, infancy: a period of time when a child is totally engrossed with itself, its needs, its limbs etc.

As I stated elsewhere, nihilism must lie to survive in a world where it is contradicted.

We see this self-deceit in Abrahamism.
Christians, for example do not live up to their own principles and values, and Muslims must lie about their dogma's violence, and the Jews are placed in a paradox built upon a power of powerlessness, and pride from humility.
Even the outcrops of Abrahamism such as Marxism and humanism must lie, because their beliefs are naive, and contrary to the experienced world.

Marxists are notoriously naive about human nature.
Their ideology is about some species other than the human one, existing in some alternate reality...and to avoid correcting themselves they blame others for failing to live-up to their naive expectations, murdering them as an act of vengeance.
Communism fails because its dogma is based on a fantasy world, concerning a fantasy organism - Utopia.
They believe society creates individuals...and those who fail is because they refuse to accept the communal good....It's Christianity minus God.

Why do pagans choose specific gods to worship?

Each god represents specific natural forces.
The individual relates to these natural forces in his own subjective way, proffering some over others.

But all the gods are important as they represent nature, the world.

And referring to yourself as half-man/half-goat is a way to strike a unity between present and past, nature and modernity, and to create a balance as to not let yourself be taken by the concept of "human" in modern times?

The symbol of the 'goat' has very specific meanings in paganism and in modernity.

The dichotomy is one of real/ideal.
Man, as the real entity, and goat as the idea that transcends the man, the hidden side, the mask which is the true face.
Public/Private man - character/personae.
My essence, like everything else, fluctuates.
Sometimes I am more ideal, and other times more pragmatic, more real.
Sometimes I am herbivore beast, and other times I am omnivorous, carnivorous man.
Sometimes I am more mind, other times more body.

Why a goat?

Why not a cow, horse or a rabbit etc?

Read above.

I must of missed something.

I did notice you put the word goat in quotes, but why a goat? why can't a tree be the idea that transcends the man..

Did you notice the sentence: The symbol of the 'goat' has very specific meanings in paganism and in modernity?

I could have put piece of shit...but it lacked the symbolism I wanted to convey.

gafr wrote:

I must of missed something.

I did notice you put the word goat in quotes, but why a goat? why can't a tree be the idea that transcends the man..

Are you Satyr's other gay boyfriend? Lol.

Are you?...LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLLLLLLLLL

Wickedgirl wrote:

gafr wrote:

I must of missed something.

I did notice you put the word goat in quotes, but why a goat? why can't a tree be the idea that transcends the man..

Are you Satyr's other gay boyfriend? Lol.

Well, if i was his boyfriend, then that would automatically make me gay, placing such emphasis on that the way you did only reveals a lot more about you and your intent than anything else.

Who said I was male?

because your capacity for intellect suggests it, now there could be an exception where you just might be a female of the higher intelligent kind, but taking a honest look into the history of the human condition that which both genders have produced..i'll take my chances you are male.

Although females are becoming more intelligent these days, so i have that to contend with..

Given the example at hand, you are contradicted.
I am ουδέν και ουτις...that goes by the symbol Satyr.
What does it matter?

It matters relative to the context, in a pagan context it would be acceptable as it expands the capacity for understanding in relation, but taking the same approach in the modern context biologically speaking then it leads to transhumanism, transgenderism or gender neutralism

I am of no sex, or race...I am outis, calling itself satyr.
Satyr was a mythological creature...a metaphor.

Are my view correct or not?
That's the only thing that matters.
What I am in relation to them is secondary, as what I am has not factored into creating them, except indirectly, by establishing a potential for doing so.