< previous page page_20 next page >

Page 20
5. The Hermetic tradition is based on the principle of similitude: sicut superius sic inferius. And once one has decided to fish for similitudes, one can find them everywhere: under certain descriptions, everything can be seen as similar to everything else.
Thus such a new symbolism grew up in the Hermetic atmosphere, from Pico della Mirandola and Ficino to Giordano Bruno, from Reuchlin and Robert Fludd to French Symbolism, Yeats, and many contemporary theories: speaking of the unshaped, symbols cannot have a definite meaning.
So it was that at the very moment in which theology, with Aquinas, was destroying the bases of the universal symbolism and allegorism, and the new science was beginning to speak of the world in quantitative terms, a new feeling was born among poets, Platonic philosophers, religious thinkers, Magi and Kabbalists. It was a new request for analogy and universal kinship, which influenced the new theories or the new practices of poetry and art, as well as new theories of myth, find definitely provided a new religion for many laymen who, in a secularized world, no longer believed in the God of theology but needed some other form of worship. Perhaps we should rewrite the traditional handbooks which tell the story of how, when, and why modern man escaped from the Dark Ages and entered the Age of Reason.
It is interesting that, being so radically different from Christian symbolism, modern symbolism obeys the same semiotic laws. In one case, one assumes that symbols do have a final meaning, but since it is the same everlasting message, there is an inexhaustible variety of signifiers for a unique signified. In the other case, symbols have any possible meaning because of the inner contradictoriness of reality, but since every symbol speaks about this fundamental contradictoriness, an inexhaustible quantity of signifiers always stand for their unique signified, the inexhaustibility of the senses of any text. One witnesses in both cases a form of ''fundamentalism." In the former case, every text speaks of the rational and univocal discourse of God; in the latter, every text speaks of the irrational and ambiguous discourse of Hermes.
7. Myths and Texts
Many modern theories have too strictly identified symbol with myth. If a myth is a tale, then it is a text, and this textas Bachofen saidis the exegesis of a symbol. Let us take a myth as a text and, metaphorically, as

 
< previous page page_20 next page >