| One of our most familiar terms for literary study, the "symbol," has an unfamiliar history. In classical Greece ";The practitioners of divination had long seen symbols in omens, and in the language of oracles and dreams. The Pythagoreans give the name "symbols" to a traditional collection of the master's sayings--enigmatic epigrams of ethical or cosmological wisdom, or of cultic prohibitions, that were thought to carry hidden messages, and also to have a mystical power to open doors to a higher world. Finally, the Neoplatonists develop a sense of the symbol as a talisman, or a token with a strong link to the spirit world of intellectual reality. In all of these literary and non-literary traditions, the symbol is a medium for messages that cross the border between gods and humans. It travels back and forth between our mundane and confusing world, and the world of the gods, where meanings are full and clear.;I close with an examination of Proclus, the last great figure among the Neoplatonists. Proclus explicitly develops the sense of the symbol as a talisman within a literary context. He produces a literary category of hyper-charged representation, where signs do not simply imitate their referents, but actually become them through a direct ontological link. His exuberant theory, enabled by earlier symbol theories, reverberates, even to this day, in various strains of mainstream literary thinking. |
