The Lexicon
Symbols and the unseen
Symbol
A symbol is an image that points beyond itself, holding more meaning than any definition can contain. For Jung the true symbol is not a sign standing for something already known, but the best possible expression of something still partly unknown, a living bridge between consciousness and the depths. The cross, the mandala, the serpent, the tree, these are not decorations but doorways, charged with the energy of the unseen.
The psyche speaks its native language in symbols: in dreams, in myth, in the spontaneous images of active imagination. To take a symbol literally is to lose it; to dwell with it, to let it work, is to let the deeper self disclose what reason alone cannot reach. The whole map of the inner world is read symbolically, for the soul does not argue, it shows.
In their words
A correspondence of heaven with all things of the earth.
By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu.
The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead.