Revelations. Symbolic Language Of Hope And Encourgement

Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning.

Cosmology and values – indeed about the whole order of things as the medieval mind saw it. Similarly, to visit, say, the garden of Versailles is to catch a glimpse of the world order as it was seen by Louis XIV and his court.regarding human potentials In other words, a garden can be a metaphor, used to convey a world view, a mood, a thought or an ideal.herbs and food for depression An entire book or several could be written about the garden as a literary or artistic metaphor. We shall of course touch on this aspect of the subject. For the most part, we will deal with real gardens.

What makes gardens such potentially powerful metaphors is the way in which they bring together nature and art. Nature is viewed differently in particular cultures and therefore there are enormous variations in emphasis in this combination. For cultures that live inseparably from nature the concept of a garden can have no meaning, since a garden is by definition something that is set apart. A garden is often thought of as a refinement of nature by cultures such as the ancient Chinese and Japanese. The modern city dweller is likely to see gardens as places where a lost natural beauty can be recreated.

To someone living in a dry desert, a garden represents on thing; to someone from a wet, green area, something else entirely. By the same token the individual motifs that appear in gardens vary greatly in the meanings attached to them – woods, for example, are traditionally sacred in northern Europe but grim and perilous places in the south. On the other hand, there are certain motifs that appear to have a universal or widely shared meaning that crosses cultural boundaries – the fountain, with its life-giving water, is one example. There are people who would say that these share symbols belong to the set of images shared by all people, which can be access via the “collective unconscious,” as the psychologist C.G. Jung claimed. Jung believed.|Some people, such as the great psychologist C.G. Jung, believed that these shared symbols are stored images inherited and accessed by all humankind.}G. Jung believed. Of course it really is up to the observer to decide how to perceive and interpret things in a garden like a bee gathering nectar from a flower, the dance of sunlight filtered through foliage, the pattern of freshly fallen autumn leaves on the ground, a spider’s web hung with dew – and an infinite number of other things. Therefore simply ‘reading’ a garden is not a simple matter, and no garden can be seen as a text with a fixed meaning.

A garden is like a good poem, it gives people lots of things to think about and brings our different feelings from different people. There are, however, enough shared images and symbols either within or across cultures to make possible the existence of a language of gardens – or rather many languages, in fact an almost infinite amount.