Symbols are a species of sign, and a sign is anything which points beyond its own visible reality. Symbols in culture and tradition are a conscious collaboration of what is more or less unconscious. They include myths and belong to the first order language, that think themselves in people. The meaning of symbols depend on particular cultural contexts and traditions.
Cultures are systems of symbols. It is the basic mode of cultural education and indeed of all human communication, hence symbolism is of interest to many disciplines, social anthropology, psychology, philosophy, theology, literature and Art.
An understanding of symbolism is central to the study of culture, and are in three kinds, which are natural signs, conventional signs and symbols itself.
Natural signs are everything that exists in a sign of itself, for instance, the colours, shapes and properties of objects are signs of their presence and nature, as smoke is a sign of fire.
Conventional signs are signs invented arbitrarily by human beings and may be appropriateness between sign and signification, as black in certain culture signifies African people and rich earth respectively; thus, too house is signified by Maison in French, Haus in German, Casa in Italian, Owa in Edo, therefore conventional signs must be taught and learned.
Symbols by itself are natural signs which yield, an additional conventional meaning by being placed in a given existential context. Symbols impose themselves because they are part of a context which we experience. They enlarge reality by communicating a further range of meaning, and do this because they participate in the reality to which they refer.
Symbols are multivocal because they evoke a multiple experience and the experience is mediated by a multiplicity of individuals. Symbols are
not taught but caught, in other words, it put together image and context, convention and invention.
Symbols simply make the real more real. Symbols occur as cultural systems with narrative structure. The narrative memory has priority over rational thought. The Nigeria Flag is a symbol of truth, faith, justice and unity.
In religion, the narrated memory is often an effective memory whereby significant experiences can be revoked symbolically. Revelation occurs through the innovative use of symbols to express religious experience.
Symbolism expresses the interrelatedness of things
- their unity, indifference or participation.
Many people pattern their socio-cultural institutions after symbolic types or ideals as a circle of four names signifying values such as conquest or peace, symbolically imitates the fighting skill of certain ancestors, such is the way people historicized their myths. Ancient people also placed so much emphasis on history that it tended to mythicize its history, retelling it in symbolic terms in order to draw out further meaning.
Myth is not opposed to history, rather it deals with the inner truth, the inner nature of experience. Symbolic words and actions were used by prophets to draw attention to key words or ideas in their messages, for instance, the boiling pot, the yoke, the loin-cloth, the potter, and Christ used the symbolic mode, parables and aphorisms to communicate religious meaning, an awareness of the transcendent. “Itan re afi ne Edo, Edigue re a gbe emwe eho ma”.
The modernist controversy was created by a misunderstanding of the symbolic mode. Modernists denied the reality of participation and saw symbols as tokens of purely subjective experiences.
“It is useful to distinguish between various terms in connection with signs and symbols. Metaphors are symbols that have become conventional signs, for example, “you will get into hot water” that is metaphor which means” you will get into trouble”. No need to think of the image of hot water.
There are symbols behind which can be seen. For example many proverbs; like “A rolling stone gathers no moss” can be explained as “No one gets rich by moving from place to place”. There are symbols behind which one thinks. In other words, it contain latent meanings of which
are intermittently or partially conscious.
There are symbols behind which cannot be seen. They have meanings related to basic life processes such as joy, pain, love, hate and so on. Such symbols defy rational paraphrase and so positional analysis is required, an indexing of the symbol back to every content in which it occurs throughout the culture.
Human beings do not learn their culture by having a whole set of ready made ideas and images put into their heads. Cultural learning or enculturation teaches individuals not only to perceive reality according to established patterns but also to create what they perceive.
Individuals are taught how to “play the game” of culture, how to be creative in accordance with the demands of their culture. Oral tradition is an important instrument of adoptive learning. The basic forms are riddles, proverbs, songs, folk-tales, historical narratives, and myths.
Riddles are the most basic form of symbols. All symbols are fundamentally riddles, challenging the listener to explore experience in order to discover further meaning. Riddles usually lead from a human experience to an experience of natures. Riddling is a didactic game that sharpens one’s power of observation and comparison. Example: “My house has no door or window” Answer “An egg”
Sometimes riddles conveys a historical message by describing the position of two plants in relation to the earth e.g. “Two leaves that are of equal size “Answer The Earth and Sky.
Myths are symbolic stories that teaches religious or universal values or provide a “charter” for present action, often they are about cosmological origins or about the origins and relationships of human groups. The words “myth” and “mythology” are also sometimes used in a general sense to refer to a whole corpus of symbolic oral literature.
Symbolic stories such as myths or folktales occur in sets of different transformations. These have to be considered together and read like a musical score or a set of variations on a musical theme, behind which lies a hidden meaning wrapped in a code of symbolic elements in cultural contexts and traditions.
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