Items related to Symbol and Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence
Synopsis
What is Symbolism? The answer to this question has been known to challenge altogether man's life; and ignorance of it can reasonably be said to have produced all the gravest problems of our time. With reference to the great religions of the world, and in particular to Christianity and Islam, martin Lings here gives us the answer in the clarest terms, with an unusually wide scope of illustration, a versatility to which the list of the chapters headings bear some witness. At one point we are gripped by the universal message of our old Lithuanian songs which speak to us, in the language of symbols, from a remote antiquity; at another we are with the Queen of Sheba at her deeply symbolic meeting with Solomon, as recounted in the Qur'an. The central theme is man, stripped of his sub-human excrescences and re-endowed with his infinitely precious primordial heritage, and the reader is quickly impelled to identify himself with that centre. Nor is it only his intelligence that impels him, for the further we read, the more we renew our deeply ingrained consciousness that everything - numbers, elements, senses, colours, etc. - has a vertical dimension that gives it a divine significance; and this awareness brings with it an existential sense of that dimension in ourselves.
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Product Description
With reference to the great religions of the world, and in particular to Christianity and Islam, the author discusses the question: what is symbolism?
About the Author
Martin Lings, formerly Keeper of Oriental Manuscript in the British Museum and the British Library, is the author of three works on Islamic mysticism, The Book of Certainty, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century and What is Sufism?, all published by the Islamic Texts Society. He is also the author of The secret of Shakespeare, Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions, both published by Quinta Essentia, and the splendidly illustrated The Quranic Art of Calligraphy. His Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, also published by the Islamic Texts Society, has been internationally acclaimed as a masterpiece.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherArchetype
- Publication date2025
- ISBN 10 1901383121
- ISBN 13 9781901383126
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Edition number2
- Number of pages148
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