Historical talisman traditions
Seal of Solomon
Interlaced triangles interpreted as the joining of spiritual and material principles.
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A symbol's meaning depends on its setting. Follow an object or image into the book, illustration or ritual that uses it, then compare other appearances while preserving their distinct contexts.
97 entries · A–Z
Historical talisman traditions
Interlaced triangles interpreted as the joining of spiritual and material principles.
Historical talisman traditions
A vocal and inscribed pattern interpreted through the planetary heavens.
Indian traditions, Nivedita and Coomaraswamy
The immense inherited bow whose breaking establishes Rama’s marriage to Sita.
Celtic fairy traditions
An Otherworld token whose music brings sleep and delight.
Manly P. Hall, The Sacred Magic of the Qabbalah
Hall associates six with a latent faculty of clear vision and a returning movement towards its source.
Egyptian funerary religion
The sun god’s vessel and a vehicle of the glorified dead.
Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1618)
Maier’s sixth emblem gives the chymist’s work the form of a sower casting gold over prepared earth.
Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic
The support drawn from the hidden and enduring forces of nature.
W. B. Yeats’s introduction to W. T. Horton, A Book of Images (1898)
Yeats’s distinction between images that continue to suggest meaning and images that can be translated into a fixed explanation.
Japanese legends, Davis retelling
Otohime's forbidden keepsake, opened by Urashima after returning from the Sea King's realm.
Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic
The four-letter divine name interpreted through manifestation and humanity.
L. Newton Hayes, The Chinese Dragon
A dragon serves as the sculptural support for an astronomical instrument in Hayes’s frontispiece.
The Mabinogion, Guest’s 1877 edition
The vessel that returns slain warriors to life while withholding their speech.
Manly P. Hall, The Sacred Magic of the Qabbalah
A plain circle accompanies Hall’s account of unity, thought and the purpose of human effort.
L. Newton Hayes, The Chinese Dragon
A coiled dragon fills the round face of the roof tile photographed by Hayes.
L. Newton Hayes, The Chinese Dragon
An artist’s drawing records the dragon-carved stone Hayes describes inside a dark imperial shrine.
L. Newton Hayes, The Chinese Dragon
Dragons form the support and suspension of the bell illustrated in The Chinese Dragon.
L. Newton Hayes, The Chinese Dragon
An embroidered dragon badge appears in Hayes’s account of official robes and rank.
Manly P. Hall, The Sacred Magic of the Qabbalah
Hall uses the triangle to describe a threefold human nature brought into harmony.
Poster and book-cover design in The Modern Poster (1895)
The Falstaff design reproduced in The Modern Poster advertises Verdi’s opera through monumental lettering and a reclining figure.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision (1925)
Will, Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate: the four interacting faculties in Yeats’s 1925 model.
Dante, Purgatorio
Four unfamiliar lights mark the southern sky at the beginning of the ascent.
W. B. Yeats’s A Vision (1925)
The circular diagram through which Yeats organises twenty-eight phases, contrasting tendencies and human types.
The Mabinogion, Guest’s 1877 edition
The severed head that accompanies the survivors’ feasts before its protective burial.