A Dictionary of Symbols

This classic book of symbols by Catalan polymath Joan Cirlot illuminates the symbolic underpinnings of myth, modern psychology, literature, and art. “Guides us through what unites us across nations, religions, and literary and artistic traditions.” —Angelica Frey, Hyperallergic Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols is a feat of scholarship, an act of the imagination, and a tool for contemplation, as well as a work of literature—a reference book that is as indispensable as it is brilliant and learned. Cirlot was a composer, a poet, an art critic, and a champion of modern art whose interest in surrealism helped to bring him to the study of symbolism. Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, René Guénon, Erich Fromm, and Gaston Bachelard also helped to shape his thinking in a book that explores the space between the world at large and the world within, where, as Cirlot sees it, nothing is meaningless, everything is significant, and everything is in some way related to something else. Running from “abandonment” to “zone” by way of “flute” and “whip,” spanning the cultures of the world, and including a wealth of visual images to further bring the reality of the symbol home, A Dictionary of Symbols—published for the first time in English in its original form—is a luminous and illuminating investigation of the works of eternity in time.