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Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning.
Cosmology and values – indeed about the whole order of things as the medieval mind saw it.communication language and symbolic codes Similarly, to visit the garden of Versailles is to catch but a mere glimpse of the world order as it was seen long ago by Louis XIV and his court.herbs that work with zoloft for depression A garden can be a metaphor used to convey a mood, a thought, a world view or an ideal, in other words. In literature and art there are countless books that use the term garden as a metaphor. We will surely discuss this aspect as well. But for now we shall focus on 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. Gardens are by definition a human creation and not part of nature, so a culture that lives in a purely natural environment cannot understand what a garden is. For some cultures, such as those of ancient China and Japan, a garden is a refinement of nature. 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. But there are also things in a garden that share a similar meaning no matter what part of the world they are found. The life-giving waters of a fountain 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. Ultimately of course anything in a garden can take on the character of a ‘symbol’ if the observer chooses to see it that way: 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, like a good poem, contains many levels of meaning and draws a different response from every individual. Enough shared images and symbols exist 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.
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Posted June 10, 2009
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