We live in a world where traveling is common, but the spirit with which such trips are undertaken is not. For this reason, we will try to present the traveler with trips that are apparently the same as the others but, deep down, very different. Visiting a monument or stopping at a detail of it can move us because of its beauty or simply because it is something different from the cultural forms we know, but it could also be due to its symbolic nature, an aspect that does not end with its connotations. artistic or social and that is why in our proposal we have chosen different examples that go from prehistory to the present, passing through the classical world, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and modernism.
A symbolic journey includes the cultural references of each place visited, but it goes further, it proposes to experience the invisible presence that shapes the visible. The symbol is the encounter between the material world and the spiritual world, and the seven examples that we have chosen for this symbolic journey are rich in this sense, but they would be reduced to an anecdote without the viewer’s predisposition to delve into the meaning of what is look and admire.
However, this sense does not depend on the outside, but it is necessary to recognize it in the human being himself. Let’s remember that the word symbol comes from a Greek verb that means to re-unite. It is a word especially rich in interpretations and one of them refers to a way of approaching the world and understanding it. An experience of knowledge of the universe different from that of academic studies and religious practices.
Symbology is a way of knowing, but it has nothing to do with what is shown in Dan Brown’s novels, such as The Da Vinci Code, which have been so successful. The protagonist of these novels is a student of the secret signs of different traditions, closer to cryptology than to symbolism. The trip that we propose is not an esoteric discovery of the chosen places, but an interaction with them, a spiritual experience. No mystery hidden by some secret society and which provides certain powers is penetrated. Symbolism in general, and that of the trip in particular, is a concrete and transcendent experience that allows those who experience it to establish links with the invisible world that are not noticeable at first sight.
Juan Eduardo Cirlot from Barcelona, ??author of the first World Dictionary of Symbols, published in 1958 and translated into multiple languages, is an essential reference in relation to the idea of ??symbolism that we propose. We will quote the words with which Cirlot closed the prologue to the first edition of his Dictionary of traditional symbols, as it was called at the beginning, and which seem to us to be an unbeatable declaration of intent regarding the symbol: “Indifferent to erudition for its own sake, we feel animosity towards everything that only provides knowledge, without immediately influencing life. This influence translates into modification and remembrance of the transcendent. […] It is evident that symbolism… will not be able to pass the turbulent thresholds of skepticism”.
One of the simplest and, at the same time, deepest ways to know what a symbol is, would be to establish the difference between a sign and a symbol. The semantic margin is narrow, but an example may be useful: a cross is a sign and a symbol at the same time. It is a sign that serves to identify the Christian religion, that is, that a human group has associated it with a form and a meaning. But the cross is also a symbol that has little to do with Christianity, since it appears in multiple cultures and times. René Guénon wrote a very important book about it entitled Le symbolisme de la croix, where he talks about the meaning of the union of the horizontal and the vertical as realities close to a collective unconscious born from the face-to-face experience of the human being in the world. In the first case, it is an agreed and closed meaning, in the second, the meaning is open because it depends on the personal experience of whoever lives this symbol. The conscious vision and the transcendent one come together in a knowledge that emerges at a certain moment.
Gaudí’s Sagrada Família is an obligatory example. It is a religious building, but the fact that it is religious does not mean that it is more or less symbolic, nor are religious artistic works always symbolic, far from it. Symbolism seeks the union of finite reality with the infinite, that of the body with the spirit, and this is what Gaudí achieved both in his religious works and in his secular ones, symbolism presents a form and a content. The content is the force of the soul of the world that some artists know how to attract and fix in their creation. What shines in the Sagrada Família or in Park Güell is not a specific liturgy but the perception of the invisible that the architect from Riudoms knew how to capture in his works and that, intuitively, the attentive traveler receives when he contemplates them.
