Symbolism around us
As a person sees some thing it inevitably brings certain images and associations in the mind of a person. There are also some events connected with one or another thing or event and as a result – emotions connected with those. The emotions and associations are the basis for features people provide certain things with. Those features may be peculiar for each person or may be common for a great number of people. In case if one thing or event provokes common emotions and associations in minds of a number of people that becomes the thing of peculiar meaning for all people.
That meaning remains unchanged for years long and soon the thing provided with that meaning becomes a symbol of danger, fear, sympathy or else, depending on the meaning it is provided with. That is how the symbols appear. At first those are symbols of a person, than the symbols of certain society and with the lapse of time those become the symbols of nation and sometimes even of the whole world.
Symbol is a perfect mean to express laconically certain idea. There is no other thing that would be able to perform the same task as brilliant as the symbols do. It is so, as symbol contains certain idea in it and has no words or description of that idea, so, as a person sees some symbol his or her imagination creates feelings as strong as no other things or words are able to create. Every single thing and object in our life is provided with certain symbolism and so exchanges information from one person to another.
There are a number of different communities exist in the world, some of those communities are open and some of those are secret communities. The members of those communities prefer remain unknown and unnoticed for other people. Though, they need something to distinguish them as brothers of the same community and that something has to be expressive only for those who are the members of the same community. So, they create certain symbol of their community and take it as a distinctive mark in order to identify each other among common people.
At first that is only a distinctive mark but soon it becomes the symbol and emblem of their community meaning of which is understandable only for members of the community. So, there are symbols that appeared as a result of humans' psychic's response to certain objects, but there are also symbols that were created by people in order to exchange certain information or to mark them as people of the same community who have common ideas and believes. Such artificially created symbol is swastika that was a symbol of Nazism. That symbol was chosen by Hitler as distinctive mark for those who followed his policy and ideas.
Though, the meaning of a great number of ancient symbols were changed till nowadays and so now we recognise them in the way extremely different of one our ancestors used to recognise those. It is interesting to find out the history and etymology of meanings of the most known symbols we have nowadays.