Where the jungle is an unsubtle, all-out attack, forests are subtler – a familiar presence, outwardly calm and tranquil, but firmly marking the boundary of man’s authority. Where the desert is stark and revelatory, forests seemingly take joy in shading and dappling, defeating the sun, blurring and softening everything into uncertainty. Vegetation is in control here, unregulated; the domain of the earth mother, the feminine principle. The heavens – and Heaven itself – are hidden in forest, out of sight, out of control.

http://www.grazulis.com/northwest/pages/forest.html

Accordingly, there is a long association between forestry and the unconscious mind, which is often seen as feminine – forests are home to fairy tales, legendary bandits and monsters, witches and wizards, and all manner of magical presences. The trees themselves are reminiscent of temple columns, but what terrifying god or goddess could need such a vast church? Children’s stories are full of forest dangers from the Big Bad Wolf on downwards, a symbolic journey into the frightening subconscious.

As a marked boundary, forests symbolise the frontier, thresholds, the unknown. Journeys into them are seen as initiations, tests and challenges; to return is to be reborn, the uncertainty of the unconscious laid to rest. Forests are the fringe of darkness that lurks on the edge of civilisation, a space where we can project our deepest anxieties and fears.

If you liked this post, you should check out author Sezin Koehler’s book American Monsters. It’s dark, packed with primal terrors, and electronic, so no poor trees were harmed in its preparation. I think you’ll like it. 

East is the direction of birth and rebirth, childhood, youth, happiness and energy. Many religious ceremonies, historically, have been conducted facing east – certainly all solar gods and religions have laid a great emphasis on the eastern horizon. By extension to the idea of birth, childhood and youth, the east is also the direction in which home lies. Taken as a cultural metaphor, the east becomes the cradle of civilization, the direction of ancient knowledge and wisdom. East is the direction of origins, mysteries and wonders, the home of the light, the source of life, eternal youth, immortality and divinity.

West, by contrast, is the universal direction of death. The sun dies in the west every night, bringing darkness and danger. Evil and misfortune are associated with westerly directions, along with autumn, old age, sickness and the lands of the dead. In ancient Greece, the entry to Hades was said to be near the western edge of the country; in Egypt, the souls of the dead had to make a dangerous pilgrimage to the lands of the west in order to find their eternal reward – a myth paralleled almost exactly by Tolkien’s elves in the Lord of the Rings cycle. In modern American mythology, the Wild West is a byword for lawless violence and sudden murder. Not all of the western associations are so negative, however. Modern cultural patterns are giving it an association with progress and scientific advancement, and traditionally it has been the direction associated with explorers, new frontiers and discoveries.

Drawing more on the geopolitics of the last five hundred years than on any particular facet of the natural world, north has come to represent modernity, materialism, advance, industrialisation and thought in general. It is masculine, aggressive and dynamic. The south, by contrast, is considerably more innocent. Viewed as relaxed, it symbolises feeling and intuition. It has a holistic nature lost to the north, and represents older, less sophisticated values.

There are no distractions, giving deserts an association with clarity, revelation and purity. Because it is such a difficult, threatening terrain type, it represents barriers, obstacles and challenges. There are strong overtones of spirituality and religion bound up symbolically with desert landscapes. These areas are brutal, but they call upon the deepest reserves of a traveller’s will. In these struggles, there is no barrier to the heavens, no distractions or comforts to distract the soul from its communion.

The Sand Angel

Accordingly, the desert can be a source of wisdom and enlightenment, of trial but also of reward. It is so far outside of normal existence that only the spiritual and divine can touch and influence it. We assume a fundamental antagonism between the physical and the spiritual, feeling that gluttony and excess obscure the divine – the desert, the ultimate source of physical scourging, thus becomes the holiest territory available. It is no accidents that prophets, visionaries and hermits throughout history have been strongly associated with these barren lands.

On the one hand, the Earth is quite literally where all of our resources come from. It feeds us, clothes us, shelters us and warms us. Even in the modern, urban world, it is impossible to escape the symbolic association between land and life. The ground is nurturing, providing, maternal and caring. It can be a thing of great beauty, warmth and comfort. Travellers by air and sea are often struck by how alien those environments become, and how much returning to dry land feels like coming home. Particularly in the sterile settings of modern life, this caring warmth is a great draw, and many of us feel a great attraction to the outside.

On the other hand however, the Earth is also the home of all that threatens us. Historically, it is the source of wild beasts, poisonous plants and creatures, dangerous terrain, threatening weather and everything else that bedevils us, including other people. It is as likely to be dark and scary as it is to be light and lovely. Nature is not kind, it is ruthless. All those deadly dangers remain in the back of our minds, as anyone who has managed to spend the night alone in deep woods can attest.

Even more powerfully, the ground is where we are laid to rest. Dust to dust, when we die the Earth opens up and swallows us, and makes us part of itself. It is the cold of the grave, a hungry monster devouring all flesh. To our symbolic thoughts, all ground is teeming with ancient carcasses, every drop of soil the broken-down remains of some pour soul. Bare earth, in particular – ploughed fields, empty flowerbeds and so on – carries this strong association to mortality, inevitability, death and decay. No matter how beautiful the Earth may be however, it always carries with it the charnel whiff of the grave – and underneath our modern romantic longing for nature, there is always a tang of fear.

As the first double-digit number in our modern mathematical system, ten caries a sense of wholeness and completeness, drawn originally from our bodies. Ten fingers/thumbs makes it an intuitively ‘full’ number, and has led to it being a standard marker in most cultures. Tellingly, the only other real contender is twenty, for all fingers and toes, and that usually only crops up in cultures where footwear is uncommon. The Ten Commandements of Mosaic law were God’s complete pronouncement. We describe ten as a ‘round’ number, meaning that it is satisfying. It also has implications of maximum quality, of being as good as it is possible to be – ten out of ten, a ‘perfect’ ten. By implication ten contains all the digits of 0 through to 9, which emphasises its completion, and can extend to representing the whole of creation. Note that in the distant past, the number 12 more commonly served this role, and ancient symbolic uses of the number ten may not carry quite the same implications.

Number 10 by Saraffo

Eleven

As 1 and 1 next to each other, eleven is something of an analogue to 2 – a higher octave, according to numerologists – but as it represents two individuals rather than a pair, it is necessarily somewhat more isolated. It is considered neutral in many ways – a middle ground between oppositions. It has connotations of being almost, but not quite too late – as in the “eleventh hour”.

Eleven by Pink Sherbet

Twelve

Historically, twelve is number of natural measurement, a position which ten has usurped to a certain extent. This is thought to be because twelve is so easy to divide – into halves (by six), thirds (by four), quarters (by three), sixths (by two), and even eighths (by one and a half). This made it very useful for any system which required frequent division by the uneducated masses, such as time, distance and currency.

Because of its clear associations with circular notions of time – twelve months in a year, twice twelve hours in a day, five times twelve minutes in an hour, twelve signs of the zodiac, and also twelve inches to a foot – twelve is associated with cycles and closed systems. It is also seen as a good number for a complete set of objects, one that covers all the bases, so there are twelve tribes of Israel, twelve labours of Hercules, twelve gates to New Jerusalem, twelve days of Christmas, twelve gods of Olympus, twelve sons for Jacob and for Ali, and twelve disciples or companions for Jesus, the Dalai Lama, King Arthur, Charlemagne and Mithras.

Twelve by jcarwil

Further numbers

Many other numbers have significant symbolic value, of course. In western culture, thirteen is famously unlucky, sixteen, eighteen and twenty-one all involve coming of age, twenty-three is associated with creative chaos, twenty-five with silver anniversaries, forty-two with life, the universe and everything, fifty with golden anniversaries, sixty-nine with sexual activity, and so on – and that is just whole numbers. The most important symbolic associations though lie within the numbers from 0 to 9.

Lo malo de ser original by Ignatio Sanz

Eight is the number of regeneration and rebirth. The baptismal font is eight-sided, as the basin in which the young are reborn free of sin. There are eight beatitudes, eight Auspicious Symbols in Buddhism, eight trigrams of the Taoist Ba’gua (and eight immortals who have mastered the Way), and eight divisions in Islam. In several mystical doctrines, personal transformation can be obtained on the eighth day, after seven days of fasting and meditation. Eight is also the number of corners on a cube, and as such as also seen as representing solidity, physical perfection and the scope of reality. The Chinese consider the number to be lucky, because their word for it sounds like the word for ‘prosper’.

The London Eye by Sweenpole

Nine

If seven is the number of mystical connection, nine is the number of magical power. As three times three, it is the ultimate expression of creative power fulfilled, of energy directed and divine will channelled. Its potential is highlighted in the Magic Square, a square divided into three by three cells in which each line, column and diagonal add up to the same number – fifteen in the case of the 3×3 square that uses each digit once.

8          1          6

3          5          7

4          9          2

Many cultures around the world have considered the number nine to be representative of spiritual and divine power. In European myth, it was associated with the Nine Worthies, three sets of three mighty heroes and defenders of truth from pagan, early Christian and later Christian times. In Buddhism, nine is the celestial number of supreme spirituality. In China, it is the most auspicious of all numbers, as it represents the eight directions plus the Hall of the Heavenly Emperor. In Hindu legend, it is number of fire that leads to the square that encloses the universe.

Biglietteria by Melisande

As the number of sides on a cube, six is associated with dice, and therefore luck, chance, victory and health. It is also linked to creation, as the number of days required in several traditions, and to mankind because man was created on the sixth day. The Great Beast of Revelations is said to have the number 666 as a trinity of earthly, human influences, simultaneously mocking and lacking the true heavenly trinity.

Desert Five-Spot by Steve Berardi

With such an intimate personal connection to the number five, it is no surprise that it feels like an automatically natural value for a set of objects. Most mathematical systems derived around the world operate on groups (ie. ‘base’) of ten – the number we can get to counting on both hands. The few cultures that do not work in groups of ten, such as the Ikwaye of New Guinea, tend to work in groups of twenty instead – both hands and both feet. As befits such a visceral number, five crops up repeatedly in religious imagery across the world, particularly with reference to human experience – the five wounds of Christ (and the feeding of the five thousand), the five Dhyani Buddhas guarding the five directions (‘centre’ is also a direction), the five faces of Shiva in Hinduism, the sacred role of five in Discordianism, and the five Pillars of Islam (and their five fundamental dogmas).