Symbols have been humanity’s shorthand for complex ideas since before we had written language. The same symbols appear across cultures separated by thousands of miles and years—a circle with a dot for the sun, a serpent eating its tail for eternity, a lotus for rebirth. These aren’t random coincidences. They reflect something about how human minds recognize patterns and assign meaning to shapes. The Ankh represented eternal life in ancient Egypt. The Om symbol connected practitioners to universal vibration in Hinduism. The Eye of Horus combined protection with a working mathematical system. Some symbols originated in religious revelation, others came from careful observation of nature, and some emerged from dreams and visions that people couldn’t shake. This category explores what these symbols actually meant in their original contexts, how those meanings changed as they traveled across time and cultures, and why certain marks and shapes continue to resonate with people thousands of years after they were first created.
Walk into any Egyptian temple that survived the millennia and you’ll notice the walls are covered in symbols. Carved deep into stone, painted in brilliant colors, repeated across every surface. The ancient Egyptians put these symbols everywhere because they believed they had actual functions … Read more