After a Long Hiatus, Symbol Systems
Sorry for the long empty space there. School, while being inspirational, doesn't always leave me with enough time to type out these musings. My subject for today could take up several posts, but I'm going to keep it brief. This semester, I read John Granger's How Harry Cast His Spell , a book on the alchemical and Christian imagery and symbolism in the Harry Potter books. In the last few weeks, I've been reading Michael Ward's book Planet Narnia , in which he examines the use of medieval cosmology (specifically the seven planets) in the Narniad. Both of these books have sparked my imagination and introduced me to systems of symbols and images that I hadn't encountered in such detail, if at all, before. One of Ward's sentences particularly grabbed my attention: "Imaginative writers are allowed—indeed, expected— to adopt symbol systems..."* By symbol system Ward seems to mean an overarching groups of symbols which pervade an author's works, rem...