Essay

Art

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

Time

1 January 2025

5 min read

Symbols in culture – the interface between the Seen and the Unseen

Open your eyes.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

an all seeing eye hovers above a renaissance style picture of the supper at Emmaus.

Pontormo, via Wikimedia Commons.

As December gives way to January, we become conscious of time rolling on from one year into the next.

The moment is often marked by that most famous image of the New Year: the Roman god Janus standing sentinel at the threshold; two-faced, gazing back into the past, but also forwards into the future.

The double-faced god is a striking symbol to depict this interface of time. But we also often find symbols at another important interface: the place where the Seen meets the Unseen.

Symbols have always existed at this touch-point - between the spiritual and the material. We might even say between heaven and earth. Symbols possess a power which goes beyond the strictly rational. They are more than their constituent parts.

In the moment when Jesus effectively instituted the church, he tells his disciple Peter: “Behold, I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Here, Jesus not only uses symbolic language with his image of the key, he also assigns Peter (and so the church) a divinely-appointed role: to stand there at this threshold between the seen and the unseen, and to have an effect.

The mission then, to occupy and influence this frontier between both realms, is significant. It’s worth considering – especially at this liminal time of year - what a culture’s symbols say about its direction of travel. What are the symbols that saturate our conscious and unconscious world? What effect are they intended to have by their creators? What influence do they actually have in the seen and unseen?

Our culture is saturated with symbols that were always meant to exert influence in the unseen. Some consciously; other maybe less so.

The notion that symbols act on reality is not a merely Christian concept. Far from it. In many cultures, the origins of written communication have often been interwoven with both mystery and magic. The futhark, for example – the basis of the Old Norse runic alphabet in Scandinavia – developed directly out of shamanistic practices. In a word: witchcraft. Certain symbols were graven into material objects in order to have a specific effect. A rune for protection carved into the haft of a warrior’s axe; a rune for fertility on a woman’s comb or belt. Symbols to curse; symbols to bless. All intended to manipulate the reality around them. Effectively they acted as a kind of spell.

Roll the wheel of history forward a bit and we see the cross itself became a powerful symbol across the developing civilizations of the world, especially in Europe. Making the sign of the cross became synonymous with an invocation of God’s blessing or else protection against some evil. An outcome all the more extraordinary when one considers the origin of its use – a shameful incident of execution, standing on a lonely hill.

Similarly, the Crescent represents one of the great symbols of history, often in antagonism with the Cross. Think of the symbolic reversals still visible in the architecture of some parts of Spain. When the Iberian peninsula fell to Moorish conquest in the early eight century, the cross was torn down, all symbols of Christian faith effaced, only to return eight centuries later with the Reconquista. Today, you can see still the Cross surmounted on clearly Moorish architecture, a visible sign of those historic conflicts.

Such warring symbols of unseen spiritual realities are hardly consigned to the history books. Witness perhaps the most live example playing out all across the cities of Europe. The Star of David opposed and disdained by those waving black, green, red and white flags.

Nor is the clash of symbols simply a matter between the great religions of the world. The rainbow flag represents a certain positioning within the realm of the unseen wherever it is planted. In other contexts, our culture is saturated with symbols that were always meant to exert influence in the unseen. Some consciously; other maybe less so.

Apple’s ‘apple’ is not just an apple. It is an apple with a bite taken out of it. Elsewhere, symbolic representations of devil horns proliferate – to be expected on heavy metal t-shirts and album covers; perhaps less so throughout myriad children’s TV shows and movies across our streaming channels. Yet they are there.

The ‘One-Eye’ symbol has been associated variously with freemasonry, Luciferanism, Satanism and the occult. It appears in anything from pop videos to movie posters to political protest logos (“Just Stop Oil” anyone?). Even a ubiquitous pose-for-camera for celebrity photo-shoots. Once you clock it, you’d amazed how prevalent this symbol is across our culture.

Does it signify anything? Or nothing at all?

You have to assume that the creators of such symbols don’t include them by accident. Some are hidden in plain sight; others are brazen and bold. Either way, they are meant to be there. But why?

Symbols have always been used in the casting of spells. These days, we give so much head space to the consumption of culture, myriad symbols flashing in and out of our consciousness as we scroll ever onward, have we any idea what spells we are subjecting ourselves to – irrespective of whether we believe they are effective or not?

Against such murkiness, perhaps this season of Christmas rolling into the New Year is a good time to consider what some might consider the ultimate symbol appearing in our reality of the Seen: the Incarnation.

In a way, Christ identified himself as the visible interface between the seen and the unseen when he said: Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

And yet, the Incarnation also transcends the mere symbolic. Yes, Christ points to an unseen reality, but he is also the ‘thing’ itself. He is both Seen and Unseen in one. Not a symbol pointing to something else, but the thing to which all symbols ultimately point: the central reality in the universe where God and creation meet.

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Article

Culture

Identity

Psychology

Work

7 February 2025

5 min read

Even the office can be a place for self-discovery

What the office makes us feel about ourselves

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A model of an office desk and shelves, at which a green plastic person sits leaning into the desk.

Igor Omilaev on Unsplash.

The realisation strikes me as I wrestle to fit my key into the lock on my office door: today I have no memory whatsoever of my journey into work. At my usual time I left the house and got in my car. I drove my usual route to my usual parking space and hopefully I stopped for all the red lights – but in truth I can’t remember any of them. Nor can I remember getting out of my car, locking my car (I hope I did that too) or walking from my parking space to this door, the lock of which is still failing to yield. This, I then realise, is because I am absent-mindedly trying to unlock it with my car key. Rolling my eyes, I reach into my pocket for the correct key… and it is not there.

Now I’m awake, glancing at my watch; 50 minutes until my first meeting of the day (online). This is enough to drive home again, but not enough to drive home, collect my key, and return to this frustrating door. By now I have established that both coat pockets are empty, so I drop to my knees and start to rummage through my bag.

It’s not a disaster if I do have to drive home, I can simply stay there and have a WFH day. I am fortunate, in my current job, to have the privilege of deciding this on a day-by-day basis. Many, I know, would love to work from home but do not have the option, but I prefer the office. The smell of black coffee, seagulls yakking on the roof. Doors open and close as colleagues come and go, keyboards tap, and on and off there is distant hum of student voices emanating from a classroom downstairs. In the hive of activity, I hum too, and I definitely get my work done more efficiently.

I’m interested to analyse this phenomenon through the lens of place attachment. There is a considerable body of research that investigates the way people feel about the spaces that they inhabit – that certain places become meaningful places to be in. Place attachment theorists explore how we can have relationships to places in much the same way that we have relationships to people – feeling a strong pull to return to the familiar, disliking change, and feeling ‘homesick’ for places where we have a strong emotional attachment. Of course, this is usually discussed in relation to the natural world, or to one’s childhood home, or ancestral lands… but why not of the office? Because the heart of place attachment is not really how we feel about places, but how places make us feel about ourselves.

Either for good or for bad, in the office one inhabits a certain sense of self – maybe not a different self to the one that we are at home – but at work, different aspects of that self are valued differently and are allowed to come to the fore. Perhaps I feel this especially because I am a working mum – it can be a relief to leave the home each day and come to inhabit a space where I am valued for more than my ability to know whether or not it’s PE today, or if there’s milk in the fridge. In the office, I can dwell in a version of myself that I enjoy – one that is paid to think and to write and to teach, a part of the university hum.

George Pitcher, in his recent article for Seen & Unseen, challenges managers to ask themselves why they are opposing more junior staff working from home. His discussion hints at this same phenomenon of places shaping identities, and Pitcher proposes that managers might resent junior staff working from home, at least in part, because they feel like their identity as a manager is compromised when they cannot sit in their glass-walled office, gazing out over the rows of worker bees, queen of all they survey. As Pitcher puts it, “…if staff aren’t in the office, then what’s the point of being a boss?”

The Bible too engages with the interplay between one’s sense of self and one’s sense of place. In the Old Testament, before the birth of Jesus, prophets and hymn writers spoke longingly of their homelands, and especially of the temple where they gathered to be assured of their identity as the people of God. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in strange land?” cries one hymnwriter, exiled far from home, while another writes of how he longs to dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of his life. With this sentiment I can empathise; just as I feel like more of a worker-bee when I am within the hive of the university, I feel I am much more of a Christian when belting out hymns among the Sunday throng than I am among my colleagues at a Monday morning meeting.

And yet the Bible issues a challenge to me here. Because after the Old Testament comes the New, written after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and largely after the destruction of the great “Second Temple” that Herod the Great had built in Jerusalem. With the temple gone, and the region subdued under Roman overlords, the New Testament writers make frequent allusions to Christian believers themselves being temples – temples of the Holy Spirit. This means that, as a Christian, I am urged to think of myself as a “place” of God’s presence in the world – and not just for my own sake but for the sake of others. I am not just part of the hum; I change the hum by being in it. The challenge is to gently bring the notes of my Sunday morning hymn to my Monday morning meeting.

A long time ago, when I was a little Brownie-Guide, we used to sing a campfire song called “Bees of Paradise.” It was very short and simple:

Bees of paradise, do the work of Jesus Christ

Do the work that no one can.

As a child, I never understood the words, although I enjoyed the pretty little tune that we sang it to, in the round. It comes back to me now, as I rummage in my bag for a key that I know I’m not going to find, and I return to my childhood habit of pondering the lyrics.