Thread: Exploring Ancient Symbolism

Introduction:
Lately this topic has been an immense interest of mine. Exploring ancient sites and structures and the mythologies and traditions that served as the inspiration of their creation provide a wealth of information about the way the mind and its structure functions. Something interesting in itself is paying special attention to the differences (and perhaps even the lack thereof) between the myths and ancient structures and temples built by societies that had developed systems of writing or relied entirely on oral traditions for the retention of information.
I'm going to focus on a few symbols in this post, and I'll try and format things so it's easy to read and each symbol is discussed as separately as possible so you don't have to read the whole post just to find specific information. I'm hoping my interpretation of these sparks some discussion; if you guys agree with what I've said and just have something to add on or have a very different interpretation, please share. Even if you aren't well read on ancient societies or any of this in particular, your ideas still provide some valuable insight into how the mind conceptualizes these types of symbols and any input you can give helps broaden the scope of what ideas these symbols can possibly represent.

The Symbols Being Covered In This Post:
With the intro out of the way, let’s begin. The symbols I want to discuss in this particular post are the pyramid, god(s), the Eye of Horus (and related symbols, like the Masonic floating eye above the pyramid), and dragons/winged serpents/exotic monsters.
The Pyramid
Pyramids, temples, and organized structures like them are widespread in ancient cultures, many of which had no possibility of contact with each other’s cultures or cultural relics. For the most part, the creation of these sprung up independently. This tells us something important about its existence and formation as a symbol, and that is that it’s a very natural way that the mind represents what it does.

Symbols are extremely dense informational reservoirs; as such, when you analyze their meaning and the ways they relate to multiple concepts, the number of concepts they will relate to is immense. I personally believe that the pyramid is a representation of a few things. Primarily it represents the mind, and organized systems of structure such as society, and even concepts such as stories/narratives, songs, and the totality of existence. Why these? They’re all interrelated in their own ways… typically in that as a function of their existence, structure and order forms out of chaos. This is necessary to form meaningful information and for things to have significance and value. The mind does this to allow you to make sense of the world and to support your continued existence in it, societies do this to function and grow, stories and songs are creations that depend on doing this in order to exist at all in the first place, and the existence of anything is predicated on chaos organizing itself into several layers of order that allows for meaningful information to form and be interacted with by other meaningful bits of information.

A pyramid is the natural shape we use when describing hierarchies as a testament to the geometry’s ability to represent that concept. Pyramids are a clear example of structured order that has arisen as what otherwise could be described as chaos (or put in other words, the formless potential for existence). Many pyramids are known to be built upon several other smaller pyramids like Russian nesting dolls, which means the pyramid as a whole is constituted by a system of structures that can be inspected and have meaning or functions separately but can also be viewed and have meaning and function as a whole as well. Further inside there are several chambers which are often inscribed with all kinds of knowledge which typically has to do with how the world/universe was formed and works, and our place as humans in it (exactly what the mind does). I could go on, but this is already going to be a couple posts.

I will continue with other symbols when I have a bit more time in a new post.