Symbols Are Not Secret Codes

One of the most common misconceptions I run into in magical communities is the idea that symbols work like secret codes. If only you knew the right correspondence. If only you owned the correct dictionary. If only you memorized enough meanings, then every dream, every tarot card, every raven perched on a fence, every candle flame, every odd coincidence would suddenly become readable, as if the universe were sending encrypted messages waiting for someone clever enough to crack them.

I get the appeal. There's something genuinely comforting about believing every symbol has one correct answer. Certainty feels safe. It suggests the world is more orderly than it usually appears, and that if we just study hard enough, we might eventually get hold of the key that unlocks everything.

That's just not how symbols have behaved in my life, and I don't think it's how they've ever really worked for anyone.

A symbol isn't a code. It's a relationship, and those are two very different things. A code is built to produce the same answer every time. Once you understand the cipher, the mystery is gone. A symbol keeps unfolding instead. It stays alive precisely because no single interpretation can use it up. The deeper you go into relationship with it, the more it shows you, not because the symbol changed but because you did.

Carl Jung drew a useful line here: a sign points to something already known, while a genuine symbol points toward something we can't yet fully grasp. A stop sign delivers one clear message and there's not much left to interpret. A crossroads, though, keeps speaking long after we think we've understood it. Every new season of life, every hard decision, every unexpected turn lets us meet that same symbol from a completely different place inside ourselves.

That's not confusion. That's just what a living symbol does.

It's part of why I get cautious whenever someone insists a particular dream image, tarot card, or spiritual experience has one universal meaning. Maybe it does, for them. Maybe it does within a specific cultural tradition, and has for centuries. All of that matters. History matters. Tradition matters. A shared symbolic language gives us common ground to start a conversation from. But starting a conversation isn't the same as ending it. A correspondence table is a doorway, not a destination, and I think we forget that more often than we'd like to admit.

It's easy to get so fixed on finding the "correct" interpretation that we stop paying attention to the actual experience. Someone dreams of a snake and immediately goes looking for what snakes mean. Someone draws the Death card and rushes online for reassurance. Someone keeps running into crows and decides they've received a supernatural message, all before pausing to ask a much simpler question: why did this particular experience stay with me?

That question opens up a very different kind of conversation. Instead of "what does this symbol mean," we start asking "what's happening between this symbol and my life?" The difference looks subtle on paper. It changes almost everything in practice.

Meaning doesn't live inside the symbol alone, and it doesn't live entirely inside us either. It shows up in the relationship between the two. A weathered key found in an antique shop might mean nothing at all to one person and hit another person hard, because it reminds them of a grandmother's house, or a childhood memory, or a season of life they thought they'd forgotten. The object hasn't changed. The relationship has.

The same thing plays out in magical practice. A torch might speak to one practitioner about illumination, to another about responsibility, to someone else about grief. None of those readings necessarily cancels out the others. Symbols are spacious enough to hold more than one truth at once, because people are spacious enough to experience them differently from each other.

That's why I've never been especially drawn to collecting endless lists of correspondences. They have their place. I use them, and I teach them. They carry centuries of accumulated wisdom and deserve real respect. But they're maps, not the landscape itself, and no map can substitute for actually walking the road.

When someone comes to me for a Threshold Reading, I'm rarely interested in telling them what a symbol means before I understand their relationship to it. Tell me what you noticed. Tell me what you felt before you started explaining it to yourself. Tell me what refused to let you look away, what keeps coming back. Those questions usually tell me more than any symbolic dictionary ever could.

Psychology has taught me that people are meaning making creatures, constantly weaving experience into narratives that help us understand who we are. Magical practice has taught me something just as important: those narratives deserve to stay alive. The moment we force every symbol into a fixed definition, we stop listening. We trade curiosity for certainty, relationship for memorization, living experience for abstraction, and something real gets lost in the swap.

I think that's part of why symbols keep changing us over the course of a life. The same dream can mean something different twenty years on. The same tarot card can stop you cold after years of passing by unnoticed. The same crossroads you once experienced as pure uncertainty can turn into a symbol of courage, once you remember what happened after you chose to keep walking. The symbol didn't get richer. You did.

Maybe that's why I've grown less interested in hunting for hidden messages and more interested in cultivating deeper attention. Not every raven is an omen. Not every coincidence is a sign. Not every dream is carrying a prophecy. Sometimes an experience is just asking us to stay present long enough for meaning to show up on its own, instead of demanding it reveal itself right away. That kind of patience turns out to be surprisingly hard to practice, and I think it's also where real symbolic thinking actually begins.

Not with secret knowledge. Not with a perfect interpretation. With a willingness to stay in relationship with mystery a little longer than feels comfortable.

Symbols were never built to hand us all the answers. They were built to change the way we ask the questions.