People often use "meaning" and "symbolism" as if they were interchangeable. I don't think they are. The distinction seems subtle at first, but I've come to believe it changes how we understand ourselves, our rituals, and the world we live in.
Meaning answers a question. Symbolism opens one. That difference has mattered more and more to me over the years.
We naturally seek meaning. It's one of the most human things we do. We want to know why something happened, want to understand our dreams, our relationships, our losses, the unexpected turns our lives take. When something grabs our attention, we instinctively ask, "What does this mean?" There's nothing wrong with that question. It's guided philosophers, psychologists, mystics, and storytellers for thousands of years. But I've learned it isn't always the most interesting one to ask.
Meaning tends to suggest arrival. Symbolism invites participation.
Say someone hands you a key. If you ask what it means, the answer might come easily enough. Opportunity. Access. Knowledge. Responsibility. Maybe it points to Hekate as Keeper of the Keys, or marks a new chapter starting in your life. All of that might be true and useful. None of it is the symbol itself. The symbol only starts to live once you enter into relationship with it.
Say you carry that key in your pocket for years. You reach for it whenever you're facing uncertainty. It reminds you that every threshold asks something of the person walking up to it. Over time the key stops simply representing change and becomes part of how you experience change. That's symbolism.
It's easy to miss this difference because our culture has taught us to value answers over relationships. We ask what a dream means, what a tarot card means, what an owl means, what the moon means, as if each of them held a single fixed definition just waiting for someone knowledgeable enough to retrieve it. Life is rarely that accommodating.
Carl Jung recognized that symbols can't be exhausted by explanation. Unlike signs, which communicate fixed information, genuine symbols stay alive by continuing to reveal new dimensions of themselves as we change. We don't outgrow them. We grow with them.
That's part of why I hesitate whenever someone asks me to define a symbol too quickly. Definitions have their place. Tradition matters. Historical symbolism and shared cultural meaning matter, and they give us common ground to start a conversation, a thread connecting us to everyone who came before. But tradition is only the starting point. A raven showing up in your life might carry centuries of symbolic weight behind it, and none of that can tell me what happened when you stood still and watched it watching you back. That moment is yours. Your history, your attention, your relationship.
Meaning can often be handed from one person to another. Symbolism can't. It has to be lived. That's why two people can perform the exact same ritual and walk away transformed in completely different ways. The herbs were the same. The words were the same. The moon overhead was the same. The experience still unfolded differently, because each person brought a different life into relationship with those symbols. Transformation has never depended on the object alone. It comes out of the encounter.
Psychology understands something close to this. Memory isn't static. Every time we revisit an experience, we revisit it as someone slightly different than the person who first lived through it. New experience reshapes old memory. New grief reshapes old joy. New understanding reshapes old fear. Our symbols shift for the same reason, or maybe more precisely, our relationship to them shifts. The crossroads I stood at twenty two isn't the crossroads I stand at now. The image is still familiar. I'm not.
That's why symbols keep speaking, not because they're hiding secret meanings waiting to be uncovered, but because they travel with us through the changing landscape of a life.
It's part of why I've grown less interested in collecting symbolic definitions and more interested in cultivating symbolic relationships. When someone tells me about a dream, I don't jump straight to asking what they think it means. I ask what stayed with them. Which image wouldn't leave? What emotion showed up first? What did they notice before they started trying to explain it? Those questions keep the symbol alive and resist the pull to reduce mystery down to information.
There's another distinction worth naming here. Meaning tends to bring closure. Symbolism creates continuity. A meaningful event answers a question and settles quietly into memory. A symbol has a different kind of life. It returns. It shows up again in dreams. It surfaces during moments of transition you didn't see coming. It gathers new layers without discarding the old ones. It becomes a companion rather than a conclusion.
That's probably why the oldest symbols in human history keep speaking across thousands of years: fire, water, trees, serpents, the moon, the crossroads, birth, death, the journey home. They haven't survived because humanity ever settled on one definition for any of them. They've survived because generation after generation kept entering into relationship with them, letting each encounter deepen the symbol instead of wearing it down.
I think that's what symbolism actually asks of us. Not that we become experts at interpretation, but that we become better companions to our own experience. That we slow down a little, notice a little more carefully, and resist the urge to explain everything before it's had a chance to unfold.
Meaning is something we often discover. Symbolism is something we keep living. And maybe the richest symbols are the ones that never stop inviting us across another threshold, reminding us that understanding isn't always a destination. Sometimes it's the relationship itself.
