Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning.

Cosmology and values – indeed about the whole order of things as the medieval mind saw it.advocates for human potential When you visit the Garden of Versailles you are looking right at something which Louis XIV looked at when he visited it.first symbolic programming language A metaphor, such as a garden, can be used to convey a world view, a mood, a thought or even an ideal. In literature and art there are countless books that use the term garden as a metaphor. The subject will surely be covered by us. But for now we shall focus on real gardens.

One thing that makes gardens such impressive metaphors in that they merge nature and art together. Nature is viewed differently in particular cultures and therefore there are enormous variations in emphasis in this combination. For cultures that live inseparably from nature the concept of a garden can have no meaning, since a garden is by definition something that is set apart. For some cultures, such as those of ancient China and Japan, a garden is a refinement of nature. A person who lives in the city will most likely view a garden as a place where the lost natural beauty of nature can be found and recreated.

Then again, a garden means one thing to a dweller in an arid desert environment and another thing to someone from a damp and verdant region. In the same way, different things found in a garden can vary widely in meaning as well. For instance, woods, for example, are traditionally sacred in northern Europe but grim and perilous places in the south. But there are also things in a garden that share a similar meaning no matter what part of the world they are found. The life-giving waters of a fountain is one example. There are people who would say that these share symbols belong to the set of images shared by all people, which can be access via the “collective unconscious,” as the psychologist C.Some would view these shared symbols as the collection of symbols inherited by all humankind and available through the ‘collective unconscious’, as the psychologist C.G. Some people, such as the great psychologist C.G. Jung, believed that these shared symbols are stored images inherited and accessed by all humankind.G. Jung believed. Your imagination can transform any ordinary garden activity as symbolic as you observe a bee hovering over a flower drinking in the nectar or see the sunlight streaming through the autumn leaves or a spider’s web glistening with dew or catching a glimpse of a thousand other small miracles of life. ‘Reading’ a garden is therefore no simple matter, and no garden can be seen as a text with a fixed meaning.

A garden, like a good poem, contains many levels of meaning and draws a different response from every individual. Enough shared images and symbols exist either within or across cultures to make possible the existence of a language of gardens – or rather many languages, in fact an almost infinite amount.