Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning.
Cosmology and values – indeed about the whole order of things as the medieval mind saw it. Similarly, to visit the garden of Versailles is to catch but a mere glimpse of the world order as it was seen long ago by Louis XIV and his court. Regarding human potentials, a garden can be a metaphor, used to convey a world view, a mood, a thought or an ideal. Many books could be devoted to using the garden as a metaphor in literature and art. The subject will surely be covered by us. First, we will learn about real gardens.
One thing that makes gardens such impressive metaphors in that they merge nature and art together. This combination allows for enormous variations in emphasis, depending on how nature is viewed in particular cultures. 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. The modern city dweller is likely to see gardens as places where a lost natural beauty can be recreated.
To someone living in a dry desert, a garden represents on thing; to someone from a wet, green area, something else entirely. The themes of a particular type of garden can be largely dependent on culture such as woods being considered sacred in Northern Europe while having a more ominous connotation in the south. Also, there are certain images or symbols that are understood worldwide, like the fountain which symbolized life-giving water. Some would see these shared symbols as belonging to the store of images inherited by all of humankind and accessible through the ‘collective unconscious’, as the psychologist C. Jung claimed.|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. Jung believed.|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. There are, however, enough shared images and symbols 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.
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