Symbols - What does heaven look like
Tightrope
Circus is a very potent image in symbolism, as well as spiritualism.
The circus itself, the Big Top, the trapeze artists and even the animals were all once part of an attempt to maintain a set of ‘truths’ about spiritual experience in a memorable form.
Most of the great French artists, for example, incorporated circus motifs and painted circus scenes.
The trapeze is symbolic of the very very narrow bridge that links the mundane world with the spiritual world.
In myths and legends, on death and in spiritual experience one traverses a bridge that is a knife edge or the edge of a sword, or as thin as a hair. If one falls one falls into the abyss. Take this legend:
From J F Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands – volume 1
When they fled, they came to a great cataract and there was no way of getting over it unless they could walk on two hairs that were a bridge across the cataract and Maol a Mhoibean ran with ease over the two hairs; but her sisters could not walk on the two hairs and Maol a Mhoibean had to turn back and carry her sisters, one after one, over the cataract on the two hair bridge
The tightrope is just another symbol for this bridge.
Observations
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