We see the individual in a world of shadow forms. … There is the ancient art of symbolism. Now a symbol is a picture of a motive or an idea or a meaning, it is putting a mysterious truth in the form of a picture.

All action all attitude all feeling can be considered as pictorial. Everything that exist has a shape of some kind. Some of these shapes we can see around us in daily life, some of these shapes impose themselves upon us as dreams and nightmares, some of these shapes never appear to the physical world at all, others are particularly limited to the use of psychics. But in every instance every single thought or emotion has a picture, has a likeness of itself, a mathematical pattern, a geometrical balanced design which stands for it.

Manly P. Hall