A Dictionary of Symbols

Juan Eduardo Cirlot's A Dictionary of Symbols is a feat of scholarship, an act of the imagination, and a tool for contemplation, as well as a work of literature, a reference book that is as indispensable as it is brilliant and learned.

Cirlot was a composer, a poet, an art critic, and a champion of modern art whose interest in surrealism helped to bring him to the study of symbolism. Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Rene Guenon, Erich Fromm, and Gaston Bachelard also helped to shape his thinking in a book that explores the space between the world at large and the world within, where, as Cirlot sees it, nothing is meaningless, everything is significant, and everything is in some way related to something else. 

A Dictionary of Symbols, here published for the first time in English in its original, significantly enlarged form, is a luminous and illuminating investigation of the works of eternity in time.