A Dictionary of Symbols: Revised and Expanded Edition

Juan Eduardo Cirlot

Sep. 2020 · New York Review of Books

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A classic encyclopedia of symbols by Catalan polymath Joan Cirlot that illuminates the symbolic underpinnings of myth, modern psychology, literature, and art.

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, René Guénon, 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. Running from “abandonment” to “zone” by way of “flute” and “whip,” spanning the cultures of the world, and including a wealth of visual images to further bring the reality of the symbol home, 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.

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Juan Eduardo Cirlot (1916–1973) was a poet, art critic, hermeneutist, mythologist, and musician. He wrote several books on the history and theory of art, published several poetry collections, and composed music.

Philip Pullman is the author of the trilogy His Dark Materials, the third book of which, The Amber Spyglass, was the first children’s book to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in the UK. His most recent novel is The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, the first book in a new companion trilogy to His Dark Materials. He lives in Oxford, England.

Valerie Miles, an editor, writer, and translator, co-founded the literary journal Granta in Spanish and also established the NYRB Classics series in Spanish. She curated the first exhibition dedicated to Roberto Bolaño’s archive papers. She is author of A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. She lives in Barcelona, Spain.

Victoria Cirlot, is a medieval scholar and professor of Romance Philology at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Her recent books include La visión abierta, Del mito del grial al surrealismo and Grial. Poética y mito.