Sacred Symbols: What They Are, What They Do, and Whom They Serve
Christos Fellowship — Sunday, 19 October 2026. Participants: Thomas, Michael, Armond, Charlie, Leonard, Isak
Notes marked “Note” were added after the meeting. They supply references or correct points the discussion missed or got wrong.
1. Opening: The Week’s News
Michael said he had spent the week in touch with former students, some of whose own students he now also knows. One is now in his fifties, a professor at Princeton who heads a department of religion. His life’s work has been building community among Catholic priests, Protestant ministers, imams, rabbis, and Buddhist monks. After 9/11, when anti-Muslim feeling ran high, he gathered Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders to issue joint statements urging that no hostility be based on religion. In his early twenties he received a large grant from a Norwegian peace organization. He chose not to keep the money and went instead to Sri Lanka, where Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs were killing one another. He visited the religious centers of each community, asked for their stories about peace, had them translated into the island’s languages, and had the churches, mosques, and temples teach them to the children. His reasoning was that the parents had already made up their minds, but the children had not yet been fully taught that the other side were the bad guys.
Michael’s second correspondent works for the UN in Haiti. Michael said the United States is sending roughly 100,000 people back to an island that is about 80% run by gangs, where no one wants to be president because presidents get shot. Many of the returnees have not lived there in ten years.
Armond said he had good weather and had been taken on, whether as volunteer or hire he was not sure, as a construction consultant to the local vocational school. Charlie said his week was just work.
Leonard said that the previous Sunday he attended the Unity and Humanity Conference, whose theme was sacred symbols. A man who had studied ancient symbols for many years gave a presentation, followed by four or five other talks, with Denver giving the last. Leonard said the conference opened his mind to the symbols God makes as well as those men make. During the week he worked with John and sent him parts so John could continue, and the flex circuits were requoted. He also reported that BYU, ranked eighth, beat Notre Dame, ranked second.
2. Does a Sacred Symbol Do Anything?
Thomas asked whether a sacred symbol has any actual spiritual significance or merely brings concepts to mind.
Leonard said the first conference speaker reported that drawing these symbols himself affected his thought processes and inner spirit and opened him to further inspiration.
3. The New Seal on the Scriptures
Leonard described how his group received a new symbol. At a gathering at a cabin in Oak City, near Delta, attended by people from the area’s Covenant Christian community, Denver and his wife Stephanie came and shared a meal. Denver brought folios of the new scriptures (the large printed sheets that are folded, trimmed, and stitched into the binding), since the bound copies had not yet been delivered. In passing he mentioned that a symbol would appear on all their scriptures and websites, and showed it without explanation.
Leonard emailed to ask for an image, and Denver sent a phone photo of it, which the group found amusingly old-fashioned. Later, during a talk Denver gave over Zoom, Leonard used the Q&A to ask him to briefly explain the symbol. Denver read the question and answered, “Yes, I can,” and moved on. Leonard said one must be careful how one phrases a question to an attorney. When Charlie asked why Denver was being so secretive, Leonard said he believes Denver wants people to inquire of the Lord and work it out for themselves.
Leonard described the symbol: it combines many ancient elements, including the circle and the square and the cross, with the phases of the moon around it, and it is eight-pointed, signifying a new beginning. Several people have written and shared their interpretations. A friend in his fellowship made iron-on transfers of it; Leonard had hats made, had small versions laser-cut (his wife Debbie chose to wear one), and made a large one for his entryway. He said people hang pentagrams and stars at their doors and he did not want that, so he made this for his own.
Michael searched the web for the symbol’s origins during the discussion and shared an image of a ring with a similar eight-sided design and a cross resembling a plus sign.
Leonard concluded that he does think symbols and images cause people to think, ponder, and center themselves. He pointed to nature: the Fibonacci spiral appears everywhere, and the sun and moon serve across religions as signs of deity.
4. Is There Such a Thing as a Sacred Symbol?
Leonard said he thinks symbols are more sacred to men than to God, though God may have symbols too. He would like to know whether God likes some symbols and dislikes others. He noted that Satanists clearly propagate their own symbols, and that symbols identify who one is and what one believes, as when a person wears a cross.
Charlie said his background is in the visual arts, and he has studied Deuteronomy 4 and its prohibition on making images, even of things God created. His questions were these: When does an image become idolatrous, and when does it remain a pictogram, like our letters? Does a symbol become sacred through usage? What separates a sacred symbol from a logo, and a sacred symbol from folk magic? He said he sees no biblical source for using a sacred symbol, and wondered whether the fish magnets on Christians’ cars are simply something people create to communicate.
He also described a vision he once saw in the night sky, witnessed by another person with him: a circle containing a five-pointed star, drawn in fine, luminescent, perfectly geometric light. He has struggled for years to understand it and wanted to take it as a sign, but does not know of what. Unlike a drawn symbol, he said, no person made it.
He noted that Masonic symbols came into use in early Latter-day Saint history and temple practice, and said he had reached no conclusion on the subject. He added that he was surprised the topic came up, though not offended.
Note: On whether Scripture uses sacred symbols, the Old Testament gives several God-instituted signs: the rainbow as the sign of the covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:12–17), circumcision as the sign of the covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17:11), the blood on the doorposts at Passover (Exodus 12:13), and the tassels on garments “that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD” (Numbers 15:38–40). God also commanded images for the tabernacle, the cherubim over the mercy seat (Exodus 25:18–22). The prohibition in Deuteronomy 4:15–19 is aimed at images made as objects of worship. The bronze serpent illustrates the line Charlie asked about. God commanded it as a means of healing (Numbers 21:8–9). Centuries later Hezekiah destroyed it because Israel had begun burning incense to it (2 Kings 18:4). The same object was a God-given sign in one generation and an idol in another; what changed was how the people used it.
5. Signal to Others or Power in Itself?
Michael said Christians of every denomination wear the cross, and it means different things to each while sharing a common Christian foundation; the same holds for Muslim and especially Hindu symbols, with their many variations. Fundamentally, he said, a symbol is devotion to whatever it means to the person wearing it.
Charlie asked whether a symbol is a signal to others or has power in itself, like a talisman.
Michael said both, much as with clothing: one picks what one likes, but it also communicates to others whether one is formal or casual, and which culture one belongs to. Wearing or not wearing something states “this is part of who I am.” His wife Jenny wears a ring with the yin-yang sign and lives by its philosophy. A cross usually means something to the wearer, but not always; for some celebrities it is a fashion accessory.
6. Isak: The Temptation to Display Righteousness
Isak said he had recently asked himself why he resists wearing a cross. Honestly examined, his answer was that for him it would be a display of his own righteousness rather than an open invitation saying “I am a safe place.” He asked whether there is more power in wearing a symbol and holding oneself accountable to it, or in presenting oneself as one is and letting one’s actions speak. He does not think wearing one is wrong, but he recognized that his own first motive was jewelry and the wish to represent something he thinks he is. He decided not to buy a cross for his chain.
Charlie joked that crosses ward off vampires; Isak said it hadn’t worked for him, since he’d already been bitten.
Isak added that his concern is whether one’s actions line up with the symbol, and he stressed that he was not directing this at Leonard. He called the cross a beautiful thing because of what Christ did, but noted it is also a torture device, and that, as Michael said, its meaning depends on the denomination and the angle.
Later in the discussion Isak clarified further. His worry is not that wearing a symbol obliges him to live up to it, but whether he would be doing it for himself or for God, like the man who opens the windows and prays in public for the glory of being seen. He said people have an urge to be seen as righteous when they are righteous and to hide when they are not, as with wanting others to see that one makes good money and buying the car to show it. The question is how much of that outward expression pulls away from actually following God. He called this “my own personal cross to bear.”
Note: The image of praying at an open window comes from Daniel 6:10, but there it has the opposite sense. Daniel prayed at his open window as he always had, knowing the decree made it a capital offense. His visibility was faithfulness under threat, not display. The warning Isak was reaching for is Matthew 6:1–6, where Jesus condemns those who pray “standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.” The two passages together locate his test precisely: the same public act is righteous or vain depending on whether it is done before God or for an audience.
7. Leonard: Why He Wears the Seal
Leonard said the main reason his group puts the seal on shirts and hats is to let people see it and ask, a subtle way to put something out there. Since almost no one has seen it before, it starts conversations, and several people have asked him what it is. That is the only reason he wears it; it has nothing to do with his identity. He simply wants to share what he has been given with those who are interested, and he has no problem with those who are not.
He also shared an image of a temple concept. He built a 3D model of the seal in his modeling program, took an image of it, and submitted that to Grok Imagine with his own prompts, which produced the rendering.
8. How Communities Picture Jesus
Michael described a book that surveyed how churches depict Jesus. Some show extreme suffering: the crucifixion, blood, the crown of thorns. Others, like the picture in his office, show Jesus simply sitting in a beam of light, a universal moment of inspiration anyone who has been inspired can relate to. The book found that communities under subjugation, political oppression, or tyranny tend to depict a suffering Jesus, while well-off communities depict a more pleasant one. If God is, as Thomas puts it, “the everything,” Michael said, then the human representation of God reflects the life of the artist and of the community that chose to hang the picture.
9. One God Seen from Many Places?
Isak asked whether Michael was saying that all people have the same God but worship from different points of view based on their experience, and whether that holds for individuals as well as cultures.
Michael answered with examples. The Eskimos lived thousands of years before Christians reached them; the Pacific Northwest peoples near Seattle carved totem poles recording memorable events without ever hearing of Jesus. Before the Bible, people still had versions of God. In fertile Mesopotamia, he said, the deity was a great mother pouring food from a horn of plenty. The Egyptian gods were by turns generous and cruel, like the Nile that brought both drought and plenty. The Norse had snow and thunder gods, which desert peoples did not. Each conception, he said, reflects what people had to work with. God, as the everything, functions like a symbol of the essential aspects of whatever makes up one’s life and gives it meaning.
Note: The horn of plenty (cornucopia) is Greek, from the myth of the goat Amalthea who nursed Zeus. It is not Mesopotamian. Mesopotamia’s prominent fertility and abundance deity was Inanna (Ishtar). The broader point, that a people’s experience of its land shapes its picture of the divine, is a common observation in comparative religion. Note, however, that it describes how people picture God. It does not establish that God is only the sum of those pictures. Scripture’s own claim runs the other way: God reveals Himself, and some pictures are true and others false (Romans 1:20–23).
Isak reflected that the people in the Zoom room come from different walks, family, old friends, and new friends, yet share a common language and communication even when not everyone understands everything. As he has become aware of other perspectives, it seems reasonable to him that we are made of the same stuff but are each bound to the view from where we stand. He wondered whether there is more to see by getting out of one’s own space, whether it is good for people to experiment with other religions, and where people can meet. His underlying question was whether humanity is bound to fight wars forever over skin color, location, or resources, or whether there is a way to agreement without war.
10. Listening, and Advice from One’s Future Self
Michael said his Princeton friend does exactly what Isak described, without needing to travel. He convenes priests, ministers, imams, rabbis, and monks, and what they write together collects the wisdom of all of them without requiring them to agree on everything. Michael said that for every religion and political belief he tries to extract the wisdom and add it to a cumulative vision that is always under revision. One grows by listening avidly and weighing what works; nobody is the same person he was ten years ago.
He cited a saying he attributed to Mark Twain: the ten-year-old self tells the two-year-old self, “Thanks for teaching me never to touch the stove; you saved me many burned hands. But I’m revising it: never touch a hot stove.” The old wisdom remains but is refined. Michael extended this forward. There is another voice, harder to hear, the self ten years from now, or more manageably one year from now. At a crossroads, one can ask what that future self will thank one for having chosen. He closed with a saying he attributed to Confucius: two ears, one mouth.
Note: Neither attribution is secure. Twain’s actual line is about a cat, not a child. In Following the Equator (1897), he wrote that a cat that sits on a hot stove-lid will never sit on a hot stove-lid again, “and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.” His point there is the opposite of Michael’s: over-learning from one experience. The child-and-stove version appears to be a later paraphrase. The “two ears and one mouth” saying is attributed in antiquity to Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, by Diogenes Laërtius (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.23), and in modern collections often to Epictetus. It is not found in the Analects of Confucius.
Isak said he found this valuable. He observed that the future self is something we construct in our heads from what we now feel is right and wrong, projected to its ultimate expression. That makes the exercise a kind of time-travel experiment in morality. It lets one test whether a decision holds up and ask where one’s sense of good and bad comes from. He said he usually begins with prayer directed outward, asking God for wisdom, which then turns inward: what wisdom is out there, what is here, and how to merge or direct them. It is a combination of the outward coming in and the inward going out.
11. “We Turned into Rome”
Thomas read a text he had just received from a friend: we have turned into Rome, like the movie Gladiator, where the rich organize wars to make money, sell their goods to the war, and gain property.
12. Thomas: Symbols in His Searching Years
Thomas said the topic reminded him of his years of spiritual searching as a New Ager and occultist. In that world, symbols were regarded as having magical power, not as mere signs. They were objects of meditation whose power was to change the person internally and carry him into a state, the state sought being some form of enlightenment, an esoteric knowledge of who God really is.
He summarized the reasons for symbols raised so far. Leonard’s seal is a symbol whose intended meaning is not yet known, yet his group has put it on their identification. Isak focused on a symbol as communication to others and the obligation it might create to live up to it.
Later Thomas returned to the question of idolatry Charlie had raised. A symbol can become an idol, he said, if one says, “I’m going to worship this thing; it will save me.” But he recalled a book he had recommended to Charlie, a survey of world religions, whose section on Hinduism presented its many gods differently from the usual view that Hindus worship elephants or monkeys. In that author’s account, a worshiper looking at Ganesh sees aspects of the universe that are like an elephant, goes into that aspect of creation, and sees God behind it. On that reading each god or symbol is a doorway: a way of focusing on one aspect of creation and seeing in it the One behind all creation. Thomas said this way of understanding symbols, and all the external things done in religion, resonates with him. We are looking for the God behind the thing in front of us.
Note: The book is Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions (1991; first published in 1958 as The Religions of Man). Smith’s reading of Hindu images as windows onto the one Brahman reflects the Vedantic interpretation. Popular Hindu practice varies widely, and many devotees relate to a particular deity as a distinct personal being. The “doorway” view also has a scriptural boundary. Romans 1:20 affirms that God’s invisible qualities are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Romans 1:23–25 condemns exactly the step of exchanging “the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to… fourfooted beasts,” worshiping “the creature more than the Creator.” Looking through creation to God is commended. Directing worship to the image is not. This is the same line drawn by the bronze serpent in §4.
13. Charlie: Jung’s Man and His Symbols
Charlie said the subject finally dawned on him when he remembered Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. He read a short summary he had asked Perplexity for. The book argues that we understand ourselves more fully when we attend not only to conscious reasoning but to the unconscious as it expresses itself in dreams, myths, religion, and art. Its central concern is individuation: becoming a more complete person by recognizing and integrating parts of oneself that conscious identity overlooks or rejects. Its main claims are that conscious identity is not the whole personality, that symbols express what plain statements cannot, that dreams must be understood in the dreamer’s own context, and that personal experience connects with recurring human patterns.
Charlie said symbols are far more than logos or drawn signs. He has a recurring dream with an airplane and another with various houses, and these are symbols to him of his freedom and his life. He said he had been asleep to how big the subject is until he remembered the book.
Note: Man and His Symbols (1964) was conceived by Jung and contains his essay “Approaching the Unconscious.” He finished it shortly before his death in 1961, and the remaining chapters were written by his collaborators (Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph Henderson, Aniela Jaffé, and Jolande Jacobi). It was Jung’s one book written for a general audience.
Michael said he loves the book and agreed with everything Charlie said. Most of the time, he said, more is going on inside a person than he is conscious of, whether in choosing a symbol (Leonard’s seal won out over hundreds of others because it appealed to him), choosing clothes, or simply deciding to be in this meeting. The better one knows the underlying causes of what one does, the richer one’s experience of those moments.
14. Animal Natures, and the Hero’s Journey
Michael added that one can think of a person in terms of an animal. Some flit from flower to flower like a butterfly, others stay home in their hovel like a mole, and others are tigers, frightened little creatures, or puppies. Cultures can adopt an animal that represents how they feel without worshiping it as a deity. If Man and His Symbols is the noun version of the subject, he said, the verb version is Joseph Campbell’s account of the hero’s journey, a universal story underlying all endeavors. He said he had to leave before going into it, thanked everyone, and signed off.
Note: Campbell’s book is The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). “The hero’s journey” is its central concept, Campbell’s “monomyth,” not its title.
15. Armond: Everything Is a Symbol
After Michael left, Armond said the conversation had led him to think of symbols less as particular emblems and more as the way he experiences life: everything is a symbol. The way someone says something or doesn’t, the treatment from a waitress, the greeting from a hostess are all signs, and he allows himself to be influenced by them, or at least not to be unaware of them. If one looks closely enough, he said, everything indicates direction on one’s path. Either you are in the right place and made the right decision to come, or being here is a distraction from what you should be doing, and the experience will reflect it. He tries to stay as neutral as possible, which is why Isak’s comments resonated with him. He does not want to impose his will so strongly that he misses the directions the environment is offering.
As for specific emblems, Armond said he sees them more as branding and belonging. Humans are social creatures, and even the soul is one part of a greater whole, so wanting to identify with a group through symbols is natural human nature, partly a means of self-protection.
16. Isak: Flags, Teams, and Reclaimed Symbols
Isak agreed and pointed to flags, countries, political parties, and states as ways people mark allegiance. He likes a couple of sports teams but has trouble wearing their hats, since he is not from Seattle and has no real part in the Seahawks. Similarly he respects the American flag for much of what it represents, and he does not feel un-American or separate from other Americans, yet he finds it hard to say “the flag is my flag” because he cannot stand for every part of what it symbolizes. Christianity’s symbols are similar.
He noted that a symbol carries who has worn it. Some symbols used by indigenous peoples are now unusable because the Nazis adopted them. The cross, by contrast, was the torture instrument of the Roman Empire, an emperor’s weapon, yet Christians retook it and turned its meaning on its head.
He said he found Armond’s point about experience the more symbolic one. Like dreams, each moment of life is not a symbol of a thing but a whole bit of meaning. His questions were what each moment means, and whether one can direct oneself toward moments that are more meaningful and part of God’s will.
17. Armond’s Hawk
Armond said he has a recurring sign. Often at a big decision or eventful moment he happens to see a red-tailed hawk or a bald eagle, often enough that he now takes it as a good omen. Years ago, during an important moment with Alicia at a Popeye’s drive-through, they looked up to see a red-tailed hawk sitting on a yellow concrete pylon six feet away. (Charlie asked whether it was holding a sign; Armond said it might as well have been.) Later in the meeting he reported spotting another red-tailed hawk as he spoke.
His conclusion was this: if we trust and have faith that God made everything in this world, how could we not trust in symbols, look for them, and believe that what we experience happens for a reason we should try to discern?
Isak agreed that if we are surrounded by God, every individual seems to have something, whether a spirit animal or a recurring sign, that resonates when he is trying to connect with God or struggling with something large: Armond’s hawk, his father’s airplanes. He said such signs seem most authentic when one is not looking for them. You don’t go out looking for the hawk; it finds you.
Note: Scripture affirms both halves of the tension here. God does give signs: Gideon’s fleece (Judges 6:36–40), and the star to the Magi (Matthew 2:2). Creation itself declares His glory (Psalm 19:1). But Scripture also warns against omen-reading as a practice: “There shall not be found among you… an observer of times, or an enchanter” (Deuteronomy 18:10). Jesus refused to perform signs on demand (Matthew 12:38–39). Charlie raised the distinction between a sacred symbol and folk magic in §4. It seems to fall where Isak placed it: receiving a sign God gives versus seeking out signs to steer by. Gideon himself asked for confirmation of a command God had already given. He did not consult the fleece in place of God’s word.