Back when I was starting out, there was no internet. When I was solely guided by spirits in my education, if I wanted to know what something meant (like what my primary helper, puma, “meant…”) I had to look it up in the encyclopedia, and possibly order a book from the main library on the animal if there was one. As I got older and started exploring paganism, I was introduced to correspondence tables and books like those about what things mean in your dreams. That was when I received my first clue that such books might not be as useful as they seemed. I don’t recall what the entry on horses said, but I do recall that it was laughably incorrect. For a while I rationalized that this was simply due to my personal associations with horses - by that point I was learning to train them, so of course they wouldn't mean the same thing to me as they would to someone else. But as time went on I realized that they missed the mark more than they hit it.
What I didn’t understand was that correspondences on a personal level are themselves personal. So what I fed my mind with altered what they corresponded to in my mind. If I fed my mind a steady diet of Jung, I’d mostly wind up with Jungian archetypes. If I filled my mind with data on the animal itself, I’d wind up with something closer to the animal. And that would ultimately, for me, be more meaningful. If I filled my mind with superstitions about black cats being unlucky, then when I saw one I would think bad luck. If on the other hand I filled my mind with actual black cats, then I would no longer see an artificial placement.
The language of the Other Worlds is metaphor. Things that you see there must be looked at on a slant, not directly. There are a lot of riddle references in stories that touch on otherworldly interactions. This is, in part, because interpreting visions given there is itself a riddle game. If you’re looking for information on what is going on with a person, if you’re the one in the wrong or they are for a situation, and you see a screw, it could mean a lot of things. It could mean they’ve “got a screw loose,” they’re not mentally stable on the issue. It could mean they are “turning the screw,” or they are putting pressure on you for some reason. Or it could mean you “screwed up” and damaged the relationship somehow. These metaphors come from your own mind. We like to talk about how the gods are inscrutable, talking in riddles, but oftentimes the riddle comes from our own heads.
When the gods or otherworldly beings speak to us, they are sending a broad band of information our way. We cannot absorb it all, in most cases. What we get of the message is only ever a part of it. Other people may hear the message and get something completely different, or might get something that overlaps with what you understood, but still has a lot that is different. And there are other people who, through no fault of their own, get nothing. So there are four different possible answers to what the message was, all different, and all completely correct. Add to this, the message will come across in the language of metaphor, and that language is different for each person. Often the overlaps in the messaging are a case where people have similar metaphors in their head. The message may be “savagery,” and you may see a group of cannibals, another may see humans feasting drenched in blood, but the third person may not see humans at all, but see jungle animals eating. It’s all down to what a person thinks of when they think about savagery, and that is assuming everyone gets the same word! Perhaps one gets “savagery” and another gets “brutality” while a third gets “ferocity.” As you can see, the problems with interpretation multiply tremendously.
This is why looking up the “correspondence” of the message might not be useful. The person seeing the jungle animals might start looking up the animals, those with the tribal images might look up their images - all of which misses the point. The correspondences might be correct, but simply not what the message was about. These things are just so intensely personal that adding another person’s interpretations isn’t all that helpful, unless they have the same metaphors you do. It’s far more useful to learn everything about the image itself, in order to better understand what your brain is trying to tell you, but also to improve your internal understanding of the things that image could represent to you.
At this point, if I see a cat in an image, I don’t think “what does a cat mean,” I look to see the poses the animal has, the position of whiskers and ears, the status of the tail… I’m looking to see what that cat is communicating, because I have that much understanding of cats after living with them for most of my life. Seeing a cat means something completely different to me than it would to someone who has never had a cat.
All of this can actually be manipulated for working in groups. The more experiences a working circle, kindred, or coven shares together, the more of a common lexicon they develop of images. It’s kind of like inside jokes, only in the metaphysical. “Cat” can become “Ed’s cat Mithrandir,” mass transit can become “the subway station on 8th street,” and images can be discussed within the circle with more people having useful input because the image is no longer totally generic, but shared. This is however also a pitfall to be wary of: if you’re looking for a confirmation reading, you can’t necessarily ask the people who have the same references as you do, because it would be too close to your own interpretations.
When someone asks me to help them interpret a dream or a vision, rather than going into what things mean, I ask them clarifying questions about what the components of the image mean to that person. What stands out about the image? Did anything catch your eye? Does anything look out of place? Is there some motion in the image that might be significant? Does anything from your history relate? These are the more useful kinds of questions, I have found, for getting to the heart of what is meant.
My final recommendation for this is to maintain records. Keep track of the images you get, and what the components mean. If you want to have something to use to look up meanings, that’s absolutely both possible and useful - but it has to be something you wrote yourself. It has to include the images of your own childhood, your own interests, your own research. Otherwise it’s just another outside perspective - which might be useful for making you think about the image in question, but not ultimately for the final meaning. That must come from your own head, as it was your head that produced the image.
KeTHeSa (KEep The HEart SAcred),
Asra Lokakona