There is good reason to suppose that religious belief and ritual are manifestations of the archetypal blueprint for human existence encoded in the genetic structure of our species. As a consequence, religion has become a focus of study for psychobiologists and neuroscientists. However, scientific explanations of religious experience do not “explain away” such experience nor are they substitutes for the experience itself. On the contrary, scientific discoveries may be seen as corroboration of religious insights into the unus mundus, the essential (...) oneness of all experience, which links human nature with the nature of the cosmos. (shrink)

The book is divided into two parts: an interpretive section that concerns symbols in general and a "dictionary" that lists hundreds of symbols and explains their origins, their resemblances to other symbols, and the belief systems behind ...