The Symbolism of Tents, Houses, Castles and Stately Homes
Introduction
Castles, houses, cottages, stately homes and tents or tabernacles
represent a person - their mind and their body combined.
It is particularly good at representing the Personality.
Occasionally, you see the Higher spirit
represented symbolically on the roof,
but to be correct, House symbolism
should relate to the Mortal rather than the Immortal.
Bhagavad Gita
Never the spirit [atman] was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems
The interior explores aspects of the Mind.
And we have a video - on Memory and Rooms.
The exterior represents the state of the body.
And the different floors, represent the levels of Mind.
The lower rooms and the basement represent the Subconscious,
the upper rooms represent the Conscious self.
As such the contents of each floor and of each room,
the design, the layout and the stairs all have symbolic significance.
The House and emotions
Not only does the house represent the Personality,
it can also be a representation of emotions.
And in the following poem rather than passion,
the emotion is lost love, causing grief.
Alfred Lord Tennyson - from Mariana
With blackest moss the flower pots Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable wall
The broken sheds looked sad and strange;
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange. ...
Old faces glimmered through the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors
Old voices called her from without
She only said 'My life is dreary He cometh not' she said
She said 'I am aweary, weary I would that I were dead'
The Design
Exterior windows, doors, roofs, building materials, chimneys,
and entrances, all show something of the person
and their personality, all have symbolic value.
The design can be imaginative and interesting,
quirky and different,
elegant, classical, solid and forbidding,
informal, a person of the land and soil, a rustic countryman,
homely, warm and inviting,
eccentric or close to insanity,
a defensive fortress with high forbidding walls
- indicating an inaccessible, private person,
or maybe the house is in a remote and distant location,
and its enclosed stark white appearance
with tiny windows cutting out almost all the Light,
speak of an equally remote unwelcoming,
and puritanical person.
In contrast, an extrovert design,
speaks of an entirely different type of person,
perhaps a dash over the top, maybe larger than life?
or maybe it is enormous, indicating both physical size,
but also equally enormous - even excess
- power and ego, out only to impress, not to welcome
or tiny and even movable, meaning a modest or meek person,
but not one who puts down roots
generally one who is modest in their needs,
cosy, plump and welcoming.
The body has nine orifices - two eyes, two ears, a nose,
a mouth, the anus, the bladder and the genital orifice.
Windows, gates and doors in this context are representing an orifice.
... the windows are the eyes, the main door is the mouth ...
There is an additional ‘gate’ and that is the gate to the spiritual world.
Often this is symbolically found in an ‘enclosure’.
And the gateway is arched or framed to look like a door.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Poems of Longfellow [printed about 1875]
from The Builders
Let us do our work as well
Both the unseen and the seen
Make the house where gods may dwell
Beautiful entire and clean
Else our lives are incomplete
Standing in these walls of Time
Broken stairways where the feet Stumble as they seek to climb
Build today, the strong and sure
With a firm and ample base
And ascending and secure
Shall tomorrow find its place
Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain
And one boundless reach of sky
The Exterior of the House
The exterior represents the state of the body.
Buddha
Looking for the maker of this tabernacle
I ran to no avail, through a round of many births
And wearisome is birth again and again
But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast seen
Thou shalt not erect the tabernacle again
All thy rafters are broken Thy ridge pole is shattered
The mind approaching the Eternal
Has attained to the extinction of all desires
As people age, they may ‘see’ visions or dream
of a crumbling structure turning back into dust
- the body as it ages, withers and prepares to die.
Moving House
Moving house symbolically represents death
and reincarnation to a new body.
This is often explained allegorically by the use of means of transport
- eg horses and carts.
There is the implication in all the stories that the person’s perceptions
move with the person
- this is told allegorically by saying the person takes his 'furniture' with him.
From Edmund Waller - On the foregoing Divine Poems
The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.