What do eyeballs symbolize

Apart from spiritual vision quests, the eyes can also speak of focus and intelligence. It also symbolizes an increased sense of perception and awareness and, perhaps most literally, observations. While all our senses are important and play their own important roles, our eyes allow us to take in such a wide range of beauty.

If we train them, we can see even beyond what is right in front of us. Eye symbolism also carries somewhat prophetic messages. Think of fortune-tellers and wise shamans who experience visions of the future. Ancient alchemists and astrologers, among other mystics, recognized the stars high up in the sky as great seers capable of foretelling events.

This is how charting the stars, and their apparent movement of planet patterns came into use. Our eyes have had symbolic meaning throughout ancient history. Although most of us consider them to be a basic function in our lives, we often under-appreciate the ability to see. This explains why blindness, both literally and figuratively, is mentioned so frequently in stories and traditions.

For example, the ancient Egyptians referred to the Eye of Horus , also known as the Eye of Ra, the sun god. This eye was a symbol of protection and life. However, Egyptian and other Western traditions made distinctions between the symbolic inclinations of the right and left eye.

While the left eye was considered to have lunar traits, it was the right eye that held solar ones. The eyes were thus opposites, the left eye representing the north with the right symbolizing the south. For them, the eye represented the omnipresence of the Holy Spirit.

You can interpret this as either comforting or intimidating- take your pick. You'll find it, for example, to this day in the arms of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. The hand is associated with the surgeon who, by cutting open the body, sees into the places that others never do.

Sometimes, of course, the surgical opening is small and so the surgeon is seeing by feeling. Before key-hole surgery using optical aids this was the only non too-invasive way to perform many operations. The idea is that the skill of the surgeon and the knowledge he gains through the use of his hands gives him a greater insight. If the symbol means that, then the contents of the jar, if it was ever meant to have contents, could have been any drug that would be useful for healing the body and not necessarily anything to do with an ophthalmological procedure.

If you have any alternative theories then do let the curator know. Nowadays you can browse the contents of major museums around the world on the Internet and the collections of smaller ones too, like the BOA Museum with its MusEYEum online catalogue It is easy to forget how recently it was still very difficult to discover just what 'stuff' most museums held.

The BOA Museum tried to help by collecting high-quality photographs of items in the collections of other museums. At other times photographs were sent in to the museum for help in identification or seeking a professional opinion and these were retained.

The images shown here have suddenly come back into significance because they depict some items from the museum of the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo National Museum which were displayed in The Power of Dogu exhibition in Room 91 at the British Museum until 22 November Dogu are usually clay figures sometimes stone that were fashioned by primitive pre-agricultural peoples who lived in sunken pit houses on the Japanese islands from around BC and just into the early Yayoi period around the time of Christ, by which time this form of art had outlived its original function.

They represent humans, if sometimes in a rather stylised manner and seem to have had a ritual purpose. The number to have been unearthed now runs into the thousands but many of these have resulted from relatively recent archaeological digs. By contrast the items shown here were discovered in the s and the photographs date from Our understanding of these objects at that time was very different.

In the third millennium BCE, the Sumerians conveyed the holiness of certain sculptures by abnormally enlarging their eyes to enhance the sensation of dutiful watchfulness.

The Sumerians used abnormally large eyes to convey the holiness of divine figures Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art. But it was the ancient Egyptians who were the originators of the detached eye as a motif: for example, a pair of eyes painted on a coffin that allowed the dead to see in the afterlife.

And one of the most famous of all Egyptian symbols is the Eye of Horus. With the help of Thoth, he later healed his eyes. The Eye of Horus was therefore a protective symbol, often used as an amulet, a sculpture small enough for a person to carry in their pocket as a form of protection. The Eye of Horus — a hybrid of a human and falcon eye — was carried as a form of protection Credit: Alamy. This and other Egyptian hieroglyphs of isolated human eyes went on to affect European iconography during the Renaissance.

Nowadays we know that they are a written language of mainly phonetic signs, but in the s and s they were believed to have a much more mystical significance.

The symbols in hieroglyphic writing — animals, birds and abstract shapes — were thought to be deliberately mysterious, each one creating meaning through the inspiration of the viewer rather than being part of a linguistic system. They were, so it was believed, open puzzles that contained multiple meanings. An eye tattoo can represent life itself. Since most people see the eye our only way to truly see the world, this meaning just makes sense for some people.

In this way, it also means that you enjoy life and are happy to keep your eyes open to it. This is slightly different than the eye tattoo meaning mentioned above because it has more to do with keeping your guard up than enjoying life.

It means that you are aware of the good and bad around you and you will make decisions based on what you see. Another great eye tattoo meaning is clarity. If for a long time you looked at the world the wrong way and have found a more beneficial way to approach it, then this is probably the perfect eye tattoo meaning for you.

Often these eye tats are complimented with other designs that also represent clarity, such as the Circle of Life Enso symbol. This is also a great motivational meaning, so many people will get this eye tattoo on a very visible part of their bodies, such as on their fingers.