Symbolism
Both the Atharva Veda and the ancient Greeks associated lips anointed with honey with the gift of eloquence and even of prescience. The priestess at Delphi was the "Delphic Bee". The Quran has a chapter titled The Bee.
A community of honey bees has often been employed throughout history by political theorists as a model of human society:
"This image occurs in Aristotle and Plato; in Virgil and Seneca; in Erasmus and Shakespeare; in Marx and Tolstoy."
Honey bees, signifying immortality and resurrection, were royal emblems of the Merovingians, revived by Napoleon. The bee is the heraldic emblem too of the Barberini.
Read more about this topic: Honey Bee
Famous quotes containing the word symbolism:
“...I remembered the rose bush that had reached a thorny branch out through the ragged fence, and caught my dress, detaining me when I would have passed on. And again the symbolism of it all came over me. These memories and visions of the poor—they were the clutch of the thorns. Social workers have all felt it. It holds them to their work, because the thorns curve backward, and one cannot pull away.”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)