In his book Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, Mircea Eliade states, 'The symbol, the myth, and the image are the very substance of the spiritual life . . . they may become disguised, mutilated, or degraded, but never extirpated'. 1 However, the function and pervasiveness of symbol are not reserved to the spiritual or religious realm. Symbols mediate reality or meaning in political, cultural, social, and ethical contexts as well; they are 'the path to truth . . . the making present of something absent -something that would remain absent and inaccessible without the symbols'. 2 Furthermore, they do so in visual, auditory, and linguistic ways. As living, dynamic products of the human imagination, symbols are 'pregnant with meaning', effecting connections between the quotidian and the transcendent, between particular fact and universal truth, between the present moment and eternity. They reveal levels of reality which are beyond the immediacy of experience and they invite the human person into existential participation in order to understand their significance. 3 Nevertheless, symbols are 'a curious phenomenon'. They conceal, even as they reveal, and perplex, even as they illuminate. They do not communicate their truth in direct and unambiguous ways, but are frequently multivalent and hold contradictory meanings in tension. Therefore, symbols require a process of interpretation -a hermeneutical process -which must be able to account for the complexity of their imaginative nature, as well as for the intentionality of their creators and interpreters, and the historical context of their creation and interpretation. This essay addresses the nature, function, and hermeneutics of the symbol, especially the sacred symbol. However, in order to enter into this process, it must lay a preliminary foundation that first establishes the condition of the possibility of symbolic creativity and comprehension within humanity itself. On this foundation, the nature of symbol and the way in which symbol functions in human experience are presented. Finally, these insights are brought to bear on processes of interpreting symbol which attend to the inherent complexity, ambiguity, tension, and inexhaustibility of symbolic communication itself. In each section, discussion moves from the general to the specific, from the non-contextualized symbol to the sacred symbol. Furthermore, although the nature and function of symbol are regarded as fundamental to the study of language and of literature, this project attempts to limit its considerations to the visual symbol. Nevertheless, the very notion of the hermeneutics of symbol transgresses this limitation, since, 'To explain the symbol . . . is to go beyond the symbol'. In the turn to interpretation and articulation of symbolic meaning, one has traversed the linguistic boundary.